Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant in Bushehr continues to function normally despite reports of renewed US-Iran military exchanges, Aleksey Likhachev, CEO of the Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, has said.

Russian personnel have not observed any attacks near the plant in recent days, and the situation there remains “generally calm,” Likhachev said in an interview with the Strana Rosatom corporate newspaper published on Friday. Unit 1, currently the plant’s only operational reactor, continues to run at full capacity, he added.

The Russian-built plant, a critical piece of Iran’s energy infrastructure, contains substantial nuclear fuel stockpiles. Likhachev previously warned that any strike on the site could trigger a catastrophe of at least “regional” proportions.

Earlier this week, the US military launched a wave of strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran accused Washington of violating a ceasefire agreed last month and retaliated against American warships in the area. The Bushehr plant is located roughly 250 km (155 miles) northwest of the strategic waterway.

Following the start of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran in late February, Rosatom reduced its on-site presence from roughly 700 specialists to just 20 people after strikes and explosions were reported near the plant in March and April. In one incident, a projectile struck near the site’s perimeter, killing a security guard.

The Rosatom chief said the company is prepared to rapidly redeploy its full workforce to Iran once it is convinced there is no renewed risk of military escalation threatening personnel safety.

Likhachev said work at the site is gradually resuming, with around 2,200 Iranian contractors returning to focus mainly on reinforcement and concrete work at the under-construction Unit 2 reactor.

The Bushehr nuclear power plant produces electricity for Iran’s national power grid. The project was started in the mid-1970s by a West German company but was suspended in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in 1980, to be revived by Rosatom in the 1990s.

The US military has attacked two more Iranian-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman as Washington presses ahead with its “freedom of navigation” blockade, while Tehran has compared control of the Strait of Hormuz to possessing an “atomic bomb.”

US Central Command said on Friday that American forces had struck two “unladen” Iranian tankers, the M/T Sea Star III and the M/T Sevda, which it claimed were attempting to “violate” the US blockade by entering an Iranian port.

Iranian armed forces allegedly responded to “the violation of the ceasefire and to American terrorism with strikes,” a military official told local media, but the US military did not report any damage.

The Strait of Hormuz has become one of Tehran’s main bargaining chips, after Iran shut the waterway early in the war, stranding hundreds of vessels and roiling energy markets.

He vowed that Iran would not “forfeit the gains of this war” and said Tehran would seek to change the legal regime of the strait, through international law if possible and unilaterally if necessary.

The US has rejected Iranian ambitions as “unacceptable,” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on Friday that Washington will never allow Tehran to “normalize” its grip on Hormuz.

The US insists that its own naval blockade is intended to restore freedom of navigation and pressure Tehran into a deal, while Iran has accused Washington of violating the April ceasefire by targeting commercial shipping.

Tehran, however, accused Washington of attacking first, claiming US forces had targeted an Iranian oil tanker in its territorial waters and struck civilian areas along Iran’s southern coast.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a landslide win in 2024. Since then, his approval rating has plummeted and he’s suffered one defeat after another. But what is it about Starmer that’s so uniquely unpopular?

How unpopular is Starmer?

The honeymoon period was brief. Within a month of the election, Starmer’s net approval rating fell from plus seven to zero, with 52% of Britons telling Ipsos that they felt the country was heading “in the wrong direction.” According to YouGov, his net approval now sits at –48 on their polling scale (not a percentage), making him the least popular prime minister in recent history.

After losing 187 local council seats in England last year, Labour is on track to lose around 1,800 when counting concludes on Saturday, in another round of local elections that are being viewed as a referendum on his leadership.

Calls for Starmer’s resignation are coming not just from his opposition – including the triumphant Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – but from within his own party. According to The Times, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband urged Starmer to begin “planning his resignation” weeks ago, in order to avoid a painful period of public infighting after the elections.

Taxes and austerity

In his first address to the nation after taking office in 2024, Starmer announced that his government had “discovered a £22 billion ($29.9 billion) black hole in the public finances,” and would have to make “unpopular decisions” to fix it. This translated into the fastest rising tax rates in the developed world, according to the OECD.

ADMIN POST@Keir_Starmer highlights our out of control migration system which he has done little to nothing about.

He talks about a 22 billion pound 'black hole' yet he continues to pay 5.38 billion pounds per year for illegal economic migrants to be housed in hotels all… pic.twitter.com/ayptgAsmta

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) November 29, 2024

Starmer hiked income and dividend taxes by 2%, increased national insurance taxes paid by employers, and raised property taxes. Between July 2024 and November 2025, Starmer’s government imposed a new tax or increased an old one every ten days, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The prime minister’s Conservative predecessors presided over an historic decline in British living standards and a rise in energy costs and inflation, both of which soared after the UK cut itself off from Russian fossil fuels in 2022. Voters expecting Starmer to ease this burden were left short-changed, however, with the PM announcing sweeping welfare cuts last year. Public outcry forced Starmer to roll back some of these cuts, including a deeply unpopular slashing of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

“We had 14 years of Conservative austerity,” Green Party leader Zack Polanski told reporters on Friday. “Keir Starmer was voted in on a promise of change and, actually, what we’ve seen is very little change, and in many ways things have got worse.”

Two-Tier Keir

If Starmer’s tax hikes and welfare cuts angered the left, his response to a spate of anti-immigration riots in late 2024 infuriated the right. Hundreds of British citizens were arrested for making anti-immigrant social media posts, and violent criminals were released from prison early so that rioters and those supporting them online could be jailed.

Two Tier Keir

No justice for severe, violent crimes, but prison for social media posts pic.twitter.com/QcK4o74Yla

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025

Starmer was drawn into a public spat with X owner Elon Musk, who referred to the PM as “two-tier Kier” over his apparent prioritization of speech crimes over real ones. His pushing of the Online Safety Bill, which critics say will further stifle free speech in Britain, then drew the ire of US Vice President J.D. Vance, who told Starmer to his face that “there have been infringements on free speech that affect not just the British… but also affect American technology companies and by extension, American citizens.”

These issues, coupled with Starmer’s failure to reduce illegal immigration, helped Reform UK emerge as the big winner on Friday, picking up at least 1,200 seats.

Palestine on the ballot

After ousting Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020, Starmer dropped all of Corbyn’s pro-Palestine policies. Whereas Corbyn was a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and supported a boycott on goods from occupied Palestinian territories, Starmer refused demands from within his party to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023, and publicly affirmed Israel’s right to cut off power and water to the strip’s two million residents.

Starmer has since reversed his position, and now backs a ceasefire and two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but left-wing and Muslim voters have abandoned his party in droves over his listing of ‘Palestine Action’ as a terrorist organization, the arrests of thousands of protesters for voicing support for said organization, and his calls for “policing of language” and banning of anti-Israel protests.

The Green Party has made the Palestinian issue a central part of its platform, and won a crucial by-election in Manchester earlier this year by courting Muslim voters. “Palestine is one of the elements on the ballot,” Polanski said ahead of Thursday’s elections. “I think lots of people feel very strongly both about their local services – as they should do – and feel equally strongly that a reprehensible genocide is happening.” 

Few scandals smeared Starmer’s reputation as thoroughly as the Mandelson affair. Peter Mandelson served as Starmer’s ambassador to the US between February and September 2025, when he was dismissed over his long-standing relationship with pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer was apparently aware of Mandelson’s ties to Epstein when he appointed him envoy, but was forced to fire him after emails emerged in which Mandelson called Epstein his “best pal,” and encouraged him to “fight for early release” from prison in 2008.

Mandelson was arrested in February, and is currently being investigated for lobbying on behalf of Epstein in the late 2000s, and leaking classified information to the notorious sex offender.

Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, took the blame for appointing a known associate of Epstein, and resigned in February.

The bottom line

Starmer’s policy record is enough to account for the surge in support for left- and right-wing alternatives on Friday. After two years of Labour leadership, Britons are poorer, less free, and more divided.

His policy failures, however, are only one aspect of his unpopularity. The Labour leader also inspires a level of visceral, gut-level hatred unseen in modern British politics: he’s been described by commentators as “useless and lacking in charisma,” “empty, brittle, [and] wooden,” and endured chants of “Keir Starmer is a wanker” from right-wing and left-wing crowds alike.

Within Labour, figures like Ed Miliband likely think that they can win back support by distancing themselves from Starmer and appointing a new figurehead to sell their message. Polanski and Farage both think that the time has passed, as has the traditional Labour/Conservative duopoly. Farage told reporters that Friday’s results represent “a complete reshaping of British politics in every way,” while Polanski said that “the new politics is the Green Party vs. Reform.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has been decimated in parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales, as well as local elections in England. However, Starmer is refusing calls to resign.

Labour was the biggest loser in Thursday’s elections. As results came in on Friday, Starmer’s party had lost more than 1,300 local council seats in England, around five seats in the Scottish Parliament, and 21 seats in the Welsh Senedd, as of 11 PM local time.

While full results are not expected until Saturday, Starmer has already admitted that “when voters send a message like this, we must reflect and we must respond.” However, although the PM has been urged to resign by some within his own party, including Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, he has dismissed the idea, stating that he is not “going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos.”

Some 5,066 out of 16,000 local council seats in England and all 129 and 96 seats in the Scottish and Welsh legislatures were up for grabs on Thursday. Labour went into the election holding 5,873 local seats, but looks set to emerge with closer to 4,000.

For the first time this century, Labour will lose control of Wales, with First Minister Eluned Morgan losing her seat and the Plaid Cymru and Reform dominating the Senedd.

Labour’s loss has not been the Conservative Party’s win. While power has typically swung back and forth between both parties for more than 100 years, the Tories are on track to lose 550 council seats, plus 16 seats in Scotland and 9 in Wales.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK was the big winner in England, picking up more than 1,200 local council seats. In some constituencies, Reform’s gains have come almost entirely at the Conservatives’ expense. Reform picked up 37 seats in Suffolk, where the Tories lost 36. Farage has spent years hammering successive Tory governments over their failure to reduce immigration and lower the cost of living, and as such has drawn the votes of dissatisfied right-wingers who once backed the Tories.

