Zelensky demands more money from Western backers
RT | December 28, 2025
The West is not providing Ukraine with sufficient financial and military support, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has complained, despite Kiev’s backers having already approved massive aid packages and loans.
In a post on Telegram on Friday, Zelensky lamented that “air defense is not enough now, weapons are not enough now,” adding that “frankly, there is a constant shortage of money, in particular, for the production of weapons and, most importantly, drones,” even despite a recent decision by the EU to provide Kiev with a huge loan.
“We need to be strong at the negotiating table. To be strong, we need the support of the world – Europe and the United States of America,” Zelensky added.
The appeal for additional funding comes as the EU approved this month a loan of €90 billion ($105 billion) to Kiev for 2026-2027, which will cost European taxpayers €3 billion ($3.5 billion) annually in borrowing costs. In addition, the bloc failed to agree on using frozen Russian assets to assist Ukraine due to staunch opposition over overwhelming legal risks from several EU members, most notably Belgium, which holds most of the funds.
The loan is aimed at propping up the struggling Ukrainian economy, with the International Monetary Fund estimating that Ukraine will need approximately $160 billion for 2026 and 2027 combined. For 2026 alone, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a budget with a deficit of around $45 billion, or 18.5% of GDP. The financial conundrum has also been exacerbated by Ukraine’s endemic corruption.
On top of that, Mikhail Podoliak, a senior adviser to Zelensky, said this week that Ukraine cannot finance potential elections due to the budget deficit, stressing that Kiev should prioritize “militarization” efforts instead. Earlier this month, he also indicated that a vote could only take place provided the West steps in to cover the costs.
Commenting on Podoliak’s remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Kiev “resorts to all sorts of tricks” to obtain Western funding. Moscow has also warned the EU that any assistance for Kiev would be essentially covered by ordinary taxpayers.
Europe’s Panic Economy: Frozen Assets, Empty Arsenals, and the Quiet Admission of Defeat
By Gerry Nolan | Ron Paul Institute | December 24, 2025
When a prime minister tells her own staff to rest because next year will be much worse, it is not gallows humor. It is not exhaustion speaking. It is a slip of the mask, the kind of remark leaders make only when the internal forecasts no longer align with the public script.
Giorgia Meloni was not addressing voters. She was addressing the state itself — the bureaucratic core tasked with executing decisions whose consequences can no longer be disguised. Her words were not about a mundane increased workload. They were about constraint. About limits. About a Europe that has crossed from crisis management into managed decline, and knows that 2026 is when the accumulated costs finally collide.
What Meloni let slip is what Europe’s elites already understand: the Western project in Ukraine has run head-first into material reality. Not Russian propaganda. Not disinformation. Not populism. Steel, munitions, energy, labor, and time. And once material reality asserts itself, legitimacy begins to drain.
The War Europe Cannot Supply
Europe can posture for war. It cannot produce for war.
Four years into a high-intensity war of attrition, the United States and Europe are confronting a truth they spent decades unlearning: you do not sustain this kind of conflict with theatrical speeches, sanctions, or abandoning diplomacy. You sustain it with shells, missiles, trained crews, repair cycles, and production rates that exceed losses — month after month, without interruption.
By 2025, the gap is no longer theoretical.
Russia is now producing artillery ammunition at a scale that Western officials themselves concede outpaces the combined output of NATO. Russian industry has shifted to continuous near-wartime production (without even being fully mobilized), with centralized procurement, simplified supply chains, and state-directed throughput. Estimates place annual Russian artillery production at several million rounds — production already flowing, not promised.
Europe, by contrast, has spent 2025 celebrating targets it cannot ever materially meet. The European Union’s flagship pledge remains two million shells per year — a goal dependent on new facilities, new contracts, and new labor that will not fully materialize within the decisive window of the war, if ever. Even the dreamed target if reached, would not put it at parity with Russian output. The United States, after emergency expansion, is projecting roughly one million shells annually once and a big if, full ramp-up is achieved. Even combined on paper, Western production struggles to match Russian output already delivered. Talk about paper tiger.
This is not a gap. It is a major tempo mismatch. Russia is producing at scale now. Europe is dreaming of rebuilding the ability to produce at scale later.
And time is the one variable that cannot be sanctioned.
