Declassified presents the first documentary about Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, exposing Keir Starmer’s shady spy flight missions for Israel.
What does a British base in Cyprus have to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
Declassified travelled to this Mediterranean island to investigate the hundreds of spy flights Keir Starmer has sent over Gaza, that coincided with Israeli airstrikes and the killing of British aid workers
We go where the British media and military experts have refused to look and ask whether this scandal could put Keir Starmer in The Hague.
An original Declassified UK documentary
Hosted and produced by Phil Miller Filmed and edited by Alex Morris Music credits:
Australian readers opening Substack this fall have found a new step inserted between curiosity and the page. Click the wrong post and a full-screen message appears, informing users they “may be asked to verify your age before viewing certain content.”
Due to authoritarian internet laws, reading now comes with paperwork.
Substack says the change is not a philosophical shift but a legal one. The trigger is Australia’s Online “Safety” Act, a regulatory framework that treats written words with the same suspicion once reserved for explicit video.
The law requires platforms to block or filter material deemed age-restricted, even when that material is lawful.
The Online Safety Act hands the eSafety Commissioner broad authority to order platforms to restrict, hide, or remove content considered unsuitable for minors.
The definition of unsuitable is wide enough to cover commentary, essays, or creative writing that falls nowhere near criminal territory.
To comply, Substack now asks some Australian readers to confirm they are over 18. That can mean uploading identity documents or passing through third-party verification services.
Readers who already verified their identity through payment systems might be spared another check, though the underlying system remains the same. Access depends on linking a real person to a specific act of reading.
This marks a shift for a platform built on the idea that subscribing and reading could be done quietly. The act of opening an essay now risks leaving a record that connects identity with interest.
The company made clear it would follow Australian law, while arguing that mandatory age verification threatens the independence of digital publishing.
This is not the familiar filter used by streaming services or adult entertainment platforms. This is text. Essays. Journalism. Political argument. Material that has long circulated without checkpoints. The same machinery sold as child protection now sits in front of discussions about social issues, politics, or art.
Australian users trying to access posts marked as adult content are met with a demand to confirm their age before proceeding.
The process may be quick, but it requires data exchanges that associate a reader with specific material. Even if those links are temporary, they represent a break from the historical norm of private reading.
For writers and readers who valued Substack as a direct channel, the dynamic has changed. Subscribing is no longer enough. Proof is required. That requirement may not ban content outright, but it introduces friction that discourages engagement with sensitive or controversial topics. It also normalizes the idea that access to writing should depend on disclosing personal identity.
Once such systems exist, expanding them becomes an administrative decision.
Australia is not alone. Similar problems are underway in the United Kingdom and the European Union, where online safety proposals also rely on digital identity frameworks.
The common premise is that anonymous access is a problem to be solved rather than a feature to be preserved.
Substack’s choice reflects the bind facing global platforms. Defy the rules and risk being blocked. Comply and accept the slow reshaping of how people read. For now, Australian readers can still reach their favorite writers, provided they show ID first. The price of admission is proof that you are old enough to read.
Lawmakers in the United Kingdom are proposing amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would require nearly all smartphones and tablets to include built-in, unremovable surveillance software.
The proposal appears under a section titled “Action to promote the well-being of children by combating child sexual abuse material (CSAM).”
We obtained a copy of the proposed amendments for you here.
The amendment text specifies that any “relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device.”
It further defines “relevant devices” as “smartphones or tablet computers which are either internet-connectable products or network-connectable products for the purposes of section 5 of the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022.”
Under this clause, manufacturers, importers, and distributors would be legally required to ensure that every internet-connected phone or tablet they sell in the UK meets this “CSAM requirement.”
Enforcement would occur “as if the CSAM requirement was a security requirement for the purposes of Part 1 of the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022.”
In practical terms, the only way for such software to “prevent the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM” would be for devices to continuously scan and analyze all photos, videos, and livestreams handled by the device.
That process would have to take place directly on users’ phones and tablets, examining both personal and encrypted material to determine whether any of it might be considered illegal content. Although the measure is presented as a child-safety protection, its operation would create a system of constant client-side scanning.
This means the software would inspect private communications, media, and files on personal devices without the user’s consent.
Such a mechanism would undermine end-to-end encryption and normalize pre-emptive surveillance built directly into consumer hardware.
According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3 percent, up from 90,950 false positives the year before.
