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Yemen being bombed by US, UK for fulfilling ICJ, UNGA ‘obligations’: Legal expert

Press TV – March 17, 2025

A prominent legal expert says Yemen is being bombed by the United States and the United Kingdom for fulfilling obligations set by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Craig Mokhiber, a US-based human rights lawyer and former United Nations official, took to his X handle, formerly Twitter, on Monday to condemn the latest American-British aggression on Yemen.

He said both the ICJ and the UNGA have found that all countries are “legally obliged” to cease any kind of support for the Israeli occupation regime amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The obligations, he elaborated, include banning any products from the illegal settlements, to cut off all military, diplomatic, economic, commercial, financial, investment, and trade relations with the Israeli occupation, to respect the provisional orders of the ICJ in the Israel genocide case, and to respect their third-state obligations under the Genocide Convention to act to prevent and stop Genocide.

“Yemen is being bombed for respecting these obligations,” he remarked.

Mokhiber, who previously served as the director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, resigned from his position in October 2023 in protest against the UN’s “failure” to prevent the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

He described the US, the UK and much of Europe as “wholly complicit in the horrific assault.”

American and British warplanes attacked Yemen on Saturday night after US President Donald Trump vowed to use “overwhelming lethal force” against the poorest country in the Arab world that had recently resumed a ban on Israeli ships from crossing key maritime regions after the Tel Aviv regime reimposed crippling blockade on the besieged Palestinian territory.

Yemeni health ministry condemned the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, describing it as a “full-fledged war crime and a blatant violation of international laws and conventions.”

The US-UK military coalition launched another attack on Sunday night, with Yemeni authorities now putting the death toll at more than 50, including women and children.

According to Yemeni reports, American and British warplanes launched at least 47 airstrikes on several sites in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a as well as areas in the northern province of Sa’ada, the central province of al-Bayda, and the southwestern province of Dhamar.

The leader of the Ansarullah resistance movement in a speech on Sunday night warned the United States that the aggression against the Arab country will be met with escalation.

“The aircraft carrier and American warships will be targets for us, and the navigation ban will include the Americans as long as they persist in their aggression,” Abdul Malik al-Houthi said.

“We will respond to escalation with escalation, and we will strike at the American enemy by targeting its aircraft carrier, warships, and imposing a blockade on its vessels.”

March 17, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK Terrorism Law Overhaul Blasted as “Unacceptable” Threat to Free Speech

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 16, 2025

Jonathan Hall, a UK government-appointed Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, has dubbed reforms announced by PM Keir Starmer in this legislative area as “unacceptable” – specifically in how that would restrict freedom of expression.

These changes came as part of the Labour government’s reaction to the Southport murders and subsequent protests and unrest.

The issue addressed by Hall’s report published this week is the legal definition of terrorism, and whether it needs to be expanded to acts of extreme violence like those perpetrated by Axel Rudakubana in Southport last summer.

Hall’s overall conclusion is that there is no need to amend the definition of terrorism, as it is “already wide.”

One of the implications, should proposed changes be adopted, concerns speech, writes the terrorism watchdog. He warns about risks involving “major false positives” – i.e., persons that would get prosecuted although they cannot be considered terrorists “by any stretch of the imagination.”

However, there is also the issue of definition expansion into what Hall refers to as novel territory.

“For example, any person who glorified ‘extreme violence’ would be at risk of arrest and prosecution as a terrorist. People swapping violent war footage would be at risk of encouraging terrorism, resulting in unacceptable restriction on freedom of expression,” he writes.

Hall also argues against the notion that it is possible to examine the browsing history of a perpetrator like Rudakubana and from that alone deduce which point in his online activities fatefully influenced his real world actions.

Expansion of the definition of terrorism to include such crimes – as essentially a way to give the authorities greater powers – is not likely to be effective for the purposes declared by the government, Hall suggests.

Many opponents of the UK government’s decisions and initiatives in the wake of the Southport murders have been warning that redefining legislation paves the way for greater mass surveillance capabilities.

Hall thinks that expectations when it comes to actually dealing with extreme violence in the proposed way might be unrealistic.

“There is no supercomputer or algorithm that can magically scan all online communications and tell who is an attacker and who is a fantasist,” he observes.

In order to avoid what the report describes as an extremely high risk of unintended consequences of rushed changes to the definition of terrorism, Hall advises the government to consider “a new offense, adapted from terrorism legislation, to deal with non-terrorist mass casualty attack-planning.”

March 16, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

UK, Poland and World War II. Lessons Before World War III

By Konrad Rękas | Global Research | March 13, 2025

Reading the recent comments to my text “Scotland Should Stay Out of the British Proxy War in Ukraine”, I feel obliged to correct one major historical misinformation concerning British-Polish relations. Some write: “How dare you suggest that Scotland should not support the government in Kiev?! After all, if our grandfathers thought the same way, the UK would not have helped Poland in 1939 and did not fight for Polish freedom in WW2!” I am terribly sorry, but this is not just a misunderstanding. It is a lie that many of my honourable critics probably have been taught in British schools.

How the UK Pushed Poland to Fight

The UK did not help Poland in 1939 but it was the British politics that pushed the Poles into war with Germany.  Westminster wanted to buy some time and distract Hitler, so provoked a war in Poland. This was the purpose of the so-called British assurance to Poland, pledged in Neville Chamberlain’s speech in the House of Commons on 31 March 1939. Doesn’t it look quite similar to Sir Keir Starmer’s “100-year partnership agreement” with Ukraine?

You don’t have to take my word for it, just please, read carefully books by English language authors such as AJP Taylor, Simon Newman and Anita Prazmowska, even Peter Hitchens and you will learn what influence British policy had on the outbreak of WWII and how the UK manipulated Polish naïve politics.  Exactly as they are doing today with Ukrainian politics, to the accompaniment of the dumbed public opinion, including the Scottish one.

