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Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief

RT | October 30, 2026

European gas prices could more than double as depleted reserves threaten winter supplies, Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller has warned.

Wholesale prices have already reached their highest level in nearly four years, briefly exceeding €97 ($108) per megawatt-hour on Monday. December gas futures climbed another 3.1% on Friday to around $1,164 per thousand cubic meters, according to London’s Intercontinental Exchange.

Miller pointed to unusually low gas reserves across the EU, noting that Germany, the bloc’s largest consumer, has filled just 61.6% of its underground storage capacity.

”Given the series of historic record lows Europeans have set in filling underground gas storage facilities […] we can expect gas prices in Europe to peak at $2,500 per thousand cubic meters in the event of a cold winter,” he said.

Norwegian energy giant Equinor has echoed concerns over another price shock. CEO Anders Opedal said on Wednesday that European gas reserves were at their lowest seasonal level since 2011, leaving the bloc exposed to further price spikes as it competes with Asian buyers for liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The US-Israeli war on Iran has further strained supplies, disrupting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which previously handled around a fifth of global LNG trade. Deliveries remain roughly 80% below pre-conflict levels.

EU gas storage facilities were 74.62% full as of October 25, well below seasonal averages, with some member states already drawing on reserves as temperatures fall.

Germany has been particularly hard hit. Gas tariffs for new household customers have jumped 55% this year, according to comparison website Verivox. High energy costs have forced some European fertilizer, chemical, and steel producers to cut output, Reuters reported.

In September, EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen warned that the bloc faced its worst energy crisis since 2022, when wholesale gas prices exceeded €300 per megawatt-hour.

Despite mounting supply concerns, Brussels is pressing ahead with plans to eliminate Russian gas imports. Long-term LNG deliveries are set to be banned from January 2027, with remaining pipeline supplies scheduled to end later that year.

Moscow has repeatedly condemned the EU’s energy policy as “suicidal.” Russian presidential investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev argued last week that restoring economic cooperation with Russia “will be inevitable.”

October 30, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief

Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media

RT | October 29, 2026

The Financial Times has refused to correct an anonymously sourced article about a recent phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Norway and Finland, despite objections from both Nordic governments, according to media reports.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store and Finnish President Alexander Stubb spoke with Putin earlier this week, drawing criticism from some of Europe’s more Russia-hawkish politicians.

The British newspaper claimed that Putin spent much of the conversation “lecturing” the Nordic leaders on “medieval Slavic history” and its relevance to the Ukraine conflict, rather than discussing ways to end the hostilities. Citing three anonymous sources described only as “familiar with the conversation,” the FT portrayed the Russian president as “fixated” on history.

Store’s government told Norwegian daily Verdens Gang (VG) that the characterization was inaccurate and that Finland had contacted the FT on behalf of both countries to challenge its account, the newspaper reported on Thursday. Finnish media also covered the joint objection, with the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat citing its own sources to dispute the British paper’s description of the call.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov said later in the day that the FT article is “some invented information, or rather disinformation” and that the Nordic leaders were correct to call out the publication.

The FT, however, rejected the request, telling VG that it stood by its reporting.

Its article, published on Tuesday, was written by three journalists.

One of them, American national Christopher Miller, previously worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded international broadcaster originally established with covert CIA funding to conduct anti-communist propaganda operations during the Cold War. Miller went to Ukraine in 2010 as a volunteer with the US Peace Corps.

His co-authors, Max Seddon and Henry Foy, head the FT’s bureaus in Moscow and Brussels, respectively.

Last week, the newspaper published a lengthy article by Seddon titled “The Putin whisperers,” recounting a dramatic but difficult-to-verify story of American and German nationals attempting to avert a “nuclear Armageddon” through backchannel diplomacy with Moscow.

Foy, meanwhile, broke a story in 2025 alleging that a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had experienced suspected Russian GPS jamming. The FT journalist was himself aboard the aircraft when it landed in Bulgaria, as he subsequently revealed on the newspaper’s podcast. His original report, citing anonymous officials, suggested Russia may have deliberately targeted the top EU executive with electronic interference.

Key elements of the story were challenged almost immediately by flight-tracking service Flightradar24. Bulgarian authorities subsequently debunked the core claims relayed by FT.

Despite the discrepancies, the FT insisted it stood by its reporting. Foy did not respond to requests for comment from fellow journalists who questioned the account.

October 29, 2026 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media

The Case for Less Unity in Europe

Why Norway and Finland Were Right to Call Putin

By Glenn Diesen | October 29, 2026

The leaders of Norway and Finland are criticised for breaking with the European consensus on boycotting diplomacy by calling President Putin. Their decision to undermine this solidarity is seen as dividing and weakening Europe. I argue the opposite. It was a brave and necessary move, as the European consensus is based on a rhetorical trap that isolates Europe, makes it increasingly irrelevant, and risks taking it to war with Russia – the world’s largest nuclear power. I will make a further argument: we should develop a healthy scepticism towards the notion that speaking with one voice is always a strength.

