Europe’s Panic Economy: Frozen Assets, Empty Arsenals, and the Quiet Admission of Defeat
By Gerry Nolan | Ron Paul Institute | December 24, 2025
When a prime minister tells her own staff to rest because next year will be much worse, it is not gallows humor. It is not exhaustion speaking. It is a slip of the mask, the kind of remark leaders make only when the internal forecasts no longer align with the public script.
Giorgia Meloni was not addressing voters. She was addressing the state itself — the bureaucratic core tasked with executing decisions whose consequences can no longer be disguised. Her words were not about a mundane increased workload. They were about constraint. About limits. About a Europe that has crossed from crisis management into managed decline, and knows that 2026 is when the accumulated costs finally collide.
What Meloni let slip is what Europe’s elites already understand: the Western project in Ukraine has run head-first into material reality. Not Russian propaganda. Not disinformation. Not populism. Steel, munitions, energy, labor, and time. And once material reality asserts itself, legitimacy begins to drain.
The War Europe Cannot Supply
Europe can posture for war. It cannot produce for war.
Four years into a high-intensity war of attrition, the United States and Europe are confronting a truth they spent decades unlearning: you do not sustain this kind of conflict with theatrical speeches, sanctions, or abandoning diplomacy. You sustain it with shells, missiles, trained crews, repair cycles, and production rates that exceed losses — month after month, without interruption.
By 2025, the gap is no longer theoretical.
Russia is now producing artillery ammunition at a scale that Western officials themselves concede outpaces the combined output of NATO. Russian industry has shifted to continuous near-wartime production (without even being fully mobilized), with centralized procurement, simplified supply chains, and state-directed throughput. Estimates place annual Russian artillery production at several million rounds — production already flowing, not promised.
Europe, by contrast, has spent 2025 celebrating targets it cannot ever materially meet. The European Union’s flagship pledge remains two million shells per year — a goal dependent on new facilities, new contracts, and new labor that will not fully materialize within the decisive window of the war, if ever. Even the dreamed target if reached, would not put it at parity with Russian output. The United States, after emergency expansion, is projecting roughly one million shells annually once and a big if, full ramp-up is achieved. Even combined on paper, Western production struggles to match Russian output already delivered. Talk about paper tiger.
This is not a gap. It is a major tempo mismatch. Russia is producing at scale now. Europe is dreaming of rebuilding the ability to produce at scale later.
And time is the one variable that cannot be sanctioned.
Nor can the United States simply compensate for Europe’s hollowed-out capacity. Washington faces its own industrial choke points. Production of Patriot air-defense interceptors runs in the low hundreds per year while demand now spans Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and US stockpile replenishment simultaneously — a mismatch senior Pentagon officials have acknowledged cannot be resolved quickly, if ever. US naval shipbuilding tells the same story: submarine and surface-combatant programs are years behind schedule, constrained by labor shortages, aging yards, and cost overruns that push meaningful expansion into the 2030s. The assumption that America can industrially backstop Europe no longer matches reality. This is not a European problem alone; it is a Western one.
War Footing Without Factories
European leaders speak of “war footing” as if it were a political posture. In reality, it is an industrial condition and Europe does not meet it.
New artillery production lines require years to reach stable throughput. Air-defense interceptor manufacturing runs in long cycles measured in batches, not surges. Even basic inputs such as explosives remain bottlenecks, with facilities shuttered decades ago only now being reopened, some not expected to reach capacity until the late 2020s.
That date alone is an admission.
Russia, meanwhile, is already operating inside wartime tempo. Its defense sector has delivered thousands of armored vehicles, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, and vast quantities of drones annually.
Europe’s problem is not conceptual; it is institutional. Germany’s much-vaunted Zeitenwende exposed this brutally. Tens of billions were authorized, but procurement bottlenecks, fragmented contracting, and an atrophied supplier base meant delivery lagged years behind rhetoric. France, often cited as Europe’s most capable arms producer, can manufacture more sophisticated systems — but only in boutique quantities, measured in dozens where attritional war demands thousands. Even the EU’s own ammunition acceleration initiatives expanded capacity on paper while the front consumed shells in weeks. These are not ideological failures. They are administrative and industrial ones and they compound under pressure.
The difference is structural. Western industry was optimized for shareholder efficiency and peacetime margins. Russia’s has been reorganized for endurance under pressure. NATO announces packages. Russia counts deliveries.
The €210 Billion Fantasy
This industrial reality explains why the frozen-assets saga mattered so much, and why it failed.
Europe’s leadership did not pursue the seizure of Russian sovereign assets out of legal creativity or moral clarity. It pursued it because it needed time. Time to avoid admitting that the war could not be sustained on Western industrial terms. Time to substitute finance for production.