Nor can the United States simply compensate for Europe’s hollowed-out capacity. Washington faces its own industrial choke points. Production of Patriot air-defense interceptors runs in the low hundreds per year while demand now spans Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and US stockpile replenishment simultaneously — a mismatch senior Pentagon officials have acknowledged cannot be resolved quickly, if ever. US naval shipbuilding tells the same story: submarine and surface-combatant programs are years behind schedule, constrained by labor shortages, aging yards, and cost overruns that push meaningful expansion into the 2030s. The assumption that America can industrially backstop Europe no longer matches reality. This is not a European problem alone; it is a Western one.
War Footing Without Factories
European leaders speak of “war footing” as if it were a political posture. In reality, it is an industrial condition and Europe does not meet it.
New artillery production lines require years to reach stable throughput. Air-defense interceptor manufacturing runs in long cycles measured in batches, not surges. Even basic inputs such as explosives remain bottlenecks, with facilities shuttered decades ago only now being reopened, some not expected to reach capacity until the late 2020s.
That date alone is an admission.
Russia, meanwhile, is already operating inside wartime tempo. Its defense sector has delivered thousands of armored vehicles, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, and vast quantities of drones annually.
Europe’s problem is not conceptual; it is institutional. Germany’s much-vaunted Zeitenwende exposed this brutally. Tens of billions were authorized, but procurement bottlenecks, fragmented contracting, and an atrophied supplier base meant delivery lagged years behind rhetoric. France, often cited as Europe’s most capable arms producer, can manufacture more sophisticated systems — but only in boutique quantities, measured in dozens where attritional war demands thousands. Even the EU’s own ammunition acceleration initiatives expanded capacity on paper while the front consumed shells in weeks. These are not ideological failures. They are administrative and industrial ones and they compound under pressure.
The difference is structural. Western industry was optimized for shareholder efficiency and peacetime margins. Russia’s has been reorganized for endurance under pressure. NATO announces packages. Russia counts deliveries.
The €210 Billion Fantasy
This industrial reality explains why the frozen-assets saga mattered so much, and why it failed.
Europe’s leadership did not pursue the seizure of Russian sovereign assets out of legal creativity or moral clarity. It pursued it because it needed time. Time to avoid admitting that the war could not be sustained on Western industrial terms. Time to substitute finance for production.
When the attempt to seize roughly €210 billion in Russian assets collapsed on December 20th, blocked by legal risk, market consequences, and resistance led by Belgium, with Italy, Malta, Slovakia and Hungary, aligned against outright confiscation, Europe settled for a degraded substitute: a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for 2026–27, serviced by 3B in annual interest, further mortgaging Europe’s future. This was not strategy. It was triage, and further divided, an already weakened Union.
Outright confiscation would have detonated Europe’s credibility as a financial custodian. Permanent immobilization avoids the blast — but creates a slow bleed. The assets remain frozen indefinitely, a standing act of economic warfare that signals to the world that reserves held in Europe are conditional and not worth the risk. Europe chose reputational erosion over legal rupture. That choice reveals fear, not strength.
Ukraine as a Balance-Sheet War
The deeper truth is that Ukraine is no longer primarily a battlefield problem. It is a solvency problem. Washington understands this. The United States can absorb embarrassment. It cannot absorb open-ended liabilities indefinitely. An offramp is being sought — quietly, unevenly, and with rhetorical cover.
Europe cannot admit it needs one. Europe framed the war as existential, civilizational, moral. It declared compromise appeasement and negotiation surrender. In doing so, it erased its own exit ramps.
Now the costs land where no narrative can deflect them: on European budgets, European energy bills, European industry, and European political cohesion. The €90 billion loan is not solidarity. It is securitization of decline — rolling obligations forward while the productive base required to justify them continues to erode.
Meloni knows this. That is why her tone was not defiant, but weary.
Censorship as Panic Management
As material limits harden, narrative control tightens. The aggressive enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act is not about safety. It is about containment, in its most Orwellian form — constructing an information perimeter around an elite consensus that can no longer withstand open accounting. When citizens begin asking calmly, and then not calmly, relentlessly, what was this for?, the illusion of legitimacy collapses quickly.
This is why regulatory pressure now reaches beyond Europe’s borders, provoking transatlantic friction over jurisdiction and speech. Confident systems do not fear conversation. Fragile ones do. Censorship here is not ideology. It is insurance.
