At the Anchorage summit last summer between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, there was some optimism that the conflict in Ukraine might be resolved through diplomacy.
There appeared to be an atmosphere of bonhomie between the two leaders, and in particular, an openness on the American side to listen to Russia’s historic grievances about NATO’s enlargement, presenting a national security threat.
Only days later, however, Trump’s administration quietly approved the supply of new cruise missiles to Ukraine. After months of delay, those new types of weapons are now on their way to Ukraine. This firepower will give a deeper reach into Russia, which is already being assailed by long-range NATO drones.
The summit in the Alaskan capital in August 2025 was dubbed the “spirit of Anchorage.” The meeting was supposed to signal Trump’s commitment to finding a diplomatic settlement of the conflict, taking into account Russia’s historic territorial claims. There appeared to be a recognition on the American side of addressing Moscow’s concerns about the “root causes of conflict” from decades of NATO encroachment on its borders.
But nearly a year on, the diplomatic track has failed to gain any traction, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged this week.
Trump has, of course, become embroiled in a disastrous war against Iran, one that is endangering the whole Middle East and the global economy.
So much for the “peace presidency” that he had promised. Still, one might expect him to at least pay some token attention to pushing diplomacy in Ukraine. No. Like a kid bored with a new toy, Trump has backed away, which makes all his past angst to stop the slaughter in Ukraine something of a superficial theater.
What is still going ahead, though, is the supply of over 3,300 U.S.-made cruise weapons, manufactured under a program called the Extended Range Attack Missiles (ERAM). The ERAM program began production in April 2025 of two new cruise missile designs.
One weapon is called the Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile (RAACM), manufactured by CoAspire. It has a range of 450 kilometers.
The other design, known as Rusty Dagger, has a much longer range of over 900 km, and is produced by Zone Five Technologies. Both companies are based in the U.S.
The ERAMs are much smaller than Tomahawk cruise missiles in terms of overall size, weight, and explosive warhead. But they were engineered to give Ukraine a cheaper option for deep strikes in Russian territory. They also do not have the iconic image of the Tomahawk and, therefore, can be supplied without arousing the same provocation.
They are designed to be deployed as air-launched weapons using F-16 fighter jets or MiG-29s, both of which are flown by the Ukrainian armed forces.
European NATO states – Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway – are picking up most of the tab for the $825 million cost of supplying the ERAMs to Ukraine, according to the Pentagon.
It is being reported, although not officially confirmed, that the Rusty Dagger ERAM, the longer-range version, has already begun operations in striking Russia. The claims are based on the alleged recovery of missile debris, showing navigation equipment belonging to Five Zone Technologies.
Since the Anchorage summit last year, President Trump has sought to cast the Kiev regime and the European NATO leaders as unhelpful to his efforts to make a peace deal with Russia. There has also been a belief on that Russian side that Trump is genuine in his expressions of wanting to find a diplomatic resolution to the more than four-year war in Ukraine – the biggest in Europe since World War II.
Moscow has tended to rebuke the Zelensky regime and its European patrons for being intransigent and acting to undermine Trump’s peace diplomacy. There is no doubt that this criticism of European Russophobia blocking diplomatic engagement has some merit.
Nevertheless, a reality check is due on what Washington’s abiding agenda is.
Washington has led the long-term strategic policy of confrontation with Russia using the NATO alliance and Ukraine as a proxy. This has been Washington’s systematic policy under successive U.S. administrations, from Clinton in the 1990s to Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.
It was under Trump during his first administration in 2018 that the U.S. broke the taboo of supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine. Those munitions included $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles. Russia warned at the time that such arming of Ukraine would lead to open conflict. That prediction duly culminated in February 2022 during the Biden administration when Russia invaded Ukraine to defend Russian-speaking people who were being attacked and killed by the NATO-backed NeoNazi Kiev regime.
Indeed, Trump has boasted at various times about how he was the first president to send lethal weapons to Ukraine, while at the same time trying to blame the Biden administration for starting the war.
In his second administration, from January 2025, Trump has balked at supplying Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine so as not to provoke Russia after Moscow gave stern warnings against such a move. And he has talked up his supposed desire to end the slaughter, at one point claiming he could achieve that in 24 hours.
Trump has also scaled back sending U.S. tax dollars as military aid to Ukraine, which might suggest that he is serious about winding down the conflict.
A more nuanced view is that what transactional Trump seems more concerned about is not so much reducing the supply of U.S. weapons to Ukraine but rather getting the Europeans to pay for it.
This is evident from the expected supply of over 3,300 ERAM cruise missiles to Ukraine, which Europe is financing. Trump has approved that delivery.
Unmistakably, this represents a grave escalation in the war against Russia, whereby the U.S. and its European NATO partners are making a concerted effort to weaponize the Kiev regime to strike deeper. The new cruise missile arsenal dovetails with the ramping up of European-supplied and financed long-range drone capability.