When the attempt to seize roughly €210 billion in Russian assets collapsed on December 20th, blocked by legal risk, market consequences, and resistance led by Belgium, with Italy, Malta, Slovakia and Hungary, aligned against outright confiscation, Europe settled for a degraded substitute: a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for 2026–27, serviced by 3B in annual interest, further mortgaging Europe’s future. This was not strategy. It was triage, and further divided, an already weakened Union.
Outright confiscation would have detonated Europe’s credibility as a financial custodian. Permanent immobilization avoids the blast — but creates a slow bleed. The assets remain frozen indefinitely, a standing act of economic warfare that signals to the world that reserves held in Europe are conditional and not worth the risk. Europe chose reputational erosion over legal rupture. That choice reveals fear, not strength.
Ukraine as a Balance-Sheet War
The deeper truth is that Ukraine is no longer primarily a battlefield problem. It is a solvency problem. Washington understands this. The United States can absorb embarrassment. It cannot absorb open-ended liabilities indefinitely. An offramp is being sought — quietly, unevenly, and with rhetorical cover.
Europe cannot admit it needs one. Europe framed the war as existential, civilizational, moral. It declared compromise appeasement and negotiation surrender. In doing so, it erased its own exit ramps.
Now the costs land where no narrative can deflect them: on European budgets, European energy bills, European industry, and European political cohesion. The €90 billion loan is not solidarity. It is securitization of decline — rolling obligations forward while the productive base required to justify them continues to erode.
Meloni knows this. That is why her tone was not defiant, but weary.
Censorship as Panic Management
As material limits harden, narrative control tightens. The aggressive enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act is not about safety. It is about containment, in its most Orwellian form — constructing an information perimeter around an elite consensus that can no longer withstand open accounting. When citizens begin asking calmly, and then not calmly, relentlessly, what was this for?, the illusion of legitimacy collapses quickly.
This is why regulatory pressure now reaches beyond Europe’s borders, provoking transatlantic friction over jurisdiction and speech. Confident systems do not fear conversation. Fragile ones do. Censorship here is not ideology. It is insurance.
Deindustrialization: The Unspoken Betrayal
Europe did not merely sanction Russia. It sanctioned its own industrial model.
By 2025, European industry continues to pay energy costs far above those of competitors in the United States or Russia. Germany, the engine, has seen sustained contraction in energy-intensive manufacturing. Chemical, steel, fertilizer, and glass production have either shut down or relocated. Small and medium enterprises across Italy and Central Europe are failing quietly, without headlines.
This is why Europe cannot scale ammunition the way it needs to. This is why rearmament remains a promise rather than a condition. Cheap energy was not a luxury. It was the foundation. Remove it via self-sabotage (Nordstream et. al), and the structure hollows out.
China, watching all of this, holds the other half of Europe’s nightmare. It commands the deepest manufacturing base on earth without having entered wartime footing. Russia does not need China’s breadth, only its strategic depth behind it in reserve. Europe has neither.
What Meloni Actually Fears
Not hard work. Not busy schedules. She fears a 2026 in which Europe’s elites lose control of three things at once.
Money — as Ukraine’s funding becomes an EU balance-sheet problem, replacing the fantasy that “Russia will pay.”
Narrative — as censorship tightens and still fails to suppress the question echoing across the continent: what was this all for?
Alliance discipline — as Washington maneuvers for exit while Europe absorbs the cost, the risk, and the humiliation.
That is the panic. Not losing the war overnight, but losing legitimacy slowly, as reality leaks out through energy bills, shuttered factories, empty arsenals, and mortgaged futures.
Humanity at the Abyss
This is not just Europe’s crisis. It is civilizational. A system that cannot produce, cannot replenish, cannot tell the truth, and cannot retreat without collapsing credibility has reached its limits. When leaders begin preparing their own institutions for worse years ahead, they are not forecasting inconvenience. They are conceding structure.
Meloni’s remark mattered because it pierced the performance. Empires announce triumph loudly. Systems in decline lower expectations quietly, or loudly in Meloni’s case.
Europe’s leadership is lowering expectations now because it knows what the warehouses contain, what the factories cannot yet deliver, what the debt curves look like — and what the public has already begun to understand.
For most Europeans, this reckoning will not arrive as an abstract debate about strategy or supply chains. It will arrive as a far simpler realization: this was never a war they consented to. It was not fought to defend their homes, their prosperity, or their future. It was fought for greed for Empire, and paid for with their living standards, their industry, and their children’s future.
They were told it was existential. They were told there was no alternative. They were told sacrifice was virtue.
Yet what Europeans want is not endless mobilization or permanent austerity. They want peace. They want stability. They want the quiet dignity of prosperity — affordable energy, functioning industry, and a future that is not mortgaged to conflicts they did not consent to.