Deindustrialization: The Unspoken Betrayal
Europe did not merely sanction Russia. It sanctioned its own industrial model.
By 2025, European industry continues to pay energy costs far above those of competitors in the United States or Russia. Germany, the engine, has seen sustained contraction in energy-intensive manufacturing. Chemical, steel, fertilizer, and glass production have either shut down or relocated. Small and medium enterprises across Italy and Central Europe are failing quietly, without headlines.
This is why Europe cannot scale ammunition the way it needs to. This is why rearmament remains a promise rather than a condition. Cheap energy was not a luxury. It was the foundation. Remove it via self-sabotage (Nordstream et. al), and the structure hollows out.
China, watching all of this, holds the other half of Europe’s nightmare. It commands the deepest manufacturing base on earth without having entered wartime footing. Russia does not need China’s breadth, only its strategic depth behind it in reserve. Europe has neither.
What Meloni Actually Fears
Not hard work. Not busy schedules. She fears a 2026 in which Europe’s elites lose control of three things at once.
Money — as Ukraine’s funding becomes an EU balance-sheet problem, replacing the fantasy that “Russia will pay.”
Narrative — as censorship tightens and still fails to suppress the question echoing across the continent: what was this all for?
Alliance discipline — as Washington maneuvers for exit while Europe absorbs the cost, the risk, and the humiliation.
That is the panic. Not losing the war overnight, but losing legitimacy slowly, as reality leaks out through energy bills, shuttered factories, empty arsenals, and mortgaged futures.
Humanity at the Abyss
This is not just Europe’s crisis. It is civilizational. A system that cannot produce, cannot replenish, cannot tell the truth, and cannot retreat without collapsing credibility has reached its limits. When leaders begin preparing their own institutions for worse years ahead, they are not forecasting inconvenience. They are conceding structure.
Meloni’s remark mattered because it pierced the performance. Empires announce triumph loudly. Systems in decline lower expectations quietly, or loudly in Meloni’s case.
Europe’s leadership is lowering expectations now because it knows what the warehouses contain, what the factories cannot yet deliver, what the debt curves look like — and what the public has already begun to understand.
For most Europeans, this reckoning will not arrive as an abstract debate about strategy or supply chains. It will arrive as a far simpler realization: this was never a war they consented to. It was not fought to defend their homes, their prosperity, or their future. It was fought for greed for Empire, and paid for with their living standards, their industry, and their children’s future.
They were told it was existential. They were told there was no alternative. They were told sacrifice was virtue.
Yet what Europeans want is not endless mobilization or permanent austerity. They want peace. They want stability. They want the quiet dignity of prosperity — affordable energy, functioning industry, and a future that is not mortgaged to conflicts they did not consent to.
And when that truth settles, when the fear recedes and the spell breaks, the question Europeans will ask will not be technical, ideological, or rhetorical.
It will be human. Why were we forced to sacrifice everything for a war we never agreed to and told there was no peace worth pursuing? And this is what keeps Meloni up at night.
Gerry Nolan is a political analyst, writer, and strategist focused on geopolitics, security affairs, and the structural dynamics of global power. He is the founder and editor of The Islander, an independent media platform examining war, diplomacy, economic statecraft, and the accelerating shift toward a multipolar world.
EU Morphing Into Its Own Worst Enemy – Viktor Orban
Sputnik – 24.12.2025
The decline of the European Union, rather than the Ukrainian conflict, is what really threatens to plunge Europe into war, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
The real reason of the existing risk of escalation, Orban argued, is the political, economic and social decline of Western Europe, whereas the Ukrainian conflict is more of a symptom of the current situation rather than its cause.
According to him, the process that led to this state of affairs started during the 2000s and was exacerbated by Europe’s inadequate reaction to the ensuing financial crisis.
Orban also noted that a war in Europe may break out soon, and that 2025 might have been the last peaceful year for the region.
He pointed out that the decisions that were made at the EU summit in Brussels last week were aimed at prolonging the Ukrainian conflict and continuing Europe’s confrontation with Russia.
Though there are powers in Europe that seek peace – like Hungary, for example – Orban warns that those European elites who seek war seem to be gaining an upper hand.