Many of these reports originate from private companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Google, which voluntarily scan user communications and forward suspected material to NCMEC under the current “Chat Control 1.0” framework, a system that is neither mandatory nor applied to end-to-end encrypted services.
Such a high error rate means that users are having their legal and private photos and videos falsely flagged and sent to authorities, a massive invasion of privacy.
Other parts of the same bill introduce additional “age assurance” obligations. On pages 19 and 20, the section titled “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” would compel VPN providers to apply “age assurance, which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not that person is a child.”
On page 21, another amendment titled “Action to promote the well-being of children in relation to social media” would require “all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.”
Together, these amendments establish a framework in which device-level scanning and strict age verification become legal obligations.
While described as efforts to “promote the wellbeing of children,” they would, in effect, turn personal smartphones and tablets into permanent monitoring systems and reduce the privacy of digital life to a conditional privilege.
The proposal represents one of the most widespread assaults on digital privacy ever introduced in a democratic country.
Unlike the European Union’s controversial “Chat Control” initiative, which has faced strong resistance for proposing the scanning of private communications by online services, the UK plan goes a step further.
The EU proposal focused on scanning content as it passed through communication platforms. The UK’s version would build surveillance directly into the operating system of personal devices themselves.
Every photo taken, every video saved, every image viewed could be silently analyzed by software running beneath the user’s control.
The bill would turn every connected device into a government-mandated inspection terminal.
Even though it is presented as a measure to protect children, the scope of what it enables is staggering. Once a legal foundation for on-device scanning exists, the definition of what must be scanned can easily expand.
A system designed to detect child abuse imagery today could be repurposed to search for other material tomorrow. The architecture for continuous surveillance would already be in place.
The United Kingdom is seeing a steady erosion of civil liberties as surveillance and speech policing expand at the same time.
When this is combined with proposals for device-level content scanning and mandatory age verification, the result is a climate in which privacy, anonymity, and free expression are increasingly treated as risks to be managed rather than rights to be protected.
Since the start of the Russian special military operation in February 2022, the European Union has spent €168.9 billion on military and financial support for Ukraine, according to figures from the European Commission. This amount is even more striking when compared to other areas of spending.
With all that money, the 27-nation bloc could finance public spending on education for an entire fiscal year in France and still have €32 billion left over, cover Germany’s entire target defense budget for 2026 (€108.2 billion), and pay for almost half of the total budget allocated by the European Commission to respond to regional crises for the period 2028-2034 (€395 billion).
However, Brussels has preferred to look outwards and pursue a foreign policy with a Euro-Atlantic vision, which has led to internal fragmentation of interests, exploited by the European elites who lead the bloc.
A group of European countries —mainly Poland, the Baltics, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—though the latter is not a member of the EU—is interested in prolonging the conflict in Ukraine for as long as possible. For them, for the elites who govern them, losing Ukraine would mean confronting their own internal problems.
Maintaining the discourse in favor of the Kiev regime and against supposed external threats is a way of preserving some cohesion in the face of the economic and political failures the EU has experienced over several years.
The Ukrainian crisis is a heavy burden for Brussels without US support, a reality under President Donald Trump. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates that, between September and October, the EU allocated only around €4.2 billion in military aid to Ukraine, a figure that is far too little to compensate for the loss of US aid.
At the same time, the gap within Europe has widened: Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have significantly increased their allocations, but Italy and Spain, among many other countries, have made only a negligible contribution.
Leaders such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are among those who have most promoted a belligerent policy regarding Ukraine, to the point of continuing to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is embroiled in several corruption scandals. These are leaders who are deeply discredited, both regionally and locally, in their own countries.
Merz and Macron can no longer achieve internal consensus within the EU, and this is eroding their credibility because they are not enabling the bloc to speak with one voice. In Brussels, there is a patchwork of passionate agendas, but not a common geopolitical agenda.
It is the European elites who insist on the continuation of a conflict, not the average citizen, who prefers that their government budgets be allocated to social spending rather than to a European rearmament project like the one being outlined in Brussels. Many see support for Ukraine as an imposed sacrifice, and the expense of continuing to fuel the conflict is already taking its toll.
In fact, the €168.9 billion that the EU has allocated to Ukraine over almost four years would have completely covered all of Spain’s public spending on education in a single fiscal year and Italy’s entire health budget.