And when that truth settles, when the fear recedes and the spell breaks, the question Europeans will ask will not be technical, ideological, or rhetorical.
It will be human. Why were we forced to sacrifice everything for a war we never agreed to and told there was no peace worth pursuing? And this is what keeps Meloni up at night.
Gerry Nolan is a political analyst, writer, and strategist focused on geopolitics, security affairs, and the structural dynamics of global power. He is the founder and editor of The Islander, an independent media platform examining war, diplomacy, economic statecraft, and the accelerating shift toward a multipolar world.
Iran says no basis for inspection of bombed nuclear sites
Press TV – December 24, 2025
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says that political and psychological pressure over inspection of damaged nuclear facilities will have no effect, calling for clear procedures to be established for such occasions.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mohammad Eslami said there is currently no codified instruction for inspecting nuclear facilities that have been damaged by military attacks.
“Until this issue is clarified, political and psychological pressure and irrelevant follow-ups aimed at re-inspecting bombed facilities and completing the enemy’s operations are unacceptable and will not be responded to,” he said.
Back in June, during the US-Israeli aggression against Iran, the US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, in a clear violation of international law and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Eslami noted that Article 68 of the Safeguards Agreement refers only to natural accidents and damage, not military attacks or war.
“If the IAEA considers military attacks on safeguarded nuclear facilities acceptable, it must explicitly approve and declare that,” he said. “But if such attacks are illegal, they must be condemned, and the post-war procedures must be clearly defined.”
He added that until such conditions are formally defined by the agency, Iran will not accept demands for renewed inspections of damaged sites.
On Iran’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Eslami said no country in history has cooperated with the agency to the extent Iran has.
“The most extensive and intensive inspections ever conducted have been imposed on Iran’s nuclear industry, and there is not a single report indicating non-compliance or diversion from safeguards,” he said.
He characterized current pressure as politically motivated and aimed at harming and weakening the Iranian people, stressing that Iran’s nuclear activities remain entirely peaceful.
Referring to the UN Security Council meeting held on Tuesday, Eslami said the discussions no longer merely warranted regret but instead exposed the reality of long-standing US pressure on Iran’s nuclear industry.
He noted that Washington has openly stated in its national security strategy that it does not pursue its interests through international organizations and, instead, relies on “the law of the jungle and the use of force.”
Eslami described the report, statements, and references made during the Security Council session as “completely unprofessional and non-legal.”
He emphasized that UN Security Council Resolution 2231 has expired, and even if it were to be cited, its procedural requirements were not followed.
Claims that Iran’s alleged non-compliance with the JCPOA justifies the reinstatement of previous UN sanctions, he said, are “entirely rejected and unacceptable.”
He added that China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, have explicitly rejected these claims, stating that the push by the three European countries and the United States—backed by Israeli lobbying—has no legal standing and is not enforceable.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Eslami announced the launch of a nationwide multimedia festival titled “Nuclear Technology for Life,” organized jointly with Iran’s national broadcaster.
He said the initiative aims to counter misinformation and distorted narratives about Iran’s nuclear program by presenting multi-layered accounts through public and media participation.
EU Morphing Into Its Own Worst Enemy – Viktor Orban
Sputnik – 24.12.2025
The decline of the European Union, rather than the Ukrainian conflict, is what really threatens to plunge Europe into war, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
The real reason of the existing risk of escalation, Orban argued, is the political, economic and social decline of Western Europe, whereas the Ukrainian conflict is more of a symptom of the current situation rather than its cause.
According to him, the process that led to this state of affairs started during the 2000s and was exacerbated by Europe’s inadequate reaction to the ensuing financial crisis.
Orban also noted that a war in Europe may break out soon, and that 2025 might have been the last peaceful year for the region.
He pointed out that the decisions that were made at the EU summit in Brussels last week were aimed at prolonging the Ukrainian conflict and continuing Europe’s confrontation with Russia.
Though there are powers in Europe that seek peace – like Hungary, for example – Orban warns that those European elites who seek war seem to be gaining an upper hand.
Failed Diplomacy & Collapse of Ukraine
Glenn Diesen | December 22, 2025
Larry Johnson is a former intelligence analyst at the CIA who also worked at the US State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson outlines why the negotiations are failing and what the pending collapse of Ukraine will entail.
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Ukraine: Does Europe Work for a Stalled Conflict?
Why negotiations are blocked and why a long, managed conflict is becoming the default outcome.
By Ricardo Martins – New Eastern Outlook – December 23, 2025
Negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine appear stalled not because of a lack of diplomatic encounters, but because there is no shared understanding of what the proxy war is about, nor of what a settlement should address. The Berlin meeting illustrated this structural deadlock.
Russia continues to restate a limited and stable set of core demands, above all, Ukrainian neutrality and the rollback of NATO’s military footprint, while Europeans and Ukrainians advance proposals that explicitly negate these demands. This is not a negotiation gap; it is a conceptual incompatibility.