Failed Diplomacy & Collapse of Ukraine
Glenn Diesen | December 22, 2025
Larry Johnson is a former intelligence analyst at the CIA who also worked at the US State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson outlines why the negotiations are failing and what the pending collapse of Ukraine will entail.
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Ukraine: Does Europe Work for a Stalled Conflict?
Why negotiations are blocked and why a long, managed conflict is becoming the default outcome.
By Ricardo Martins – New Eastern Outlook – December 23, 2025
Negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine appear stalled not because of a lack of diplomatic encounters, but because there is no shared understanding of what the proxy war is about, nor of what a settlement should address. The Berlin meeting illustrated this structural deadlock.
Russia continues to restate a limited and stable set of core demands, above all, Ukrainian neutrality and the rollback of NATO’s military footprint, while Europeans and Ukrainians advance proposals that explicitly negate these demands. This is not a negotiation gap; it is a conceptual incompatibility.
The American role exacerbates this problem. The United States oscillates between mediator and belligerent, without committing to a coherent diplomatic line. Instead of deploying professional diplomatic teams with a clear mandate, Washington relies on ad hoc envoys and transactional approaches. Trump’s inclination towards deal-making, inspired by business logic rather than diplomatic craft, leads to contradictory signaling: reassurance to Moscow followed by alignment with European and Ukrainian maximalist positions. This reinforces Russian perceptions that talks are performative rather than substantive.
From a European perspective, the refusal to listen to Russia’s security concerns is justified through a normative framing of the conflict: Ukraine is the victim, Russia the aggressor, and therefore only Ukrainian security deserves guarantees. This position, articulated explicitly by EU figures such as Kaja Kallas, forecloses any bargaining space.
Russia is delegitimised as a security actor, and empathy, understood here not as moral approval but as analytical capacity to understand the other side’s threat perception, is absent. The result is a strategy that implicitly accepts the continuation of the conflict until Ukraine collapses militarily or Russia concedes its defeat, a scenario that seems unrealistic.
Meanwhile, Russia senses that time is on its side. Battlefield dynamics, industrial mobilisation, and political cohesion reinforce Moscow’s assessment that it can achieve its objectives through attrition. In this context, concessions would be irrational from a realist standpoint.
As negotiations fail, Europe and Ukraine increasingly rely on asymmetric strategies, such as sabotage, attacks on Russian assets, and irregular warfare, openly endorsed by Western intelligence discourse, including references by the head of MI6 to Second World War–style special operations. This marks a shift from conflict resolution to conflict management.
Financing Ukraine: strategic risk without political consent
Europe’s approach to financing Ukraine reveals a second layer of contradiction. The decision not to confiscate Russian frozen assets, but instead to fund Ukraine through EU borrowing (€90 billion for 2026–2027) acknowledges the legal, financial, and systemic risks involved. Belgium’s concerns over Euroclear, the threat of credit downgrades by rating agencies such as Fitch, and the exposure of European pension funds and financial institutions underline the fragility of this strategy.
Yet this choice was made without a social pact with European citizens. There has been no democratic debate proportionate to the scale of financial commitment. At a time when European societies face mounting pressures on housing, welfare, pensions, and infrastructure, war financing is normalised as a moral and face-saving necessity rather than a political choice. This fuels domestic resentment and strengthens nationalist and far-right parties across the continent.
Strategically, European financing does not resolve the conflict. Money cannot substitute for manpower nor reverse battlefield dynamics. Ukraine’s primary constraint is not just liquidity but, above all, soldiers. Moreover, persistent concerns about corruption and weak accountability mechanisms undermine public support for continued transfers. Rather than bringing peace closer, European funding functions as a holding mechanism: prolonging the conflict to weaken Russia, buying time to rearm European militaries, and delaying political reckoning of the defeat.
In this sense, Ukraine increasingly functions as a proxy, absorbing the human cost of a broader confrontation while Europe avoids direct military engagement. This is a morally uncomfortable but analytically coherent reading of current policy.
The fear of a Russian “victory” and the erosion of Europe’s political core
The prospect of Russia being perceived as the winner is existentially threatening for European elites. It would symbolise not only Ukrainian defeat but also NATO’s limits and Europe’s strategic weakness. More profoundly, it would undermine the EU’s self-image as a political peace project and a normative power.