And it is not like we are just now getting smarter. Some people realised the perfidious British game right away, already during WWII. General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, Polish Commander-in-chief during the late period of the WWII, has written to the Polish soldiers in 1944:

“Five years have passed since the day when Poland, having listened to the encouragement of the British government and received its guarantees, stood alone in the fight against the German power.”

After that harsh but true reminder, that Poland was pushed to fight by Britain, Churchill successfully demanded general Sosnkowski’s dismissal, later yelling at another Polish distinguished commander general Wladyslaw Anders:

“You can take your Polish divisions! I don’t need them anymore…”

Analogically today, we can see with no doubts, that it has been the encouragement of London and Washington pushing Kiev to pursue a policy that resulted in war with Russia.

The UK has never fought for anyone’s freedom

Let us finally emphasize one thing. The UK has never fought for anyone’s freedom, and certainly not for a free Poland. As today, it is all about the interests, geopolitical influence and profits of the City. It was no different during WWII. It was not the UK that defended Poland, but there having been the Poles who defended the UK during the Blitz, in the Norwegian, Libyan, Italian and French campaigns, in the Battle of the Atlantic, breaking Enigma codes, gaining an operating V2 missile and localising the Peenemunde facility. 

And do you know how Britain thanked the Poles? The UK stole some of the Polish gold reserves, which have been heroically saved from the Germans. We paid for the defence of the UK with Polish blood and Polish gold, and then we couldn’t even take part in the London victory parade.

We were no longer needed by the British Empire, which in the meantime was welcoming thousands of Ukrainian Nazis, Hitler’s collaborators, who were to be turned into saboteurs, spies and the army of WWIII. And after 80 years, the warmongers finally succeeded…

So please, don’t teach us the history of WWII as you don’t know it yourselves. Better be worried how to avoid WWIII because this could be the very last moment to do that. However, we cannot achieve the peace by supporting the Nazi-oligarchic Kiev regime nor the British jingoism. 

March 15, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

The ball is in Russia’s court? Russia is winning a war, not playing tennis

Strategic Culture Foundation | March 14, 2025

The ball is in Russia’s court, according to the Trump administration regarding a proposed 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine.

The proposed truce was announced following discussions on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia between the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and representatives of the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime. Rubio said it was now up to Russia to reciprocate with the Ukrainian side’s purported willingness to hold a ceasefire.

In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin tactfully said that Russia was open to a ceasefire but only if it led to a complete and comprehensive peace settlement. Putin repeated that any durable resolution must address the root causes of the conflict and Russia’s fundamental strategic security concerns.

The Russian leader then met with Trump’s special envoy on Thursday. Following the discussions in Jeddah between the U.S. and the Kiev regime, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff travelled to Moscow where he met with Putin. The details of their conversation were not disclosed. But it was reported that Witkoff delivered “additional information” from Trump to Putin regarding the proposed ceasefire. It was reported that Witkoff returned to Washington with details from Putin. It may be surmised that the Russian position on its terms was reiterated. Trump hailed the discussions as “productive.”

Herein lies the rub. The essential underlying issues are the aggressive expansion of NATO and its weaponizing of a NeoNazi Ukrainian regime. The United States and its NATO partners instigated the conflict in Ukraine over several decades since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991. The past three-year war in Ukraine is but a symptom of a longer and systematic hostility. Trump seems to be cognizant of those issues.

The Trump administration has abandoned the false war-propaganda of the Biden administration. It is now acknowledged in Washington that the conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war between the U.S.-led NATO axis and Russia.

As the spectacular military defeat of the NATO proxy forces in Kursk this week demonstrates – as well as the rapid gains Russia is making against the crumbling Kiev regime – the U.S.-led “Ukraine Project” has been vanquished. Russia has all but won the proxy war.

The Americans (factions within) and their NATO surrogates are trying to avoid the admission of defeat by contriving a superficial peace process that only ends up as a “frozen conflict” on Russia’s borders.

The best way to bring the war to an end is for the United States to stop arming the Kiev regime and supplying it with intelligence and logistical support.

This week Trump resumed military and intelligence supplies to the Kiev regime to coincide with the apparent offer of a ceasefire from the Ukrainian regime. That amounts to one step forward, two steps back.

It was rather risible to hear Marco Rubio, the U.S.’ top diplomat, affecting the image of an honest peace broker telling Russia that the ball was in its court to reciprocate for peace as “a compromise” with Ukraine.

The Trump administration has a misplaced view of the conflict if it thinks Russia can be pressured according to U.S. one-sided and pretentious demands.

Russia is winning a momentous war, not playing tennis.

In any case, the ball, so to speak, is and will remain firmly in the United States’ court until it accepts defeat and Russia’s victory terms. It is the U.S. and not its European vassals nor its catspaw Kiev regime that will have to make that call.

Those terms have been repeatedly stipulated by Moscow: a lasting security treaty in Europe consonant with Russia’s just and basic demands for NATO to roll back and desist from its aggressive tendencies; for Ukraine to be a neutral state in perpetuity never being a member of NATO; for the NeoNazi regime to be eradicated and the cultural rights of ethnic Russian people to be guaranteed and respected; and for the historic Russian territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporozhye and of course Crimea to remain intact as part of the Russian Federation.

Moscow reserves the right to change the terms per conditions on the ground if the conflict persists, such as reclaiming its historic territory of Odessa, Kharkiv, Nikolaev, and enforcing a no-fire zone in Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast from where the failed NATO Kursk offensive was launched last August.

On Russia’s successful recapture of Kursk, as Putin points out, there are serious contingencies that need to be dealt with even before a ceasefire is contemplated. The invaders, including NATO mercenaries, committed war crimes against civilians. Are they expected to be let go freely? This is no doubt a reason why the U.S. and Ukraine are suddenly pushing the idea for a ceasefire as a way to salvage failure and rearm.

Trump will have to deal with the reality of Russia’s dominant position: its military victory and its historically righteous cause to confront NATO aggression.