How to Speak with One Voice: The Rhetorical Trap

Ask yourself: how can 27+ countries with different political, economic, and security interests agree on a common foreign policy and speak with one voice? A common voice can be achieved by defining collective interests or by setting a rhetorical trap. A rhetorical trap is set when politicians use shared values and earlier commitments to pressure others into supporting policies they would otherwise oppose. Disagreement is portrayed as a betrayal of these values, making it politically costly to dissent, even when the policy goes against national interests.

The easiest way to force a consensus is to frame every issue as a struggle between good and evil. Once political disagreements become moral questions, those who challenge the consensus can be shamed rather than answered. If every issue is reduced to a choice between freedom and imperialism, it becomes much easier to speak with one voice. The obsession with speaking with one voice makes Europeans vulnerable to Manichean thinking and warmongering policies.

Europeans unite around absurd slogans such as “Putin is Hitler” and “Russia wants to restore the Soviet Union”. These slogans do not help us understand Russia or develop sensible policies to mitigate the security competition. Their purpose is to establish moral clarity and enforce political conformity. Challenging these slogans with well-documented arguments is considered immoral and a threat to European unity. This rhetorical trap is extremely dangerous because, in a struggle between good and evil, we reach the conclusion that diplomacy is appeasement and weapons are the path to peace.

The End of Debate

Consider the debate about European security after the Cold War. We once recognised the principle of indivisible security, which means that one state should not strengthen its security at the expense of others. Discussions about security entailed balancing deterrence with reassurance. These principles have largely disappeared from European political discourse. It is now only about deterrence. It is heresy to contest the notion that NATO is a “force for good”, and all concerns about NATO expansionism are framed as opposition to democracy and freedom. How can we resolve a security competition if we are not even allowed to discuss its causes?

Instead, European leaders increasingly measure the success of their policies by their moral intentions rather than their consequences. Sanctions are presented as a demonstration of resolve, the willingness to fight a war as an expression of solidarity, and refusing diplomacy as standing firm against aggression. But what happens when these policies fail to produce the intended results? The answer is usually more sanctions, more war, and less diplomacy. The policies themselves cannot be questioned without appearing to undermine the moral foundations of European unity.

Weaponising Solidarity

The demand for solidarity is also weaponised to override reason. WikiLeaks exposed how Norwegian officials had initially expressed serious concerns that US strategic missile defence would disrupt the nuclear balance with Russia and destabilise the world. The US ambassador reported to Washington that the Norwegians could be persuaded to change their position, not through arguments, but by emphasising the need for NATO solidarity. If the Norwegians were presented with a choice between “repeating Russian narratives” and defending NATO solidarity, they would fall in line.

Later, the American ambassador sent another cable to Washington confirming that their work with NGOs, think tanks, journalists, and politicians had delivered the message, and that the Norwegians were abandoning their security concerns. This was not the result of arguments, but of pressure to show solidarity in a world where everything is framed in black-and-white terms. Since then, the nuclear arms control architecture has largely collapsed, and the world faces a dangerous future – but the political class takes comfort in the fact that it was all done in solidarity.

This is a dangerous way to organise European security. If solidarity means that countries must abandon their own security assessments to support a common position, then solidarity itself becomes a source of insecurity. The purpose of cooperation should be to reconcile different interests and develop better policies, not to pressure governments into repeating the same empty arguments.

Speaking with One Voice or Correcting Course?

A strong Europe should be able to tolerate disagreements among its members. Indeed, such disagreements are necessary if Europe is to correct mistaken policies. When dissent is treated as disloyalty, political mistakes become almost impossible to reverse. Leaders become prisoners of their own rhetoric.

Norway and Finland should therefore not be criticised for challenging the European consensus on diplomatic isolation. They should be encouraged. Europe needs countries willing to question policies that have become resistant to criticism, especially when those policies concern war and peace.

The current European consensus is sustained by a rhetorical trap that isolates Europe, makes the continent increasingly irrelevant, and risks dragging us into war. I therefore argue for a little less solidarity and a little more common sense.

October 29, 2026 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Russophobia | | Comments Off on The Case for Less Unity in Europe

Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure – but Russians remain excluded

By Uriel Araujo | October 29, 2026

President Volodymyr Zelensky recently signed Bill No.16119, a law expanding educational rights for national minorities and indigenous peoples. Ukraine is thereby selectively adjusting, rather than reversing, its post-2014 Ukrainization policies.

The measure was presented as progress on minority rights and a step that could help open further EU accession clusters. Romanian President Nicusor Dan welcomed the legislation, noting that mother-tongue education for ethnic Romanians is “no abstract matter” for families living in Ukraine.

The law expands the use of eligible minority languages in schools, recognizes special institutional status for minority-language schools, and strengthens continuity of education.

Crucially, the additional protections apply only to official languages of the European Union and to indigenous languages such as Crimean Tatar. Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian and Slovak qualify. Russian does not. The Ukrainian Ministry of Education clarified that the additional rights “do not apply to the Russian language.”