Thus, the inescapable conclusion is that Washington’s agenda of hostility towards Russia has not changed fundamentally. It has merely become nuanced with duplicity about seeking diplomacy, a charade in which Washington is supposedly thwarted by a recalcitrant Kiev regime and European Russophobes.
This same duplicitous charade is played with regard to Iran. Trump makes out that he wants to find a peace deal with Tehran, but that his efforts are continually sabotaged by Israel and its “crazy” prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he gets on the phone to shout at, we are told. This, from a U.S. president who started a war of aggression against Iran 100 days ago on February 28 by murdering Iran’s supreme leader while he was saying prayers in his Tehran home, and on the same day killing 168 schoolgirls in a multiple air strike on a college in Minab.
The reality is that the United States could bring the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to a rapid end by stopping the supply of weapons.
Trump’s so-called peace diplomacy is a con to cover up for the fact that U.S. warmongering is the root cause of conflicts, and this warmongering is not going to stop until it is defeated.
By the summer of 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević appeared firmly entrenched in power.
A decade earlier, he had risen to prominence by harnessing Serbian nationalism as Yugoslavia began to fracture. Over time, he consolidated control over political institutions and much of the media while leading Serbia through wars, sanctions, and NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign. Yet beneath the surface, public frustration was growing. The economy was struggling, unemployment remained high, and many Serbians had grown weary of international isolation and authoritarian rule.
When Milošević changed election rules in July 2000 to allow the presidency to be decided by popular vote, he likely expected another victory. Instead, the move created an opportunity for a united opposition.
On September 24, voters went to the polls. Milošević faced Vojislav Koštunica, the candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). Election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe later described the vote as fundamentally flawed, citing irregularities, restricted monitoring, and unequal media access. State television overwhelmingly favored Milošević while opposition voices received little coverage.
When results were announced, the opposition claimed Koštunica had won outright. The government election commission insisted that no candidate had received a majority and ordered a runoff election. The opposition rejected the decision and called for nationwide resistance.
The first major challenge came from the Kolubara coal mines, where thousands of workers launched a strike. The mines were critical to Serbia’s electricity supply, giving the protest movement leverage over the government. Despite a heavy police presence, authorities proved unwilling to use significant force. Officers were instructed to appear tough, but many showed little enthusiasm for confronting the workers.
The regime’s position weakened further as demonstrations spread across the country.
On October 5, hundreds of thousands of protesters converged on Belgrade. Opposition leaders issued an ultimatum demanding Milošević step aside. When he refused, demonstrators stormed parliament and the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), long viewed as a symbol of state propaganda.
The moment that gave the uprising its name came when construction worker Ljubisav Đokić drove a wheel loader through police lines and into the parliamentary complex. Yet the decisive factor was not the wheel loader itself. Police units increasingly refused orders, roadblocks collapsed, and security forces largely stood aside. Within days, Milošević’s rule unraveled.
The protests were undeniably driven by genuine domestic grievances. Yet Serbia’s opposition was not operating alone.
According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), its Office of Transition Initiatives began programs promoting political transition in Serbia as early as 1997—three years before Milošević’s removal. USAID later acknowledged that it intensified support in the run-up to the 2000 election.
Between 1999 and 2000, at least $41 million flowed into Serbia through USAID, the State Department, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. The money supported opposition coordination, polling, election monitoring, media projects, and mass political messaging. Thousands of cans of spray paint, millions of stickers, and tons of campaign materials helped spread anti-Milošević messaging throughout the country.
The overt funding was only part of the story.
Journalist David Shimer reports that the CIA spent millions of dollars supporting efforts to unseat Milošević. Former CIA officer John Sipher later acknowledged that one successful American election-interference operation involved “certainly millions of dollars” directed against the Serbian leader. Outgoing President Bill Clinton defended assistance to the opposition, stating that while the United States did not rig the vote, he had no objection to CIA involvement.
Perhaps the most influential opposition organization was Otpor, a youth movement founded in 1998.
Otpor became famous for its clenched-fist logo, creative activism, and the slogan “Gotov Je!”—”He’s Finished!” Rather than building around charismatic personalities, organizers sought to create a decentralized movement capable of surviving arrests and repression. Small actions such as sticker campaigns gradually escalated into mass demonstrations.
Western organizations played a significant role in Otpor’s development. The National Endowment for Democracy provided funding—$282,000 in 2000 alone—while retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Helvey trained activists using concepts developed by political theorist Gene Sharp. Sharp’s work on nonviolent resistance became so influential that some activists referred to it as Otpor’s unofficial manual.
George Soros’ Open Society network was another important source of support for Serbia’s opposition. According to Ivan Vejvoda of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the organization provided one of Otpor’s first grants in 1998, helping support the student movement before it became a national force. The organization’s Belgrade branch also funded independent media and opposition-linked groups such as the G-17 economists. Velimir Curgus of the Soros network later stated that “most of our work was undercover,” while another Open Society official described the organization as one of Otpor’s earliest financial backers. Foreign financial support also helped fund the production of roughly 60 tons of posters and leaflets distributed before the election.