Amid this situation, some European leaders are insisting that the Russian assets frozen more than three years ago be confiscated to guarantee a €210 billion loan for Kiev, which could complicate the peace talks the US and Russia have been conducting for months over the Ukrainian conflict.
That money is Russian, and international law would have to protect Russian assets if the EU were to choose to confiscate these. If they do, it would be a major contradiction within the European narrative because these countries are supposed to be the ones that champion international law and guarantee what they have called ‘a rules-based world,’ but appropriating those assets is essentially theft, and this would violate international law.
Nonetheless, the EU announced on December 12 that an agreement had been reached to indefinitely freeze €210 billion of Russian Central Bank assets held in Europe, particularly in Belgian securities depository Euroclear. Although the freeze is intended to facilitate EU plans to provide Ukraine with a loan of up to €165 billion to cover military and civilian budget needs in 2026 and 2027, Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria, and Malta expressed reservations about transferring funds to Ukraine. A final decision will be made at an EU summit being held at the end of the week.
It is foolish that the EU has wasted so much money on the Ukrainian crisis, knowing that the bloc is economically suffering, with very low growth rates and a deindustrialized Germany that is not recovering. Yet, despite this, the EU seemingly wants to further tarnish its global reputation by aiming to steal Russia’s wealth.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
UK Drops Terrorism Case Against Journalist Richard Medhurst No charges will be filed, and bail has been cancelled. However, this is only a partial victory for freedom of the press, as the UK authorities handed Austria all their intel/files for them to continue the persecution.
Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/richardmedhurst
Richard Thomas Medhurst (1992) is an independent journalist, political commentator, and analyst from the United Kingdom with a focus on international affairs, US politics, and the Middle East.
Readers of The Defender are familiar with the fact that the COVID-19 mRNA shots pose a risk of myocarditis, especially in children. But they may not know that myocarditis is usually permanently disabling, and in adults, it is often fatal within five years.
This has been a public relations setback for industry and governments that have been advocating, and sometimes mandating, that children as young as 6 months get the vaccines — even though COVID-19 is almost always mild or symptom-free in young people.
This month, 22 British scientists from prestigious universities published a study intended to ease parents’ minds about risks of the vaccine, and simultaneously scare them about the dangers of getting COVID-19.
The message is that yes, there are rare cases — they always use the word “rare” — in which children get myocarditis after vaccination, but hey, no product can be perfect. And it’s better to risk the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. Also, they claim, kids are more likely to get myocarditis if they get the virus than they are to get myocarditis from the vaccine.
That’s the message — and the authors and publisher have the clout to widely broadcast that message in a press release and in news headlines in Britain and America.
But what does the study actually say? In short, it asks the wrong question — and even so, the answer they get must be buried in the appendix, because it’s inconsistent with the message they want to promote.
Article summary omitted evidence of vaccine risk
The study design is deeply compromised because the 22 authors constructed a complicated model to avoid doing a straightforward comparison (vaccine only versus disease only).
And even after they cooked the books, even after they took data from almost 14 million children and teens under age 18 in England, they got a result that is barely statistically significant, with overlapping error bars for the risk from COVID-19 and the risk from vaccination.
It gets worse.
The results, which marginally favored the vaccination, were trumpeted in a summary at the top of the paper and announced to the press.
But buried in the appendix, published separately online, is a table that shows a more relevant version of the comparison.
The version in the summary is from an early time frame when the vaccine was not available. The appendix shows comparable data for the time frame in which the vaccine was available, limited to the ages for which the vaccine was offered.
In the appendix, the risk of myocarditis from the disease is half that of the risk from the vaccine. This blatantly contradicts the summary and the headlines generated by the article — and this was a response to the deceptive version of the question, not the more straightforward one that the researchers chose not to answer.
Study authors asked the wrong question
The most pertinent question is the simple one: Did vaccinated children have a higher incidence of myocarditis than unvaccinated children?
This is an easy question to answer, given the data that these authors (but not the public) had access to. In a few minutes, they could have calculated a rate of myocarditis among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
However, if they did the calculation, they didn’t report the results. My guess is that they did the calculation, didn’t like what they saw, so they didn’t include it in the published article.
As I stated above, I believe the study authors “asked the wrong question.” What I mean is that the article compares the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from vaccination.
But this is not the most relevant question. Why?
Because many people got the vaccine and then got COVID anyway, so they were unnecessarily exposed to both risks.