The American role exacerbates this problem. The United States oscillates between mediator and belligerent, without committing to a coherent diplomatic line. Instead of deploying professional diplomatic teams with a clear mandate, Washington relies on ad hoc envoys and transactional approaches. Trump’s inclination towards deal-making, inspired by business logic rather than diplomatic craft, leads to contradictory signaling: reassurance to Moscow followed by alignment with European and Ukrainian maximalist positions. This reinforces Russian perceptions that talks are performative rather than substantive.
From a European perspective, the refusal to listen to Russia’s security concerns is justified through a normative framing of the conflict: Ukraine is the victim, Russia the aggressor, and therefore only Ukrainian security deserves guarantees. This position, articulated explicitly by EU figures such as Kaja Kallas, forecloses any bargaining space.
Russia is delegitimised as a security actor, and empathy, understood here not as moral approval but as analytical capacity to understand the other side’s threat perception, is absent. The result is a strategy that implicitly accepts the continuation of the conflict until Ukraine collapses militarily or Russia concedes its defeat, a scenario that seems unrealistic.
Meanwhile, Russia senses that time is on its side. Battlefield dynamics, industrial mobilisation, and political cohesion reinforce Moscow’s assessment that it can achieve its objectives through attrition. In this context, concessions would be irrational from a realist standpoint.
As negotiations fail, Europe and Ukraine increasingly rely on asymmetric strategies, such as sabotage, attacks on Russian assets, and irregular warfare, openly endorsed by Western intelligence discourse, including references by the head of MI6 to Second World War–style special operations. This marks a shift from conflict resolution to conflict management.
Financing Ukraine: strategic risk without political consent
Europe’s approach to financing Ukraine reveals a second layer of contradiction. The decision not to confiscate Russian frozen assets, but instead to fund Ukraine through EU borrowing (€90 billion for 2026–2027) acknowledges the legal, financial, and systemic risks involved. Belgium’s concerns over Euroclear, the threat of credit downgrades by rating agencies such as Fitch, and the exposure of European pension funds and financial institutions underline the fragility of this strategy.
Yet this choice was made without a social pact with European citizens. There has been no democratic debate proportionate to the scale of financial commitment. At a time when European societies face mounting pressures on housing, welfare, pensions, and infrastructure, war financing is normalised as a moral and face-saving necessity rather than a political choice. This fuels domestic resentment and strengthens nationalist and far-right parties across the continent.
Strategically, European financing does not resolve the conflict. Money cannot substitute for manpower nor reverse battlefield dynamics. Ukraine’s primary constraint is not just liquidity but, above all, soldiers. Moreover, persistent concerns about corruption and weak accountability mechanisms undermine public support for continued transfers. Rather than bringing peace closer, European funding functions as a holding mechanism: prolonging the conflict to weaken Russia, buying time to rearm European militaries, and delaying political reckoning of the defeat.
In this sense, Ukraine increasingly functions as a proxy, absorbing the human cost of a broader confrontation while Europe avoids direct military engagement. This is a morally uncomfortable but analytically coherent reading of current policy.
The fear of a Russian “victory” and the erosion of Europe’s political core
The prospect of Russia being perceived as the winner is existentially threatening for European elites. It would symbolise not only Ukrainian defeat but also NATO’s limits and Europe’s strategic weakness. More profoundly, it would undermine the EU’s self-image as a political peace project and a normative power.
To prevent this outcome, European leaders and media have invested heavily in a simplified narrative: Russia as sole aggressor, Ukraine as pure victim, and Europe as moral defender. Yet two facts disrupt this narrative. First, the EU has not presented a concrete peace proposal of its own.
Second, dissenting voices are increasingly marginalised or silenced, contradicting Europe’s professed commitment to pluralism and freedom of expression. In several European countries, journalists, analysts, and former officials who question NATO strategy, the feasibility of a military victory, or the costs of prolonged war – such as George Galloway in the United Kingdom, former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud, French analysts like Xavier Moreau or the online platform Euroactiv – have been systematically delegitimised, deplatformed, or labelled as disinformation vectors rather than engaged on the substance of their arguments. The closure of debate, whether through media pressure or formal and informal censorship, erodes Europe’s intellectual resilience.
As nuance becomes suspect and contradiction is framed as betrayal, Europe loses its capacity to think strategically. Political realism, understood as the ability to engage with power politics without moral illusion, has largely disappeared from mainstream European discourse. NATO expansion is no longer discussed as a variable in Russian threat perception but as an unquestionable good. The assumption persists that Russia will eventually weaken, accept European terms, and even relinquish frozen assets. There is no empirical basis for this belief.
Is there a way out?