The movement’s success later became a model for future political campaigns abroad. Otpor veterans established the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which advised activists in countries ranging from Georgia and Ukraine to Egypt.
European governments were also involved. According to reports in Der Spiegel, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer coordinated with Yugoslav opposition figures before the election. Germany and other European actors provided substantial financial support to opposition-controlled municipalities and political organizations.
None of this means the Bulldozer Revolution was simply a foreign creation. Milošević was genuinely unpopular, and hundreds of thousands of Serbians willingly participated in the protests that ended his rule.
But the historical record leaves little doubt that Western governments were more than passive observers. Through funding, training, media support, election monitoring, and covert intelligence operations, they actively worked to shape Serbia’s political future.
The Bulldozer Revolution became a blueprint. The combination of grassroots activism, youth mobilization, foreign funding, independent media networks, and nonviolent resistance training would reappear in later movements across Eastern Europe and beyond. Whether viewed as democracy promotion or regime change, Serbia in 2000 became one of the clearest examples of domestic opposition and foreign intervention operating side by side to bring down a government.
The murder of 21 Russian students at a college dormitory on May 22 has yet to be fully understood in terms of the exact involvement of NATO states.
The university building in Starobelsk, Lugansk, was attacked in the early hours of the morning with 16 drones in three consecutive waves of assault. The targeting of the dormitory was deliberate. There were no Russian military installations in the vicinity.
NATO’s involvement in this act of terrorism is on multiple levels. Ukraine’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles has ramped up in recent months, in line with the massive financial support provided by the European Union in the form of a €90 billion loan, most of which is dedicated to boosting Ukraine’s drone arsenal, with European manufacturing companies working in partnership.
At another level, the Western corporate news media have largely ignored the Starobelsk atrocity and NATO’s involvement. The Western media have distorted the de facto war crime by highlighting implausible denials from the Ukrainian regime. In short, covering up.
At yet another level is the new and remarkable efficiency of Ukrainian-launched drones to evade Russian air defenses. Since the conflict in Ukraine escalated in 2022, NATO intelligence from satellite surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft has been supplying the Kiev regime with targeting data to attack Russian units.
But in recent months, NATO information flow and data analysis have taken a quantum leap regarding targeting range and lethality. Thus, the close partnership between Ukrainian and NATO drone manufacturing is amplified by the involvement of U.S.-based Palantir Technologies in operating systems.
Palantir was cofounded in 2003 by German-U.S. billionaire Peter Thiel. It has grown to become the “brains” behind operating weapon systems for the Pentagon, as well as the Israelis in their genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and aggression towards Iran.
Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp visited Kiev on May 12, where he met with the regime leadership to firm up military partnerships for using Artificial Intelligence in attack drones. Karp was ecstatic about the global business opportunities accruing to Palantir by using the Ukraine war as a laboratory for developing technology.
He boasted that his company’s software was the “operating system” for Ukraine’s military deploying against Russia. Significantly, the Palantir boss remarked that the real-time learning and development of his company’s systems were giving Palantir a huge commercial advantage that could not be achieved in peacetime laboratories. In other words, the killing fields of Ukraine are plugging into Palantir’s profitability and global status as a company.
“It’s our software primitives or infrastructure and your people building things that are completely different from what we would have ever built on top of this,” Karp said in an interview with Ukrainian media.
“You’re doing it on the battlefield with a very small number of people and then showing the world how these things work.”
This strategic collaboration between the Kiev regime and Silicon Valley’s hottest company was also revealed in an exclusive report this week by CNN. The CNN report did not mention Palantir by name, but screenshots reposted clearly showed that the Ukrainian drone operators were using the company’s PRISMA software. As reported, the software allows the processing of vast amounts of aviation and radar data in seconds, which is then used to deploy drones that evade Russian air defense systems and hit deep inside Russia.
The success of Ukrainian-NATO drones to strike deep inside pre-war Russian territory has improved dramatically. The air strikes have reportedly damaged 24 out of a total of 33 of Russia’s top oil refineries. Last month alone, it was reported that six refineries were hit, as well as major fuel depots. The installations, such as at Saratov and Volgograd, are hundreds of kilometers inside Russia. The disruption in fuel supplies has necessitated the Kremlin’s imposition of rationing on public purchases.
Palantir’s data processing and AI are such that interception of Ukrainian drones by Russian air defenses is incorporated into the targeting programs, which permits subsequent drone waves to circumnavigate anti-aircraft systems. This feedback loop brings new challenges for defense systems.