Conversely, many children who didn’t get the vaccine, didn’t get COVID. Or, they get such a mild case that they don’t even notice it. These children avoided both risks.
This is why comparing the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from the COVID vaccine is not really the pertinent question. It’s not a question of “either or.”
Authors ‘muddied the waters’ by analyzing myocarditis in kids who got vaccine and the virus
The message the authors wanted to imply was that, even though the vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis, it decreased the risk of COVID — and since COVID itself can cause myocarditis, the total risk is actually lower with vaccination than without.
If that is their claim, it’s easy to determine if it is true. The simplest calculation they could have done with the data available to them was also the calculation most pertinent to what parents want to know: Is my child better off with or without the vaccine?
The authors chose not to offer us the simple answer to that straightforward question.
But — given that they asked the wrong question — they might have derived a clean answer just by comparing the subset of children who were vaccinated but never got COVID to the subset who got COVID but were never vaccinated.
Because the study included data spanning two years from all over the U.K., there were hundreds of thousands of children in these subcategories — more than enough to do a clean statistical comparison.
But again, the authors chose not to do this. Or, my guess, they did the comparison and didn’t like the result, so they didn’t include it in the publication.
Instead, the authors analyzed myocarditis in the large group of children who got both the vaccine and the disease. This muddied the waters because there is no clear way to determine whether it was the disease or the vaccine that damaged the child’s heart.
Hence, the complicated model, based on timing.
The possibility that seems likely is that children who got COVID after the vaccination had the highest heart risk of all. Of course, there is the logical possibility that children who got COVID after vaccination had a milder case, with a lower risk of myocarditis.
However, if that had been the result, I would think the authors would not only have included that result, but also headlined it.
One more thing — the study looked only at the Pfizer vaccine. Myocarditis risk from the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be three times higher than Pfizer. They had the Moderna data and chose not to look at it.
Or they looked at it, decided they didn’t like what they saw, and decided not to report it.
‘This is public relations masquerading as science’
So, to summarize:
The authors asked a complicated question when a simple one was more relevant.
Given this wrong question, they did not do the most straightforward analysis to answer it.
Even so, they found that the vaccine held almost twice the risk of myocarditis compared to the disease. This result was only in Table S16 of the Supplementary Appendix — but mentioned nowhere in the body of the paper, let alone in the summary at the top.
And still they made prominent announcements to the public, claiming that their study confirms that children are better off with the vaccine than without.
This is public relations masquerading as science. For an article like this to be peer reviewed and featured prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal tells us just how deeply the ecosystem of medical research has been corrupted.
And this is the “science” that our U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on when they approve dangerous vaccines for healthy children who are at almost no risk from the disease itself.
In most statistical articles, the raw data used for a study are published online and linked in an appendix to the article. However, in this case, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) granted access to the data exclusively to this prestigious group of scientists.
Personally, I would like to see the raw data and perform the analysis that the 22 scientists should have done from the beginning. Children’s Health Defense is in the process of requesting access from the NHS. Stay tuned …
The death of a British paratrooper reported this week was the first public admission by Britain’s authorities that a serving member of its armed forces has been killed in Ukraine.
The timing of the official disclosure and its very public, emotive nature raise questions about the motives of the British authorities. The news of the death comes at a critical moment when London and other European capitals seem desperate to sabotage efforts by U.S. President Trump to find a peaceful settlement to the nearly four-year conflict.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer led tributes in the British Parliament on Wednesday to Lance Corporal George Hooley, who was described as a “hero” who “served our country in the cause of freedom and democracy.”
The British media were plastered with fond photos and sentimental commendations of the dead paratrooper.
Britain’s Minister of Defense [sic] John Healey added: “George’s tragic death reminds us of the courage and commitment with which our outstanding armed forces serve every day to protect our nation.”
How exactly British soldiers in Ukraine are “protecting” Britain is not explained.
The Sun newspaper went further to whip up anti-Russian feelings when it subsequently reported that the Kremlin made “disgusting” comments about the death of the soldier. Moscow had simply dared to ask what the British soldier was doing in Ukraine in the first place, and pointed out that British personnel have been participating in “terrorist” attacks on Russian civilian centers along with Ukrainian military units. That much is fact. Ukrainian forces have been firing UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russian territory over the past two years. These missiles could not be operated without British personnel on the ground. Similarly, American-made HIMARS and ATACMS, which have also targeted Russian territory, have also necessarily involved U.S. personnel for operation.