Reform UK has wiped out the Tories and won Essex County Council.

Kemi Badenoch would not even hold her own seat. pic.twitter.com/hNOeZ7tM6X

— Reform UK (@reformparty_uk) May 8, 2026

“It’s a big, big day, not just for our party, but for a complete reshaping of British politics in every way,” Farage told reporters, adding that Labour had been “wiped out.”

Zack Polanski’s Green Party has also drawn votes from former Labour supporters abandoning Starmer’s party over the prime minister’s austerity policies and support for Israel. “I said that the Green Party was going to replace Labour,” Polanski told reporters, “and we’re seeing that right across the country. The new politics is the Green Party vs. Reform.”

US President Donald Trump has announced a three-day ceasefire and a major prisoner swap between Moscow and Kiev, expressing hopes the truce would become the “beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought war.”

Trump took to his Truth Social network on Friday to make the unexpected announcement. The US president said the ceasefire would be in place for May 9-11, with the two sides swapping 1,000 POWs each during the period.

“The Celebration in Russia is for Victory Day but, likewise, in Ukraine, because they were also a big part and factor of World War II,” Trump wrote, adding that the “request was made directly by me,” and both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky agreed to it.

“Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War. Talks are continuing on ending this Major Conflict, the biggest since World War II, and we are getting closer and closer every day,” Trump added.

Trump later told NewsNation that he hoped the temporary truce would be extended beyond the initially announced three-day period. “I’d like to see a big extension,” he said when asked whether he planned further talks with Putin and Zelensky about continuing the ceasefire.

When asked by a reporter at the White House whether he would send his negotiating team to Moscow again, Trump replied: “I would do it if I thought it would help. I would do it.”

Despite what Western mainstream media, think-tanks, and some propagandists with academic titles have been telling us, NATO-EU Europe has never “appeased” Russia.

In reality, the NATO-EU European elites, with Germany among the leaders, have certainly appeased the US. Because you don’t end up with the Nord Stream scandal and US President Donald Trump’s Turnberry tariff diktat without a policy of irrationally self-damaging submission driven by shortsightedness and fear bordering on panic – that is, appeasement.

And what has all that fear been about? In essence, a very simple thing: being abandoned by Uncle Sam, because NATO-EU European elites have a breathtakingly perverse relationship with the US, the greatest abuser of the sovereignty of their countries and spoiler of the prosperity of most of their citizens.

During last century’s Cold War, which ended almost four decades ago – in 1987 with the INF Treaty’s unprecedented elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons – Western Europe’s dependency on Washington could at least claim some kind of rationale. It was dubious, but plausible on its own terms. But there is no remotely reasonable or good-faith explanation for the European elites’ failure to emancipate their countries from America after 1987 or, at the latest, 1991 when the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

That is why what is happening between the US and Germany now is one of those ironies of history so implausible you’d never dare invent them. And yet it’s true: Washington has just announced the largest drawdown of US troops in Germany – it’s single biggest and most important base in Europe – since the end of the great post-Cold War re-adjustment.

Until now: Trump has just decreed that 5,000 – or 14% of the current number – of American troops must leave within no more than one year. That is still less than the 12,000 soldiers Trump wanted but failed to pull out during his first term, but it’s enough to matter. Especially since that departure is unlikely to be the last: Trump has already announced that US numbers in Germany will be “cut way down” and “go down a lot further.”

Moreover, medium and intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missiles – the old Tomahawk combined with Typhoon launchers and the new Dark Eagle hypersonics – scheduled to be stationed in Germany next year, a Washington-Berlin agreement never submitted to serious debate in Germany, are also shelved. By the way, being punished by “Tomahawk withholding” is now a common experience that Berlin and Kiev can commiserate about. What an achievement for Berlin: getting the Ukraine treatment from Trump’s US.

For reasonable people, the absence of the missiles is a good thing, of course: if it lasts, this US cancelation will put a damper on the plans of the most bellicose in Berlin who seem to positively relish the idea of going to war with Russia within the next decade or two. From the perspectives of these dark fantasists, however, the American change of mind hurts badly, since the NATO-EU Europeans have no comparable systems and will still need years to develop them.

The unwitting trigger of what may well be remembered as a historic turning point is Friedrich Merz, a German chancellor whose signature style has combined harsh and bossy austerity talk and mean social policy at home with almost absolute submission to Washington abroad. It was Merz’s off-the-cuff and very unguarded comments about America’s humiliation by its lost war against Iran that made Trump go ballistic. Merz, speaking before an audience of German high-school students who will now forever remember how individual incompetence can make history, has “torpedoed” – in the Financial Times’ words – his prior policy of flattering Trump no matter what.

Merz is no rebel by nature, to put it politely. Indeed, the only – if tragically important – thing about which Merz has ever shown any substantial disagreement with the current American leadership is the Ukraine war. Where Washington has displayed – whether in earnest or just the always devious American way – an imperfect willingness to end this perfectly avoidable and unnecessary war by some form of compromise, Merz’s Germany has led the European rebellion against too much American reasonableness. By now, it is Berlin that has become the main supporter of the proxy war, even while its own economy keeps tanking and over 17.5 million – one fifth – of Germans are “at risk of poverty and social exclusion.”

Even mainstream mouthpiece Spiegel admits that the German model of economic growth “has reached its end.” Yes, it’s that simple and that obvious. Spiegel is, of course, not honest about the causes of this not-so-sudden death: it is not merely a result of China and the US no longer buying enough German exports. In reality, cutting Germany off from competitively priced Russian energy and instead establishing an unprecedentedly severe dependency on the US and sources it can control and sabotage (as currently, the Persian Gulf suppliers) has been a decisive factor.

But that obvious fact is a taboo of German mainstream discourse because it stands for perhaps the single worst policy failure of post-unification Germany. Whether by treacherous design or criminal stupidity – it is not something its elites will ever allow to be publicly admitted while still in control of the mainstream media.

Merz is the rare leader who has mastered the art of antagonizing literally everyone and at once: his voters, most Germans in general, his coalition “partners,” and his overlord in Washington as well. And all for nothing, or at least, nothing worthwhile: Germans cannot stand him for his broken promises, his staggering arrogance and lack of empathy with a nation in considerable pain, while he has not even achieved any major reforms.

His SPD coalition partners defy him despite the fact that he has bent over backwards to accommodate them, so much so that his own party has had enough of his perverse submission to a junior partner.

And Trump hazes and punishes him not because Merz has taken a principled stand against the genocide in Gaza or the war against Iran. On the contrary, in both cases, he has been a willing follower of America’s – and Israel’s – criminal leadership. What Trump does not like about Merz is that the latter has not been perfect in his submission.

And that is how Merz does represent the worst about the current iteration of Germany’s elites. Stuck in an archaic Cold War client mentality that is not even opportunistically advantageous. To paraphrase a great French statesman: Berlin’s policies are worse than criminal, they are stupid. But they are also worse than stupid because they can’t even avoid being shamefully criminal and immoral.

America’s reputation has been worsening under US President Donald Trump and the country now lags behind China and Russia, an annual study commissioned by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation indicates.

The Denmark-based nonprofit was founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2017 in response to the purported retreat of Washington from the global stage amid Trump’s first tenure. Over the past six years, the foundation has released Democracy Perception Index reports, which assess “the state of democracy” in countries across the globe.

The return of Trump to office has seen the US plummet in the rating, which ranges between +100% and -100%, with the country currently dropping to -16% from +22% two years ago. The current indicator is less than China (+7%) and Russia (-11%), according to the survey.

The Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, and the host nation of the non-profit, Denmark, were listed as the top three nations in the latest index. Ukraine was among the bottom five, taking 95th place in the rating and measuring -23%.

The poor performance of the US is “saddening but not shocking,” Rasmussen stated when the report was released. The ex-NATO chief squarely blamed Trump for the situation, citing the US administration’s actions, including repeated run-ins with Washington’s European allies over various issues ranging from aggressive trade policies to the openly proclaimed intent to seize Greenland from Denmark. 

“US foreign policy over the past 18 months has, among other things, called into question the transatlantic relationship, imposed widespread tariffs, and threatened to invade a NATO ally’s territory,” Rasmussen said.

The strained transatlantic ties have been further aggravated by the US-Israeli war against Iran, which has been unpopular among many European NATO allies. The conflict has led to global oil shortages, with Europe emerging as one of the worst-affected regions.

Washington joined Israel’s war against Iran despite intelligence assessments that the Islamic Republic was not developing nuclear weapons, US President Donald Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, has said. 

Kent, who resigned in protest as head of the US National Counterterrorism Center in March, argues that West Jerusalem dragged Washington into another “never-ending” conflict that does not serve American interests. 

In a post on X on Thursday, Kent said the entire US intelligence community, including the CIA, had agreed before the escalation that Tehran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. 

He added that US agencies had also warned that Iran would target American bases across the Middle East and attempt to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if attacked by Israel or the US. 

One of the many tragedies of this war is that before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including CIA, was in agreement that Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon & that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region & shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by… https://t.co/6fqTW7qLX3

— Joe Kent (@joekent16jan19) May 7, 2026

Despite this, “the narrative and agenda spun by a foreign government – Israel, won the argument and forced us into this war,” Kent wrote. 

A former CIA officer, Kent claims that Trump fell victim to an Israeli misinformation campaign portraying Tehran as a threat. Similar lies were used to drag the US into war with Iraq back in 2003, he has argued.  

The US and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran in late February, prompting retaliatory strikes by Tehran on regional targets and shipping routes linked to the Strait of Hormuz. Despite a ceasefire announced by Trump last month, the US military launched a wave of strikes on Iranian targets near the strait on Thursday night, while Tehran accused Washington of violating the truce and responded by targeting American warships in the area. 

According to Axios, US-Iran negotiations have focused on a proposed 14-point memorandum that reportedly includes a moratorium on Iranian uranium enrichment, phased US sanctions relief, the release of frozen Iranian funds, and guarantees of free transit through Hormuz.