The increase in EU and NATO drone funding and technology would account for the quantitative surge in attacks on Russian territory. The complicity of NATO states, primarily the Baltic states, in lending their territories as launch sites is also a factor. The NATO propaganda machine, too, plays a role in minimizing the civilian deaths and thereby blindsiding European and American public opposition to a dangerous provocation and escalation of war with Russia.
But the involvement of Palantir in increasing the kill machine is another crucial qualitative dimension in the escalation, whereby Ukrainian-NATO drones are evading Russian defenses and increasing their capability at hitting its deep interior and vital infrastructure.
The massacre at the Starobelsk college in Lugansk points to the systematic involvement of Palantir in executing such a deadly attack.
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov (2010-14) expressed his astonishment at how 16 drones were able to penetrate Russian air defenses and hit the college in three waves. Azarov toldTass, the Russian news agency: “I think [NATO countries] are involved. Because, first, the drones that were sent flew right past all Russian air-defense systems, which means that someone guided them through. And you can only guide them if you have space reconnaissance data – it was a whole wave of 16 drones, and they passed by air-defense systems. It means they were guided through, solely thanks to the intervention of Western intelligence agencies. I think that, strictly speaking, they [NATO states] were behind this provocation,” he said.
Azarov did not mention Palantir per se. But the complex navigation ability of the NATO drones to thread through layers of Russian defense is the very kind of qualitative edge that the American software company is giving to the Ukrainian operators.
The other grave implication is that the extensive mapping of Russian targets, from oil refinery installations to fuel depots, suggests that the information supplied by the NATO “brains” has a detailed picture of what is being targeted. There is no way that the air strikes on a college dormitory could be confused with military installations that are not even present in the area.
That means Palantir and its multi-billionaire bosses like Alex Karp and Peter Thiel have blood on their hands, no matter how much they scrub their hands at their company’s newly opened office in Kiev.
In a perverse sidenote, Thiel, who was a friend of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has a personal interest in the topic of the Anti-Christ, traveling the globe delivering exclusive lectures to wealthy audiences about Armageddon and the end of times. It’s not clear what his exact views are on manifestations of the Anti-Christ. But the murder of teenage student girls sleeping in their beds should surely be relevant to his lectures.
The US is weighing whether to expand NATO’s nuclear-sharing framework by inviting more alliance members to host American dual-capable aircraft—warplanes configured to deliver nukes, reports the Financial Times.
At present, the arrangement includes Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkiye and the UK.
Under its terms, the US retains full custody of the nuclear warheads, which are stored at select European bases, while allied air forces train for nuclear deterrence missions using aircraft such as the F-35, F-15, and Tornado.
The discussions are reportedly driven in part by a need to reassure European allies of Washington’s enduring commitment to NATO’s nuclear deterrent—even as the US scales back some conventional troop deployments on the continent and pushes allies to shoulder more defense responsibility.
The talks remain at an early, highly confidential stage, with no imminent decisions anticipated.
Nevertheless, nations on NATO’s eastern flank—notably Poland and several of Russia’s neighbors—have already signaled interest in a possible expansion of the nuclear-sharing deal.
Russia has repeatedly cautioned that any deployment of nuclear-capable assets close to its borders would be seen as a destabilizing factor, and a direct threat to its national security.
In 2022, the U.S. provoked Moscow to invade Ukraine so Washington could attempt to destroy Russia’s economy with sanctions, orchestrate worldwide condemnation in an information war and lead a proxy ground operation to bleed Russia — all part of an attempt to bring down its government.
In case there’s any doubt that this is the goal, recall what President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government said right after Russia’s intervention.
On the day Russia invaded, Biden admitted that the sanctions weren’t meant to prevent an invasion. “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. … This is going to take time. And we have to show resolve so he [Putin] knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.”
On March 1, [2022] Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.”
Biden said on March 26, 2022 at the Royal Castle in Warsaw: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
A month later Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia, get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately to restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.
“Let’s get something straight,” Biden said. “I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. … The maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain … we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year. That’s what will stop him.” Of course it’s taken NATO more than a year but they haven’t given up.
The United States could have easily stopped Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war from happening by doing four things: forcing implementation of the 8-year old Minsk peace accords; dissolving extreme right Ukrainian militias; saying Ukraine would not join NATO and engaging Russia in serious negotiations over Moscow’s proposed December 2021 treaties about a new security architecture in Europe. Russia threatened a “technical/military” response if NATO and the U.S. did not take those two treaty proposals seriously.
So the U.S. knew Russia would invade if it rejected those proposals, which called for Ukraine not to join NATO, for missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed and NATO troops in Eastern Europe withdrawn. Instead, the U.S. refused to move the missiles and provocatively sent even more NATO forces to Eastern Europe, knowing full well it would lead to war. Washington was singularly uninterested in preventing Russia’s invasion.
Instead the U.S. essentially set a trap for Russia. Using the precedents of the Afghan trap set for the Soviets in 1979 and the Kuwait trap set for Saddam Hussein in 1990, the U.S. forced Russia’s hand by rejecting the treaty proposals while thousands of Ukrainian troops (Russia claimed as many as 122,00) amassed for an offensive against ethnic Russians in Donbass. Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022.