It remains to be seen now how Trump responds. He needs to disabuse arrogant misconceptions that Washington is acting as a peace broker. The U.S. is the main protagonist in a proxy war against Russia. The Kiev regime is but a bit player. Moscow has no need or inclination to engage with a corrupt NeoNazi regime headed up by a puppet president who no longer even has the semblance of legitimacy after cancelling elections last year and ruling by martial law.

If Trump is serious about ending the proxy war in Ukraine, he can do so promptly by ending the weapons flow to that country. His resumption of weapons supplies this week does not bode well.

Trump should also ignore the bleating of the European lackeys, in particular the British, who have nothing positive to offer. London was “intimately” involved in the latest ceasefire proposal from the U.S. and Ukraine, according to the BBC. That should be seen as a warning of a dirty trick.

It is a negative sign that the U.S.-Ukraine joint statement this week in Saudi Arabia peddled vile lies about Russia abducting Ukrainian children. It was also contemptible that the statement called for “future security guarantees for Ukraine” (the aggressor!) while saying nothing about Russia’s security concerns. The absence of the latter indicates the U.S. side has little understanding about “root causes” of the conflict.

Moreover, the U.S.-Ukrainian joint statement called for the involvement of European partners in peace talks. The present crop of European leaders has no intention or capability of negotiating a lasting peace with Russia. They insist on Ukraine becoming a future member of NATO and they want to insinuate themselves into the dialogue to scupper a peace deal by deploying “peacekeeping” troops. The British and French reportedly want the U.S. to provide air cover for what would be their trip-wire troop presence, thereby escalating the war.

Will Trump be duped by the perfidious British, French and other European Russophobes? Perhaps with a false-flag provocation?

American and European political leaders have negligible credibility for offering a ceasefire to Russia, never mind a durable peace. They started this war and surreptitiously want to continue it by other means under the guise of a peace process that does not address the root causes of conflict.

That implies that the only way to deal with the root causes and to establish a lasting peace is for Russia to defeat the NATO enemy with an explicit, unconditional surrender. Can Trump’s ego handle that?

Peace begins when the guns cease, but for true peace to last, the U.S.-led NATO war on Russia must be defeated. Can the U.S. imperial deep state handle that?

Either way, we will soon see.

March 15, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Remove Hamas and the other Resistance groups from the Home Office list of proscribed organisations

By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | March 14, 2025

The British government should de-proscribe all of the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance groups currently listed on the anachronistic list maintained by the Home Office. The first and most obvious reason for this is that banning these groups does not in any way prevent or disrupt political violence in the UK. This sounds like a dramatic claim. So, let’s take a close look.

After a year and a half of genocide by the illegitimate Zionist entity, voices are beginning to be raised calling for the removal of Palestinian resistance groups from the government list of proscribed organisations. But what is the list and what offences are attached to it?

When I was detained by officers of SO15 or the Counter Terrorism Command (formerly the Special Branch) under Schedule 7 the other day, I was given a piece of paper with the legal basis of the detention which I was required to sign and was given a copy to keep. It states that the detention is to enable whether I appeared ‘to be a person who is or has been concerned in the commission of instigation of acts of terrorism.’

And yet, they asked me no questions about commissioning or instigating acts of “terrorism”. Not a single one.

Instead, they asked about extremism, the Western way of life, and asked me to characterise specific views on political violence. If the Trades Description Act applied to the Terrorism Act 2000 and to the activities of SO15, I would be making a complaint to the Heathrow Trading Standards Officer.

But the reason for this is that Schedule 7 is not really intended to disrupt actual terrorism, but to surveill and repress political views and political speech which is critical of UK foreign policy, including of course support for the Palestinians’ legitimate right to resist the Zionist occupation. Don’t believe me? Let’s look closely at the Home Office list of offences related to proscribed organisations.

As one can see from the offences below, none of them have anything to do with actual acts of violence. Let’s take each in turn.

  1. Obviously being a member of a proscribed group might have some relevance, but membership is not itself an act of terror. And certainly, professing to be a member of Hezbollah is not, in itself, an act of terror.
  2. Inviting support for a proscribed group is an offence. How does one ‘invite’ support for a ‘terrorist’ organisation? The language is of course similar to the ‘notice’ issued to UK broadcasters on 19 October 1988. Otherwise known as the Broadcasting Ban, this was an attempt to suppress support for the Irish Republican movement and in particular its political wing Sinn Fein, which throughout the period remained a legal political party with many elected councillors in the north of Ireland. It made, as I argued at the time, no appreciable difference to the Irish Republican Army, the wing of the movement engaged in armed struggle. But what does it mean to ‘invite’ support? It’s not altogether clear and it is pretty plain that this particular provision has been of little use to the British state, resulting, as it has, in precious few convictions. As a result, the government added a wider and more vague clause to the act via the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, to which we turn next.
  3. Express an ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’ that is supportive of a proscribed organisation. What does that mean? It obviously has the potential to be stretched quite far into opinions and beliefs that are shared by most people, even in the UK. Is saying that Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, the assassinated leader of Hezbollah, was widely respected and admired an opinion which is ‘supportive’ of a banned group?  Notice the language is ‘will be’ encouraged not ‘is’ encouraged. So, at best this is a conjectural crime which does not require that anyone is actually encouraged, only that the hypothetical ‘reasonable person’ might think that. Again, nothing here that relates to involvement in planning any ‘act’ of violence.
  4. Arranging or managing a meeting is, manifestly, not an act of violence, whether or not it involves giving ‘support’ for a proscribed organisation and whether or not a representative of the organisation speaks, or whether the purpose of the address is to encourage support. In fact, the more we hear the voices of those (in proscribed organisations and legal ones alike) who are involved in resisting the menace of Zionism and genocide, the better it will be for the possibility of ending the genocide.
  5. Next is Clothing: It is an offence to ‘wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that the individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation’. Articles of clothing are also not in themselves acts of terror, no matter how they are displayed. Obviously, what they have in mind here is branding relating to specific organisations, such as a Hezbollah flag, a Qassam Brigades head band, or other perhaps less directly connected imagery or items.  Obviously, given the attemtps of the Zionists and their craven allies in the British security state, there is a push to widen the parameters so they can scoop up more and more supporters of the Palestinians. Thus the case of the young women found guilty under these powers of sporting parachute patches (below).