Russian remains widely spoken, with 28% or even more Ukrainians still using both Russian and Ukrainian at home despite years of Ukrainization and wartime restrictions.

The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe flagged the problem years ago: in its 2017 opinion, it found the less favorable treatment of non-EU languages, particularly Russian, difficult to justify and raised discrimination concerns. Its 2023 opinion report on national minorities legislation reiterated that promoting Ukrainian as the state language does not justify withholding equivalent protections from Russian speakers.

Ukraine’s Constitutional Court took a different view in 2021, holding that preferential treatment for EU languages was permissible – the European advisory body’s criticism and Kyiv’s domestic position have never fully aligned.

The expanded guarantees for ethnic Hungarians and Romanians may reflect Budapest’s and Bucharest’s ability to block or delay Ukraine’s EU accession process.

It is no accident Roma inclusion follows a separate track: a national strategy running to 2030 addresses education, housing and discrimination. These measures concern the social integration of marginalized Gypsies communities, rather than reversing Ukrainization.

Similarly, Russian speakers and ethnic Russians, who cannot exercise comparable leverage inside the EU process, remain outside the new framework.

By comparison, although the ongoing war complicates it, Russia formally recognizes ethnic Ukrainians, while its Constitution and laws guarantee the preservation and study of minority languages.

In any case, Kyiv explicitly differentiates between Russian and EU minority languages, while Moscow formally has an inclusive framework.

Ukraine’s Russian minority-rights controversy predates the 2022 invasion: differential treatment has been a structural feature of post-Maidan policy, rather than just a temporary wartime measure.

After 2014, language, media and minority legislation steadily elevated Ukrainian while narrowing the public space for Russian. US political scientist Nicolai N. Petro, writing in Foreign Policy in late 2023, described policies that further relegated Russian speakers to a permanent second-class status – and warned that such approaches risk alienating a significant share of the population even once fighting ends.

Ukrainian officials have at times declared there is simply “no Russian minority”, a claim that sits uneasily with census data and everyday bilingual reality, to say the least.

Meanwhile, nationalist historical narratives persist: a Lviv’s museum dedicated to Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych was being rebuilt just weeks before the education law was signed. Shukhevych incited anti-Polish pogroms in 1930.

The continued public commemoration of such figures is hard to reconcile with any claim of comprehensive ideological retreat from post-Maidan nation-building. Moreover, the reforms will be viewed by Ukrainian ultranationalists as a setback forced by European partners – and are likely to generate domestic pushback.

They may also, on the other hand, encourage further demands from minority communities, including over the glorification of controversial wartime figures – an issue that still strains relations with Poland. Not surprisingly, Ukrainian tensions with neighbors have been a recurring feature of the regional landscape – Hungary being a case in point.

As part of its EU accession plans, Kyiv is reviewing chauvinistic policies regarding some minorities – while leaving the largest linguistic community outside the latest concessions.

The “macro” dimension of the conflict involves great-power rivalry, proxy dynamics and the long trajectory of NATO expansion. The micro or rather “meso”-level dimension remains the unresolved issue of post-Soviet borders and the ethnopolitics of a post-Soviet republic still consolidating its nation-building project.

In the words of Kristin Henrard (Professor of International Law at the Brussels School of Governance): “Ukraine will need to acknowledge that the Russian minority, as one of the several minorities with kinstates in its territory, is special because of that strong numerical size, and traditional presence.” This would be “in line with Ukraine’s international obligations”, she writes.

So much for the idea that minority-rights problems were ever merely “Russian propaganda.” They were real enough for Hungarians and Romanians that Kyiv had to legislate; they remain real for Russian speakers. The civil-rights issue remains.

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

October 29, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure – but Russians remain excluded

Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – October 26, 2026

October 26, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Comments Off on Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”

Democrats Put Anti-Russia Agenda Ahead of American Workers

Sputnik – 25.10.2026

Even as the US diesel deal with Russia that was brokered by Donald Trump could help bring the price of oil down, the Democrats’ Russophobia “is leading them to try to sabotage the deal,” Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of CovertAction Magazine, tells Sputnik.

“Trump may be making some steps at the beginning to try to end the conflict in Ukraine, whereas the Democrats, I think, want to escalate that conflict. And they are totally irrational,” he adds.

Only a small number of Democrats opposed the anti-Russian sanctions bill, arguing that it is “totally irrational and is going to have a very negative effect on the US economy.”

“This is a case in point where this hysteria about Russia and Russophobia reaches the extent that the government is actually advocating for positions that are very harmful to the American economy and to American workers or farmers — even though the Democrats purport that they are more for the working people.”

American farmers complain that they cannot stay in business due to the cost of fuel, the soaring cost of living does a number on the budgets of working Americans, and many businesses in the US are struggling.

“Some of that also has to do with the war spending of the government and all the money they put into warfare, including Ukraine. That is the thing that Democrats are so hypocritical about. Because they just want to spend more and more billions on Ukraine,” notes Kuzmarov.