On March 16, 2022 — the same day it was revealed Russia and Ukraine had worked out a 15-point peace plan that later resulted in a tentative agreement to end the war — Biden announced another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine. As we now know, Emmanuel Macron tricked Putin into withdrawing his troops from outside Kiev to make that agreement work, only for Boris Johnson to intervene to stop the deal once the troops had been removed.
Having lost on the ground in Donbass over the subsequent four years, NATO has turned to an air war, hitting targets deep inside Russia with NATO-operated, long-range missiles and swarms of drones fired from Ukrainian territory. These attacks have damaged Russia’s oil exports and killed civilians. The most prominent provocation was last week in Donbass in which NATO and Ukraine slaughtered 21 Russian students in their sleep.
As our guest Scott Ritter pointed out, these attacks are designed to put internal political pressure on Putin. Either he acts more decisively, or risks his hold on power. Thus Russia has warned embassies in Kiev to evacuate their personnel as Moscow threatens to hit “decision-making centers” in the Ukrainian capital. There are also hardline demands on Putin to hit facilities in Germany and Britain that provided the munitions that murdered the students.
Until now Putin has studiously avoided direct war with NATO. But in the same way that NATO provoked Russia to invade in 2022, NATO now appears to be provoking Russia to strike a NATO country to start a direct war with the aim of strategically defeating Moscow.
Either way Europe thinks it may get what it wants. If Putin doesn’t act against Europe it could threaten his position at home. And if he does hit Europe it could be the casus belli Europe seeks for a direct NATO-Russia war. German and British generals tell their nations to be ready for conflict with Moscow by 2029.
Last week an errant drone — ostensibly Russian — hit a Romanian apartment building near the Ukrainian border. All hell broke loose with calls for an invocation of NATO’s Article 5. It could be a harbinger of what would come if Russia not only devastates Kiev, but conventionally attacks a NATO nation too.
Absent the provocative NATO attacks on Russia, Moscow has shown zero interet in threatening war on Europe.
The big questions are: How would Europe react if decision-making centers are wiped out in Kiev? How would the United States react if Russia hits a NATO country? Donald Trump is no fan of NATO, but would he succumb to pressure from Europe, Congress and his cabinet to directly attack Russia? Without the U.S., NATO could hardly act.
In provoking Moscow with increasingly effective strikes deep inside Russia, why are Britain and Germany — the NATO ringleaders — seemingly so confident that direct war with Russia would not turn nuclear?
The murder of 21 Russian teenage students at a teacher-training college last week was an abominable moment of truth with far-reaching, grievous implications.
A grim, consequential watershed in the West’s conflict with Russia has arrived.
The victims were mainly girls aged between 14 and 18 who were killed when their university dormitory in Starobelsk, Lugansk, was attacked overnight on May 22.
What is absolutely revealing is how the Collective West has shown no remorse or restraint about the crime, going as far as denying responsibility and adding insult to the memory of the dead. The perpetrators have an obscene sense of impunity and inhumane entitlement.
The attack involved 16 drones that targeted the college in a wave of three assaults. There can be no doubt that the air strike was a deliberate act. That makes it an act of cold-blooded mass murder; an act of terrorism.
Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, stated: “The blood of the children from Starobelsk is on the hands of the West whose nations are supplying the terrorist regime [in Ukraine] with money, intelligence, weapons, and ammunition for years, inspiring it to commit new crimes against the civilian population, and then covering it up by presenting the Kiev regime as a victim.”
The corrupt NeoNazi regime in Kiev under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies is only a bit player in this crime. The regime, which, by the way, gave burial honors to a World War Two Nazi collaborator this week, is merely the scum atop the Western criminal organizations behind this and other atrocities, and indeed the entire conflict with Russia.
Several respected international authorities have repeatedly pointed out that the nearly five-year war in Ukraine that erupted in February 2022 is the culmination of a long-term policy to embattle Russia with NATO aggression. Professors John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Alfred de Zayas, among others, have cogently explained how this conflict in Europe – the biggest since WWII – has come about.
The Kiev regime has been armed to the teeth by the United States and its Western partners, bankrolled by Washington and the European Union, and directed by NATO military intelligence. The attacks on Russian civilian centers could not happen without the direct support of the “Collective West”.
More recently, the European Union, which has emerged as the de facto political and fundraising wing of NATO, has stepped up its funding and coordination of drone armaments for the Kiev regime. Britain has also become an important supplier of Ukrainian drone technology, while the Baltic states and Finland are acting as launch sites for deeper strikes into Russia.
A drone crash in Romania this week elicited much theatrical condemnation of Russia as the perpetrator. More likely, given the surge in drones operating from NATO states, the Romanian incident was an own goal or a Ukrainian false-flag provocation. Telling, too, was the paroxysm of Western media coverage blaming Russia for the “reckless” drone, compared with the negligible reporting by these same media on the massacre in Starobelsk only days before.