Or, the case of the young man found guilty of supporting Hamas for wearing a green headband with the Shahada (the Muslim profession of faith) on it (first below). This is of course not a ‘Hamas headband’. Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, do have a specific headband with a gun on it! As can be seen, it is not at all similar (right below).

6.        It is an offence to “publish an image of an item of clothing or other article, such as a flag or logo, in the                          same circumstances.” This is obviously intended to cover social media posts, which are manifestly not                           ‘acts’  or terrorism. This provision was inserted (12.4.2019) by Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act                        2019.

Overall, then, as we see these ‘proscription’ powers have nothing at all to do with interfering with material acts of political violence or armed struggle.

The proscription offences are not terrorism offences. It is an absurd nonsense, not to mention a colossal waste of resources, that SO15 are required to attempt to police thoughts, beliefs and speech as the vast majority of their activities at ports.

When the leading journalist Asa Winstanley was recently raided (but not arrested), he was told that it related to his alleged support for proscribed groups. A letter addressed to him ‘from the “Counter Terrorism Command” … indicates that the authorities are “aware of your profession” as a journalist but that “notwithstanding, police are investigating possible offenses” under sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006). These provisions set out the purported offense of “encouragement of terrorism.”’

And yet, if you look at the passage at the beginning of this article about commission or instigation of acts of terror, the implication is that to be of interest one would have to be involved in setting up a branch of Qassam Brigades in North London, or a version of Hezbllah’s Radwan Force in Reading.  There is nobody in the entire counter-terrorism apparatus who believes that that is what Asa, me, or anybody else, is doing.

And when you put it like that, it’s also manifestly the case that neither Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP-GC or Palestinian Islamic Jihad are planning to set up branches in the UK, or – indeed – to carry out attacks here. Given the UK’s role in directly participating in the genocide, that is generous of them, but it appears to be a fact.

But more than that, free speech about armed groups fighting an almost universally acknowledged genocide should not be criminalised and proscribed.

And the case for proscribing their welfare, health, education and other manifest functions of Hezbollah and Hamas is even weaker.

They should be de-proscribed now.

March 14, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Western media suggests Zelensky will be replaced

By Lucas Leiroz | March 14, 2025

Western media are apparently already announcing the “end” of Zelensky’s rule in Ukraine. Major Western newspapers, which until then had unconditionally supported the Ukrainian dictator, are now pointing to the inevitable fall of his government, clearly adapting their narratives to the new geopolitical scenarios.

Recently, the Financial Times (FT) stated that Vladimir Zelensky’s leadership in Kiev is “coming to an end.” Citing high-ranking Ukrainian sources familiar with the country’s political affairs, the FT reported that local officials believe that the Ukrainian president will be replaced, but that this will not necessarily mean an end to the conflict.

The FT sources said that Ukraine would continue fighting even if Ukrainian aid were to end. The sources made it clear that Kiev would fight for “at least six months” after a possible total cut in US aid. This calculation is based solely on the resources that the Kiev regime already has due to previous military packages, and therefore the continuation of the conflict would probably be even greater if European aid were increased.

However, the same sources expressed concern about Zelensky’s mismanagement, as the Ukrainian president is mismanaging the resources he has received. Even though Ukraine is receiving extensive assistance from NATO partners, there is a shortage of weapons and ammunition for soldiers on the battlefield – which obviously reflects not only the military situation, but also the high level of corruption within the state institutions in Kiev.

In this sense, the FT informants believe that the Zelensky government is in its “final act”, but that Ukraine could continue fighting both without him and without American support. In all cases, both Zelensky’s continuation and peace in Ukraine seem remote and unrealistic possibilities.

Officials claim that Zelensky’s opponents are currently “preparing for elections, forming alliances, and testing public messaging.” There is a combination of factors favoring this scenario. Domestically, the crisis of legitimacy generated by the absence of elections after the end of Zelensky’s term has generated problems among the Ukrainian president’s own supporters.

Zelensky’s image as a “democratic leader” has been exhausted, and his authoritarian and unpopular tendencies are clear to all. Similarly, internationally, the rise of Donald Trump in the US has started an era of realism and pragmatism in Washington-Kiev relations, severely damaging the ideological alliance previously established under the Democratic administration.

Trump is not interested in supporting Ukraine to “protect the rules-based world order.” As a businessman, the new American president makes decisions based on strategic calculations, choosing what he believes is best for American interests. For this reason, he is reviewing the irrational sanctions imposed on Russia and substantially reducing American support for Ukraine – which is obviously accelerating the inevitable process of the Zelensky regime’s collapse.

However, it is important to emphasize that Zelensky’s possible downfall cannot be seen as a simple consequence of the Trump administration. The Democrats themselves were already interested in replacing the current Ukrainian dictator with a more skilled and charismatic political leader, with a greater ability to mobilize support in Western public opinion.

Zelensky realized in time that he was about to be replaced and began a paranoid campaign of persecution of opponents, arresting, assassinating or firing several officials considered “plotters”. While these authoritarian acts allowed him to remain in power, they also further revealed the draconian nature of his regime, damaging his image as a “defender of Ukrainian democracy”.

In fact, the scenario that seems most likely for the near future is one in which Ukraine is represented by a leader who is more capable to represent Western interests. Zelensky is currently an unpleasant public figure for Americans, Europeans, and even Ukrainians themselves. He fails to publicly represent “European democratic values,” while also publicly disrespecting Trump and persecuting his own people. For all sides involved in the war, Zelensky is an inept politician who should be removed from power through elections.

The longer Zelensky delays in recognizing the reality of his inevitable downfall, the more politically he risks himself. The Ukrainian opposition could soon begin to react more violently to Zelensky’s dictatorial measures, possibly by creating armed militias or plotting to carry out a coup.