The Pentagon has declassified and released a batch of government files on unidentified flying objects (UFOs), describing the move as a “historic transparency effort.”

The release, published on a dedicated page on the website of the US Department of War, contains hundreds of documents, videos, intelligence reports, and witness accounts spanning decades, including FBI interviews, NASA mission transcripts, military pilot testimony, US State Department cables, and archival imagery tied to unexplained aerial incidents.

Among the newly released material are reports describing “metallic objects,” unexplained “red lights” in the sky, and aerial encounters involving US military personnel. One highlighted case references a 2024 Indo-Pacific sighting of a football-shaped object near Japanese waters, while another revisits Apollo 17 mission records from 1972 documenting mysterious drifting lights observed above the lunar surface.

The release was coordinated through the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as part of a broader interagency initiative involving the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NASA, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and other US intelligence agencies.

The initiative follows years of congressional pressure and military personnel whistleblower testimony alleging the government withheld information about unexplained objects observed near sensitive military installations.

In February, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of War to disclose “any and all information” related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Trump’s UFO disclosure order follows earlier declassification efforts related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Those releases produced few major revelations beyond details already known publicly about the killings.

Trump’s order on UFO files also followed a widely shared podcast appearance by former US President Barack Obama, who discussed the possibility of extraterrestrial life while insisting the American government was not concealing proof of alien contact. Trump later claimed Obama had “made a big mistake” by disclosing “classified information.”

Former AARO chief Sean Kirkpatrick told AP last week that many alleged UFO sightings have mundane explanations, arguing that viral videos often stem from infrared camera distortions, aircraft heat signatures, or other routine phenomena rather than extraterrestrial technology.

Artificial intelligence could make cyberattacks a systemic threat to global finance, the International Monetary Fund has warned, saying advanced models can help attackers exploit vulnerabilities faster than institutions can fix them.

In a blog post published on Thursday, the IMF said its latest analysis suggests that “extreme cyber-incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets.”

According to the organization, the current financial system relies on shared digital infrastructure, including software, cloud services and networks for payments and other data. The fund warned that advanced AI models can sharply reduce the time and cost needed to identify and exploit weaknesses, raising the risk of simultaneous attacks on widely used systems.

The fund cited Anthropic’s recent controlled release of Claude Mythos Preview, which it described as “an advanced AI model with exceptional cyber capabilities.” According to the IMF, Mythos could find and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, “even when used by non-experts.”

AI-driven cyber risks could destabilize the financial system if they are not managed carefully, the IMF stressed, noting that attacks could spread beyond finance because banks share digital foundations with energy, telecommunications and public services. 

“Defenses will inevitably be breached, so resilience must also be a priority,” the IMF warned, calling for cyber stress testing, scenario analysis, board-level oversight, public-private cooperation and stronger international coordination.

The White House is allegedly also considering reviewing new AI models before they are released to avoid political fallout from potential AI-enabled cyberattacks, the New York Times reported earlier this week.

AI chatbots have also increasingly been implicated in facilitating serious and violent crimes. A recent joint investigation by CNN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 8 out of 10 AI chatbots were eager to help researchers simulate the planning of violent attacks, including school shootings, religious bombings, and assassinations, wishing would-be attackers “happy (and safe) shooting!”

The Greek authorities are investigating a suspected Ukrainian-made sea drone discovered by local fishermen in a cave on the island of ‌Lefkada, Reuters reported on Friday, citing coast guard and police sources.

The vessel, reportedly a MAGURA V3 kamikaze drone, was found late on Thursday. Preliminary evaluation indicated the boat was fitted with at least three detonators, sources told the agency. One source said the vessel was packed with explosives, but that information has not been confirmed by the Greek military yet.

Bomb disposal experts and military divers were reportedly deployed to the island to dismantle the drone and further examine the site. Investigators are trying to establish the characteristics of the vessel and its purpose, namely whether it was intended to attack Russian maritime traffic in the Mediterranean, a coast guard source said. The vessel could have been a part of a larger drone shipment or could have drifted into Greek waters from elsewhere, a ⁠maritime security source told Reuters.

According to the Greek broadsheet Kathimerini, the investigators are also considering a theory that the recovered drone could have been involved in an illicit drug trafficking operation. Given the purported lack of a warhead, the theory appears to be feasible since  vessels of the type are capable of covering large distances and are very hard to detect, allowing them to avoid interception by coast guard patrols.

Unverified footage circulating online shows the drone being towed by a patrol boat into a harbor. It appears to be fitted with a Starlink satellite dish, a common practice in the Ukrainian military to ensure stable connection for both naval and aerial long-range drones.

Ukraine has for months targeted Russia’s oil and gas trade by attacking vessels it claims are linked to Moscow. While most incidents have occurred in the Black Sea, several attacks attributed to Kiev have also been reported in the Mediterranean. Moscow has repeatedly branded the strikes on civilian shipping in international waters as “terrorism and maritime piracy.”

In December 2025, Kiev acknowledged striking the Qendil, an Omani-flagged oil tanker, in the eastern Mediterranean off Libya’s coast. Early in March, the Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker Arctic Metagaz was attacked off Malta, suffering extensive damage and ending up abandoned by its crew.

Three Iranian oil tankers have bypassed what US President Donald Trump has called a naval “wall of steel” in the Strait of Hormuz and reached Iranian ports through Pakistani waters over the past two days, Tehran’s IRNA state news agency reported on Friday, citing maritime tracking data.

Washington imposed a naval blockade on Iran last month to choke off the country’s oil trade and pressure Tehran into agreeing to a deal on its nuclear program.

Iran operates ports outside the Strait of Hormuz choke point, including Chabahar and Jask near the Pakistani border, allowing ships to reach Iranian territory via the Gulf of Oman without entering the narrow transit corridor where US naval patrols are concentrated.

According to IRNA, the empty vessels belonging to Iranian state-owned oil firm, NIOC, transited through Pakistan’s exclusive economic zone before arriving at Iranian ports. Citing the TankerTrackers platform, the agency said the tankers’ combined capacity is about 5 million barrels of crude oil.

Iran’s economic situation is “nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one source told the WaPo.

Analysts estimate that Iran currently has access to about 65-75 million barrels of floating storage capacity, equivalent to roughly 36-42 days of its prewar crude exports.

Pakistan has also opened multiple overland transit routes connecting its ports and border crossings to Iran, allowing trade flows to continue.

Germany and about a dozen other countries support making it harder for dissenting member states to block EU foreign policy decisions, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has said.

Speaking on Wednesday at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, the diplomat outlined Berlin’s vision for reforming the European Union. The six-point plan he presented closely mirrors proposals made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen, a fellow member of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, has argued that the EU should “use the momentum” for institutional changes after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – a prominent defender of national sovereignty within the bloc – lost power in the recent election.

Wadephul endorsed calls to abolish veto powers on foreign policy matters, arguing that consensus rules create paralysis. He specifically referenced Hungary’s blocking of aid for Ukraine after Kiev cut off the transit of Russian oil supplies destined for Hungarian consumers.

Tiered enlargement and punitive mechanisms

Among Wadephul’s other ideas was abandoning the principle that every member state should automatically receive its own European commissioner – a system he described as unfeasible in an EU that could eventually expand to 35 members.

He also advocated a phased approach to enlargement, arguing that countries which have waited decades for accession are “owed” at least partial integration.

During a panel discussion following his speech, however, the minister stopped short of saying whether Germany itself would be willing to give up its own commissioner quota in an enlarged EU. He also avoided taking sides in the ongoing institutional rivalry between von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas over who should serve as the bloc’s main international representative.

Competition between the European Commission president and the head of the European External Action Service for influence over the portfolio has been widely reported in recent years.

Tensions fueled by Brussels’ policies

Outgoing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is due to leave office on Saturday, has repeatedly accused Brussels of being dominated by German political interests and of imposing Western European priorities on eastern member states.

The bloc’s decision to phase out cheap Russian energy supplies in an effort to pressure Moscow has likewise become a defining – self-defeating, according to Moscow – pillar of EU policy.

Migration policy remains another major source of division. EU redistribution rules for asylum seekers from Africa and Asia have generated fierce resistance from eastern member states. Germany under former Chancellor Angela Merkel championed an open-door migration policy during the 2015 migrant crisis.

A reported $125 million pocketed by an oil trader from a perfectly timed Iran-linked bet is “only the tip of the iceberg” in what appears to be a pattern of insider trading tied to key developments during the Iran war, Professor Jack Rasmus has told RT.

Roughly 10,000 contracts worth an estimated $920 million were reportedly opened on Wednesday, less than an hour before media reports said Washington and Tehran were nearing an agreement, triggering a more than 12% drop in oil prices and an estimated nine-figure profit.

Similar suspiciously well-timed bets have repeatedly coincided with major developments during the war and public statements by US President Donald Trump, including on April 7, when oil prices plunged after he announced a temporary ceasefire, the professor from Saint Mary’s College of California told RT on Friday.

“Every time Trump says something that sounds tough the price of oil goes up,” Rasmus said, adding that traders then made bets that generated an estimated $7 billion in March and April alone in what he described as a “very well organized” operation.

According to the economist, commodity exchanges including Chicago Mercantile Exchange and ICE “know who this is” but will not announce findings because “some people in the government got their hands in this pie.” He described the Trump administration as “a big grift” and “a historical grifting” extending beyond oil into crypto and other “shady deals.”

Check out the full interview below.

The European Commission has faced ridicule after using a popular internet meme to portray critics of the EU as conspiracy theorists.

On Thursday, the bloc’s executive branch posted a variation of the well-known ‘Peter Parker glasses’ four-panel meme on social media. The format, taken from the Tobey Maguire-era ‘Spiderman’ films, typically shows the main character realizing that reality looks very different depending on whether he is wearing glasses.

In the commission’s version, Paris is depicted as beautiful and safe – unless it is viewed through the supposedly distorted perspective of conspiracy theorists.