The European NATO states are in effect becoming the Luftwaffe of the Kiev regime. As Russia’s envoy, Dmitry Polyansk, to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, warned this week, the drums of war are beating louder across the continent. European politicians like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are calling for more NATO forces to build up along Russia’s borders, while the EU’s so-called top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, disparages peace diplomacy with Russia as a “Kremlin trap.”
Alfred de Zayas, professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and a former UN independent expert, gave the following assessment to Strategic Culture Foundation regarding the NATO alliance. He said that it is now urgent to recognize that “it is a criminal organization” within the meaning of the Nuremberg rulings delivered in 1946 against Nazi war criminals, when aggression was defined as the supreme war crime.
De Zayas notes that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded nearly eight decades ago, in 1949, supposedly to defend the West from the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, along with its Warsaw Pact military bloc, NATO should have also disbanded at that time.
“NATO has morphed from being a defensive alliance into a war coalition that has committed heinous crimes since the 1990s in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere,” he said. “While NATO forces, since the 1990s, have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, what is important today is that world public opinion recognizes NATO as a threat to the peace and security of humankind.”
From the end of the Cold War, the United States-led military alliance has more than doubled its member states to the current 32, several of which border Russia. Under the UN Charter, regional security organizations are supposed to be subordinate to the UN Security Council. But the NATO bloc presumes to be above the law. It is a rogue force that attacks other nations at will, as we are seeing currently with Russia.
Says de Zayas: “It is not a legitimate regional organization under article 52 of the UN Charter, because it acts against the purposes and principles of the UN and has relentlessly committed the crimes of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”
The mass murder of college students in Starobelsk and numerous other civilian casualties of NATO drone attacks on Russian territory are a testament to the terrorist nature of NATO.
De Zayas adds that it is also important to identify the sinister role of the Western corporate-controlled news media. The media have systematically distorted the conflict in Ukraine as “unprovoked Russian aggression” while whitewashing NATO and the NeoNazi regime for their litany of crimes, the latest being the atrocity at Starobelsk.
“Relentless propaganda and public relations have convinced the Western public that NATO is a good organization, legitimate, respectable, interested in peace and defense. This is total brainwashing,” said de Zayas.
“When the media indoctrination and propaganda about NATO is exposed as false, when the perception in Western countries moves from positive to negative, when people realize that NATO is a criminal institution, it will be possible to wind it down. Ultimately, NATO must be recognized not only as a criminal organization, a blustering vestige of a moribund Western imperialism, but as a mortal danger to the survival of civilization on Earth.”
All this confers on our editorial to draw several inescapable implications: the political leaders of the United States and the European Union, who make this NATO aggression happen through deliberate policies, must also face the same indictment. They are war criminals.
The Western media that propagandize for war and war crimes are also indictable as complicit in these crimes.
Furthermore, it is now clearer than ever that Russia is at war with an aggressive Collective West, and its manifestations, including the United States, the EU, NATO, and the Kiev regime. Therefore, Moscow has the legal and moral right to hit the decision-making centers that have Russian blood on their hands. All the more so because these Western decision-making centers presume impunity and the ghoulish right to drench their hands with even more Russian blood.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic broke ranks with other NATO members as he slammed Lithuania’s foreign minister for his “irresponsible” call to attack the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Milanovic’s comments came after Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys called NATO the “strongest organization ever created” last week, arguing for a more assertive posture toward Russia and saying European NATO members must turn “fear of the threat into a sense of empowerment.”
“We have to show the Russians that we’re capable of penetrating the small fortress they’ve built in Kaliningrad,” he said. “NATO has the capability, if necessary, to raze Russian air defenses and missile bases there to the ground.”
Speaking on Thursday at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the creation of the Croatian Army, Milanovic called out the remarks.
“Equally irresponsible, turning now to our own camp, are the calls and appeals I hear week after week from high-ranking officials of certain Baltic states to attack Kaliningrad Region… Such things should not be said,” he said.
He went on to warn that NATO’s principle of solidarity should not be unconditional: “Readiness to come to someone’s vital assistance on the one hand also presupposes responsibility on the other.”
Following the backlash, Budrys walked back the tone but not the substance, claiming that his remarks were not aimed at Russia but at audiences “less familiar with military matters,” and were intended to counter what he called Moscow’s narrative of Kaliningrad as an impenetrable fortress.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called the interview “not the most successful statement.” Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene urged restraint in public comments.
Kaliningrad is Russia’s westernmost outpost on the Baltic Sea coast and is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, with no land connection to the mainland part of the country. Formerly known as Koenigsberg and the capital of the German province of East Prussia, it was ceded to the Soviet Union after the end of World War II.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO’s expansion, Kaliningrad became surrounded by the bloc from all sides.