“That is what has been ruining the American economy and American society over decades now — the excessive military spending. The Democrats undercut their claim to be for the working people or for farmers if they are trying to sabotage an economic arrangement that would actually work to bring the cost of fuel down.”

Meanwhile, more and more Americans may start seeing the numerous opportunities for economic deals with Russia, potentially leading them to “put more and more pressure on the government to ease relations, restore regular diplomatic relations, end the war in Ukraine, stop the sanctions, and restore ties for the benefit of both countries.”

The Europeans are also “increasingly protesting their governments’ policies and the position they have taken against Russia,” seeing how purchasing more Russian oil and gas would have been beneficial to the European economies.

American people ended up being the losers in their government’s scheme to weaken Russia through the Ukrainian conflict, with billions of dollars that are “needed here in the United States” being lost in the process.

“Ukraine has sacrificed generations of its youth now, its economy has been devastated, and it has become more of an autocratic country under Volodymyr Zelensky,” Kuzmarov says, noting that US Democrats support the “destruction of Ukraine” rather than Ukraine itself.

“That has been destructive for everybody except the weapon contractors and maybe the Wall Street financial firms that own those weapon contractors.”

On October 22, The Washington Post reported that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had asked companies involved in Russian diesel imports to preserve relevant documents as Democrats prepared for a possible probe.

October 25, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Democrats Put Anti-Russia Agenda Ahead of American Workers

Peace in Ukraine: the easy way – or the hard way

Strategic Culture Foundation | October 23, 2026

Diplomacy, as the saying goes, is the art of the possible. A peaceful settlement to the war in Ukraine is possible if all sides were to engage in genuine diplomacy. That’s the easy, more civilized way.

If not, Russia will achieve peace the hard way through complete military victory.

Diplomacy is being prevented because European politicians, in particular, are held hostage by their own twisted ideology and false propaganda.

Ironically, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine was intended to “strategically defeat” Russia. It turns out, however, that it is the NATO axis that is staring at a historic defeat. The chaos surging across Europe is a manifestation of that failure, driven by higher energy prices and reckless, unsustainable militarism.

Thus, peace in Ukraine is concomitant with peace in Europe, and diplomacy would expedite that to obviate more instability and suffering.

But diplomacy is incompatible with parties who possess a diseased mentality of Russophobia.

Diplomatic engagement involves putting pragmatic interests first, ahead of ideological bias. The pragmatic interest of everyone surely should be to find an end to this nearly five-year war that has caused millions of casualties and runs the risk of escalating to a general war in Europe.

The Trump administration appears to be renewing peace efforts by dispatching a presidential envoy to Russia this week. Russian President Vladimir Putin cordially greeted American envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg. It is unimaginable that any European politician or envoy would be capable of that rudimentary courtesy. Putin reiterated that Russia’s door is open for negotiations.

Diplomacy can create a path to peace sooner, as internationally renowned Professor Jeffrey Sachs advocated in an eminently reasonable presentation this week.

Key issues for a peace agreement include: 1) indivisible security for all; 2) permanent neutrality status for Ukraine; 3) an armistice, not a temporary ceasefire, based on current lines of conflict; and 4) a declaration by NATO to halt its eastward expansion.

The framework for peace proposed by Sachs is similar to Russia’s position. It addresses the causes of conflict rather than only its symptoms.

Professor Sachs points out that these are not new principles. They were recognized and agreed upon in the past by the United States, its European allies, and Ukraine. In the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the U.S., Soviet Union, and European states accepted the principle that security is not a zero-sum game. All states must have a mutual right to security.

On the issue of permanent neutrality of Ukraine, that was declared in its constitution when it established independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The seeking of NATO membership for Ukraine overturns that principle. It was the United States under President GW Bush that initiated the drive for NATO membership with the Bucharest Declaration in 2008, which was repudiated by Russia with the warning that it would inevitably lead to conflict, as history proves.

Sachs also points out that the United States and its NATO allies must return to the pledge made to the Soviet Union in 1989 that there would be no eastward expansion of the military bloc. It is basic common sense that the encroachment of NATO forces on Russia’s borders is destabilizing and a source of confrontation. The relentless expansion is a violation of the principle of indivisible security. Would the United States accept a situation where Mexico was installing Russian or Chinese military forces?

As for the cessation of hostilities and the drawing of territorial lines, that is a thorny issue. Moscow claims that it has a historical right to the territories east and south of the Dniper River, including Sumy, Kharkov, Kherson and Odessa, in addition to the Donbass and, of course, Crimea.

What is unrealistic is for Ukraine to claim the total return of territories that Russia has taken since 2022 (and 2014 in the case of Crimea). From Russia’s point of view, and many international historians would concur, the post-1991 composition of Ukraine was an artifice. It arbitrarily incorporated lands that were historically always part of Russia. These lands were donated to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Soviet leaders in dubious schemes of demographic manipulation that did not respect the antecedent cultural Russian ties.

In any case, a framework for a permanent peaceful settlement is feasible if all sides engage in honest discussions that recognize the historical background.