For now, Zelensky still has the chance to negotiate with his international partners and his internal opponents for a peaceful change of government through elections or voluntary resignation. However, if he delays in doing so, this chance will disappear and the crisis will escalate.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

March 14, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Militarism | , | 1 Comment

All the pressure is now on Zelensky after ceasefire offer – don’t believe the British spin

By Ian Proud | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 12, 2025

I assess that Russia will agree with the U.S. on a proposed ceasefire in Ukraine. This would put the ball back in Zelensky’s court to sign a peace deal that could destroy him politically and may give President Putin the security assurances he has sought for over seventeen years.

In a quite remarkable turn of events, the BBC announced that Britain had helped the U.S. and Ukraine agree on the need for a 30-day ceasefire. This is spin of the most disingenuous kind.

The UK has done everything in its power to prevent the possibility of ‘forcing’ Ukraine into negotiations on ending the three-year war. Indeed, just last week, a prominent UK broadsheet reinforced this point in a searing editorial. The British narrative for three years has been that, with sufficient support and strategic patience, Ukraine could impose a defeat on Russia. To use a British military phrase, that plan ‘didn’t survive contact with the enemy’.

Ukraine’s sudden collapse in Kursk, after Russian troops crawled ten kilometres through a gas pipeline that President Zelensky had, with much fanfare, shut down in January, was an astonishing defeat. It was astonishing because it revealed what many western commentators had said since August 2024, that seizing a small patch of land in Russia would turn out to be a strategic blunder for Ukraine. Since the Kursk offensive was launched, Russia has occupied large tracts of land in southern Donetsk, including several important mines and one of Ukraine’s largest power stations. The basic maths show a significant net loss to Zelensky over the past six months. The bigger picture proves that the overall direction of the war has been moving in Russia’s direction since the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.

In Ukraine itself, the vultures are already circling in the sky as the body of Zelensky’s now six-year presidential term approaches its final breath. Arestovich was quick to call for Zelensky to resign after the damaging shoot-out at the Oval Office. Poroshenko has come out to say Ukraine has no choice but to cut a deal. Even Zelensky’s former press spokeswoman has called for peace and implied that the Ukrainian government tries to limit free speech on the subject of a truce. Team Trump is apparently talking to the egregiously corrupt former Prime Minster Yulia Tymoshenko about the future, heaven help us. The domestic political space for Zelensky to keep holding out with meaningless slogans like ‘peace through strength’, and ‘forcing Russia to make peace’ is rapidly closing around him.

That Ukraine has come to the negotiating table at all is a sign that it has been given no choice, since America paused the military and intelligence gravy train. There is nothing in the Jeddah meeting that suggests any change in the U.S. position towards Ukraine.

All that the ceasefire does, if Russia agrees to it, is pauses the fighting. Indeed, it goes further than the unworkable Franco-Ukrainian idea to pause the fighting only in the air and sea, allowing Ukraine to keep fighting on the ground. Ironically, the Jeddah formulation favours Russia, as a partial ceasefire would have provided succour to the Ukrainian army which does not enjoy strategic air superiority, despite its mass drone attack on Moscow and other parts of Russia.

The joint U.S.-Ukraine statement calls for Ukraine and others to ‘immediately begin negotiations toward an enduring peace that provides for Ukraine’s long-term security’.

If Russia agrees to a ceasefire, the clock will start on 30-days of intensive talks aimed at delivering a durable peace. Russia has said consistently that it will not agree to a ceasefire only; it wants the big questions addressed front and centre. These include Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, the status of the four oblasts annexed by Russia since the start of the war and the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine.

The latter should be easier to tick off, at least in theory, although it will face resistance from ultranationalists in Ukraine. The second will be harder, as there is no military route for Ukraine to reclaim occupied lands, so may require some diplomatic finesse in allowing for a freezing of the line. By far the most bitter pill for Ukraine and its European sponsors will be the NATO issue.

Just moments after U.S. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth said at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine’s NATO aspiration was unrealistic, Keir Starmer told Zelensky that it was irreversible. There is simply no way in which Britain will be able to finesse the point that a core plank of its strategy on Ukraine will be shattered, at U.S. and Russian insistence. Nor is it likely that Russia will agree to any UK proposal for a NATO-lite peacekeeping force in Ukraine, even if it is in Lviv or some place hundreds of kilometres from the line of contact.

Moreover, Russia will expect some movement in any peace talks on the issue of economic sanctions. Before arriving in Jeddah, the Guardian newspaper published an OpEd from Andriy Yermak calling for more sanctions on Russia as part of any peace plan. This is beyond idiotic. What person with an ounce of political savvy thinks that Russia will sign up a peace process that punishes it for ending a war that it is winning on the battlefield?

While I doubt that Russia expects to achieve a complete lifting of all 20,000 sanctions, they will want many to fall away immediately as part of a longer-term plan. This will also force a reckoning with the issue of the $300bn in seized Russian sovereign reserves, most of which are held in Brussels. Ignoring the issue or hoping that western nations can simply give the money to Ukraine, simply won’t work; detailed thinking needed here too, as I have said several times before.

From my perspective, Ukraine’s readiness to go for a ceasefire illustrates how weak its hand of cards has become. Many on the western side are crowing that Russia will be forced to accept a ceasefire on Ukrainian terms, but this is nonsense. I predict President Putin will see this as an opportunity for NATO to provide him with the longer-term security reassurances on NATO enlargement that he has sought for the past seventeen years, without heed.

March 13, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Europe faces a MAGA ‘vibe-shift’ as Trump moves to his primordial objective – The Global Reset

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 11, 2025

President Trump wants Ukraine settled, full stop. This is so that he can move ahead quickly – to normalise with Russia, and begin the ‘big picture’ project of setting a new World Order, one that will end wars and facilitate business ties.

The point here – which Europe feigns to not understand – is that the end to the Ukraine conflict simply is Trump’s ‘gateway’ to the entire rationale and platform on which he stood: The Great Reset of the Geo-Political landscape. Ukraine, simply said, is the obstacle to Trump’s pursuit of his primordial objective: The Global Reset.