To prevent this outcome, European leaders and media have invested heavily in a simplified narrative: Russia as sole aggressor, Ukraine as pure victim, and Europe as moral defender. Yet two facts disrupt this narrative. First, the EU has not presented a concrete peace proposal of its own.
Second, dissenting voices are increasingly marginalised or silenced, contradicting Europe’s professed commitment to pluralism and freedom of expression. In several European countries, journalists, analysts, and former officials who question NATO strategy, the feasibility of a military victory, or the costs of prolonged war – such as George Galloway in the United Kingdom, former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud, French analysts like Xavier Moreau or the online platform Euroactiv – have been systematically delegitimised, deplatformed, or labelled as disinformation vectors rather than engaged on the substance of their arguments. The closure of debate, whether through media pressure or formal and informal censorship, erodes Europe’s intellectual resilience.
As nuance becomes suspect and contradiction is framed as betrayal, Europe loses its capacity to think strategically. Political realism, understood as the ability to engage with power politics without moral illusion, has largely disappeared from mainstream European discourse. NATO expansion is no longer discussed as a variable in Russian threat perception but as an unquestionable good. The assumption persists that Russia will eventually weaken, accept European terms, and even relinquish frozen assets. There is no empirical basis for this belief.
Is there a way out?
A negotiated settlement remains theoretically possible but politically unlikely. European leaders seek a face-saving exit that preserves moral superiority while avoiding military escalation. Yet they are unwilling to make the concessions such an exit would require.
Europe will not send troops to fight Russia, but it will also not accept defeat. The most probable outcome is therefore a long, tense cold peace, akin to the Korean model: frozen frontlines, unresolved status, and continuous low-level confrontation.
This outcome will shape European–Russian relations for decades. It will also accelerate Europe’s internal fragmentation, as member states increasingly diverge in their strategic orientations, weaken its social model, and normalise permanent rearmament. Europe pays the bill, calls it principle, and postpones the hardest decisions at the cost of Ukrainian lives and its own political coherence.
Ricardo Martins, PhD in Sociology, specializing in International Relations and Geopolitics
EU country seizes gold and luxury watches from ex-Ukrainian prosecutor general – media
RT | December 23, 2025
The French authorities have seized gold bars, expensive watches, and other valuables from a former Ukrainian prosecutor general living in the country, according to local media.
A villa near Nice owned by Svyatoslav Piskun, who served as Ukraine’s top prosecutor in the 2000s, was reportedly raided in a joint Ukrainian-French operation last week. Details were reported on Monday by Ukraine’s Dzerkalo Tizhna (Weekly Mirror), citing a source familiar with the probe.
According to the outlet, Piskun failed to explain how he acquired 3kg of gold, roughly €90,000 ($106,000) in cash, and 18 luxury wristwatches valued at over $1 million. French authorities suspect him of money laundering, the outlet claimed.
Kiev’s State Investigation Bureau (DBR), which operates under the president’s office, reportedly requested and participated in the raid. Previous Ukrainian press reports suggest the action in France is linked to a case against oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, who has been held in pre-trial detention for over two years on multiple charges, including allegedly ordering a murder in 2003.
The oligarch, who played a key role in Vladimir Zelensky’s rise to power, as recently detailed in a special RT investigation, made widely-covered comments in November on a high-profile corruption scandal. He said Zelensky’s longtime associate, Timur Mindich, who was charged with running an extortion scheme, did not have the aptitude to be a criminal mastermind and was a patsy for the real perpetrators.
Earlier this month, Kolomoysky teased more remarks on the scandal during a court appearance, which was subsequently postponed twice. When proceedings occurred two weeks ago, he claimed Mindich was targeted by assassins in Israel – a claim Israeli authorities have not confirmed – with the hitman allegedly supplied with a weapon at the Ukrainian Embassy.
His lawyer announced that Kolomoysky would make statements on Tuesday – this time regarding the “approaches and methods” of the Western-backed Ukrainian agencies investigating Mindich and his alleged accomplices in the Ukrainian government.
RT published Part 2 of its Kolomoysky special last Thursday. You can read it here.
Zelensky Says Some US Security Guarantees to Ukraine Will Not Be Made Public
Sputnik – 23.12.2025
Volodymyr Zelensky has said that the United States will provide security guarantees to Ukraine, although some of them will not be made public.