A negotiated settlement remains theoretically possible but politically unlikely. European leaders seek a face-saving exit that preserves moral superiority while avoiding military escalation. Yet they are unwilling to make the concessions such an exit would require.
Europe will not send troops to fight Russia, but it will also not accept defeat. The most probable outcome is therefore a long, tense cold peace, akin to the Korean model: frozen frontlines, unresolved status, and continuous low-level confrontation.
This outcome will shape European–Russian relations for decades. It will also accelerate Europe’s internal fragmentation, as member states increasingly diverge in their strategic orientations, weaken its social model, and normalise permanent rearmament. Europe pays the bill, calls it principle, and postpones the hardest decisions at the cost of Ukrainian lives and its own political coherence.
Ricardo Martins, PhD in Sociology, specializing in International Relations and Geopolitics
US war hawk senator calls for seizure of Russian oil tankers
RT | December 22, 2025
US Senator Lindsey Graham has urged Washington to ramp up restrictions against Russia, including sanctioning China over its energy imports from Moscow and seizing tankers carrying Russian oil.
Last month, US President Donald Trump proposed a roadmap to resolve the Ukraine conflict, which Kiev and its European backers have rejected as favoring Russia, while stalling settlement efforts with counterproposals and accusing Moscow of delaying peace.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Graham, a longtime Russia hawk, echoed that stance, claiming that Moscow has “rebuffed all our efforts” to end the conflict and would not sign a peace deal “until we increase pressure.”
“If [Russian President Vladimir Putin] says no this time… sign my bill that has 85 co-sponsors and puts tariffs on countries like China, who buy cheap Russian oil,” Graham said, referring to a bill he authored that would authorize tariffs of up to 500% on imports from countries that continue to buy Russian energy products. “Seize ships that are carrying sanctioned Russian oil like you’re doing in Venezuela. If Putin says no, we need to dramatically change the game,” the Republican added.
Moscow has criticized Western sanctions, warning that they violate international law and harm global economic stability. While Trump earlier floated sanctioning Russia’s trading partners amid frustration over stalled peace efforts, he has so far gone no further than imposing an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods over New Delhi’s trade with Moscow. India denounced the move as unjustified.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cautioned against additional secondary sanctions or tariffs on major buyers of Russian oil, citing the risk of global energy price spikes. Even the EU, despite expanding its Russia sanctions to 19 packages, has avoided penalizing third-country partners.
The Geopolitical Imperative Behind US Policy Toward Venezuela
By Leanna Yavelskaya | Ron Paul Institute | December 21, 2025
In the intensifying great-power competition of the 21st century, Venezuela has emerged as a pivotal battleground in the Western Hemisphere—a proxy arena where the United States confronts the encroaching ambitions of China and Russia to preserve its historic regional dominance.
Conventional explanations for Washington’s unrelenting pressure on Caracas, citing resource acquisition or counternarcotics imperatives, crumble under scrutiny amid America’s strategic primacy, energy independence, and the broader architecture of multipolar rivalry.
US policy toward Venezuela is fundamentally a defensive maneuver in the superpower contest, aimed at denying Beijing and Moscow a strategic foothold in America’s backyard. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—the world’s largest—might superficially suggest energy motives, yet the United States, now the globe’s top petroleum producer and exporter, no longer depends on Venezuelan heavy crudes. Sanctions have deliberately slashed imports, while any genuine resource priority would favor diplomatic normalization over confrontation. Historical US behavior reinforces this: when energy security truly matters, Washington opts for pragmatic deals, not escalation. The current standoff, therefore, serves deeper geopolitical ends—blocking rival powers from entrenching influence proximate to US shores.
The counternarcotics rationale fares no better. Venezuela transits cocaine but plays minimal role in the fentanyl epidemic ravaging America. Washington’s dollar hegemony and financial levers could dismantle trafficking networks without military brinkmanship, yet global drug flows persist due to strategic tolerances. Venezuela’s marginal position in this trade renders anti-drug rhetoric an inadequate justification for the extraordinary measures deployed, including naval blockades and tanker seizures.
The core driver is Venezuela’s alignment with US adversaries, transforming it into a potential forward base for China and Russia in the Americas. Beijing has poured billions in loans-for-oil, infrastructure projects, and discounted crude purchases—securing long-term resource access while propping up the regime against Western isolation, even as recent US escalations test this lifeline. Moscow has supplied arms, intelligence, and diplomatic shielding, positioning Venezuela as a counterweight to US hegemony, much as it leverages proxies elsewhere. These partnerships challenge enduring American doctrines: the Monroe legacy rejecting extra-hemispheric powers in the Americas, and Cold War precedents like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Soviet encroachment provoked crisis.