Starmer, Macron and the eastern wing of the Euro-élites are blind to the sheer scale of the global vibe-shift towards traditionalist U.S. politics and ethics. They miss too, the barely concealed fury in the Trump world that exists behind this nascent revolution. “The Maga Right has none of the inhibitions of its predecessors. It is planning to leverage the power of a recaptured state to annihilate its enemies”, Allister Heath writes.

The European Ruling Class is in desperate trouble and increasingly isolated, in a world shifting ‘Rightward’ at breakneck speed. “The U.S. is now the enemy of the West”, the FT proclaims. European leaders wantonly won’t understand.

The reality is that the U.S. is engaged now in rolling up Europe’s foreign policy. And, is about to start exporting U.S. traditional Republican values to roll up the European wokeist belief-system. The European Ruling strata – far removed from its base – has failed to grasp the threat to its own interests (a scenario outlined here).

The Trump administration is trying to rebuild the ailing Republic, and Americans in this new era do not care for the European obsession with ancient feuds and their entailing wars.

Trump reportedly views with utter disdain the UK and European boast that should the U.S. not do it, then Europe will. The Brussels class claims to be able still – after three years of losing in Ukraine – to be able to inflict a humiliating defeat on President Putin.

More profoundly, however, Team Trump – committed to the task of taking down the American Deep State as the ‘inexorable enemy’ – perceives (rightly) the British security state to be co-joined at the hip with their American counterparts, as a part of its global meta-structure. And its oldest and deepest component has always been the destruction of Russia, and its dismemberment.

So when Macron, in an address to the nation this week, rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine and declared that “peace in Europe is only possible with a weakened Russia”, calling the country a direct threat to France and the continent, many in ‘Trump world’ will interpret this defiant declaration (that ‘Ukraine defeating Russia is preferable to ‘peace’’) is nothing more than Macron and Starmer ventriloquising the aims of the Meta Deep State.

This notion is lent substance by the sudden plethora of articles appearing in the European-(managed) MSM to the effect that Russia’s economy is much weaker than it appears and might collapse in the next year. Of course it is nonsense. This is about managing the European public to believe that keeping the war going in Ukraine is a ‘good idea’.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured, as Wolfgang Münchau notes, in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia: “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said.

Zelensky and his European fans want ‘to negotiate’ – though later, rather than sooner (perhaps in a year, as one European Foreign Minister reportedly told Marco Rubio privately).

This”, Münchau writes, “is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office [last week] was all about. Peace through untrammelled victory — essentially the Second World War model — as the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict”.

America sees things differently: It views almost certainly the European Deep State to be putting a spoke into Trump’s ‘normalisation with Russia’ wheel – a normalisation to which they are viscerally opposed. Or, at the very least, as the Europeans chasing a “mirage that no longer exists, stubbornly hiking ‘tax and spend’, whilst doubling down on mass immigration and overpriced energy, oblivious to the flashing red lights in the [financial markets] as government debt yields rocket to their highest levels since 1998”, as Allister Heath outlines.

In other words, the suggestion is that Friedrich Merz, Macron and Starmer are talking about how they are going to turn around their countries – via a massive infusion of debt – into defence superstates. Yet, at some level of consciousness, they must realise that it is not doable, so they settle instead for presenting themselves as ‘world leaders on the international stage’.

The European élites are deeply unstable ‘leaders’ who are risking the prosperity and stability of the continent. It is clear these countries do not have the military capacity to intervene in any concerted manner. More than anything, it is the European economy circling the drain that is the reality at the gates.

Zelensky is accomplice to the European insistence that defeating Russia takes priority over achieving peace in Ukraine, in spite of lacking any strategic rationale as to how it may be achieved after three years of a worsening military situation. Both plans – crushing the Russian economy with sanctions and attrition of the Russian military to the point of collapse – have failed. Why then does Zelensky resist Trump’s peace proposals? On the surface, it makes no sense.

The explanation likely goes back to the post-Maidan era when the western ‘Meta Security State’ (principally, the British and the Americans) entrenched hardline Banderites (then a tiny minority) into the Ukrainian Police, Intelligence and Security State. They are still today the controlling force. Even were this faction to acknowledge that their war cannot be won, they understand what happens if they lose:

Russia will not deal with them. They view them as extremists (if not war criminals) who are in no way ‘agreement capable’ and must be replaced by a leadership who is actually capable of compromise. Russia would likely pursue and bring these men to trial. Zelensky has to be frightened at what the Banderites might do to him (despite his British team of bodyguards).

Well, Trump is not entertaining these European ‘games’: He is administering a slap-down to Zelensky and European leaders, perhaps bringing Zelensky into line; or perhaps not … Team Trump, Politico reports, has now entered into direct talks with the Ukrainian opposition on holding early elections to unseat Zelensky – who is on his way to being removed, members of Team Trump say.

Zelensky may be finished, but interestingly Zaluzhniy wasn’t discussed either. He is being groomed by the British as a replacement – it looks like the Americans are going to make this decision independently of the British, too.

President Trump has ordered intelligence sharing with Ukraine stopped. What he technically did was to stop allowing Ukraine to use exclusive U.S. targeting systems controlled by U.S. Intelligence, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. What has been suspended is the exchange of so-called ‘lethal’ data, including information for HIMARS targeting. However, the defensive information needed for protection is still being provided to Ukraine.

“The extent of the intelligence-sharing freeze, which appears to have been imposed alongside the halt in military aid Mr Trump announced on Monday, initially appeared to be somewhat limited … But by Wednesday afternoon it became clear that the Trump administration, ignoring overtures from Mr Zelensky the previous evening, had gone much further. A military intelligence officer in Kyiv told The Telegraph that the freeze amounted to “more or less a total blackout””.