It is an open secret that British, French, American, Polish, German, and other NATO forces have been deployed in Ukraine to fight against the Russian military. Up to now, the NATO authorities have maintained a cynical silence about their involvement, pretending that the estimated 30,000 foreign soldiers in Ukraine are “private mercenaries” who have no official affiliation. Russia’s warnings about NATO being a direct participant in war have been dismissed as “Kremlin propaganda”.
But Moscow’s claims have been previously corroborated. Pentagon classified documents leaked in 2023 indicated that 50 British special forces were deployed in Ukraine, making up the biggest contingency of other NATO commandos in combat with Russia.
In March 2024, a leaked audio recording of Germany’s Luftwaffe commander, Lt Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, was released, in which he told other top officials that the British forces were on the ground operating Storm Shadow missiles.
British elite forces from the SAS and SBS (Special Boat Service), which work in conjunction with the paratroop regiments, are known to operate underwater drones in the Black Sea to target Crimea.
It is estimated that 40 British nationals have been killed in combat in Ukraine, along with other NATO nationals. However, the American, British, French, and other authorities have kept a stony silence about the identities and circumstances, implying that the casualties were private mercenaries and “soldiers of fortune”.
Logically, the NATO powers want to deny the depth of their involvement in the conflict. They are supposed to “merely” support Ukraine with the supply of weapons to defend against “Russian aggression.” The admission of NATO armed forces on the ground is an acknowledgment of the reality that the U.S.-led military alliance is at war with Russia. Of course, many independent observers know that already as fact, as does Russia. Still, it behooves the NATO states to suppress the truth and maintain plausible deniability.
Russia has said, with justification, that all combatants in Ukraine are legitimate targets. That includes members of armed forces who claim to be “peacekeepers” or acting as “military advisors”.
Given the secrecy that Britain and other NATO nations have maintained about deployment in Ukraine, and over previous military casualties, it does seem strange that this week saw such a very public announcement about the death of the paratrooper.
The British authorities claimed that Lance Corporal Hooley was killed in an accident “far from the frontlines” while overseeing the testing of an “air defense system”.
That disclosure appeared to be aimed at portraying the soldier in a minimal role working on “defense”. Together with effusive eulogies in the British media for the paratrooper as an honorable person, the intended effect was to rally public sympathy and anger towards Russia.
Britain’s Starmer has been a leading voice, along with France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz, for the deployment of so-called peacekeeping troops to Ukraine as a security guarantee for Ukraine in the event of a peace settlement. The real agenda, however, is to sabotage any peace deal because the Europeans know full well that Russia would never accept such a presence, seeing it as a backdoor for escalating NATO participation in the conflict.
U.S. President Trump has belatedly realized that the proxy war is a dead-end for NATO, especially as Russian forces speed up their advances following the capture of key bastions, including Seversk, Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk), and Kupyansk. The British and the Europeans are in panic mode to keep the proxy war going because of their vested interests. They can’t accept defeat because of the fatal loss to their political image and fallout from the false narrative they have been spouting to justify a criminal proxy war.
One can expect various provocations and maneuvers to escalate the conflict to avoid peace. Declaring the death of a British soldier should be a damning admission of NATO being at war behind the backs of the public of NATO states. But rather than an admission of culpability, the British authorities, as with other European NATO leaders, are trying to rouse public support for escalation. The civilian head of NATO, former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, gave a speech in Berlin this week in which he stated that European nations must be ready for full-scale war with Russia, like “our grandfathers endured”. The insane European losers want to save their political necks with World War III.
The current moment “is critical for Ukraine as Zelensky’s regime is coming closer to collapse both politically and on the frontline, where Russia is advancing on all fronts,” Armando Mema, a member of the Finnish Freedom Alliance party, told Sputnik.
While Trump inherited the Ukraine mess from Biden, who “provoked this conflict and created this disaster,” he’s trying to prevent “a total defeat of Ukraine” because “it would be a disaster for his administration too,” Mema explained.
But Zelensky “is not interested in peace,” as seen in his recent demands for “security guarantees similar to Article 5 of NATO, [which] he knows… he cannot get,” the observer said.