“The battle of narratives is going strong,” the accompanying message declared. “Let’s live our own story! Protect what matters – our democracy.” Another message warned ominously that “everyone wants to control the narrative to dominate.”

The battle of narratives is going strong.

Our countries are a recurring target.

It is time to act to tell the stories that make us strong. Let’s live our own story!

Protect what matters - our democracy. pic.twitter.com/6XXveMTuua

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) May 7, 2026

Brussels noted that the meme had been inspired by material produced by the French Foreign Ministry. Unlike the commission’s more sanitized adaptation, the French version made its intended targets explicit. In that variation, Peter Parker puts on a MAGA cap and a stereotypical Russian fur hat before seeing a warped image of the Eiffel Tower.

Online reaction to the commission’s post was overwhelmingly negative, with critics describing the messaging as both Orwellian and embarrassingly inept. “The EU neither understands the meme’s pattern, nor the problems of its citizens,” one response stated.

pic.twitter.com/n69zh60sQ3

— Luzius Meisser (@Luzius) May 8, 2026

Within the meme template, the glasses traditionally reveal reality more clearly rather than distort it – much like the special sunglasses in John Carpenter’s 1988 cult film ‘They Live’, which famously satirized propaganda and hidden systems of control.

Or rather pic.twitter.com/JALe2paBR7

— Frédéric Leroy (@fleroy1974) May 7, 2026

The backlash comes amid growing criticism of Brussels over its increasingly aggressive approach to regulating online speech under the banner of combating foreign disinformation and manipulation. EU institutions have been accused of suppressing dissenting voices and reinforcing establishment narratives, including during several recent elections.

Everything is fine in the EUdSSR🇨🇳
Did Mrs. Lying find her pfizer-sms ? pic.twitter.com/Jn1Y6BlrQR

— Prof. Elon_Lab-zertifizierte Desinformation ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@Elon49943563) May 7, 2026

In 2024, Brussels infamously supported the annulment of the Romanian presidential election first round over baseless allegations of Russian interference. The case was cited by US Vice President J.D. Vance as an example of anti-democratic trends in the EU. Just this week, the pro-EU government of Romanian Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan was toppled in a crushing 281-4 no-confidence vote.

In 2026, the British monarch issued a public message marking Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, while Easter, unlike in all previous years, was no longer accompanied by a special royal address. Only a brief greeting on behalf of the royal family was published for the Christian holiday.

This pattern in the king’s addresses to his subjects reflects not only the increased demographic and political weight of the Muslim community, but also a clear setting of priorities.

The British monarch’s refusal to deliver the traditional Easter address continues a policy that can hardly be described as anything other than anti-Christian and anti-national. When, in Southport, the son of migrants from Rwanda carried out the stabbing of little girls at a children’s club, all those who came out in protest – including the parents of the murdered children – were labeled ultra-right-wing extremists. As part of the “total retribution” announced by the prime minister, 1,280 protesters were arrested, and to make room for them in the autumn of 2024, the government released around 2,000 criminals from prison early.

In the spring of 2025, the government gave a final answer to those Britons who dared to say: “We want our country back.” The Sentencing Council recommended that magistrates and judges take the ethnic and religious background of an offender into account when issuing verdicts, thereby enshrining privileges for ethnic and religious minorities instead of the principle of equality before the law.

The logical result of such a strategy is the final transformation of Britain from an icon of capitalist progress into an epicenter of growing social dysfunction. You can see this by examining RT’s global survey – the Social Well-Being Index (SWI). While the West compares who has more money and greater opportunities for consumption, we measure what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education). As a result, the great Western powers did not even make the top 20 in the SWI rankings. France is in 29th place, Germany 41st, the US 48th, and the UK 53rd.

Russia is marking the 81st anniversary of its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II on May 9 with a parade on Red Square in Moscow.

Smaller military processions took place across the country earlier on Saturday, paying tribute to the millions who gave their lives to defeat the Third Reich.

The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war, losing an estimated 27 million people in what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. Victory Day remains one of the country’s most important national holidays.

In Russia, Victory Day is celebrated on May 9 because Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender was signed late on May 8 in Berlin, when it was already after midnight in Moscow.

Commemorations in several Western European countries, including Germany, have been overshadowed by restrictions on Soviet and Russian symbols, such as flags and St. George ribbons, introduced after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Moscow has condemned the bans as an attempt to erase the memory of the USSR’s role in defeating Nazism.

Despite the restrictions, people across Europe are continuing to lay flowers at Soviet war memorials and take part in Immortal Regiment marches, carrying portraits of relatives who fought the Nazis during the deadliest conflict in human history.

The US military has launched a wave of strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz, as Tehran accused Washington of violating the ceasefire and retaliated against American warships in the area.

US President Donald Trump downplayed the latest strikes as “just a love tap,” after Tehran “trifled” with Washington, while warning that the US would strike Iran “a lot harder, and a lot more violently” unless Tehran signs a deal “fast.”

“I’ll let you know when there’s no ceasefire… You’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran,” the US leader stated.

US Central Command claimed it targeted Iranian launch sites, command-and-control locations, and surveillance nodes in “self-defense.”

Tehran, however, accused Washington of violating the ceasefire first by attacking an oil tanker inside Iranian territorial waters and coordinating with “some regional countries” to strike civilian areas along the coasts of Bandar Khamir, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

The IRGC Navy claimed that three US warships fled the strategic waterway after suffering “significant damage.” Both CENTCOM and Trump,  however, insisted that no US assets were hit.

• Ahead of the latest escalation, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait reportedly lifted restrictions on US military access to bases and airspace, which had previously forced Trump to halt his much-hyped Project Freedom military escort operation in Hormuz.

• The US Department of War did not specify which areas of Iran were hit, but a senior American official told Fox News that US forces struck the port in Qeshm, Iran and Bandar Abbas, as well as the Bandar Kargan naval checkpoint in Minab.

• RT’s crew filmed flashes in the sky over Tehran after Iranian media reported that air defenses had also been activated in western Tehran to counter “hostile targets.”

This live coverage has now ended. Read the key developments below as they happened.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is considering extracting oil from beneath military bases to refill the depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to Bloomberg.

Created in the mid-1970s, the SPR is an emergency stockpile meant to alleviate oil price spikes in times of supply disruptions.

Global oil prices have soared above $100 a barrel in the wake of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran that began in late February, as Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to “enemy ships.” Before the war broke out, the strategically important waterway accounted for roughly 20% of global crude trade.
While Trump has downplayed the impact of the Strait of Hormuz blockade on the US economy, gasoline prices topped $4.50 a gallon this week on average for the first time since 2022.

On Thursday, Bloomberg, citing an anonymous source, claimed that the Trump administration is looking into “innovative” ways to replenish the national emergency reserves, including the use of Department of Defense sites.

“We have military bases or facilities that are in the middle of oil fields, but there’s no development under those resources. That’s crazy. It’s right there,” he said.

“We need creative ways to fill the strategic petroleum reserve all the way up,” Wright added.

According to Bloomberg, drilling under military bases is unlikely to have any immediate impact on energy prices, but it could allow the US government to directly own the extracted oil instead of purchasing crude from private producers to replenish reserves.

It was not immediately clear which sites were under consideration, Bloomberg noted, adding that last September, the Trump administration sold drilling rights for oil and gas beneath nearly 2,000 acres at Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base, which hosts B-52 strategic bombers.

In March, Trump authorized the Department of Energy to release 172 million barrels from the SPR throughout this year and into 2027, in a bid to mitigate soaring energy prices.

Under the scheme, crude is being loaned to energy companies, which are to return the “borrowed oil to the DOE with additional barrels as a premium” at a later date.

The administration of ex-President Joe Biden, too, tapped into the SPR following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 when oil prices skyrocketed.

According to DOE estimates, the national emergency reserves currently hold approximately 415 million barrels, the lowest level since the mid-1980s.

Germany is considering imposing fines on young men who fail to complete mandatory military questionnaires as part of a new army recruitment drive, according to a report by Der Spiegel.

Berlin has been seeking to rapidly expand the Bundeswehr as part of a broader EU military buildup, aiming to increase the number of active troops from the current 186,000 to over 260,000 by the mid-2030s. German officials have repeatedly cited an alleged Russian threat to justify the plans, something that Moscow has dismissed as “nonsense.”

Around 10,000 men who failed to complete the government’s online survey despite receiving reminder notices are now reportedly facing penalties of €250 ($294), the outlet wrote on Thursday. Officials previously warned that fines of up to €1,000 could be imposed.

The questionnaire, which asks recipients about their physical fitness, health condition and willingness to serve, was introduced earlier this year as part of a new voluntary military service program promoted by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. Under the Military Service Modernization Act, all 18-year-old German men are required to register for potential service by completing the form and undergoing a medical checkup.

Germany abolished conscription in 2011. However, senior officials, including Pistorius, have recently suggested it could be reinstated. Last year, Pistorius claimed that Russia could attack a NATO member “as early as 2028,” insisting on the need for a costly military buildup. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has similarly stated that he aimed to turn the country’s military into the strongest conventional armed force in the EU.

Moscow has consistently denied harboring aggressive intentions towards its Western neighbors. Commenting on Germany’s continued military buildup, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that it could lead to another tragedy on a global scale, referring to World War II.

Around 70% of people living in the EU and UK want more independence from the US and believe it’s time for Europe to “go its own way,” a new study compiled by the Germany-based research foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung indicates.

According to the survey, some 73% of respondents across the EU believe that it is time for the continent to drift away from Washington. UK respondents expressed a similar level of desire to free themselves from the clutches of the US, measuring at 67%.

The sentiment has been steadily growing across the bloc over the past few years, measuring some 63% back in 2024, the foundation noted. The level of mistrust towards the US has been growing as well, with only 42% deeming it a trustworthy partner against 46% last year, according to the researcher.

The survey, which was released on Thursday, is based on a sampling opinions of some 18,000 respondents across all 27 EU member states and some 2,000 in the UK. The polls were conducted in March this year among people aged between 18 and 69 years, with the sample meant to reflect current population distributions in terms of age, gender, and population density.

In just over a year, the US has had repeated run-ins with its European allies, engaging in a brief trade war, sparring over taking a different approach to the Ukraine conflict, Washington’s threats to seize Greenland from Denmark, and other issues.

The situation further deteriorated in the wake of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, which has not been supported by Washington’s European allies. Moreover, the hostilities in the Middle East caused worldwide disruptions in oil and gas supply, with the issue heavily affecting many European nations.

The rapidly evolving security landscape in the Middle East is prompting Saudi Arabia to rethink its national defense strategies. With no reliable guarantees of American protection, Riyadh is looking to establish an alternative framework for reliable defense – and surprisingly, Pakistan is becoming its key component. 

The Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA), signed last September by Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister of Pakistan Shehbaz Sharif, is one of the most significant pacts between the two nations in recent decades. Its central provision states that aggression against one state will be automatically regarded as aggression against both, echoing the principles of classic collective security treaties and formally establishing allied relations between the two countries. However, the deliberately vague wording concerning specific response mechanisms allows both parties considerable political maneuverability. In diplomatic agreements this is standard practice. 

The true value of this agreement, however, lies in the context in which it was concluded and, according to Pakistani sources, its potential. Islamabad possesses an estimated arsenal of 150-160 nuclear warheads and a well-developed nuclear missile delivery system, including short-and medium-range missiles. The agreement legally allows for the consideration of Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities in the defense of Saudi Arabia, effectively creating the first ‘nuclear umbrella’ in the Islamic world, founded not on Western guarantees but on mutual Muslim solidarity reinforced by shared strategic interests.

The pragmatic implications of this arrangement are clear. For Riyadh, the primary source of existential anxiety is Shiite Iran, which vies for dominance in the region and is armed with an extensive network of proxy forces throughout the Middle East. The US serves as a military counterbalance to Tehran; however, the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated the limits of its reliability. Washington’s tacit support for Israeli strikes on Qatar last September revealed its willingness to sacrifice the interests of regional allies for its own agenda, a precedent that did not go unnoticed in Riyadh. Today, amid a direct military conflict between the US and Iran (and despite the fragile ceasefire which may be broken at any moment) the situation has become even more tense. Since February 28, American strikes on Iran have failed to yield substantial results, and if US President Donald Trump is unable to subdue Tehran, Iran may emerge from this crisis significantly strengthened, acquiring the status of an undefeated regional power. This means Riyadh would face a formidable neighbor with a stronger-than-ever geopolitical standing. This scenario compels Saudi Arabia to treat its partnership with Pakistan seriously. While Washington wages war, Riyadh seeks to ensure its own security.

Both sides want to make it clear to the entire region that the primary function of the SMDA is not so much to create a mechanism for an automatic military response as to establish a reliable deterrence signal: any escalation against Riyadh will have repercussions extending beyond bilateral Saudi-Pakistani relations. In this regard, the agreement serves a stabilizing role rather than a destabilizing one – at least, that’s how both signatory nations view it.

From Islamabad and Riyadh’s perspective, the SMDA is strictly a defensive agreement forged by two sovereign states in full compliance with international law. Additionally, the agreement fits into the broader logic of a multipolar world order: two non-Western regional powers are constructing their own security architecture outside traditional Western alliances, without seeking permission or approval from either Washington or Brussels.

Essentially, the SMDA legally formalizes a defense partnership that has been in effect for over 60 years. Pakistani military personnel have been present on Saudi territory since 1967, securing Saudi Arabia’s borders, and tens of thousands of Saudi troops have been trained in Pakistani training centers. In other words, the operational and institutional infrastructure for cooperation was established long before September 2025. The agreement merely provides the necessary legal foundation and gives it a public dimension. Both parties consistently emphasize that the agreement is the result of many years of dialogue, is not directed against any specific state, and is not a response to any single event. This means it aligns with the logic of long-term strategic planning rather than reactive measures.

This raises an important question: how likely is the full activation of SMDA provisions in case of attacks on Saudi Arabia? In March, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar publicly reminded Tehran of the agreement. However, there’s a significant gap between demonstrative signals and actual military involvement. The key issue is that from a factual and legal standpoint, the US, not Iran, is the aggressor in this conflict; Tehran is only responding to American strikes. If the roles were reversed, and Iran had suddenly initiated attacks on Saudi territory, the legal and political grounds for invoking the SMDA would be clear and indisputable. However, in the current context, declaring war on Iran would be equal to joining the US-Israeli military alliance, which would contradict Islamabad’s stated neutrality and its positioning as an independent player in the Islamic world.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, currently the threat is not so high as to necessitate Pakistan’s direct military intervention. Saudi Arabia’s defensive capabilities are effective: its missile defense systems are operational, and Riyadh has not made an official request for the deployment of Pakistani forces for combat purposes. Also, we must remember that following the events of May 2025, Pakistan’s armed forces remain in a state of full readiness at the eastern border, and it cannot use these troops in external conflicts. Thus, in the present circumstances, the SMDA continues to serve its primary function of deterrence. 

It would be a mistake to interpret Pakistan’s military presence in Saudi Arabia and its public reminders about the SMDA as signs of Islamabad’s readiness for a direct armed confrontation with Iran. Pakistan seeks to avoid direct engagement and it seems that Saudi Arabia does not expect it either. Both sides have a clear understanding of the limits of their alliance and harbor no illusions that Pakistani forces would engage in a war against Tehran.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Pakistan currently serves as the only viable channel for mediation between Iran and the United States. In the context of the ongoing US-Iran military conflict, Islamabad maintains working relationships with both parties, making any direct involvement in a conflict against Tehran not just undesirable but strategically counterproductive. A mediator engaged in a war ceases to be a mediator.

Finally, this complex scenario is part of a broader calculation by Islamabad. Pakistan is strategically leveraging the current crisis to enhance its regional influence in the Middle East, demonstrating a willingness to act without actually committing to military action. This policy of ‘presence without involvement’ allows Pakistan to assert its interests while maintaining maneuverability. Ultimately, it is this stance, rather than military engagement, that secures Pakistan’s status as a player recognized by all sides of the conflict– a position that clearly elevates Islamabad’s geopolitical standing. 

The captain assured passengers aboard the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius that the first death on board was due to “natural causes” and that the vessel was safe, according to newly released video footage.

The footage, captured on April 12 – before the hantavirus outbreak was confirmed – shows Captain Jan Dobrogowski informing passengers that one man aboard the ship had died.

“Tragic as it is, it was due to natural causes, we believe,” Dobrogowski said, adding that “whatever health issues he was struggling with, I’m told by the doctor, were not infectious, so the ship is safe when it comes to that.”

The Dutch‑flagged Atlantic cruise ship, carrying some 150 people from 23 countries, departed from Argentina toward Cape Verde on April 1. The first victim, a 70‑year‑old Dutch man, began showing signs of illness on April 6 and passed away on April 11. His 69‑year‑old wife accompanied his body to South Africa, where she later collapsed and died in a Johannesburg hospital on April 26. On May 2, a third passenger – a German woman – also died from the disease and her body is still on board the vessel.

Investigators believe that the elderly Dutch couple likely contracted the rare virus during a bird-watching excursion at a landfill site in Ushuaia, Argentina, before boarding.

The virus has been identified as the Andes strain of hantavirus, a rare pathogen typically spread through contact with infected rodent droppings, urine or saliva. Unlike most hantaviruses, the Andes strain is known to be capable of limited human‑to‑human transmission through close contact with an infected person.

Initially denied docking in Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, the MV Hondius has now been permitted to proceed to Tenerife. Once there, unaffected passengers will be transported home, while Spanish nationals will be quarantined.

“Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so many troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.”

This is what Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin wrote on X on May 5, 2026, triggering a storm of harshly critical replies, many of them crossing the line into verbal abuse, mostly accusing him of racist anti-white hatred and hypocrisy. This reaction betrays an utter lack of understanding of Dugin as a thinker.

Dugin’s critics read him as though he were speaking in the language of modern racial politics, identity engineering, and population arithmetic. Instead, he is speaking in the language of civilization, metaphysics, and historical destiny. When he attacks ‘Whites’, he attacks a spiritual condition shaped by centuries of liberalism, materialism, and desacralization. He points towards a civilization that abandoned memory, faith, hierarchy, rootedness, and historical continuity in exchange for consumption, individual appetite, technological acceleration, and abstraction. His target is the modern West as a mode of existence rather than Europeans as a biological people. He describes a civilizational type that dissolved its own foundations through universalism and endless self-criticism until every inherited structure became an object of suspicion or demolition. The statement reads far less like racial hatred than like a furious condemnation of modernity itself.

Anyone familiar with Dugin’s broader body of work can see this pattern immediately. His entire intellectual project revolves around the rejection of liberal universalism and the defense of distinct civilizations against homogenization. He has long expressed support for the French New Right and for European traditions resisting Western liberal culture. That fact alone destroys the shallow interpretation advanced by his opponents. A man calling for the annihilation of Europeans would hardly spend decades engaging with European philosophers, praising European traditionalist movements, or drawing intellectual inspiration from figures such as Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist. He has remained remarkably consistent for years in his hostility towards liberal modernity and in his distinction between civilization, ontology, and race in the biological sense. His vocabulary often sounds extreme because he writes as a metaphysician rather than as a conventional political commentator.

This also explains the deeper contradiction inside liberalism itself. Liberalism presents itself as universal, humanitarian, and post-racial, yet in practice it functions as the final global form of Western cultural domination. Liberal modernity universalizes specifically Western historical assumptions and presents them as eternal truths binding upon all peoples and civilizations. Parliamentary democracy, individualism, secularism, market ideology, and the human-rights cult emerge from a particular Western historical experience, yet liberal ideology treats them as mandatory norms for humanity as such. In this sense, liberalism becomes the highest and most expansive form of White supremacism precisely because it aims to dissolve every civilization into a single Western model while claiming moral neutrality. The liberal empire spreads Western ‘values’ and ideas across the planet and calls that process ‘progress’. Dugin’s critique targets this civilizational universalism rather than white people as such. He attacks the missionary impulse of liberal modernity and the spiritual emptiness produced by its global triumph.

This view also carries a profoundly fatalist dimension. The German historical philosopher Oswald Spengler described civilizations as living organisms passing through vigor, hypertrophy, sclerosis, senescence, and eventual death. In his understanding, the Faustian civilization of the West entered its terminal phase long ago. Organic vitality yielded to technocratic rationalization, pecuniary domination, demographic disaster, and spiritual atrophy. Culture calcified into civilization, and civilization ossified into pure mechanism. Dugin inherits much of this morphology. When he speaks about ‘Whites’, he speaks about the cadaveric stage of the contemporary Western order: A civilization consumed by decadence, auto-intoxication, and a historical coma. The West appears less as a living culture than as a gigantic administrative apparatus sustained through inertia, artificial stimulation, and technological prosthesis. From this perspective, its decline appears almost physiological, since the civilization itself lost the animating principle that once coursed through its arteries. Empires ascend, decay, and pass into sepulchral memory. Paradigms perish, and new forms crystallize from the detritus of exhausted epochs. One may therefore hope that whatever succeeds the present Western order may recover form, rootedness, hierarchy, sacred intensity, and civilizational vigor absent from the moribund liberal world now approaching its final convulsion.

Prominent figures within the identitarian sphere understand this perfectly well. Their staged outrage functions primarily as political theater rather than genuine confusion. They defend an abstract idea of whiteness rooted in modern identity politics, racial self-consciousness, and liberal-era categories of collective identity. Dugin attacks the liberal core that produced those categories in the first place. For him, liberal modernity destroys every authentic people by reducing identity to biological labeling detached from spiritual form, historical mission, and traditional order. Identitarians treat race as the center of politics. Dugin treats the Logos of civilizations, primordial existence, and the destiny of peoples as the true center of politics. The two worldviews overlap at moments, yet they emerge from radically different intellectual schools.

The entire controversy reveals how shallow modern political interpretation has become. People trained entirely through social media conflict and ideological tribalism lose the ability to recognize metaphysical or civilizational language. Every statement becomes flattened into the vocabulary of race discourse, internet factionalism, and outrage performance. Philosophical arguments become screenshots. Ontological categories become hashtags. A thinker rooted in Heideggerian language, Orthodox mysticism, and civilizational theory gets interpreted as though he were merely another participant in online racial agitation. The result resembles a complete disintegration of interpretive depth.

No one is required to agree with Dugin’s conclusions. A reader may reject his geopolitical vision or his interpretation of modernity. Yet basic intellectual honesty still requires interpreting a thinker according to the logic he actually uses rather than according to the logic imposed by his enemies. Reading Dugin through the lens of liberal racial discourse guarantees misunderstanding from the very beginning. His language belongs to the realm of civilizational metaphysics, plural modes of Being, and spiritual conflict. Anyone approaching his post on X seriously can recognize that reality almost immediately.

“A new world order must be built to ensure economic justice and equal political security for all nations. An end to the arms race is an essential prerequisite for the establishment of such an order.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of those words from the Soviet-Indian Delhi Declaration, signed in 1986 during Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to India and his talks with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It was one of the first major documents of the late Cold War era to openly speak of the need for a ‘new world order’.

At the time, the Soviet leadership believed this order would emerge through what it called ‘new political thinking’. The idea was that former adversaries would abandon confrontation and combine the best elements of their respective systems to create a more stable and equitable international framework. It was an ambitious vision: A joint effort to rebuild global politics from the ruins of ideological rivalry. But history, however, had other plans.

The Soviet Union soon disappeared into a vortex of internal crises before vanishing altogether from the world stage. The phrase ‘new world order’ survived, but it was quickly repurposed by the administration of President George H.W. Bush. In Washington’s interpretation, the concept no longer meant a shared international architecture. It came to mean a liberal order dominated politically and militarily by the US and its allies.

In reality, this wasn’t an entirely new order at all. It was an extension of the post-1945 system, only now without the counterweight of the Soviet Union.

Since then, the pace of disintegration has accelerated dramatically.

As humanity moves deeper into the second quarter of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that the previous world order has effectively ceased to exist. Whatever doubts may have lingered vanished during the opening months of 2026.

What matters isn’t simply that the strongest states increasingly ignore laws and conventions that once appeared firmly established, more significant is the style in which politics is now conducted. Decisions are impulsive and often openly contradictory as governments act first and improvise later. Statements made today may directly contradict those made yesterday, yet this no longer seems to matter.

This atmosphere shouldn’t necessarily be mistaken for collective irrationality. Rather, many political actors appear convinced that the old restraints have collapsed and that the current moment represents a historic opportunity. The instinct is simple: Seize as much advantage as possible before the landscape hardens again.

The redistribution of the world has already begun. Political influence, transport corridors, resources, financial flows, technological ecosystems, and even cultural and religious spheres are all being contested simultaneously. Every major power is now defining its ambitions and testing the methods by which those ambitions might be achieved.

The real uncertainty lies elsewhere because the previous era left behind an assumption that periods of chaos are eventually followed by the emergence of a new equilibrium. After disorder comes structure and after confrontation comes a new framework. But there’s no guarantee this time.

The international system today isn’t an empty construction site waiting for a new design. After major world wars, old structures are often swept away on a vast scale, creating space for something new to emerge, and that’s not the case now.

Instead, the world remains cluttered with institutions and habits inherited from previous eras. Many are discredited or dysfunctional, but they still exist. And even those states that attack these institutions most aggressively continue to use them whenever convenient.

The United Nations system remains an example. Its authority has diminished, yet governments still appeal to it selectively when doing so serves their interests. Likewise, the structures created during the period of liberal globalization have proven more resilient than many expected.

This resilience appears to frustrate some of the very powers trying to reshape the system.

The creation of a genuinely new international framework will therefore be an exceptionally painful process. The available raw material consists of fragments from different historical periods, ideological systems, and institutional models. Somehow these incompatible components must be assembled into something functional.

Some states are attempting this carefully, selecting elements that might fit together into a relatively coherent structure. Others are behaving more crudely, trying to hammer incompatible pieces into place through pressure or intimidation. The danger is obvious: Excessive force may not produce stability at all, but only further fragmentation.

Yet perhaps the defining feature of the present moment is that nobody possesses a real blueprint for what comes next. During earlier periods of transition, however flawed the visions may have been, leaders at least believed they understood the destination.

However, today there is no such clarity and the latest struggle to construct a new world order comes without universal principles or even a broadly accepted idea of what success would look like. The old rules are fading, but no agreed replacements have emerged.

For now, the message confronting every major power is brutally simple: Do it yourself, and then try to live with the consequences.

The steep rise in jet fuel prices caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran is posing a bigger challenge to the global airline industry than the Covid-19 pandemic did, according to AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes.

In response to the US-Israeli aggression, Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz – a choke point through which around 20% of global crude passes – to “enemy ships.” US President Donald Trump has meanwhile imposed a blockade on Iranian ports. Massive maritime traffic disruptions have sent global oil prices above $100 a barrel, resulting in a spike in jet fuel prices as well.

In an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday, Fernandes said he thought he had “seen it all with Covid… but having seen jet fuel go up almost three times – this is much worse.”

“You wake up one day and your major cost has tripled – it was quite a new experience for me and I’ve been through a lot in my life,” the AirAsia CEO added.

Last week, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary similarly predicted that “if it continues at $150 a barrel into July, August, September, then you’ll see European airlines fail.”

According to the aviation analytics company Cirium, carriers have cut 13,000 flights from May schedules worldwide.

Turkish Airlines and Air China have taken similar steps, among numerous other carriers.

Last Saturday, US-based low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines said it was shutting down due to the sudden and sustained rise in fuel prices in recent weeks. The closure of the seventh-largest passenger carrier in North America is expected to leave around 17,000 people without work.

Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, said on X that the “global aviation shock is spreading quickly and is a HARBINGER of the more severe shocks to come in other sectors.”

The remains of 80 Soviet soldiers that were discovered during construction work have been reburied in Potsdam, German. The troops took part in the liberation of the city from Nazi forces in 1945, the Russian Embassy in Berlin has told Zvezda TV.

The ceremony took place at a Potsdam Soviet military cemetery on Thursday and was attended by Russian diplomats and local officials.

Graves containing the remains were uncovered last year during redevelopment work at a former barracks site that the German authorities have been converting into a residential district. Embassy staff later studied archival records and identified 76 of the 80 soldiers, sergeants, and officers.

Earlier, Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechaev said there are more than 4,000 memorials to Soviet soldiers across the country, and they are being well maintained.

Saudi Arabia reportedly refused to allow the US military to use its airspace and a key airbase for President Donald Trump’s ‘Project Freedom’ in the Strait of Hormuz, forcing the operation to be paused, NBC News claims, citing US officials.

The kingdom is said to have pulled support after Trump announced the operation on Sunday, stating that Western-flagged ships would be provided with US military escorts through the strait. Reportedly, however, neither Saudi Arabia nor any other Gulf states were informed of the plan ahead of time.

In response, Saudi Arabia informed Washington that US aircraft would not be permitted to operate from Prince Sultan Airbase southeast of Riyadh or fly through Saudi airspace in support of the mission.

According to two US officials who spoke with NBC, a phone call between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman failed to resolve the issue, forcing the president to pause Project Freedom just two days after it was announced in order to restore critical US military access to the region’s airspace.

The move appeared to have caught even Trump’s own officials off guard. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said just hours before the announcement that operation ‘Epic Fury’, the original operation, was over and that Project Freedom was now the primary focus. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had also been touting the initiative, claiming that hundreds of ships were lining up to pass through the strait.

Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, mocked Trump online, saying, “Operation Trust Me Bro failed” and that the US is back to spreading falsehoods about ongoing talks.

There is something deeply unsettling in the tone of the EU’s current strategic debate. What is presented as prudence increasingly resembles panic. What is framed as ‘strategic autonomy’ often sounds like something else entirely: A loss of confidence, a surge of ideological hostility, and a willingness – among declining liberal elites – to flirt with the most destructive weapons ever created.

A continent losing its nerve – and its judgment

At the center of this shift stands a revived obsession with nuclear deterrence. France, Germany, and Poland are now openly discussing deeper engagement with nuclear strategy, invoking the usual talking points of deterrence and security. But beneath that lies a far more troubling dynamic: A growing fixation on Russia as an existential enemy and a readiness to escalate rather than de-escalate.

French President Emmanuel Macron has taken the lead, recasting France’s nuclear doctrine in the name of European security. His concept of ‘advanced deterrence’ is presented as a stabilizing innovation. In reality, it marks a dangerous step toward normalizing nuclear thinking across the continent.

Macron has framed the issue starkly, warning that Europe must be prepared to defend itself in a more uncertain world. He has spoken of opening a “strategic debate” on extending France’s nuclear protection to European partners – moving beyond the traditional Gaullist posture of strictly national deterrence.

But what is being normalized here is not merely cooperation – it is the political integration of nuclear weapons into EU identity. France is expanding its arsenal, ending long-standing transparency practices, and inviting other states into nuclear exercises and planning discussions. These steps may not violate treaties in a formal sense, but they erode the spirit of restraint that has underpinned European security for decades.

The message is as clear as it is dangerous: Nuclear weapons are once again acceptable instruments of policy.

Even more striking is Germany’s shift. For generations, Berlin defined itself through restraint, shaped by the catastrophic legacy of the 20th century. Today, that restraint is visibly eroding.

German leaders now speak openly about the need to engage in nuclear deterrence discussions with France and other partners. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has indicated a willingness to explore new forms of cooperation, breaking with the cautious approach of his predecessors. German forces are preparing to take part in French nuclear exercises, and a joint ‘nuclear steering group’ has been established to align strategic coordination.

Officially, Germany remains within its legal commitments. It does not seek control over nuclear weapons. But politically, a threshold has been crossed. The normalization of nuclear discourse in Berlin signals a deeper transformation, driven less by careful strategy than by fear and pressure.

That fear is increasingly shaped by a hardened, ideological view of Russia that leaves little room for diplomacy or nuance.

The politics of fear

If France provides the doctrine and Germany the institutional weight, Poland supplies the emotional intensity. Polish leaders have been among the most vocal in calling for a stronger nuclear dimension to European security.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has declared that Poland seeks a future in which it is autonomous in nuclear deterrence. This is a remarkable statement from a non-nuclear state bound by international agreements. It reflects a profound sense of insecurity – but also a political environment in which escalation is becoming normalized.

At the same time, even within Poland there are voices of caution. Officials have acknowledged that European arrangements cannot replace the US nuclear umbrella and have warned against overestimating the effectiveness of new initiatives. Yet these warnings are increasingly drowned out by a louder narrative: That Russia represents an imminent and existential threat requiring extraordinary measures. This narrative, repeated across much of Europe, risks becoming self-fulfilling.

This mindset is now shaping strategic policy. Deterrence is no longer paired with diplomacy; it is replacing it. Military build-ups are not accompanied by serious efforts at dialogue; they are justified as ends in themselves.

This is obviously a dangerous trajectory. When an adversary is seen as inherently hostile and beyond engagement, escalation becomes the default response. Nuclear deterrence, in this context, is a tool of confrontation. Liberals push Europe toward a far more rigid and dangerous posture.

Delusions of autonomy

The idea of strategic autonomy deserves careful consideration. A more self-reliant EU could, in principle, contribute to global stability. But what is being pursued today is autonomy defined almost entirely in military and nuclear terms.

This is a distortion of the concept. True autonomy would involve the ability to pursue independent diplomacy, to mediate conflicts, and to reduce tensions. Instead, Europe’s current trajectory binds it more tightly to confrontation.

In this sense, the pursuit of nuclear deterrence is a sign of strategic confusion. It reflects a failure to imagine alternatives to escalation.

The implications extend far beyond Europe. The gradual normalization of nuclear discourse among non-nuclear states risks weakening the global non-proliferation regime. Other regions may follow Europe’s example, reinterpreting their own commitments and exploring new deterrence arrangements. The result could be a more fragmented and unstable international order.

The EU’s actions also risk complicating efforts to stabilize relations between major powers. Any attempt at rapprochement between Russia and the US becomes more difficult in an environment where European actors are actively escalating rhetoric and military postures. Instead of serving as a bridge, Europe is becoming an obstacle.

The broader militarization of Europe follows the same pattern. Increased defense spending and rearmament are justified as necessary responses to a changing security environment. In principle, this is not unreasonable.

But in practice, militarization is being driven by a political climate that rewards alarmism and discourages restraint. And without a parallel commitment to de-escalation, military build-ups can easily spiral into confrontation.

What is unfolding in the EU today is a dangerous flirtation – by political elites under pressure, facing declining influence and legitimacy, and seeking to reassert control through displays of strength. Nuclear weapons, in this context, are symbols of resolve, power, and serious intent. But they also carry risks that cannot be controlled or reversed.

Stepping back from the brink

The EU does face real challenges and existential problems. The international environment is more uncertain, and the future of transatlantic relations is not guaranteed. But the answer to uncertainty cannot be a headlong rush into nuclear brinkmanship.

A different path remains possible – one that emphasizes diplomacy, restraint, and a genuine commitment to reducing tensions. This would require political courage of a different kind: The courage to resist fear, to question prevailing narratives, and to engage with perceived adversaries rather than simply confronting them.

Whether Europe’s leaders are willing to take that path remains an open question. For now, the signs are troubling.

A bank employee hung up on Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff tried to change his address over the phone, according to an anecdote shared by a longtime friend of the Vatican leader and reported by the New York Times.

The Chicago-born Leo became the first American elected Pope when he was chosen to lead the Catholic Church in 2025.

Two months into the role, Leo, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, called his bank to update the phone number and address on his account after moving to the Vatican, Tom McCarthy said at a Catholic gathering in Illinois last week.

McCarthy, who has known the Pope for more than four decades, said Leo correctly answered the bank employee’s security questions but was told he would still need to visit a branch in person to make the changes.

“Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,” McCarthy recalled the Pope saying. “I gave you all the security questions.”

“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked, according to McCarthy.

The employee hung up, apparently believing the call was a prank.

The Pope’s brother, John Prevost, confirmed the account to CNN on Wednesday, saying Leo had answered “four or five” security questions before the teller ended the call.

“She said, ‘Oh really?’ and hung up,” Prevost told CNN, adding that the employee “just thought it was a prank.”

McCarthy said the issue was eventually resolved after another priest, the Reverend Bernie Scianna, contacted the bank president and threatened to move the Pope’s account elsewhere. The New York Times reported that one of the Pope’s provincials later visited the branch in person to finalize the changes.

Efforts by the German authorities to ban the display of Soviet flags or St. George ribbons during celebrations of the defeat of Nazism are blatant discrimination against Russia, former European Parliament Member Gunnar Beck has told RT.

A member of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Beck noted that Berlin has made no announcements banning representatives or citizens of other victorious World War II countries from displaying their own flags or national symbols during the Victory Day celebrations.

“There is absolutely no basis for such discrimination against Russia. It ignores the fact that Russia suffered by far the most casualties in its war against Germany and made the greatest single contribution to the defeat of Nazism,” Beck said, stressing that it is impossible to justify Berlin’s attempts to ignore the Soviet or Russian dimension of the WWII victory over Nazism.

“It’s indisputable. It’s obvious to any historian. The German government is obviously politicizing the issue,” the AfD politician argued.

Russia has repeatedly condemned recent efforts across Europe to ban the display of Soviet symbols during Victory Day celebrations and has accused the West of historical revanchism and trying to erase the memory of WWII and rewrite the USSR’s victory over Nazi ideology.

Moscow has also consistently sounded the alarm about the resurgence of Nazi ideology in Europe, pointing to numerous torchlit marches in Baltic states openly honoring Waffen SS veterans and Ukraine’s state-level celebrations of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed tens of thousands of Jews and Poles during WWII.

Ukraine’s most popular format for political content recently seems to be reading aloud invective-laden transcripts of Vladimir Zelensky’s closest political allies scheming about stealing in Russian. The ‘Mindich tapes’ could have serious ramifications for the government, as they purport to implicate Zelensky in unabashed corruption.

The root of the escalating graft scandal lies in an investigation that Western-backed Ukrainian law enforcement agencies conducted into Timur Mindich – a business associate of Zelensky, known as his ‘bagman’ or ‘wallet’ in Kiev – who is now a fugitive and is fighting an extradition request from his hideout in Israel.

Investigators from the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) wiretapped Mindich’s luxury apartment in Kiev – reportedly between April and July 2025, when Zelensky tried to take control of the agency and triggered a wave of mass protest and rebukes from his Western backers.

Since mid-April, the Ukrainian public has been showered with what are purportedly parts of the records, though none have been officially released by the authorities.

Are the Mindich tapes authentic and who released them?

Ukrainian political commentators broadly assume that they are. Zelensky’s office has not claimed that they are fabricated, and there are notable intersections between releases by different sources.

The ongoing wave of publications was launched on April 23 by former SAPO prosecutor Stanislav Bronevitsky. Ukrainskaya Pravda journalist Mikhail Tkach was behind a major disclosure on April 28 – which RT reviewed in detail previously – with another installment coming on May 1. Opposition lawmakers Yaroslav Zheleznyak and Aleksey Goncharenko have produced multiple Mindich tape videos – the latter reading them to an empty parliament chamber.

Why are the Mindich tapes being leaked? 

The motives behind the disclosures remain unclear. Did the investigators leak them to overcome pressure that Zelensky reportedly subjects them to behind closed doors? Did Mindich and other suspects shoot a proverbial cannon across the bow as a warning to Zelensky that they won’t sink alone?