When U.S. President Donald Trump met Russia’s Putin in Anchorage back in August 2025, there seemed to be an acceptance by the American side of Russia’s perspective on addressing “root causes”. Subsequently, Trump failed to follow through on what appeared to be a breakthrough meeting in Anchorage. Part of the problem was the Europeans and the Kiev regime thwarting Trump’s initiative and throwing obstacles in the way of negotiations. European leaders insisted on a temporary ceasefire and NATO peacekeepers, and have persisted in treating Russia like a pariah.

The international context has shifted in a way that makes Trump more amenable. His disastrous war with Iran has blown fuel prices sky-high for American consumers. With the mid-term elections only weeks away, the White House needs some good news to prevent a political wipeout for the Republicans.

Trump made a deal with Putin two weeks ago for diesel supplies from Russia to ease the pain at the pump for American voters. Essential to that is for Ukraine to stop air strikes on Russian oil facilities. The corrupt puppet president in Kiev, Vladimir Zelensky, is defying Trump with churlish remarks and threats to keep striking Russian oil refineries and depots.

One positive thing from the rift with Zelensky is Trump viewing him as the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump is now openly castigating the Ukrainian former comedian and calling for a new president in that country.

The cocaine addict Zelensky, with his loathsome war racketeering, is hanging on to power by a thread, and only because of continuing support from European leaders. These elitist European politicians are driven by anti-Russian ideology and servility to the futile geopolitical agenda of strategically defeating Russia. Europe is witnessing a social upheaval bordering on revolution over the fallout from the soaring cost of living, which is, in turn, a consequence of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. But the elites have no way to address the chaos because they are the problem.

For all his flaws, and there are many, at least Trump is willing to engage in diplomacy. He is not encumbered with hatred of Russia. His understanding of the root causes of the war may be limited. But at least his administration has the basic quality of respecting Russia as an equal and listening to Russia’s perspective. That is a modicum for negotiations and the art of the possible.

By contrast, the European elites and their pet regime in Kiev are incapable of engaging in any diplomacy. They are obsessed with unattainable and sinister ideological prejudices that hark back to Nazi Germany and the belief that Russians are “subhumans” to be conquered. They have no respect for Russia, nor are they capable of any intelligent, honest discussion about the causes of conflict.

Jeffrey Sachs contends that Trump could promptly end the war and create peace if he were to make a clear policy announcement that the United States is returning to a position whereby it respects indivisible security for all, including Russia, accepts permanent neutrality of Ukraine with no future as a NATO member, and declares that NATO ends its eastward expansion. A rational path to peace is possible.

There will be howls of condemnation from the Kiev regime and its European sponsors. There will be howls too from within the U.S. establishment who share the European ideology of demonizing and belligerence towards Russia. Trump may be so weakened by the mid-term elections that it is not politically possible for him to make such a policy announcement.

So be it. Russia will continue to win its military objectives and demand its rightful terms of peace. Diplomacy offers an easy way to peace. But if the West insists on the hard way, then Russia will deliver that way too. The Europeans and Kiev regime will pay an even higher price with their own implosion.

October 24, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Comments Off on Peace in Ukraine: the easy way – or the hard way

Trump & the Rrrrussians

By Patrick LAWRENCE | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 24, 2026

Given the gush of vitriol and condemnation since Oct. 9, when Donald Trump announced his deal to import 5 million metric tons of Russian diesel, roughly 37 million barrels, one would think the president had surrendered the United States’ sovereignty to the Kremlin, or handed over the Ukrainians to the Russian army, or rankly betrayed the Europeans or altogether renounced what we picturesquely call Western civilization.

This is, indeed, what we read daily in the corporate press these days and what we are supposed to think. It is 2016 redux, it seems. Another round of Russiagate may not be far off, given 16 House Democrats have introduced a Prohibit Corrupt Russia Oil Deals Act and 12 senators now attack the diesel accord as “a gift to our adversary.”

If there is one thing essential to recall about those dreary years it is that the wobbly-from-the-first Russiagate edifice, the whole of it, was made of mis– and disinformation, hyperbole, innuendo, extravagant abuses of office and propaganda incessantly disseminated in corporate media.

It was, in short, the Deep State’s attempt to scuttle any effort to advance beyond the poisonous Russophobia it had spent a decade cultivating (taking my date from Vladimir Putin’s era-defining speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007).

It is the same again as Trump tries once more to end the war in Ukraine and refashion East–West relations, a project the old “MICIMATT”— the military-industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academic and think tank blob — simply cannot abide.

Let us listen to this new round of rubbish with the recent past in mind.

“Donald Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain.” That is Tom Friedman, writing in The New York Times last week under the headline, “Trump’s Democracy–for–Diesel Deal Shames Us All.”

“When future students search online for ‘sellout,’ ‘appeaser’ or ‘traitor to his country’s core values,’” Friedman elaborates, “their two pictures will come up first, side by side.” There is no matching our Tom when it comes to overdrawn historical reference dressed up as intellectual gravitas.

Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect Tuesday under the headline, “Why Putin Is Now Our Ally,” is unhappy that Americans are not angrier and more contemptuous than they appear to be in response to Trump’s latest démarche to Russia.