Put bluntly, the earlier munitions freeze will undoubtedly affect Ukraine’s military abilities over time, however the impact might not be felt for some weeks. The loss of vital intelligence, however, will make its mark immediately. It will – simply put – blind Ukraine. In Ukrainian command posts, the battle tracking and satellite online feeds on tablets and TV screens have indeed been disconnected.

What Trump’s slap-down has done is to puncture the fiction that Ukraine is able to defend itself with a little substitute of European support. That has always been nonsensical bravado. NATO, the CIA and the global Intelligence Community have been in control of the war fighting from the outset. And that, for now, has been switched off.

So, Europe wants to shoulder the U.S. burden? Bloomberg reports that European bond markets are in meltdown. If Europe pretends to replace the U.S., it is going to be extremely expensive, very politically costly, and it will fail.

March 11, 2025 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Much ado about nothing – Macron proposed nuclear umbrella for Europe

By Uriel Araujo | March 10, 2025

France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced last week his intention to extend the French nuclear shield to its European partners, and there are now talks about French-British nuclear deterrence. Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has urged France and Britain to share their nuclear weapons to “supplement” (not “replace”) the American nuclear shield.

The premise here is that a “pro-Russian” Trump is going to “abandon” Europe and thus leave it vulnerable to Moscow’s “aggression” – and so it is necessary to build an alternative shield. While various analysts and journalists put on serious faces while talking about these issues, underneath the rhetoric, the whole narrative lacks any substantiality, to the point of being laughable.

Let us briefly touch the premisses:

While the situation with borders is indeed far from being a settled matter in the post-Soviet space (with a number of frozen conflicts), there is of course no Russian appetite for attacking, or much less, “conquering” portions of Europe. The whole crisis in Ukraine has in fact more to do with the ethnocratic contradictions of nation-building in the new independent state of Ukraine, and with NATO’s enlargement, a policy denounced by the likes of the late Henry Kissinger himself, George Kennan, and a number of scholars and authorities who predicted it could cause the Ukrainian war since the late nineties.

Albeit partially bent on a kind of “reverse Kissinger” strategy to stop Biden’s dangerous “dual-containment” approach” (of antagonizing both China and Russia simultaneously), Trump is hardly pro-Moscow in any sense beyond that of avoiding an escalation. Moreover, his rhetorical attacks on NATO have more to do with burden sharing than with “ending” the Alliance.

The truth is that Europe embarked on an America’s proxy attrition war, and now that an overburdened Washington is retreating from its very war, puzzled Europeans do not know what to do. Now, let us delve into the idea of European deterrence, as proposed by Macron.

Europe has stayed under Washington’s wings long enough, and Trump does have a point when he says most NATO countries fail to meet the agreed expenses’ goal of using at least 2 percent of their GDP in military spending (which overburdens the US). And now that the Atlantic superpower is really signing its intent on pivoting to the Pacific, partially withdrawing from Eastern Europe, and shifting NATO’s burden onto its European allies, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst Europe and Britain’s political elites.

European powers today are simply not what they once were. Consider the United Kingdom, for instance: it might even lack the capacity to maintain its own nuclear arsenal without American help, as experts have been warning, in the context of Trump’s “burden shift” threats to “abandon” or to leave the American transatlantic allies on their own. In January last, a British “Trident” nuclear missile embarrassingly failed (for the second time) during a test launch, which led to speculations about the realities of Britain’s nuclear deterrence.

Long story short, Paris and London are the only nuclear powers in Europe – and it is unclear however to what extent they would be capable of replacing the so-called American “nuclear umbrella”.

According to Astrid Chevreuil (a visiting fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – CSIS – in Washington, D.C.) and Doreen Horschig (a fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues at CSIS), there are “significant strategic, doctrinal, and logistical obstacles” to that. More to the point, they add: “in the current situation, the French and British nuclear forces are a complement to US extended deterrence, but they would not constitute a viable solution in the event of an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. nuclear forces.” Elaborating on it, Chevreuil and Horschig argue that:

Both the British and French arsenals are designed, in their size, to respond to attacks “based on their vital interests”: Paris counts on less than 300 nuclear warheads, and London, in turn, possesses less than 250 (Washington in contrast has “a total of 1,700 deployed warheads”).

Moreover, American nuclear weapons stored in Europe today are “airborne capabilities” (and not ground-based or seaborne systems). Only France has such an airborne nuclear component, and “replacing” the US would require enormous efforts from European allies.

Finally, the two experts conclude, Britain and France lack a nuclear doctrine compatible with the very idea of “extending their nuclear deterrence through stationing their weapons in other countries.” Paris does not even participate in NATO’s nuclear planning groups, as the French doctrine “insists on the independence of its nuclear decision making.”

I’ve written before on the challenges Europe faces when it comes to “rearming” itself – they range from de-industrialization to lack of a common legal and bureaucratic framework, or a common EU defense market – according to Sophia Besch (a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow), and Max Bergmann (a former member of the US Policy Planning Staff and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies).

One should also keep in mind that Paris’ own relationship with NATO is historically complex, to say the least. Under De Gaulle, France withdrew from the organization’s integrated military structure in 1966, and even expelled all of its headquarters and units on French territory. It was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who finally ended Paris “estrangement” from NATO as recently as 2009 – so it took 43 years for Paris to change its course. To this day, France has not given up “nuclear independence” with regards to NATO, as mentioned. It is hard to change things overnight.

In addition, French ambition’s aside, a quick look at Africa is enough to demonstrate how much of a declining power France really is today: one just needs to consider the French failures in ChadNiger, Mali, and elsewhere – the French military was basically kicked out of their main bases in the African continent.

Lastly, there is also an element of a power struggle going on. If the overburdened American superpower is partially retreating from a number of theaters, the outcome of it could be a local power vacuum (in Europe) and some actors might have an appetite for filling such a void. Even Poland has eyes on that, as I wrote before. Much of the French rhetoric we are now seeing has a lot to do with that.

To sum it up, Macron is offering Europe something he does not have to counter a threat that does not really exist the way he describes it. He is doing so because of something Trump will not actually do. To put it another way, it is “words, words, words”.

Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

March 10, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Five Eyes Would Go Blind Without US Backing: US Army Vet and Intel Specialist

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.03.2025

Britain’s intelligence establishment reportedly started “rationing” what info to pass on to the US after Trump’s election, and his thrashing of Zelensky at the White House last month has sparked talk of a ‘breakaway’ ‘Four Eyes’ intel-sharing pact. Sputnik reached out to a leading US military intel specialist for details on what this could entail.

Sources told The Mail on Sunday that while joint work intercepting electronic communications could be ‘hard to disentangle’, human intelligence by agents on the ground could be held back from being shared with the US, especially “raw intelligence, which can be very exposing of sources if it falls into the wrong hands.”

Diplomatic sources, meanwhile, told the newspaper that the US intelligence establishment is “in a state of panic” over Trump’s approach, and actively destroying files on assets in Russia.

Five Eyes Without US is Nothing

“The US share is huge,” retired US Army Lt. Col. Earl Rasmussen told Sputnik. “There’s very little the remaining Five Eyes would have without the US,” the observer noted, highlighting that America provides:

  • Immense signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities including information from satellites (about 5,000 of the world’s roughly 8,000 satellites are American), in Rasmussen’s estimation
  • a military feed from the US Defense Intelligence Agency
  • substantive human intel
  • real-time open-source info collection and analysis capabilities
  • security intelligence via cooperation between the FBI and the Five Eyes’ allies’ analogs.

If the Five Eyes were to break up, Rasmussen doesn’t exclude the creation of new, regional intel-sharing alliances, like:

  • Australia and New Zealand partnering up with Japan and South Korea
  • The UK ramping up intel cooperation with France and Germany

As for the Five Eyes’ “global reach, the fusion of information, the mass experience, the analytical tools that are commonly operated…almost all the major ones have either been operated completely by the United States, or via a shared operation with the United States and another [country],” the observer summed up.

March 10, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

UK eyes intelligence alliance to share data with Ukraine

Al Mayadeen | March 9, 2025

The UK government is considering forming a new intelligence-sharing subgroup within the Five Eyes alliance in reaction to US President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday, citing anonymous defense officials.

The requests for the effort apparently arose after the US suspended information collaboration with Kiev and prevented the UK and other allies from sending American intelligence to Ukraine.

A new proposed subgroup would greenlight intelligence cooperation without a US veto, according to the British daily.

According to the Daily Mail, the new project is not about abandoning Five Eyes but rather about establishing a new Four Eyes suborganization within it.

Simultaneously, US allies are mulling lowering the intelligence they share with Washington, citing worries about the administration’s conciliatory attitude to Russia, according to NBC News.

These include “Israel” and Saudi Arabia, as well as Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, with the latter four being members of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence cooperation.

Officials in New Zealand, Australia, and Saudi Arabia declined to comment, while authorities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and “Israel” refuted the accusations.

The United States has temporarily suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine following a notable rift between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed on Wednesday.

The decision follows a public row between the two leaders during a meeting in the Oval Office last week, which also led to the suspension of critical US military aid to Ukraine.

Speaking to Fox Business, Ratcliffe stated that the pause in intelligence cooperation is linked to Trump’s concerns about Zelensky’s dedication to the peace process with Russia.

“President Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process,” Ratcliffe said. He noted that the suspension is temporary and expressed confidence that the US would soon resume its close partnership with Ukraine.

For Ukraine, which is engaged in a war with Russia, US intelligence support is as vital as military supplies. The sudden halt in assistance has shocked many Ukrainians, who rely heavily on American backing in their war with Russia.

March 9, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Von der Leyen hopes to turn EU into ‘defense union’ for $867bln

Al Mayadeen | March 9, 2025

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that she believes her proposed new 800 billion euro ($867 billion) military plan will transform the European Union into a “defense union”.

During Thursday’s EU leaders’ conference on defense, ReArm Europe received unanimous support, according to von der Leyen.

“You are familiar with the 800 billion [euro] package for defense, and that is historic, this can be the foundation of a European defense union,” she said.

“We will drive the ReArm Europe plan forward with full force,” she stated at a news conference in Brussels marking the first 100 days of her second term as President of the European Commission.

Von der Leyen went on to say that the EU should “team up with other like-minded countries,” such as the United Kingdom, Norway, and Canada, to “unleash the full potential in the face of concrete threats.”

Von der Leyen recently put forward an initiative to attract loans of up to 150 billion euros to the defense industry over the next four years and to allow EU countries to free up another 650 billion euros to increase defense purchases and develop the defense industry.

The European Union is ramping up efforts to develop its military-industrial sector, drawing insights from the Ukraine war. A statement issued following a European Council meeting on Thursday outlined key areas for defense investment, particularly in air defense, advanced drone technology, and precision-guided weaponry.

According to the European Council’s conclusions, the bloc is focusing on strengthening its military capabilities in coordination with NATO and the European Defence Agency. The document specified that priorities include air and missile defense, long-range artillery, missile stockpiles, and anti-drone technologies.

“[The European Council] identifies the following first list of priority areas for action at EU level in the field of capabilities taking into account the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, in accordance with the work already done in the framework of the European Defence Agency and in full coherence with NATO: air and missile defence; artillery systems, including deep precision strike capabilities; missiles and ammunition; drones and anti-drone systems…,” the statement read.

This move comes as part of a broader strategy known as ReArm Europe, an initiative aimed at significantly boosting the EU’s defense capabilities while reducing reliance on external allies. Under this plan, EU leaders have proposed unlocking up to €800 billion to finance military advancements, primarily through defense loans, budget repurposing, and private capital mobilization. The European Investment Bank (EIB) may also lift restrictions on lending to defense firms to support this push.

Von der Leyen has described this as a necessary response to “a clear and present danger” facing the region, marking a shift in the EU’s traditional defense posture. The initiative also aligns with recent calls from the US for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security, especially amid concerns about potential shifts in American foreign policy under a future administration.

March 9, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment