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No European security without Russia – Lavrov

RT | August 20, 2025

Collective security in Europe cannot be resolved without Russia’s participation, as Moscow will “firmly” defend its own legitimate interests, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.

Kiev and its Western European backers have increasingly demanded “security guarantees” as a precondition for any potential peace deal with Russia. While several NATO states have voiced their readiness to deploy so-called “reassurance forces” to Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly warned that it will not accept troops from the US-led military bloc in the country.

“We cannot agree with the proposal that security issues, collective security, be resolved without the Russian Federation. This will not work,” Lavrov said.

Russia does not overstate its interests, but we will ensure our legitimate interests firmly and harshly.

Lavrov added that the West, and primarily the US, now “perfectly” understands that discussing security issues without Russia is “a road to nowhere.”

Kiev’s negotiating team had proposed developing security guarantees that involved all the permanent members of the UN Security Council during the early Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul in 2022, soon after the escalation of the conflict, Lavrov said.

Russia, China, the US, France, the UK and some other individual countries were to be involved, and each interested party’s security guarantees were to be ensured on an equal basis, he said, adding that Moscow had supported this approach.

However, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had “arrived and forbade his proteges in Kiev from signing anything, and demanded that military actions be continued,” according to Lavrov.

Now, while US President Donald Trump is increasingly pushing diplomacy to end the conflict, Kiev’s Western European backers “are just trying to keep the US as a participant, less and less successfully,” Lavrov said.

According to the top diplomat, the European NATO states want to get Washington to continue to supply arms, so that they can “continue to pump the Kiev regime full of these weapons.”

August 20, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine and EU attempt to hinder peace process started in Alaska

By Lucas Leiroz | August 20, 2025

On August 18, US President Donald Trump hosted Ukrainian and European representatives in Washington to discuss possible peace negotiations regarding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The Washington summit was seen as a kind of “reaction” to the previous summit, held on August 15 in Alaska between American and Russian representatives. Outraged that the US president was open to listening to Russian demands, the Ukrainian president and his European supporters headed to Washington to show their “terms”.

The conversations were marked by diplomatic tensions. People familiar with the matter explain that the illegitimate Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky didn’t know how to behave with the American president. There are reports that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer instructed Zelensky to act “nicely” to Trump, avoiding the same gaffes he made during the previous summit between the leaders in the White House’s Oval Office.

Apparently, Zelensky didn’t fully understand Starmer’s instructions, as there are reports that he acted exaggeratedly, such as repeating “thank you” to Trump over the course of a few minutes of conversation (about a dozen times) — a reaction to Trump’s previous description of him as “ungrateful.”

The discomfort during the summit was clear to everyone. Western analysts described the meeting as “deeply weird” and “worse than the last time Trump met Zelensky.” In an analytical article, an Independent’s reporter showed absolute despair when describing the scenes at the White House, making clear his antipathy towards Trump for the way he treats Zelensky:

“I’ll admit to believing that it couldn’t get worse than the school bully-style treatment of Zelensky last time he visited Washington, but this was worse. To listen to this press conference, you’d think Biden really was the one rolling tanks into Donetsk. A grievance recital that used the background of war for the foreground of Trump’s hurt feelings is so much less than what the world deserves,” the article reads.

Regardless of these details, negotiations have reached an absolute impasse. Zelensky arrived in the US ready to take the war to its ultimate consequences, stating that he would never accept any agreement that involved “ceding” territories to the Russian Federation. The EU similarly made clear its full endorsement of Ukrainian demands. This obviously impedes any peace talks, since Russia is also in no position to negotiate its legitimate sovereignty over the New Regions, which independently voted for the right to reunification with Russian territory.

However, after the meeting, Zelensky confirmed to reporters that territorial changes are still on the list of conditions for a peace dialogue. He appears to have recognized his inability to enforce the so-called “Ukrainian demands,” when the winning side (Russia) and the leader of the pro-Ukrainian coalition (the US) agree to change the map of Ukraine to meet the needs of the Russian-speaking people. The European leaders present at the White House were also unable to convince Trump to drop the territorial issue from negotiations with Putin, tacitly acknowledging the inevitability of a Ukrainian defeat.

It’s important to emphasize that Trump interrupted the conversation with Zelensky and the European leaders to call Putin. Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov clarified some details of the conversation, emphasizing that the objective was to consult Russia’s “readiness to discuss a resolution to the Ukraine conflict with Zelensky.”

There isn’t much information available yet about what the two presidents talked about but Russian representatives have previously clarified that Putin is willing to participate in a trilateral meeting with Trump and Zelensky, as long as the event is merely formal and ceremonial to sign a peace agreement previously agreed upon between the parties. In other words, Putin won’t risk wasting time on fruitless negotiations in a face-to-face meeting, hoping that such an event will merely confirm something already previously deliberated.

Western analysts interpreted Trump’s attitude as disrespectful. The arrogance of the EU and Ukrainian leaders prevents them from having a summit interrupted for less than an hour for an important call whose subject is, at least in theory, precisely the same as the one being discussed at the meeting (to advance the peace process). However, realistically, Trump is absolutely right to inform Putin of every detail of the dialogue with Kiev and the EU.

The one with the real power to “stop the war”—that is, effectively halt military action—is Russia, since Moscow is the winning side in the conflict. It is necessary to know whether the Russians are ready to continue negotiations to advance a fruitful peace process, regardless of how European arrogance interprets this.

However, there is one situation that still needs to be resolved: Russia’s willingness to find a peaceful solution, possibly even in a meeting to sign a peace agreement, will only be possible if Ukraine agrees to respect Russia’s sovereignty over the New Regions (in addition to Crimea). No ceasefire or peace is possible while Ukrainian troops are on Russian constitutional territory.

By merely acknowledging the possibility of negotiating with Zelensky, Russia is already making a major concession, considering that Zelensky is no longer the legitimate president of Ukraine. In fact, it is the Russian side that is showing the greatest interest in peace, and it does so solely for humanitarian reasons, considering that it has all the necessary conditions to end the war militarily.

If Zelensky and the Europeans are even remotely interested in what is best for the Ukrainian people, they will have to quickly accept Russia’s conditions rather than impose even more obstacles to peace.

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

You can follow Lucas on X and Telegram.

August 20, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s man inside the CIA betrayed the US, new files show

By Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | August 15, 2025

Veteran CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton secretly oversaw a top-level spy ring involving Jewish émigrés and Israeli operatives without “any clearances” from Congress or Langley itself, according to recently declassified documents published as part of the Trump administration’s pledge to disclose all available information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The files provide a fresh and often disturbing look at a spy described by historian Jefferson Morley as “a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel,” detailing Angleton’s role in transforming the Mossad into a fearsome agency with global reach, while assisting Israel’s theft of US nuclear material and protecting Zionist terrorists.

Angleton established the Jewish emigre spying network in the aftermath of WWII, with the apparent goal of infiltrating the Soviet Union. But as the files show, the spymaster considered his “most important” task to be maintaining the supply of Jewish immigrants flowing from the Soviet Union towards the burgeoning Israeli state.

According to Angelton, his Jewish assets were responsible for 22,000 reports on the USSR, generating several intelligence masterstrokes. Chief among them was the publication of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Kruschev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin, which the spymaster boasted “practically created revolutions in Hungary and Poland.” Elsewhere, Angleton bragged that his arrangement with Israel had produced “500 Polish intelligence officers who were Jewish” who “knew more about Polish intelligence than the Poles.”

Other passages appear to show Angleton taking credit for securing the “release” of several Zionist terrorists affiliated with the Irgun militia before they could be convicted for bombing the British embassy in Rome. Though the group had been captured by Italian authorities, the newly-disclosed files indicate the terror cell was freed on the orders of the CIA.

The information was originally divulged in 1975 to senators serving on the Church Committee, which probed widespread abuses by US intelligence in the decades prior. Congress was particularly interested in claims by New York Times foreign correspondent Tad Szulc, who testified under oath that Angleton had personally informed him that the US provided technical information on nuclear devices to Israel in the late 1950s. The new documents show that Angleton was deceptive under questioning, and evaded questions on Israel’s nuclear espionage efforts on the record.

Additional unsealed FBI documents, which refer to Israel’s Mossad as Angleton’s “primary source” of information, confirm that the CIA’s head of counterintelligence relied heavily on Tel Aviv to solidify his position within the Agency – and also add to the growing body of evidence that Angleton may not have been operating with US interests in mind throughout his 21-year tenure.

Other newly declassified files from the FBI have shown that Angleton maintained a wildly lopsided relationship with the Bureau, which saw federal agents deferring to the CIA counterintelligence chief after they caught him surveilling the correspondence of huge numbers of Americans. The files show Angleton openly admitting he would have been fired if Langley caught wind of his leaks to the Bureau.

A side-by-side analysis of the now-unredacted Church Committee files compared with their previously-released versions from 2018 demonstrates that even after 70 years, Washington felt compelled to conceal details of its real relationship with Israel’s founders. Over a dozen references to “Israel,” “Tel Aviv,” or descriptions of figures as “Jewish,” which were scrubbed from the 2018 release, can now be viewed on the National Archives site.

The documents reveal that Angleton repeatedly lied to multiple Congressional bodies, including the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which probed the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Angleton was similarly evasive when interrogated over Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and about CIA knowledge or complicity in the scheme.

Those documents also reveal that Angleton’s CIA counterintelligence staff ordered Lee Harvey Oswald’s removal from federal watchlists six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, despite his classification as a high security risk. The surveillance of Oswald was personally overseen by a member of Angleton’s intelligence network of Jewish emigres, Reuben Efron, a CIA spy from Lithuania. Angleton had placed Efron in charge of an Agency program called HT/Lingual which intercepted and read correspondences between Oswald and his family.

Numerous historians have questioned why the CIA counterintelligence chief insisted for decades on personally overseeing what he described as the “Israeli account.” Though several off-the-record interactions remain impossible to parse, the documents show that when grilled about his “unusually close” connections to the Israeli Mossad, Angleton acknowledged forming an “arrangement” in which, “in most simplistic terms, [the Israelis] were informed that we would not work with them against the Arabs, [but] that we would work with them on Soviet bloc Intelligence and communism.”

Freeing Zionist terrorists

One of the earliest instances of Angleton’s cooperation with Zionist elements came as Zionist militants embarked on a terrorist campaign to pressure the British colonial authorities to leave Mandate Palestine.

In October 1946, three months after they bombed the British administrative headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, members of the right-wing Irgun militia planted explosives in the British embassy in Rome in a failed bid to assassinate the UK’s ambassador to Italy.

According to Angleton, after the Irgun “blew up the British embassy in Rome” in 1946, the CIA intervened to ensure they escaped Italy without prosecution.

“We had the members of the group, and then we had the dilemma again as to whether we turned them over to the British authorities,” noted Angleton, who had served as counterintelligence chief for the Italian branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor. “And we were in a position to make the decision one way or the other. And eventually we came down on the side of releasing them.”

A secret deal with the Mossad

As Washington sought to manage the political ruptures caused by the creation of Israel, and monitor the wave of Soviet migrants pouring into the self-proclaimed Jewish state, Angleton framed his takeover of “the Israeli account” as a convenient way for US intelligence to kill two birds with one stone.

“The other side of the Israeli problem was that you had thousands coming from the Soviet Union and you had the Soviets making use of the immigration for the purpose of sending illegal agents into the West and breaking down all the travel control, identifications and so on. And so there was both a security problem and a political problem.”

To manage these “problems,” the US and Israelis brokered a deal involving the secret exchange of “papers and signals, communications intelligence, [and] the other products of intelligence action,” Angleton stated. The spy chief claimed the only records of the 1951 arrangement held by the US side would be in the possession of the Agency, and admitted US Congress had been left in the dark, telling senators, “I don’t think there were any clearances obtained from the Hill.”

Asked by one legislator how it was “possible for succeeding directors of the intelligence agency to understand what the agreements were between” US and Israeli intelligence, Angleton responded: “Very simple. They saw the production to begin with. And they met with directors or the head of Israeli intelligence. And they met with Ambassadors and prime ministers. And they were very much involved.”

Grooming Zionist spies “outside the structure” of the CIA

Angleton was especially protective of what he called “the fiduciary relationship” with Tel Aviv, assembling a close-knit clique of Jewish Americans with dubious loyalties to manage it as World War Two drew to a close. “I started from the south side with two Jewish men who worked with me during the war,” he explained. Having “sent them over as ordinary people under cover” to get their bearings in newly-formed Israel, Angleton “brought over six others and put them through some months of training, outside of the structure” of the CIA.

“To break down the fiduciary relationship – which is after all a personal business – all the men I have had, were men who stayed in it and came back to headquarters and went back to Tel Aviv, they went to the National Security Council, and went back to Tel Aviv, et cetera.”

“It was probably the most economical operation that has ever been devised in the U.S. Government,” Angleton crowed. “I don’t think there was [sic] more than 10 people that were hired in the same process.”

Having trained these spies “outside of the structure” of the CIA, it’s unclear how Angleton ensured they remained faithful to US national security objectives, or whether he ever intended to.

Enabling Israeli theft of US nuclear material, spying on America

Angleton’s role in enabling Israel’s wanton theft of nuclear material from an American facility is one of the more shocking episodes in the US-Israeli relationship. The scene of the crime was the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, a uranium processing facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania owned by a Zionist financier named David Lowenthal. In 1965, Zalman Shapiro, a fellow Zionist hired by Lowenthal to run the plant, illegally diverted hundreds of kilograms of nuclear fissile material to Israel. Posing as a scientist, the notorious Mossad spy Rafi Eitan visited NUMEC three years later to continue the heist.

As Jefferson Morley documented in his biography of Angleton, “The Ghost,” the late CIA counterintelligence chief made sure the CIA looked the other way as Israel constructed its first nuclear weapon out of the stolen fissile material. According to Morley, “Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than U.S. non-proliferation policy.”

A 1977 investigation by the US Government Accountability Office found that the CIA withheld information about the NUMEC nuclear theft from the FBI and Department of Energy, and “found that certain key individuals had not been contacted by the FBI almost 2 years into the FBI’s current investigation.”

The latest batch of Church Committee files add new detail about Angleton’s compromising of US national security to benefit Israel, and his attempts to cover up his betrayal.

During his testimony before the Committee, Angleton was pressed about media reports alleging that he and his counterintelligence unit provided Israel with technical support for constructing nuclear weapons. He strenuously denied the charges, insisting the CIA had never played any role in providing Tel Aviv with nuclear materials. However, when questioned about whether “Israeli intelligence efforts” were ever conducted in the US “aimed at acquiring… nuclear technology,” Angleton equivocated.

First, he blustered, “there have been many efforts by many countries to acquire technical knowledge in this country, and that doesn’t exclude the Israelis.” Asked if CIA counterintelligence had “certain knowledge” of Israeli agents “trying to acquire nuclear secrets in the US,” Angleton pleaded, “Do I have to respond to that?”

The Committee then went “off record” at the senators’ request, making Angleton’s responses impossible to scrutinize.

In a secret 1975 memorandum to the FBI, the ousted CIA counterintelligence chief disclosed that he had “avoided any direct answers” during his Senate testimony on Israel’s spies carrying out “intelligence collection” to gather “nuclear information” in the United States.

Just days later, a Bureau report on “Israeli intelligence collection capabilities” revealed Angleton entertained “frequent personal liaison contacts” with Mossad representatives at Israel’s Washington DC embassy between February 1969 and October 1972. This “special relationship” involved “the exchange of extremely sensitive information.”

Further, the 1975 FBI memo on Angleton disclosed the Israeli embassy’s establishment of a “technical intelligence network” seven years earlier which was directed by an Israel scientist who worked on Tel Aviv’s nuclear program. This may explain why Angleton was so cagey under Senate questioning.

“Israeli matters” trigger Angleton’s downfall

The Church Committee files show Angleton bristled at then-CIA Director William Colby’s efforts to apply a modicum of transparency to the Agency’s activities, especially as they related to Israel. The spymaster warned that if the USSR ever caught wind of Langley’s use of the self-proclaimed Jewish state as a de facto halfway house for communist turncoats, they would almost certainly end their policy of encouraging Eastern European Jews to migrate to Israel:

“This idea of opening the doors and letting the light in, and breaking down compartmentation, and breaking down the need to know, would inevitably put in jeopardy the immigration, if the Soviets should learn the extent of the activities,” Angleton stated.

Colby fired Angleton in 1974 after the New York Times revealed that he devised an illegal program of domestic spying targeting antiwar American dissidents. In his testimony, Angleton framed their clash as an interpersonal conflict, describing Colby as “not my cup of tea professionally or in any other way.”

Yet Angleton also acknowledged to Senate that a “dispute in connection with these Israeli matters” between himself and Colby contributed to his departure from the Agency. Was this a reference to the former spook’s involvement in Israeli theft of US nuclear secrets, enabling Israel to acquire the bomb?

Whatever the case, it was clear why Angleton would be remembered more fondly in Israel than inside the country he ostensibly served.

On December 4, 1987, the director of Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services gathered in secret on a hillside in Jerusalem to plant a tree in honor of Angleton. They were joined there by five former Israeli spy chiefs and three former military intelligence officers.

Despite attempts to keep the ceremony under wraps, two local reporters managed to evade the cordon to record the ceremony for the former CIA counter-intelligence director, who had died seven months prior. Together, the Israeli spooks laid a memorial stone that read, “In memory of a dear friend, James (Jim) Angleton.”

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kiev’s backers fail to sway Trump on Russia – analyst

RT | August 19, 2025

The White House meeting on Monday between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s European backers produced no major results, political analyst Sergey Poletaev has told RT.

Trump met to discuss the Ukraine conflict with Vladimir Zelensky and some European leaders in Washington just days after holding a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

“Just like in Anchorage, no decisions were announced afterward. And that, in itself, is a sign that something important is happening,” Poletaev said, noting that the talks are part of a larger diplomatic struggle, the ultimate goal of which is to win over the US president.

He suggested that Moscow is seeking to draw Washington out of the conflict, while Europe and Ukraine are pushing to keep the US firmly entangled. Following what Poletaev called Putin’s “gambit” in Anchorage, the European delegation hurried to Washington to persuade Trump to toughen sanctions against Moscow and maintain weapons deliveries to Kiev.

So far, it looks like they came up empty.

Poletaev pointed out that, unusually for the US president, he did not repeat European talking points after the meeting. Instead, Trump reminded the European leaders at the start of the summit that “they had no real power,” the analyst said.

While the immediate effort may have failed, “most likely, Europe will soon try again,” Poletaev stressed.

According to the analyst, the key issue at Monday’s summit was security guarantees for Ukraine. Russia has insisted “from day one” that any such commitments must be tied to “neutrality and disarmament,” he said.

Europe and Kiev, meanwhile, are desperately trying – by hook or by crook – to preserve Ukraine’s armed forces, and even to push for a NATO presence on Ukrainian soil.

According to Poletaev, the attempts are “naive and desperate,” but whatever form security guarantees take in any eventual peace deal will ultimately determine “the fate of the Kiev regime.”

“For now, there’s no compromise in sight,” Poletaev concluded. “And as Ukraine continues to lose ground on the battlefield, the room for maneuver – for both Kiev and its European backers – is shrinking fast.”

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Alaska meeting is a milestone of the decline of NATO and EU

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 19, 2025

Is the EU and its member states collectively heading towards the abyss? For so many years analysts have thundered headlines of the flavour “end of the EU” – even myself I must admit – but in recent days the EU itself has never been placed so low on the world map as it was in the so-called Alaska meeting. A few weeks earlier, many supporters of the EU were stunned at just how pusillanimous the EU commission boss was facing Donald Trump, as she accepted 15% tariffs across the board on all EU goods entering the U.S. – absolutely amazing given there was no announcement of trade talks where officials on both sides would negotiate a more appropriate rate. This move alone revealed so much. The EU is, if nothing else, a pseudo superpower administration owned wholesale by the world’s largest corporations – like Pfizer, the U.S. drag maker who Ursula von der Leyen made part of a 600bn euro EU vaccine fund – and so it would have been absurd for her to have resisted.

And now it is the EU’s time to take another body blow as it plays a secondary role in the negotiations for a peaceful settlement for the Ukraine war. Yet few are betting on a peace deal. Even Trump himself doesn’t seem to hold out much hope as Putin has made it clear that he wants the Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine to be handed over as part of the deal, plus guarantees that Ukraine can never be a NATO member.

Whether NATO will even be around in the coming months is another matter as it is worth noting that this transatlantic organization, which the U.S. runs, is currently going through its lowest point of its history, like the EU. What idiotic U.S. journalists who shout out to Putin in the press conference “are you going to stop killing civilians” don’t ask is more telling. Of course, they don’t shout out such stupid questions to Netanyahu when he visits, who is the architect of the most horrific genocide of the 21st century, where women and children who manage to miss the bombs which reign down on their tents are now starved to death – all supported by the U.S. But to Putin, U.S. journalists don’t ask “how’s the war going in Ukraine, sir?” or even “what do you think will happen to NATO if your army forces Zelensky to surrender?”.

The meeting was never going to be a deal breaker for a peace deal in Ukraine as the journalists’ temporary accommodation was a clue to that. What the Alaska meeting set out to do was for both leaders to show reverence for one another so that bigger deals can be worked out – perhaps energy and infrastructure deals in Alaska itself or even more rare earth and minerals in Russia – and if you listen carefully to Trump’s responses to questions from U.S. media, you will note the hints.

But with U.S.-Russia relations moving in a soberer, grown up direction, rather than the silly Biden stance, there are many possibilities on the table. Ukraine may well be resolved at some point if some of these super deals can see the light of day.

For the Europeans and the EU, they will have to dance to the beat of the Putin-Trump drum which makes them look even more ineffective and congruent to the bigger picture geopolitics which they crave. Same goes for NATO. Both of these institutions have poured oil on the fire in recent years by only seeing the war option – or more specifically the ‘escalate to de-escalate’ option which backfired spectacularly every single time that now to justify the huge amounts of money shovelled into a war project which cannot benefit the West, its leaders only have one narrative to repeat over and over again now, so that they can save their own jobs and credibility. War talk. More war. War, war and even more war.

It’s incredible. The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s former PM gave a clue recently to the tunnel vision that the EU and NATO have about the Ukraine war. They see it as the EU’s first test at hard-core foreign policy action, despite it being bank rolled by “Daddy” Trump. Probably the most delusional and idiotic quote of the month has to go to Kallas who told journalists “If Europe cannot defeat Russia how can it defeat China?”. The entire thinking is really all based on conflict rather than conflict prevention which is also about saving both NATO and the EU from its worst ever credibility crash when Russia finally defeats the Ukrainian army. These EU buffoons have created, since 2014 and even before, a war which was inevitable, which they don’t have the means, military capacity or even the leadership to win and yet their priorities now are making a massive cover-up of the failure and protecting their own dynasties. Europe is not preparing itself for war. This is the huge bluff. It is preparing itself for a huge fall which is unprecedented and may well be a catalyst for both the demise of the EU and NATO as we know them.

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump Holds Firm Peace Deal with Putin Despite European Pushback

Sputnik – 19.08.2025

European leaders and Zelensky didn’t succeed in changing Trump’s peace proposal, which the US president had reached with Putin, former defense politician and chief of staff with the Sweden Democrats Mikael Valtersson told Sputnik.

“The ball is now clearly in Ukrainian and, to a lesser degree, European hands. A strong and clear ‘no’ from the European side might result in broken relations between the US and Europe/Ukraine. Therefore we can expect a ‘maybe’ from the European/Ukrainian side,” he said.

However, Valtersson also notes that playing for time may be part of Zelensky’s strategy, hoping that eventually, a shift in the geopolitical landscape might restore the hardline anti-Russian alliance. This strategy, though, is likely a “lost cause,” according to the former Swedish defense expert. By dragging out the negotiations, Zelensky and his allies risk further territorial losses to Russia and an increase in war casualties.

“If the European leaders really cared for Ukraine, they would pressure Zelensky to accept a peace deal that includes swapping of territories. This would minimize Ukrainian territorial and human losses,” Valtersson argues.

Yet, the expert predicts that European obstruction of a peace deal will continue, driven by the hope that a miraculous turn of events will “rescue” Ukraine. This approach could extend negotiations for weeks, but ultimately, he believes Trump’s patience will wear thin, forcing a clear decision.

In the meantime, the peace process is largely aligning with Russia’s expectations, with Trump holding firm to the terms agreed with Putin in Alaska.

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Michael von der Schulenburg: Alaska Meeting Was a “Game Changer”

Glenn Diesen | August 16, 2025

Michael von der Schulenburg is a German member of the EU Parliament who was previously a UN diplomat for 34 years in positions that included Assistant Secretary General of the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. Schulenburg explains why he thinks the Alaska meeting was a game changer.

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Merrick Garland Should Start His Crusade Against White Supremacists By Re-Opening the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing Case

By Richard Booth | The Libertarian Institute | August 18, 2025

Given the recent stories about Merrick Garland’s experience at the helm of the Oklahoma City bombing prosecution and his own comments about prosecuting white supremacists should he be made Attorney General, I have some questions about Garland’s handling of the OKC bombing case.

My questions:

  • At an April 27, 1995 Preliminary Hearing, why did you “object” when defense attorneys noted that your witness, FBI agent Jon Hersley, testified that the Ryder truck carried “passengers” — plural? Your objection was overruled, and your witness confirmed that Timothy McVeigh was seated in the Ryder truck with another individual. Who is that individual?
  • At the April 27, 1995 Preliminary Hearing, why did you “object” when attorneys asked your witness the names of those FBI agents tasked with reviewing the surveillance camera footage of the bombing?
  • You once said “we did everything we could to find every person who was involved.” If that’s true, then how do you explain the fact that every eyewitness you touted at the April 27th 1995 preliminary hearing never testified at the federal trials? Why didn’t these witnesses get to tell a jury what they saw? Why is it that the man seen with Timothy McVeigh in the Ryder truck has never been identified?

If Merrick Garland is truly dedicated to prosecuting dangerous white supremacists then he can show it by reopening the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case and identifying and prosecuting Timothy McVeigh’s accomplices. I would not be alone in calling for the case to be re-opened. Danny Coulson, the FBI on-scene commander for the Oklahoma bomb site, agrees. In 2004, Coulson told John Solomon of the Associated Press that there are “some unanswered questions here. A lot of things happened that were inappropriate,” Coulson said. “I think it needs to be reopened, but I don’t think it should be reopened by the FBI. It needs to be a special investigator, a lawyer, totally independent. He needs to have subpoena power and the ability to use a grand jury.”

Danny Defenbaugh, then the retired chief of the FBI’s OKBOMB investigation agreed: “If I were still in the bureau, the investigation would be reopened” said Defenbaugh, commenting on new evidence that came to light almost a decade after the bombing. ”If the evidence is still there, then it should be checked out.”

Garland can kick off this effort by compelling the FBI to produce the surveillance camera footage that shows two men exiting the Ryder truck, and he can finish by apologizing for letting dangerous white supremacists get away with it for the last 25 years.

August 19, 2025 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , | Leave a comment

Trump-Zelensky Summit Marks a Win for Russia and a Loss for Ukraine’s European Masters

Sputnik– 18.08.2025

The Trump-Zelensky meeting in Washington suggest that the US is “engineering a managed withdrawal from Ukraine,” with the White House valuing ‘America First’ agenda more than Ukrainian leadership’s ambitions, geopolitics and security analyst Dr. Marco Marsili told Sputnik.

Commenting on the results of the summit, Dr. Marsili made the following observations:

  • Zelensky’s behavior betrayed his desperation. As Trump put an end to Biden’s blank check policy regarding the aid to Ukraine, Zelensky now has to beg for scraps as without the full US backing, “Ukraine’s military collapse is inevitable.”
  • By dismissing a demand for a ceasefire before negotiations, Trump sends a message to Zelensky: negotiate now or face annihilation at the hands of the Russian forces.
  • Ukraine’s impending collapse will allow Trump to claim that US weapon such as Patriot missile systems are invincible despite numerous documented instances of them being taken out by Russian missiles. Instead, the following narrative will be pushed: “We gave them perfect weapons; their corruption lost the war.”
  • The protection alternatives offered by Trump to Ukraine instead of NATO membership are mere theatrics. Ukraine would become nothing but a non-aligned buffer state completely dependent on the US’ whims.

Thus, Dr. Marsili comes to these conclusions:

  • Having prioritized domestic politics, Trump views Ukraine as a liability
  • Russia is poised to achieve its goals: a cessation of NATO expansion and recognition of Russia’s new territories.
  • Europe is unable to replace the US support to Ukraine, and Germany and France “will inherit a crisis they cannot resolve.”

August 18, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Iraqi FM warns PMU, Lebanese Hezbollah cannot be disarmed by force

The Cradle | August 18, 2025

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein stated on 18 August that efforts to pass a new law in the parliament to regulate the status of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) are coming at the wrong time, while at the same time emphasizing the government’s inability to disarm the resistance factions comprising the PMU by force.

“The timing of introducing the Popular Mobilization Forces law was wrong, and I was the only minister who expressed this within the cabinet before the draft law was sent to parliament, especially in light of the tense regional and international situation and the Iranian–American conflict,” Hussein said in an interview on Iraqi TV.

The new law would update an existing law regulating the PMU, transforming it into a fully independent security institution directly under the prime minister and bypassing the Defense and Interior Ministries.

The PMU was created in 2014 to recruit volunteers to fight against ISIS, which had just taken over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with covert support from the US and Peshmerga forces loyal to Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani.

The PMU, which was comprised of multiple Shia armed factions, was incorporated into Iraq’s security forces with the passage of the first PMU law in 2016. The group was later expanded to include other ethnic groups, including Sunnis, Yezidis, Shabaks, and Christians.

The Coordination Framework coalition, a Shia political bloc supported by Iran, is pushing for the Iraqi parliament to include a vote on the new PMU law in its upcoming sessions.

In contrast, Foreign Minister Hussein argued that the PMU should be disarmed, but through dialogue rather than force.

“We need a rational dialogue with the factions to disarm, and this cannot be done by force, as this could lead to internal strife. Before the national dialogue, we need an inter-Shia dialogue between the Shia parties and leaders, but unfortunately, so far, there has been no dialogue in this regard,” Hussein added.

The US has also reportedly pushed for the PMU to be disarmed.

Hussein, who also serves as deputy prime minister, compared the issue of the PMU in Iraq to that of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The US is also pressuring the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, which defended the country from Israel’s invasion last year.

“Hezbollah’s weapons in Lebanon cannot be disarmed except through dialogue, and the Iraqis cannot disarm the Popular Mobilization Forces by force. Centralization of decision-making is the problem in Syria, and decentralization may be the solution.”

The minister accused Iran of interfering in Iraqi affairs by promoting the law. “Most neighboring countries interfere in political, security, and military affairs, including Iran, which has significant influence,” he stated.

Hussein’s statements come amid interference from Washington, which seeks to block the law’s passage.

The US has warned Iraq against passing the new law, arguing it would entrench Iranian influence and empower armed groups “undermining Iraq’s sovereignty.”

US Chargé d’Affaires Steven Fagin and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio both raised these concerns in meetings and calls with Iraqi officials, pressuring parliament to halt the vote despite the bill already completing its second reading in July.

Iraq’s parliament has since avoided including the law on its agenda, facing opposition from Sunni and Kurdish blocs, while pro-Iran factions continue to push for its passage.

Shafaq News wrote on Monday that according to Iraqi MP Thaer Mokheef, “the real obstacle lies in US opposition, warning that Washington seeks to block the legislation and may attempt to reassert influence in Iraq.”

Among the groups represented in the PMU are Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and the Al-Nujaba Movement – Iran-linked resistance factions involved in the attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, which began after the start of the Gaza war and ended months later with the help of Iraqi government pressure.

Last year, the US launched heavy strikes on Kataib Hezbollah sites in Iraq in response to the killing of three soldiers in a drone strike on a US military base on the Syria–Jordan border.

August 18, 2025 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ridiculous Europe

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | August 18, 2025

By President Donald Trump’s transactional criterion, NATO has been a costly failure that needs fixing or needs to be cut lose. Europe has failed to pay the price and has left the United States with the financial and military burden of defending Europe. The war in Ukraine has proven the point.

But that was never the point of NATO. The point of NATO was never economic nor transactional. The point of NATO was, in large part, to keep Europe militarily coordinated with, dependent on and subordinate to the United States. The point wasn’t to extricate the U.S. from Europe, it was, as Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO explained, precisely “to keep the Americans in Europe,” while keeping the Russians out.” By that criterion, NATO has been a massive success. The Ukraine war has proven that point too.

While it continues, with a loud voice, to make demands regarding the defense of Ukraine and the terms for ending the war, Europe has revealed to the world that it is unable to mount that defense without the U.S. and that it has been sidelined in the negotiations, leaving decisions about Europe to the Americans.

Europe is unable to supply Ukraine with the weapons it requires and that Europe insists Ukraine must receive. The United States has reiterated that it will no longer be the font from which Ukraine’s weapons flow. On August 10, Vice President J.D. Vance said clearly again that the U.S. is “done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.” Europe does not have the stockpile to spare nor the capacity to manufacture a fraction of the weapons Ukraine needs. And though Europe has, by necessity, accepted the American plan that Europe can send U.S. weapons to Ukraine if they pay for them, that will not provide Ukraine with even close to the amount of weapons the U.S. was supplying. And even that was not enough.

Not only can Europe not supply the weapons, they cannot supply the troops. Europe has, to its embarrassment, publicly conceded that it cannot mount the number of troops needed to send to Ukraine as peacekeepers after a ceasefire.

The war in Ukraine has exposed Europe’s dependence on the United States. Europe can neither provide the weapons nor the troops to defend itself. Europe has been revealed as dependent on, and subordinate to, the United States.

Ukraine is now facing a crisis on the battlefield. Russia’s military efforts were long dismissed as not rapidly gaining ground. But keeping the media focus on that criterion kept the public in the dark about the real criterion. Russia’s war of attrition was devouring and exhausting Ukraine’s weapons and, more importantly, manpower. The shrinking Ukrainian armed forces is running out of weapons to defend itself against the massive and still growing Russian army. There are not enough soldiers to fill the front line. That leaves gaps in the line. As Ukraine moves troops from other places to fill those gaps, it leaves even bigger gaps in those places. Russia’s war of attrition was setting up this moment. And now, Russian troops are breaking through those gaps in the lines.

For the first time in the war, the Russian armed forces have broken through key defensive lines and their rapid move west is now measured in miles and not inches. Logistical hubs critical for the Ukrainian armed forces to supply their troops in the east have been partially infiltrated and surrounded. Russian positions are being consolidated and roads that are lifelines to Ukrainian soldiers have been partially cut. There is also reliable reporting from both Russian and Ukrainian sources that the rapid advance has brought the Russian army all the way to the heavily fortified second Donbas fortification line, which they have now breached. Beyond that defensive line is largely open fields with no organized line of defense. The Russian armed forces may then be free to rapidly advance, making the Russian goal of control of the entire Donbas a real possibility. For the first time in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces face the very real possibility of collapse.

Geoffrey Robers, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork, told me, “All the signs point to a significant Russian breakthrough north of Pokrovsk. The Ukrainians may be able to stem the Russian advance but I doubt they will be able to throw it back, at least not without fatally weakening their already crumbling defensive lines in other sectors of the front.” Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told me that “regardless of how one might categorise this most recent Russian breakthrough, the reality is quite clearly that the rate of Russian advance has sped up recently and Ukrainian forces are having increasing difficulty in plugging gaps in their line.” Roberts says that “if Putin doesn’t obtain the rest of the Donbass through a deal with Trump, he will certainly secure it by military means, in months, if not weeks.”

But, despite this threatening reality, Europe is pleading for the war to go on. While Trump pushes for a diplomatic end to the war, Europe continues to push for an unreachable dream of a military solution. They insist on supporting Ukraine in its aspiration of goals that were already unrealistic over a decade ago. They continue to push for an open door to Ukrainian NATO membership even though Russian President Vladimir Putin went to war to prevent that—and will not stop the war without preventing that—Trump has vetoed it and even Europe has been reluctant to grant it. Putin made it clear on the threshold of the war, that that is what he went to war to prevent. Even NATO has acknowledged that. That goal was unrealist before the war, and it is even more out of reach with Russia winning the war.

The goal of reincorporating Crimea has been unaligned with reality, since 2014, when a referendum and the reincorporating of Crimea into Russia was already a reality. The idea of a Donbas that is at least semiautonomous has been unrealistic since the conception of the Minsk Accords. That idea became more unrealistic with the mounting assaults on Donbas prior to the war and the attacks on the rights of ethnic Russians in Donbas that began in 2014 and have grown worse since the start of the war.

As the Ukrainian armed forces face collapse and defeat, Europe continues to push for a continuation of the war that they cannot help. The War in Ukraine has exposed, not only Europe’s helplessness and dependence, it has revealed its ridiculousness.

August 18, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

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