“There are security guarantees between us, the Europeans, and the US – a framework agreement. There is a separate document between us and the US – bilateral security guarantees. These, as we see it, should be considered by the US Congress, with some classified details and additions,” Zelensky said during a press conference on Monday.
Last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the European Union and the US had agreed to provide security guarantees for Ukraine, similar to NATO’s Article 5. At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow and Washington had reached an understanding that Ukraine must return to the non-aligned, neutral, and non-nuclear foundations of its statehood.
Since mid-November, the US has been promoting a new peace plan for Ukraine. On December 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin received US special presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at the Kremlin. The US representatives’ visit to Russia was related to the discussion of the US peace plan for Ukraine. The Kremlin stated that Russia remained open to negotiations and committed to the Anchorage discussions.
Ukrainian investigative journalist ‘kidnapped’ by draft officers
RT | December 23, 2025
A Ukrainian investigative journalist is reportedly missing after being seized by conscription officials days after filing a criminal complaint against his local city administration.
A video shared on the Facebook account of Aleksey Brovchenko, which went viral this week, was purportedly filmed by CCTV cameras at his home in Podgorodnoye in Dnepropetrovsk Region on Monday morning. It showed people in military and police uniforms apprehending a man and forcing him into a van despite a woman’s vocal objections – which the description called a “kidnapping.”
Brovchenko’s family said he was beaten earlier in the day and called police to file a complaint, but was instead taken away and has since been out of touch with them.
Last week, the journalist reported an “interesting situation” at a police station where he went to file a complaint against the town mayor for alleged fraud. He said officers accused him of being a draft dodger but let him go instead of transferring him to military officials – a move he described as a sign that “the police will soon switch to the side of the people.” Brovchenko’s reporting often highlights suspected abuses by conscription centers.
City head Andrey Gorb, whom the journalist had accused of wrongdoing, claimed on Tuesday that Brovchenko is a “fake journalist” who “did everything to derail the mobilization.” He thanked police and military officers “for doing their job.”
Military mobilization is a contentious issue in Ukraine, viewed by many as unfair due to corruption that allows the wealthy and powerful to evade mandatory service. Videos of what critics call abductions regularly go viral, even as officials downplay the so-called “busification” as not a serious problem.
Public resistance to recruiting also exacerbates existing issues with Ukrainian troop desertion. The Prosecutor General’s Office recently stopped reporting the number of cases against soldiers who have left their posts, a move critics say is an attempt to conceal the scale of the manpower drain.
EU loan to Ukraine pushing bloc ‘into war’ with Russia – Orban
RT | December 20, 2025
EU nations have a vested interest in continuing the Ukraine-Russia conflict and even escalating it, as repayment of their €90 billion loan to Kiev is essentially tied to a military victory, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.
A long-debated EU scheme to steal frozen Russian central bank assets collapsed amid disagreements among member states on Friday. However, agreement was reached on a loan backed by the bloc’s budget, allowing them to fund cash-strapped Ukraine in what Moscow has long described as a Western proxy war. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic secured exemptions from the loan.
“Whoever lends money wants it back. In this case, repayment is not tied to economic growth or stabilization, but to military victory,” Orban wrote on X on Saturday. “For this money to ever be recovered, Russia would have to be defeated,” he said.
A war loan inevitably makes its financiers interested in the continuation and escalation of the conflict, because defeat would also mean a financial loss.
Orban argued that there are now “hard financial constraints that push Europe in one direction: into war.”
Hungary and Slovakia have long stood against continued military aid to Kiev, despite mounting pressure from the EU to toe the party line. The Czech Republic joined the fold after the recent election of new Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who has refused to fund Ukraine at the expense of his taxpayers.
Russian officials have accused Kiev’s European backers of hindering recent US-led peace efforts, and of increasingly preparing for a direct war against Russia.
Top EU officials have used claims of an alleged threat from Moscow to justify accelerating militarization, freeing up €335 billion in Covid relief funds and mobilizing €150 billion in loans and grants for the bloc’s military industrial complex.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly dismissed the allegations as “nonsense” aimed at “creating an image of an enemy” to distract Western European taxpayers from domestic problems.
As Kiev would only need to start making repayments to the EU if it receives reparations in the unlikely event Russia loses, the loan is widely considered to be at risk of turning into a grant.