No US administration—Democratic or Republican—has tolerated a peer rival gaining decisive leverage in Latin America. The Trump administration’s 2025 campaign, with carrier groups, strikes on vessels, and a declared blockade of sanctioned tankers, underscores this zero-tolerance posture amid Maduro’s disputed reelection and pleas for Russian and Chinese aid. Venezuela embodies the frontline of eroding US unipolarity: proximity magnifies threats, just as China dominates the Indo-Pacific or Russia its near abroad.
This is no mere bilateral dispute over democracy or drugs—it is a superpower clash over spheres of influence in a fragmenting world order. Caracas’s geopolitical pivot toward Beijing and Moscow directly contests Washington’s hemispheric primacy. The United States will not permit rival superpowers to consolidate enduring control on its doorstep, a contest that will shape power balances in the Americas and beyond for decades. As great-power rivalry intensifies, Venezuela’s fate signals whether the US can stanch encroachment in its traditional domain or cede ground in the new multipolar era.
Leanna Yavelskaya is a freelance civilian journalist who focuses on geopolitical analysis, with particular emphasis on Eastern Europe.
Daniel Davis: Russia Preparing Retaliation – Oreshnik Deployed & Seizing Odessa
Glenn Diesen | December 20, 2025
Lt. Col. Daniel Davis is a 4x combat veteran, the recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and is the host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive YouTube channel. Lt. Col. Davis discusses how Russia is preparing itself for the possibility of Europe attacking Russia by deploying a powerful arsenal of Oreshniks. The attacks on Russia’s civilian vessels will likely end with Russia seizing Odessa, which could also trigger the Europeans to send troops. We are rapidly going up the escalation ladder as diplomacy fails.
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Russia, African Countries Agree to Strengthen Security Cooperation – Lavrov
Sputnik – 20.12.2025
CAIRO – Russia and African countries have agreed to strengthen cooperation in the spheres of politics and security following the Second Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday.
“The joint statement also contains our shared decision to strengthen cooperation in the political and security spheres, including with the aim of recommending the establishment of working relations between the African Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization,” Lavrov said at a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty.
The minister added that Russia and Africa do not see the need to dwell on Western sanctions.
“We prefer to focus on coordinating workable, efficient mechanisms that will safeguard our trade and economic ties, making them independent from the illegal actions of those who, in violation of all principles of international law, resort to methods of blackmail and pressure,” Lavrov noted.
Additionally, the Foreign Minister discussed increasing trade turnover and energy cooperation with African partners, as well as the creation of joint financial and logistical structures to protect the trade and economic investment partnerships of the countries from illegal unilateral sanctions.
“Unlike those who try to continue colonial and neocolonial policies, dictating their will to others, we, together with our African friends, have a solid international legal foundation in our positions,” he emphasized.
In turn, Abdelatty said that during the ministerial conference in Cairo, African countries and Russia had reached a mutual understanding regarding further cooperation.
Lavrov participated today in the second ministerial conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum in Egypt. The conference was attended by foreign ministers, heads of state, and leaders of executive bodies from integration associations across the continent. They discussed cooperation in various areas. The minister also held a series of bilateral meetings.
The forum was established in 2019. Two summits were held within its framework—in Sochi in 2019 and in St. Petersburg in 2023, as well as the first ministerial conference in November of last year.
No More Ukraine Proxy War? You’re a Traitor!
Glenn Diesen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
Glenn Diesen | December 16, 2025
I had the pleasure of speaking with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis about how Europe has trapped itself in ideological narratives of good versus evil
Majority of Belgians oppose theft of Russian assets – poll
RT | December 17, 2025
Around 67% of Belgians oppose the EU scheme to use frozen Russian central bank assets to back a ‘reparations loan’ to prop up Ukraine, according to a recent poll conducted by Ipsos and Belgian news outlets published on Monday.
The bulk of sovereign Russian assets frozen in the West are held in the Belgian clearinghouse Euroclear. Prime Minister Bart De Wever has steadfastly opposed EU moves to “steal” the funds, citing disproportionate legal risks to Belgium, despite mounting pressure from the European Commission.
EU leaders were set to vote on using the assets to back a controversial €90 billion ($106 billion) ‘reparations loan’ to help cover Ukraine’s floundering budget, which faces an estimated $160 billion shortfall over the next two years.
However, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the EU leadership “backed down” and that “Russian assets will not be on the table” at Thursday’s European Council meeting. The council “pushes joint loans, but we will not let our families foot the bill for Ukraine’s war,” he wrote on X on Wednesday.
Last week, the EU tightened its grip on the frozen Russian assets by invoking Article 122, an economic emergency treaty clause, to bypass the need for a unanimous decision amid opposition from a number of member nations.
By using the mechanism, the bloc stripped “Hungary of its rights,” Orban said at the time.
Belgium, Slovakia, Italy, Bulgaria, Malta, and the Czech Republic joined Hungary to oppose raiding the Russian assets to finance Ukraine.