“We’ve grown so inured to Trump’s outrages,” he writes, “that his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime hasn’t yet stoked the level of horror and rage it deserves.”

Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime. We’re back to this, are we?

We’re also back to the good old Trump–Putin “bromance” bit, it seems, as in “Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail.”

This bizarre suggestion of homophilia repeats a tiresome trope from the Russiagate years — never in the slightest documented, for the record — and this time comes from Tom Nichols, a neoliberal hack of long standing. Writing Oct. 18 in The Atlantic, Nichols wants us to see matters this way:

“Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful — and powerful — security arrangement in human history.”

Are we clear on all this? The corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev is America’s friend and partner, simple as that.

The Western order as we have it is the finest thing humanity has ever managed, and Donald J. Trump has forsaken this finest-ever order.

All because the Trumpster signed an agreement whereby the United States will purchase, all in, about two weeks’ worth of Russian diesel fuel.

Paranoia strikes deep, as should be plain to all as the imperium proceeds into its self-inflicted decline. Into the pages of The Atlantic it will creep whenever the topic is “Putin’s Russia” (as against “Russia”).

Trump’s ‘Simple’ Decision

How to account for this outpouring of nitwittery from all these pseuds? Why so suddenly does the world seem to be coming to an end? These are our questions.

Trump II has proven disastrously worse than Trump I, to state the obvious. He had a few good ideas the first time around: end the wars of adventure, bring the soldiers home, decommission NATO, a new détente with Moscow.

This time — and you have to credit the Trumpster for this, strange as it is to credit him with anything — he has only one. He still wants to restore relations with Russia to a working order of some kind, and this must begin with ending the war the Biden regime provoked very quickly after Trump was voted out of office.

Trump is a Manhattan property man for whom everything is transactional, we have to remember. Exploring “deals” does not figure at the higher end of statecraft — certainly not given all that is at issue between Russia and the West — but this is a question of method, not purpose. Let us not get lost in the former while losing sight of the latter.

Peaceful, constructive relations with Russia, based on an enduring settlement of benefit to all sides, are a good thing altogether to be welcomed, however often Americans and West Europeans are told any such eventuality would amount to the horror of horrors.

As everyone thinking about this has remarked, Trump’s immediate intent in striking his diesel deal is to get prices down as best he can before the midterm elections and to pretend the price crisis has causes other than the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran.

I’m for setting the politics aside. A few days’ worth of diesel — all that can possibly arrive from Russian refineries before Nov. 3 — won’t make any difference, and Trump cannot but know this.

My mind goes to a remark Trump made on Truth Social, his digital bullhorn, at the beginning of this week in response to all the shrieking and shouting that followed his Oct. 9 announcement:

“My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

It is important to read this together with other things the Trump regime has got up to lately. While the United States is in plausible-denial mode, Kiev reports that it has disrupted some of the early-warning satellite intelligence vital to Ukraine’s defenses.

Elon Musk, apparently after consultation with the White House, has restricted Ukraine’s use of Starshield, the military-grade version of the Starlink communications system.

These are day-to-day lifelines. So is the Prioritized Ukraine Requirement List, the arrangement whereby the United States sells arms to the Europeans, who send them on to Ukraine. To date the volume of shipments through the P.U.R.L. channel has come to $7 billion. Trump is reportedly threatening to end the program.

Atop all this he has suspended implementation of a sanctions bill he signed into law only a month ago. Concurrently, the Witkoff–Kushner duo presented Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator, with a new settlement proposal that reads to me like a condensed version of the very creditable 28–point plan they presented a year ago next month.

Something is afoot, it seems to me. I see a thought-through strategy in all this. I see renewed determination on Trump’s part.

Trump is out of the closet at last — and perfectly accurate — as he asserts that Zelensky is the principal impediment to a settlement accord and, so, should be either removed from office or forced to accept defeat and recognize Russia’s legitimate interests.

Trump’s new push to bring the Ukraine crisis to a close, to be clear on this point, is not a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. It is just the opposite.

There are a lot of reasons to question how far Trump will get either in ending the war or restoring relations with Russia to a livable détente. But if he maintains the present momentum, we may be watching the beginning of the endgame in Ukraine.

This is a “may,” conditional verb required. But it is this prospect that has all the warmongers in the MICIMATT complex in a dither.

Strange it will be if a president so wrong about so much manages to achieve the peace he is after. But maybe the Tom Friedmans and the Tom Nichols and the rest of their kind are useful as a mirror.

Maybe the extent of their panic is a measure of the Trumpster’s chances of success this time around.

October 24, 2026 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on Trump & the Rrrrussians

BRITAIN’S WARNING: PREPARE FOR WAR

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | October 22, 2026

From military speeches to civil-defense drills, Europe’s leaders are openly preparing their countries for conflict. Jefferey looks at the warnings coming out of Britain and the polling that suggests the public may not be ready to answer the call.