Budrys comments triggered a sharp rebuke in Moscow, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling the remarks “borderline crazy” and a sign of “maniacal” hostility toward Russia.
Asked on Thursday whether NATO could attack Kaliningrad, President Vladimir Putin warned that Russia “has all the means to raze to the ground anyone who tries to do so.”
Russia has warned that deploying additional US troops near its borders would be “unacceptable,” after Washington pledged to send more soldiers to Poland.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a press briefing on Thursday that reducing the number of US personnel stationed in Europe would be a “rational, justified, and long-overdue” step toward stabilizing what she described as an “imbalanced” security situation created by NATO policies.
Deploying more American troops in the region, on the other hand, would place them within striking distance, Zakharova added.
She said such a move would only increase tensions in Europe and compel Russia to respond with “military-technical measures.” Zakharova accused NATO of pushing the continent toward a “suicidal” conflict.
Around 10,000 American service members are currently stationed in Poland, most of them on a rotational basis, while roughly 80,000 are deployed across Europe overall. Poland shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, an exclave on the Baltic Sea.
Last week, US President Donald Trump unveiled plans to send 5,000 additional troops to Poland, one of the most vocal supporters of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. The announcement came after the Pentagon said it would delay the rotation of 4,000 troops, which Vice President J.D. Vance later downplayed as a “standard delay.”
Trump has frequently accused NATO members of failing to spend enough on defense and recently announced the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany amid a dispute with Berlin over the war with Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow has no intention of attacking NATO members unless Russia itself is attacked first. Russian officials have accused the West of “reckless militarization” and cited NATO’s eastward expansion as one of the causes of the Ukraine conflict.
On Thursday, Sergey Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said NATO was “de facto preparing for a large-scale military conflict in the east.”
Czech President Petr Pavel has urged NATO to “show its teeth” in response to what he described as Russian “provocations” on the bloc’s eastern flank.
Pavel’s remarks follow a series of Ukrainian drone incursions into NATO airspace in Europe. Since mid-March, long-range UAVs have repeatedly crossed Baltic and Nordic airspace en route to targets in northwestern Russia, particularly oil facilities in Leningrad Region. The incursions prompted fighter jet deployments, and some drones crashed inside NATO states, causing damage.
Moscow has accused European NATO members of quietly allowing Kiev to use their airspace for attacks on Russian territory, but Western officials deny this, instead blaming Russia for the incursions and claiming that Russian electronic warfare systems may have redirected the drones to stray into NATO airspace.
In an interview with The Guardian published Friday, Pavel echoed the accusations, claiming that Russia was intentionally staging “provocations” operating just below the threshold that would trigger NATO’s collective defense clause, Article 5. He also claimed that Russian military officials openly mock the bloc’s indecision during such incidents, and called for “decisive enough, potentially even asymmetric” responses to counter Moscow’s actions.
“Russia, unfortunately, does not understand nice language. They mostly understand the language of power, ideally accompanied with action,” he claimed. “When I asked them why they do these provocative actions in the air… their answer was ‘because we can’. That’s exactly the kind of behavior we allowed.”
Citing earlier Western allegations of Russian “provocations” in the Black and Baltic Seas – such as fighter jet intercepts and purported airspace violations – Pavel suggested that NATO should consider shooting down “either an unmanned or manned” Russian aircraft if spotted near its borders. Moscow has denied the accusations, insisting its patrols occur in international airspace and are a necessary response to Western reconnaissance flights near Russian borders.
Pavel also proposed “potentially asymmetric” measures against Moscow, including disrupting internet access, targeting satellites, or cutting Russian banks off from the global financial system, measures he said “are not killing people, but are sensitive enough to make Russia understand this is not the way they should go.”
Pavel’s position echoes that of several other NATO countries. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Thursday that NATO states should actually help Kiev “direct” drone attacks “in the right directions.” Latvian and Estonian officials defended Ukrainian incursions by saying that Kiev “has every right to defend itself.”
Finland, however, rebuked Kiev over the breaches of its airspace, while Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico urged renewed dialogue with Moscow, warning of potential Ukrainian drone provocations involving NATO territory that he said could trigger direct conflict between Russia and the bloc.
Multiple Western officials have claimed that Moscow could test the alliance through provocations and hybrid operations, or eventually attack European states after the Ukraine conflict ends. Citing the purported threat, European NATO members last year pledged to raise military spending to 5% of GDP and launched rearmament initiatives such as ReArm Europe.
Moscow, however, dismissed claims that it poses a threat to Europe as baseless “nonsense” and condemned what it calls reckless EU militarization. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently accused European “warmongers” of portraying Russia as a “model external enemy” to distract from domestic problems.
I argue that European states have made themselves legitimate targets by being participants in attacks on Russia. The emotional and often hysterical reactions this argument provokes reveal the extent of the radicalisation engulfing Europe.