Last week, the Russian central bank sued Euroclear in a Moscow court, accusing it of the “inability to manage monetary assets and securities” entrusted to it. The firm estimates that it holds nearly $19 billion in client assets in Russia, which could become targets for legal retaliatory measures.
The Map Is Not the Territory: Ukraine, Manufactured Consent, and Europe’s War of Attrition
By Gerry Nolan | Ron Paul Institute | December 16, 2025
Western headlines are screaming that Ukraine has “encircled” Kupyansk city… a glorified town, selling it as a nightmare for Moscow. But this is not a battlefield report. It is narrative management, timed precisely to negotiations in Berlin. Kupyansk is not Stalingrad. It is not Kursk. It is not even a decisive urban fight. It is a ruined settlement on the Oskol, a former logistics node reduced to rubble, where control is measured not in flags but in fire control, drone dominance, and whether men can be rotated without being killed.
And when even Reuters couches claims as “unverified,” you know what that means. When it hedges, pauses, and inserts distance between claims and confirmation, it is signaling that fog is being weaponised. What exists on the ground is block-by-block ruin fighting, contested neighbourhoods like Yubileynyy, clashes near Mirovoye and Radkovka, infiltration attempts, temporary interdictions. Battalion-scale collisions between exhausted units in a place that barely functions as a glorified town.
The unit scale tells the truth the headlines obscure. Kupyansk has never hosted a force capable of deciding a front. Within the urban core, the Russian presence has been limited and exposed, with little time to dig in deeper, the town’s ruins making sustained fortification difficult, relying on fire control rather than secured occupation. With thousands tied down protecting the flanks and barely a battalion inside the city itself, Ukrainian assaults are not sweeping counteroffensives but concentrated pushes by swarms of worn formations, often built from forcibly mobilised men with minimal training, starving and thin on ammunition, cannibalized from fronts like Sumy, and thrown into an urban graveyard to manufacture leverage.
This is not manoeuvre warfare. It is attritional contact deliberately framed as momentum to serve a media and political narrative rather operational gain. What matters is that the map is not the territory. In this war, a coloured overlay often marks a brief window of drone interdiction, hours, not control. Fire control can deny movement, but without sustainment it cannot secure ground. Fire control without sustainment does not produce breakthroughs. It produces graveyards. Ukraine has been forced by its Western patrons into too many of them already.
Kupyansk does not change the war unless it becomes part of a broader operational rollback and it won’t. Otherwise, it is a bad PR bargaining chip, paid for in blood.
While cameras fixate on Kupyansk, the real pressure story runs elsewhere, across a widening arc Western coverage fragments to prevent pattern recognition. West of Russian liberated Seversk, claims and denials continue, but the geometry is clear: Ukrainian forces are stretched thin, defending ground without strategic depth. Around encircled Lyman, the contest is about lines of communication and Ukranian reserve erosion, not symbolism.
Central to the Donbass arc, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd matter not because of names, but because they anchor logistics. Russian control here forces a stark contrast in how the war is being fought. Ukraine is expending irreplaceable manpower to manufacture moments, brief tactical actions designed to win optics for a day. Russia, by contrast, is trading space, fire control, and logistics denial for outcomes that compound over time. One side is managing headlines. The other is managing the war.
To the south, the picture is more dangerous still. Around Gulyaypole, pressure is persistent and cumulative, not theatrical. And beyond it lies the real anxiety Europe refuses to discuss openly, the slow, grinding push toward Zaporozhye city. This is not a sprint. It is a methodical march Westward. If current trends hold, Zaporozhye can be operationally threatened, even encircled in less than six months. That outcome would dwarf any skirmish in the small town of Kupyansk.
This is where time asymmetry becomes decisive. Russia is fighting a time-positive war: industrial scaling and real capacity that dwarfs the fiat, paper-tiger illusory capacity of NATO; deep manpower reserves; and a level of internal cohesion sufficient to sustain a long campaign. Ukraine, by contrast, is fighting a time-negative war, with catastrophic demographic collapse, mass emigration, forced conscription, and shrinking public consent. Every Ukrainian media counteroffensive now borrows against a future that no longer exists to replenish it.
This is one of the real reasons behind Trump’s push. Less sentiment. Not ideology. Geometry. Timelines. Arithmetic. Washington understands that delay only makes the endgame worse, militarily and politically for project Ukraine. Europe understands this too. But Europe cannot admit it without confessing its humiliation.
So Europe clings to suicidal optics. It inflates Kupyansk. It sells illusory leverage. And it sacrifices Ukrainians to buy time, not for victory, but for narrative survival.