October 24, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , | Comments Off on BRITAIN’S WARNING: PREPARE FOR WAR

How the Cambridge Analytica scandal still haunts Mark Zuckerberg

RT | October 23, 2026

‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.

On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.

The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.

Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.

To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.

What was Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.

Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.

SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.

What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?

Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.

How did this become a scandal?

Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.

Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.

Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?

“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.

AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Has Facebook been punished?

At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.

Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”

However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.

In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.

The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.

In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.

Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.

Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.

Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?

Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.

What about Brexit?

Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.

Is Zuckerberg in the clear?

The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.

Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.

October 23, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on How the Cambridge Analytica scandal still haunts Mark Zuckerberg

Easy fix for Europe’s chaos? Stop fueling war against Russia

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 23, 2026

There is a straightforward way to alleviate the social chaos sweeping Europe, as well as the war in Ukraine threatening to engulf the continent. It’s an easy fix – and it’s not shoving more white powder up Zelensky’s nose paid for by European taxpayers.

European leaders just have to find the resolve to stop fueling the war against Russia and engage in diplomacy with Moscow to establish an all-encompassing security architecture (as Russia had proposed back in December 2021). That, in turn, will salvage European nations from unsustainable debt driven by militarism and propping up a kleptocracy in Kiev, whose puppet leader is obviously degenerating from cocaine addiction.

Across Europe, cities are looking like battle zones with mass protests, public tensions, buildings burning, shops looted, riot police baton-charging crowds, and masked mobs running amok. France is bearing the brunt of street violence, but so too are Italy, Belgium, and others. Spain and Portugal are seeing their cities turned into tent camps in protests against a lack of affordable housing.

In the turmoil, it is easy to lose sight of the basic problem. People en masse are suffering from economic privation. Why can’t their individual and social needs be met in an efficient and effective manner? Why is there seemingly no money to fix broken societies?

Curfews are declared in Paris and cities across France while Italy moves to deploy soldiers in Milan to restore a semblance of order. Thousands of arrests have been made in recent days. Revolution is in the air, and so too is the sinister possibility of supposedly democratic governments flipping to become police-state dictatorships.

In this volatile, explosive situation, it is tempting to look for scapegoats.

French President Emmanuel Macron goes on national television to denounce “ultra-left groups” who he says are mindlessly trying to destroy France.

Even American President Donald Trump weighs in to claim that a once great nation (France) is being “conquered by immigrants, jihadists and communists.”

There were also predictable accusations in Western media that Russia is fomenting the unrest across Europe.

Another misdirection is to portray the European governments as cash-strapped and unable to deliver relief from the cost-of-living crisis and deteriorating public services. The governments and media tend to define the problem as one of balancing fiscal bookkeeping, overspending on social welfare, aging populations, or some other demographic factor.

European nations, we are told by pundits, are in massive debt and under pressure from bond markets to ramp up austerity by slashing public spending. The challenge for France and other governments is that they “no longer have the fiscal room to simply throw more money at these problems,” as one commentator put it.

Another commentator lamented that: “Hamstrung governments seem to have no answer to the public’s furious demands, making further discontent likely.”

In other words, we are told, “there is no alternative to austerity,” to paraphrase the late British leader Margaret Thatcher.

But that premise deceptively tells only part of the picture. The crucial part omitted is that the fiscal crunch of European governments is largely caused by the reckless funnelling of money to fuel the war in Ukraine and inordinately build up their own military forces. That wasteful misallocation of resources is “justified” by relentlessly and absurdly demonizing Russia as a “threat to Europe”. The news media play the role of amplifying the propaganda.

The media do not question, never mind expose, how Europe’s economies have been exhausted by a proxy war agenda against Russia that has involved cutting themselves off from Russian affordable energy, the lifeblood of industry, and on top of that racking up hundreds of billions in debt by propping up the endemically corrupt Kiev regime.

That regime is losing the war against Russia as it runs out of conscripts for the meat grinder. Yet, European governments are fixated on keeping the futile war going with ever more funding of the regime.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, dissembled this week by claiming that “Ukraine would have surrendered a long time ago if not for European support”. This is a tacit admission that the EU and Britain are fueling the war.

She also accused the Trump administration of forcing Ukraine into a surrender. In her soulless view, diplomacy and peace are sneered at as surrender.

European societies are deprived of financial resources for vital public services and infrastructure all in the fraudulent name of “defending” Ukraine in a war that has gone on for nearly five years. There is no end in sight if the European leaders have their way.

The European Union’s unelected bureaucracy has donated €90 billion to the Kiev regime for 2026 and 2027 alone, in addition to over €200 billion already allocated. This largesse is still not enough. The Zelensky dictatorship is calling for an extra €70 billion to be doled out, and the EU Russophobic elites are clamoring to oblige.

No wonder that European societies are visibly falling apart from underinvestment and widespread hardship from the soaring cost of living. The social implosion is a direct consequence of a policy of militarism and war, a policy that the Euro elites are running with impunity and unaccountability. That’s dictatorship by any definition.

The depiction of fiscally constrained and helpless European governments is an illusion. The constraint is not a natural condition of societies. It is the consequence of a deliberate, criminal policy of warmongering.