Daniel Davis: Russia Preparing Retaliation – Oreshnik Deployed & Seizing Odessa
Glenn Diesen | December 20, 2025
Lt. Col. Daniel Davis is a 4x combat veteran, the recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and is the host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive YouTube channel. Lt. Col. Davis discusses how Russia is preparing itself for the possibility of Europe attacking Russia by deploying a powerful arsenal of Oreshniks. The attacks on Russia’s civilian vessels will likely end with Russia seizing Odessa, which could also trigger the Europeans to send troops. We are rapidly going up the escalation ladder as diplomacy fails.
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Western media peddle Russia’s ‘abduction’ of Ukrainian children to prolong the proxy war
It is not Moscow, but rather the Kiev regime and its backers who are using children as “pawns of war”
By Finian Cunningham | RT | December 18, 2025
It’s not clear if the Trump administration wants to genuinely resolve the proxy war with Russia, or if it is merely trying to extricate itself from the mess Washington helped instigate. But one thing is clear: the major Western European capitals are desperate to keep the war going.
Various pretexts are being used to frustrate a diplomatic process. NATO-like security guarantees to Ukraine pushed by Berlin, London, and Paris are likely to be a non-starter for Moscow. So too are moves by the Europeans to use Russia’s seized wealth as a “reparations loan.”
Another issue that Europeans are dredging up is the allegation that Russia has abducted Ukrainian children. This emotive issue has support in Washington among the hawkish anti-Russia factions in the US establishment opposed to Trump’s diplomacy with Moscow.
Earlier this month, the European states sponsored a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling on Russia to return all Ukrainian children that it is alleged to have forcibly relocated from Ukrainian territory during the past four years of conflict. The president of the UNGA is former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
An article published by the Washington DC-based Atlantic Council contended: “The issue of abducted Ukrainian children is especially relevant for Ukrainians as they debate painful political compromises, territorial concessions, and security guarantees premised on Western assurances. If world leaders cannot secure the return of the most vulnerable victims of Russia’s aggression, how could Ukrainians trust that those same leaders can prevent Russia from reigniting the war or committing new atrocities?”
In other words, the allegation of child abduction is being made into a condition for Russia to fulfill for the diplomatic resolution of the conflict. The trouble is that the condition is impossible to fulfill because the allegation is so vague and unfounded. Russia has denounced the accusation that it forcibly relocated Ukrainian children as a “web of lies.”
In March 2023, the Hague-based International Criminal Court indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin, along with Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, of war crimes related to the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Moscow is not a member of the ICC and rejected the charges as null and void.
Still, however, the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors continue to level the accusations. The Western media, as usual, serve to amplify the narrative despite the lack of evidence.
At the recent UN General Assembly debate, British representative Archie Young stated: “Today is a moment to reflect on the plight of Ukrainian children who have become victims of Russia’s illegal invasion. We all have an obligation to protect children and must not allow Russia to use them as pawns of war. According to the government of Ukraine, corroborated by independent mechanisms, more than 19,500 Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported to Russia or within the temporarily occupied territories.”
Note how the British official peddles a series of disputable claims that are transformed into normative facts by the Western media’s repetition.
It is not Russia, but rather the Kiev regime and its Western backers who are using children as “pawns of war.”
Moscow has openly stated that up to 730,000 children have been relocated to the Russian Federation since hostilities erupted in February 2022. Most of the children are accompanied by parents and come from the territories that seceded from Ukraine in legally held referenda.
Of the nearly eight million people who fled Ukraine, the largest share of them – an estimated 35% – have taken shelter in Russia. The second and third biggest host countries for Ukrainian refugees after Russia are Poland and Germany. But the European governments and media are not accusing Warsaw or Berlin of “child abductions.”
In a war zone affecting millions of people, it is absurd to make out that displaced families and their children are being kidnapped. The vast majority of people have willingly sought shelter within Russian territory to escape the violence on the frontlines – violence that has been fueled by NATO states pumping hundreds of millions of dollars’ and euros’ worth of weapons into Ukraine.
Moscow points out that the figure of 20,000 to 35,000 that the Western governments and media claim for children “abducted by Russia” is never substantiated with names or identifying details.
Russian authorities say that the Kiev regime has provided the names of just over 300 individuals. Moscow has endeavored to return individuals where it is mutually requested, although some of the identities provided by the Kiev regime have turned out to be adults or they are not present in Russian territory.