Here is the truth Europe works hardest to bury beneath headlines and choreographed resolve: this war no longer reflects the will of the Ukrainian people, and, in truth, it only ever did through manufactured consent that has now collapsed. Not marginally. Not ambiguously. Overwhelmingly. Even after years of saturation messaging, censorship, emergency laws, and relentless narrative conditioning, roughly four-fifths of Ukrainians now demand peace. It is devastating precisely because it persists despite one of the most intensive information campaigns the modern West has ever mounted.
Instead, men are dragged from streets and their homes, beaten, bundled into vans, forced into uniforms, and sent to the front. Videos of violent conscription squads no longer shock because they are the tragic norm.
This is not mobilisation. It is cowardly and punitive coercion, the final refuge of elites who lack legitimacy but demand sacrifice. It is the politics of cowardice, where those who made the decisions never bear the cost, and those who pay the price were never given a choice. These wars are always fought with other people’s sons, for objectives that dissolve under scrutiny, while the architects retreat behind speeches, security details, and moral posturing.
When a state must kidnap its own citizens to sustain a war, it has crossed the final moral line: it is no longer defending a nation, because it never was, but cannibalising one, deliberately sacrificing its people as a tip of the spear against a stronger Russia, to shield the reputations, fortunes, and careers of elites who will never bleed, never fight, and never answer for the ruin they leave behind.
Washington shattered Europe’s strategic autonomy years ago and quietly handed the bill to the continent. NATO expansion without strategy. Economic warfare without insulation. Energy sabotage without a contingency secured. The result was inevitable… Accelerated deindustrialisation, inflation, social fracture, political fragility. Europe emerged poorer, weaker, and strategically irrelevant, yet still clinging to the language of moral authority.
Rather than confront this collapse, Europe chose the refuge of absolutism. Negotiation became heresy. Compromise became betrayal. Peace became appeasement. Diplomacy itself was criminalised, because diplomacy invites the most dangerous question of all. What was this for?
And that question cannot be answered without consequences. Because peace does something war cannot. War suspends politics. Peace resurrects accountability.
Europe does not fear losing the war as much as it fears surviving it with memory intact.
That is why the war must continue. Not to save Ukraine, but to postpone reckoning, at the hands of Europeans.
Which brings us back to Kupyansk.
Kupyansk is not a battlefield turning point. It is a tombstone. Not only for the men buried beneath its rubble, but for Europe’s moral credibility itself.
What will damn this war in the historical record is not how it began, but how long it continued after its flimsy justification collapsed. When even manufactured consent evaporated, when diplomacy was deliberately buried, when Russian defeat quietly gave way to arithmetic, the war did not stop. It hardened. Not because it could still be won, but because ending it would have forced admissions no ruling class was prepared to make.
Kupyansk is not remembered because it mattered militarily. It matters because it exposes the moment when the war ceased to be about territory at all. It marks the point where Europe chose blood over truth, coercion over consent, and narrative survival over human life. Not out of strength, but out of fear.
History is unforgiving toward wars waged without consent and prolonged without purpose. It does not care about intentions, speeches, or moral language. It records only what was done, who benefited, and who paid. And when the record is written, it will show that Ukraine was not denied peace because peace was impossible, but because peace would have ended the lie.
That is the real defeat.
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Israel Would Have No Qualms About USS Liberty-Style FALSE FLAG If Iran Campaign Falters – Analysts
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 18.06.2025
Donald Trump is mulling whether or not to join Israel’s aggression against Iran as Tel Aviv faces problems sustaining its defenses against growing counterstrikes, and apparently lacks a realistic game plan for an end to hostilities after failing to achieve its goals. Analysts told Sputnik how the US could be ‘nudged’ into the conflict.
“The US is already assisting Israel with supplies, intel, refueling support, etc. One of the many US posts in the region could be attacked for a casus belli,” former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski explained.
“If Trump doesn’t comply with Israel’s demand” and join its aggression voluntarily, “a false flag may be needed” to drag the US in, Kwiatkowski, retired US Air Force Lt. Col.-turned Iraq War whistleblower, fears.
Netanyahu has a diverse array of options at his disposal, according to the observer, including:
- a false flag against US assets abroad blamed on Iran or one of its Axis of Resistance allies, like the Houthis
- a US domestic attack or assassination blamed on Iran
- Iranian air defenses ‘accidentally’ hitting a civilian jetliner carrying Americans
- use of a dirty bomb or nuclear contamination somewhere in the region blamed on Iran
- even blackmailing by threatening to use nukes against Iran if the US doesn’t join the fight
Kwiatkowski estimates that Israel probably has “enough blackmail power” against President Trump and Congress to avoid the necessity of a false flag operation, but a “USS Liberty-style” attack, targeting the soon-to-be-retired USS Nimitz supercarrier that’s heading to the Middle East, for example, nevertheless cannot be ruled out entirely, she says. … continue
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