So spare us the scapegoating and misdirection. Spare us the curfews and calls for emergency police state powers to curb “hooligans and extremists.” That misdirection is playing into the hands of the ruling class, which has delegitimized itself by its sponsoring of war in Ukraine, its support for American aggression against Iran and Yemen, and its complicity in Israeli genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.

Contrary to the politicians and pundits claiming that there is “no easy fix” to the chaos erupting in Europe, there is. It is for the European governments to stop fueling the war in Ukraine and actually manage societies according to democratic needs.

However, that rational and feasible solution is probably out of reach under the prevailing political system. The elites in control of the system are incapable of overseeing any meaningful reform. They will not engage in diplomacy to find a peaceful settlement in Ukraine with Russia.

And so the outcome seems to be either they consolidate the emerging dictatorship and quash the legitimate social demands of the people, or the people will prevail by sweeping away the corrupt regimes that masquerade as “democratic”.

October 23, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on Easy fix for Europe’s chaos? Stop fueling war against Russia

Putin’s key remarks on peace talks and Europe’s ‘schizophrenia’

RT | October 23, 2026

Russia remains ready to negotiate a lasting settlement in Ukraine but will achieve its objectives regardless, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin on Thursday. He also outright rejected “schizophrenic” claims in Western media that Moscow could be seeking a war with Europe.

Putin’s comments followed nearly three hours of talks with US envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. Witkoff brought new peace talk proposals following his own discussions with Vladimir Zelensky, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s Chief of Staff Bjoern Siebert, and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in Oslo.

The new diplomatic engagement comes after Putin’s October 9 agreement with US President Donald Trump on Russian diesel supplies, whereby Washington eased fuel export restrictions while engaging with Moscow on broader economic cooperation.

Lasting peace, rather than a temporary pause

Putin confirmed Russia’s readiness to resume trilateral contacts with the US and Ukraine, focusing on security arrangements for both countries after a final settlement. The goal is to achieve definitive peace agreements, rather than “a suspension of hostilities for some short period,” he stressed.

The Russian leader also stated that he agrees with Witkoff’s argument that such discussions would also need to address Europe’s wider security architecture.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov previously suggested the talks could resume around mid-November, potentially in Abu Dhabi.

Putin said an agreement was possible, but insisted that “all the goals of the special military operation will be achieved” one way or another.

Europe’s ‘political schizophrenia’

European claims that Russia poses a military threat and preparations for confrontation amount to “political schizophrenia,” Putin said, arguing that European populations do not want war with Russia and explicitly rejected suggestions that Moscow is preparing to attack them.

“We do not want, we are not preparing for any war with Europe,” he said.

Putin described inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia as unrealistic, expressing hope that its opponents would recognize that peaceful relations better serve their own populations.

‘Historic Russia’ and the territorial question

Asked about Zelensky’s recent comments to Fox News that he would be willing to give up 25% of his territories in order to freeze the conflict on the current battle lines, Putin rejected the premise.

“It is not their territory, it is the territory of historic Russia,” he said, citing residents’ votes for independence and subsequently for reunification with the Russian Federation.

He acknowledged that the issue remained disputed, but argued that describing these developments as Ukraine losing territory was inappropriate.

Fighting ‘to the last Ukrainian’

Putin called it “incomprehensible” that Kiev expects that “the entire world should pay them, fight for them, supply them with weapons, ammunition, equipment,” and stressed that Russia has no desire to fight Ukraine.

“If Ukraine’s current leadership wants to wage war, let them fight. But why do they think everyone should pay for it and supply them with weapons?” Putin questioned.

He noted that much of this desire for war can be attributed to foreign countries that want to fight against Russia in order to weaken it and have promised support to Kiev.

However, Putin stressed that these foreign entities are prepared to fight until “the last Ukrainian” and questioned whether Ukraine’s leadership similarly treats its citizens as expendable cannon fodder.

Putin accused Ukrainian authorities of rounding up men “like stray dogs” and forcibly sending them to the front, undermining motivation. He also argued that nationalist groups that carry out this so-called “busification” do not always bear the frontline burden themselves.

He recalled that, according to official figures, there have been half a million deserters in Ukraine and over 300,000 criminal cases opened, adding that the actual numbers could be significantly higher.

Shared history and missed opportunities

Putin said Moscow had sought a negotiated resolution with Kiev since 2014, including through the Minsk agreements intended to settle the Donbass conflict. He blamed Ukrainian authorities for repeatedly rejecting opportunities to reach an agreement before Russia’s military operation began in 2022.

He described Ukrainians as a people closely related to Russians, pointing to genetic research that has shown they are “one people.” However, he acknowledged that some wished to identify differently and said Russia accepted that reality.

“We are ready even now to negotiate and seek solutions to this difficult, complicated situation,” Putin said. “Everything can be agreed upon.”

October 23, 2026 Posted by | Russophobia | , | Comments Off on Putin’s key remarks on peace talks and Europe’s ‘schizophrenia’

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