In the chaos of war, it is all too easy to throw around vague numbers and exploit the imprecision for propaganda. The European governments and media are doing that and embellishing the emotive issue with dark claims that Russia is sending masses of Ukrainian children to “re-education camps” for “indoctrination.”
One of the main sources for such claims is the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. It has produced unverified reports that Russia has sent 35,000 Ukrainian children to hundreds of brainwashing centers all across Russia to erase their national identity.
A major supporter of the Yale research group is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This association strongly suggests that the group is a CIA-sponsored propaganda tool. But the US and European media regularly cite the research and amplify its claims as reliable facts.
The exploitation of children for war propaganda is a staple of Western intelligence agencies and the media.
A classic case was in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s when the Western media were replete with horror stories of the Viet Cong torturing Vietnamese children, as recounted by James Bradley in his book, ‘Precious Freedom’. The supposed communist guerrillas reportedly stabbed Vietnamese children with chopsticks in their ears so that they could not hear the Bible being preached. Such alleged atrocities were widely published by the Western media to whip up public support for the US military deployment “to save Vietnam from evil communists.” But it was all CIA-orchestrated lies. More than three million Vietnamese were killed in a war based on American intelligence and media lies.
A re-run of the psychological operation today is the lurid claims that Putin’s evil Russia has kidnapped tens of thousands of children for brainwashing in detention camps. Some reports even claim Russia has sent the children to North Korea.
The Western media are doing their usual service of peddling war propaganda and ensuring diplomacy is rendered impossible because Russia is portrayed as monstrous.
Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist and co-author of Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism’s Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain’s Independent, among others.
No More Ukraine Proxy War? You’re a Traitor!
Glenn Diesen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
Glenn Diesen | December 16, 2025
I had the pleasure of speaking with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis about how Europe has trapped itself in ideological narratives of good versus evil
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Alon Mizrahi: ‘Israel Must Be Dismantled’
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From the Archives
Allies Don’t Need Lobbies
By Jay Knott | Dissident Voice | September 24, 2013
In a recent article on Counterpunch, Rob Urie defended the traditional Marxist analysis of US policy in the Middle East. He argues that support for Israel is driven primarily by economic interest, not the Jewish lobby.
He starts by paying tribute to the idea that Western societies are uniquely racist. He says that the “Western narrative” claims there is an “Arab character”, and that this is “antique racist blather”. He gives no definition of these terms. Further, he establishes his credentials as part of the dominant current in the American left by claiming that “over a million people in Iraq died so ‘we’ in the West can drive SUVs.”1
When he tries to criticize bourgeois economics, he makes it clear he doesn’t understand the developments it has made since Marx’s day, using the mathematical discipline known as “game theory”. He dismisses the basic abstraction of economic theory, the idea of the rational individual, on the grounds that it is “devoid of history, culture and political context”. But abstractions are always devoid of something.
He defends a more concrete economic theory, mostly Marxist, with some input from another theorist of capitalist crisis, Hyman Minsky. This concrete theory leads him to the view that US activity in the Middle East is primarily driven by rational capitalist motives, the need to secure a supply of oil.
“Taking the totality of circumstance — former oil company executives launching war on an oil rich nation on a pretext they publicly proclaimed they didn’t believe shortly before taking office — and that upon launching their war proved to be non-existent, requires a willingness to overlook the obvious — that the war on Iraq was for oil, that is difficult to support.”1
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood him, but based on what he says in the rest of the article, this convoluted sentence seems to argue that, because president Bush and vice-president Cheney attacked Iraq on false premises, and they also said it was all about oil, and they are former oil executives, and Iraq has a lot of oil, it’s difficult to deny US attacks on Iraq are all about oil.
In fact, it’s not hard at all. As Urie points out, at times Bush and co. said that attacking Iraq was “protecting the world’s supply of oil.”1 But, as he also points out, they are congenital liars. Why should we believe them when they say they are trying to “protect” the oil supply? Protect it against what? When politicians “admit” attacks on Middle Eastern countries are wars for oil, they are parroting the neo-con party line, feeding the public, both left and right, with a plausible-sounding pretext. For right-wingers, “it’s a war for oil” is a reason to support war, and for leftists, it’s a way to feel better by complaining impotently about corporate greed. Both approaches help the war drive. … continue
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