Knowing that’s impossible, “he uses as an excuse to continue to be in power despite his mandate [ending]. Zelensky has banned all political opposition parties in Ukraine, arrested opponents, including regular citizens who were simply advocating for peace. Zelensky knows that if a regular election were to be held, he will lose immediately and all his administration will be prosecuted for corruption,” Mema emphasized.
As for reports of a US-mediated push to restore Russia’s access to Europe’s energy markets, Mema predicts this will remain “impossible” to achieve as long as the current crop of leaders are in charge.
“But Trump has started to dismantle the EU leadership (Macron, Merz, Ursula, Meloni and so on)” and over time they will be replaced by leaders who take account of their own countries’ interests, the Finnish politician believes.
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has been the keystone of U.S. foreign policy in Europe. Indeed, the alliance has been the most important feature of Washington’s overall strategy of global primacy. America’s political and policy elites have embraced two key assumptions and continue to do so. One is that NATO is essential to the peace and security of the entire transatlantic region and will remain so for the indefinite future. The other sacred assumption is that the alliance is highly beneficial to America’s own core security and economic interests.
Whatever validity those assumptions may have had at one time, they are dangerously obsolete today. The toxic, militaristic views toward Russia that too many European leaders are adopting have made NATO into a snare that could entangle the United States in a large-scale war with ominous nuclear implications. It is urgent for Donald Trump’s administration and sensible proponents of a U.S. foreign policy based on realism and restraint to eliminate such a risky and unnecessary situation.
Throughout the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, NATO’s European members followed Washington’s policy lead on important issues with little dissent or resistance. That situation is no longer true. The governments and populations in the alliance’s East European members (the countries that the Kremlin held in bondage during the Cold War but that eagerly joined NATO once the Soviet Union collapsed) have adopted an especially aggressive, uncompromising stance toward Russia as the USSR’s successor. They have lobbied with special fervor in favor of admitting Ukraine to NATO, despite Moscow’s repeated warnings over the past two decades that such a step would constitute an intolerable provocation. The East European states also have been avid supporters of the proxy war that NATO has waged against Russia following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Their toxic hostility toward Russia has inexorably made inroads even among the previously more restrained, sensible members of the alliance. With a few partial exceptions, such as Hungary and Slovakia, NATO governments now push for unrealistic, very risky policies with respect to the Ukraine-Russia war. Washington’s volatile, ever-changing policy under President Trump regarding that armed conflict has not helped matters.
The Trump administration’s latest approach has been to try to inject some badly needed realism into the position that Ukraine and its NATO supporters pursue. Realities on the battlefield confirm that Russia is winning, albeit slowly and at considerable cost, the bloody war against its neighbor. Moscow’s forces are gradually expanding the amount of territory they control. Kiev’s propaganda campaign to portray Ukraine as a stalwart democracy and a vital symbol of resistance to an authoritarian Russia is collapsing as well. Corruption scandals now plague the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, as does growing evidence of his regime’s authoritarianism. Proponents of NATO’s continuing military intervention now seek to downplay the once-dominant “moral case” for the alliance’s involvement and try to stress Ukraine’s alleged strategic importance to both the United States and its allies.
Stubbornness and lack of realism on the part of NATO’s European members (as well as too many American policy analysts and media mavens) is worrisome and dangerous. They have launched a concerted effort to torpedo the Trump administration’s latest peace initiative. Proponents of continuing the alliance’s proxy war insist that no peace accord include territorial concessions by Ukraine. They also demand that Kiev retain the “right” to join NATO. Finally, they insist that any settlement contain a NATO “security guarantee” to Ukraine, and that a peacekeeping force that includes troops from alliance members enforce that settlement. Britain and France have explicitly made the demand to send troops.
Such demands amount to a poison pill designed to kill any prospect of an agreement that Moscow might accept. The insistence on a security guarantee to Kiev and a peacekeeping contingent especially fits that description. Any accord that puts NATO military personnel in Ukraine would make the country a protectorate of the alliance, even if Kiev did not receive an official membership card. The commitment itself would have NATO’s military might perched on Russia’s border. That is precisely the outcome that Moscow has sought to prevent for decades.
Extremely inflammatory and combative rhetoric on the part of high-level European officials increasingly accompany such provocative, anti-Russia policy stances. Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, even mused that the alliance should consider the option of launching a “preemptive” military strike against Russia. Other officials in NATO member governments have asserted that the alliance (or “Europe”) must be prepared to wage war against Russia, if relations continue to deteriorate.
NATO’s European hawks are flying high, and the irresponsible options they toy with put the United States in grave danger. The NATO alliance is no longer even arguably a security asset for the American people. Instead, it has become an increasingly worrisome, perilous liability – a loose cannon that poses a grave danger to our country.
NATO was created so that the United States could protect a collection of weak democracies in Western Europe still suffering from the aftermath of World War II against a strong, menacing totalitarian state: the Soviet Union. That world no longer exists. Today, a much larger, stronger collection of democratic and quasi-democratic European states confronts Russia – a weaker, non-totalitarian power. Even without the United States, the European countries are capable of building and deploying whatever forces they deem necessary to sustain their security interests. NATO’s European contingent also has its own, extremely assertive (indeed, aggressive) policy agenda toward Moscow. That agenda endangers rather than benefits the United States and the American people. It is now imperative for America to sever the transatlantic security tie and say farewell to NATO.
A depressing pattern has taken hold in the way parts of the Western press cover Russia: take a volatile subject, strip it of the conditional language that contains it, and then act surprised when the public grows more fearful, more hardline, and less able to distinguish deterrent rhetoric from an intent to attack.
The latest example is the frenzy around Vladimir Putin’s remark about Europe and war. In Russian, his meaning is not subtle: “We are not going to fight Europe, I’ve said it a hundred times already. But if Europe suddenly wants to fight and starts, we are ready right now.” A refusal paired with a threat of readiness if attacked. Many headlines flattened that into “Russia is ready for war with Europe.”
In news reporting, headlines aren’t neutral labels. They are the main event. They set the emotional temperature for millions who will never read beyond the first line, especially on mobile feeds where nuance is a luxury and outrage is a business model. So when a headline drops the words “we are not going to” and discards “if Europe starts,” it’s not just a shortening – it reverses the reader’s perception. The public walks away believing Putin signaled readiness to launch a war against Europe, not readiness in response to one. In a moment when misperception can harden policy and policy can harden into escalation, that is reckless.
Worse, this kind of framing does real political work. It amplifies the narrative long championed by certain European officials – that Russia is poised to attack the EU next, regardless of evidence. If you swallow the headline alone, those officials sound validated. If you read the quote, at minimum you have to admit the claim is not what was said. Maybe you’ll even start asking questions. That difference is the hinge between journalism and propaganda.
This pattern didn’t start this week. Since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, Western coverage has too often treated Russia’s declared motives as unworthy of even being stated without scare quotes, while the most intimidating interpretation of Russian intent is treated as default reality. “Imperial ambition.” “War of conquest.” “Russia wants to reconstitute an empire.” The public is denied the basic reporting function of hearing why Russia is doing what it’s doing. Instead we get a morality play with prewritten roles: one side’s motives are analyzed in paragraphs; the other’s are assumed in headlines.
The same sloppiness shows up in claims that Putin “stalled” peace talks. Negotiations are not a TikTok trend; they are an exhausting grind of sequencing, verification, backchannels, domestic politics, and face-saving. Many major conflicts have required long, ugly diplomatic marathons before anything moved. The Vietnam peace talks, for example, dragged on for years. To declare “stalling” because a meeting ended without a breakthrough is to confuse diplomacy with customer service: “Where is my peace deal? I ordered it an hour ago.”
And if we’re going to talk about “stalling,” we should at least look honestly at which actors have been most allergic to acknowledging battlefield realities. The Russia-US channel – whatever one thinks of it – is the only vector that has shown any capacity to force trade-offs into the open, because it involves the parties with the leverage to make and enforce them. By contrast, the EU and the UK’s public posture has often resembled a maximalist wish list: demands unmoored from the war’s trajectory, presented as prerequisites rather than negotiating positions. It has hardened expectations so thoroughly that any compromise looks like betrayal, and any diplomacy looks like surrender. That is the worst kind of stalling – not merely delaying talks, but by making talks politically impossible.
It didn’t have to be like this, and it isn’t universal. Some outlets have demonstrated that integrity is still possible: they lead with the full quote and include the conditional. They are at least honest with the readers about what was said and what was implied, allowing them to distinguish threat from intent. Far from being “soft on Putin”, this is basic journalistic competence. In a climate where fear sells and escalation eats, and the Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, faithful quotation is a mandatory public safety measure.
Timur Tarkhanov is a journalist and media executive.
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