Most countries avoid sending weapons to states engaged in war precisely because doing so risks making them participants in the conflict. Many Western leaders, from Boris Johnson to Marco Rubio, recognise that this is a proxy war. European states provide weapons, intelligence, targeting, planning, and contractors. European leaders openly speak about the need to bring the war to Russian territory and to destroy Russian refineries, while rapidly expanding the production of long-range weapons to support this objective. Attacks are now also being launched from the territory of the Baltic states. It is therefore difficult to deny that European states are directly involved in military actions against Russia. As this involvement escalates, Russia is under ever-greater pressure to retaliate and restore its deterrence. This should all be common sense, yet in Europe, recognising the march to war is considered a controversial observation. Why?
The responses I receive rarely address this argument directly. Instead, they focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and war crimes. Whatever one’s views on those issues, they do not alter the question of Western participation in attacks on Russia. The implicit argument seems to be that Russia is uniquely evil, and therefore the West is justified in attacking Russia while Russia is not permitted to respond. Most people would recognise that if Russia had launched missiles into Washington or London in response to the invasion of Iraq, it would have been understood as a Russian attack with unpredictable consequences. By attacking Russian forces in Ukraine, European states became involved in the conflict; by attacking inside Russia itself, they are deepening that involvement further and making a Russian retaliation inevitable. Ukraine’s right to self-defence has nothing to do with the discussion of European participation. There was a time when President Biden argued that sending F16s to Ukraine meant World War 3, today this argument would be smeared and censored in Europe as “Russian propaganda”. The instinct for self-preservation is gone.
I argue that Europeans have become radicalised because there now appears to be a widespread belief that acknowledging the reality of European involvement is treasonous. In their minds, reality is a social construction. Warning that Europe may be heading toward a direct war with Russia is condemned as “legitimising” Russian retaliation and dismissed as a “pro-Russian” position. The prevalence of constructivism and the focus on “speech acts” have led to the belief that even using realist analysis and discussing competing national interests entails legitimising realpolitik and thus socially constructing a more dangerous reality. Speech acts refer to the use of language as a source of power to construct political realities and influence outcomes. Everything is interpreted as normative statements about what one supports or wishes how the world worked, as opposed to recognising an objective reality of the world. If one does not participate in the suicidal self-delusion, then there will be accusations of having taken the side of Russia. Had this radicalised mentality prevailed during the Cold War, we would never have survived.
Academics in Europe are forced into the role of activists. It is impossible to analyse conflicts without being met with the demand to condemn Hamas, Iran, Russia and the “other” to prove you have picked our side. This is the ideological litmus test to establish if you are allowed to participate in the discussion or must be purged from polite society. The role of academics is analytical, not moralistic. The purpose is to explain motivations, power distribution and strategic behaviour. An objective analysis allows us to pursue the best policy to maximise our security. The demand to conform to the “correct” moral posture and EU-approved speech acts implies obligatory participation in the emotional and hysterical sloganeering. When the premise in any discussion is that we are in a struggle between good and evil, then security can only mean victory or deterrence. War creates peace, diplomacy is appeasement, and Europeans celebrate ignorance by criminalising the ability to recognise the security concerns of the other side.
In Europe, it is also considered “Russian propaganda” to argue that NATO expansionism provoked the Ukraine War. The overwhelming evidence supporting it is irrelevant and will under no circumstance be discussed, as it is considered an immoral argument that legitimises Russia’s invasion. Our political leaders frame all their policies as “pro-Ukrainian”: the toppling of Yanukovych, arming the far-right militias, sabotaging the Minsk peace agreement, ignoring Russian security concerns, supporting busification, boycotting diplomacy, etc. What makes this “pro-Ukrainian”? Did any of this do anything good for Ukraine? These questions cannot be asked because they are considered to be “pro-Russian” questions. Everyone has empathy for the gruesome situation in Ukraine, and would like to support those who suffer, and the European leaders have claimed the right to monopolise on what a “pro-Ukrainian” position entails – to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Similarly, warnings about Europe’s march to war with the world’s largest nuclear power by participating in attacks are viewed as treasonous efforts to reduce trust, legitimacy and support for the NATO war efforts at the behest of Russia. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”.
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OSCE Dmitry Polyanskiy warned that NATO’s growing involvement in the conflict with Russia is pushing Europe toward a dangerous threshold.
“I would advise against testing the limits of our patience and the limits of our self-restraint,” Polyanskiy said on Deep Dive.
He stressed that Russia has avoided harsher steps not out of weakness, but because it is thinking about the consequences for civilians in Europe.
“They confuse it with weakness,” he said. “No, Russia doesn’t react because Russia is humane.”
Europe is already directly involved by providing weapons, missiles, airspace and production facilities for Ukraine, Polyanskiy stressed.
“They have already crossed all the red lines,” he warned, adding that if this continues, Russia’s response could be “harsh” and “resolute.”
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 