There are some caveats, however. People in the transcript talk informally and omit context. For instance, they refer to acquaintances by their personal names or nicknames. ‘Vova’, often mentioned in the tapes, is believed to be Zelensky himself. Consequently, identification of mentioned individuals falls on the media.

What’s the bottom line?

The transcripts suggest that Zelensky’s inner circle sees indefinite war as a corporate opportunity and exerts improper influence over the government to maximize their profits, counting on their patron to protect them.

What are the most scandalous claims?

Arguably the most salacious of the latest leaks involves Mindich and Zelensky’s then-defense minister – presently the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council – Rustem Umerov discussing what they believe to be US President Donald Trump’s relations with glamorous women, while debating potential candidates to be Ukrainian ambassador in the US.

“You know who would be great? Svetka. Trump would go crazy about her,” Umerov said. He and Mindich agreed that the “curly” bombshell would make “everyone there chase her.”

This is apparently a reference to former Energy Minister Svetlana Grinchuk, appointed by her disgraced predecessor and alleged romantic partner, German Galushchenko, who like him, was forced to resign after Mindich was charged with siphoning off $100 million from state energy producer Energoatom. Grinchuk was also deputy energy minister under Galushchenko.

Mindich and Umerov debated the pros and cons of several officials who could represent Kiev’s interests in Washington, DC but agreed that Grinchuk had the best chances to get regular face time with “the old man.”

What were Mindich and Umerov plotting? 

Mindich and his group were apparently seeking political and financial leverage. For instance, they wanted their man overseeing the nationalized Sense Bank, a potential source of business credit.

Umerov, who was facing resignation at the time of the recording, was highly interested in receiving a special diplomatic appointment that would allow him free travel abroad. He was eyeing privileges similar to those enjoyed by ‘Vitya’ – apparently Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Freedom to fly to the US and back would help Umerov – whose family lives in Miami – protect Mindich’s interests, he told the businessman. 

Apparently, Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, sabotaged a planned appointment of Evgeny Korniychuk as ambassador to Germany over suspicions that the career diplomat served as an anonymous source for a Politico article in which he was criticized.

Is Mindich a power broker or a businessman?

Both. Many of the conversations were about the arms industry and Zelensky’s often-touted ‘miracle arms maker’ Fire Point, which the leaked records prove Mindich ran, with Umerov steering defense contacts his way.

One person called by his full name in the tapes is a major figure in the US – Google executive Eric Schmidt, known to be tight with the Pentagon and an influential voice on national security policy, including the arming of Ukraine.

Umerov pitched the US billionaire to Mindich as a possible business partner to whom a majority stake in Fire Point could be offered. Schmidt, according to Umerov, has the connections that Fire Point would require to access the lucrative American weapons market and “enter [Silicon] Valley.”

Do the tapes prove criminality?

Not obviously, but something shady was implied in the discussion of what Mindich and Umerov called Project 23. It may be a weapons manufacturing offshoot. Umerov reminded Mindich that somebody had given instructions not to get German arms giant Rheinmetall involved.

The two then discussed discrete funding options for “23” and how the same unnamed person may not agree to the proposal because he is skittish with his significant sums in cash.

“He gets money from everywhere. Three from here and five from there. And he has no expenses,” Mindich explained. “He pays what to his driver – $300?”

Umerov gleefully continued: “From the state budget.”

MP Zheleznyak, who highlighted this exchange, has argued that Project 23 is what the Mindich group called their ‘obshchak’.

The criminal slang term refers to a money pot that all members of a gang are obliged to donate to and which is tapped for their common interests or in case of an emergency. Safekeeping the funds is obviously a role of high responsibility and high risk for any criminal organization.

Some media outlets nicknamed Mindich ‘Zelensky’s wallet’ for allegedly playing that role.

Israeli strikes have damaged buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs and hit a commercial site in southern Lebanon despite a ceasefire, according to two videos shared by Ruptly on Thursday.

One video showed damage in Bourj al-Barajneh in the Beirut area, where what looked like a market was hit, with several nearby buildings reduced to rubble and at least one residential block heavily damaged. It was unclear which buildings were struck in the latest barrage and which had been damaged in earlier Israeli attacks.

“When the first warning arrived, we ran with our clothes,” local resident Hassan Mustafa Harb told Ruptly. “When things calmed down, we returned to our home here and found this massive destruction.”

A second video showed damage on the outskirts of Al-Saksakiyeh in the southern Tyre district, where an attack struck a commercial center. Footage showed smoke rising from debris, wrecked cars, fires still burning, blood stains on the ground, and abandoned belongings.

Eyewitness Youssef Younes said he scrambled for safety when he heard a drone fire a missile. “It was either a warning strike, or the missile did not explode,” he told Ruptly. “Moments later, we came back here to see what had happened, and then the heavy shelling began. Four or five people who were passing along the road were killed.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated he had personally approved a strike on Beirut, which he said targeted a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force.

His remarks came despite Israel and Lebanon agreeing to a ceasefire as part of a wider US truce with Iran. Israel, however, said it would continue taking “all necessary measures in self-defense” against Hezbollah. Israel also continues to occupy parts of southern Lebanon, with the Jewish state and Hezbollah exchanging accusations of violating the ceasefire’s terms.

Since the escalation in the Middle East in late February, Israeli strikes on Lebanon have killed more than 2,700 people, with thousands more wounded.

Iran’s top negotiator has mocked US President Donald Trump after he abruptly suspended American efforts to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Washington was again spreading falsehoods about ongoing talks.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf ridiculed Trump with a sarcastic one-liner: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Ghalibaf’s comments came after Trump paused ‘Project Freedom’, an operation aimed at clearing a path through the strait for more than 1,500 commercial vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf, just two days after its start. The US president, however, insisted that the decision was made based on what he described as “great progress” in negotiations and a request from Pakistan.

Ghalibaf’s ‘Fauxios’ pun was an apparent reference to the US outlet Axios, which previously reported that the US and Iran were making progress on a 14-point memorandum of understanding to end the conflict.

Axios also indicated that the White House is awaiting a response soon and could resume military action if no progress is made.

A senior Iranian official told Tasnim that Tehran has yet to officially respond to the proposal, which he said contains “some unacceptable clauses.”

“Today’s propaganda by American media is mainly aimed at justifying Trump’s retreat from his recent hostile action. Trump’s move was wrong from the beginning and should never have been carried out,” the source said.

The US has demanded the total dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear program and that Tehran hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium, as well as free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which accounted for 20% of global seaborne oil trade before the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran at the end of February.

Iran has dismissed demands to surrender enriched uranium while insisting that it has no plans to build a nuclear weapon. It has also insisted on Washington providing guarantees of non-aggression and an American military withdrawal from the Gulf.

Threats by Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO, expressed on March 27, 2026, at an investment forum in Miami, statements by J.D. Vance about Europe’s loss of its identity during an interview with Fox News on March 15, 2026, along with the refusal of European countries to directly join the aggression against Iran and participate in the adventure of the ‘military unlocking’ (and then – blocking) of the Strait of Hormuz are dividing Europe and America more than ever in the last 100 years. These developments demonstrate that European ‘strategic autonomy’, so desired by the liberals, is much closer than it seems. The main question is who will dictate the future agenda in the current toothless and frigid Europe. There are enough applicants: disgusting Brussels eurocracy, chatty and smug Gaulish sodomites and, finally, the German leadership that has grown increasingly vocal about its claims to hegemony in the Old World, while emasculating the responsibility of its ancestors for the crimes of Nazism in the public perception. Let us focus on the latter in more detail.

There is nothing new in the actions of the German leadership (first of all, the descendant of the Nazis Merz & Co). The endeavor to revise the disappointing outcomes of World War II was undertaken by the defeated state almost immediately after the end of the war. The purpose of Nazi followers was to compensate for the political, territorial, ideological and economic costs incurred as a result of the complete military defeat and collapse of German statehood. Along the way, they tried to neatly filter out the atmosphere impregnated by the spirit of Prussian militarism and the stench of National Socialist ideology. The German elites remaining in the western zones of occupation formally and quickly abandoned the legacy of Hitler, who had led his thousand-year Reich to collapse. But they had no desire to truly reject the very ideology of Nazism. Why?

The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg convicted only a small number of the top Nazi criminals. Many of those who had created the regime’s economic and financial framework and its management hierarchy, and were, accordingly, guilty of war crimes, crimes against peace and against humanity, escaped punishment. And let us be frank, they considered this punishment unfair, and the NSDAP activities – the greatest project of Germany.

In fact, the Federal Republic of Germany has seen no real denazification. Archival materials of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, including a reference on the political situation in West Germany from 1952, convincingly show that instead of its implementation, “the Western powers followed the path of justifying Nazi war criminals”.¹ The entire process, carried out with much ado, turned into an empty farce, with the exception of the liquidation of notorious pro-fascist organizations and the purification of public spaces. The Anglo-Saxons, trying to preserve the former leaders of Hitler’s military economy and the major Nazis they needed, campaigned under the slogan ‘hang the small ones – acquit the big ones’.

On April 10, 1951, the Bundestag passed a law regulating the activities of persons subject to the provisions of Article 131 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (persons subject to denazification shall not have the right to hold public office), and reinstating all former civil servants and military personnel with the preservation of posts, ranks and titles, if they were not classified as ‘main guilty’ during denazification.² On August 2, 1956, the Federal Staff Review Committee decided to allow service in the successor of the Wehrmacht – the Bundeswehr – for former SS members with a rank not higher than Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel). It may be argued that in general, the process of ridding the post-war German society of National Socialism for the main managerial and administrative sectors already ended six to ten years after the war. Let us not talk about what conversations were held in the kitchens of West Germans of that period. Everyone knows this anyway. ‘Deutschland über alles’ was the most innocent phrase said by humiliated burghers after a portion of apple schnapps.

Many of the former Nazi party members who found a place in the sun in Germany had been ‘quiet desk murderers’, party members who had set in motion the monstrous machine of genocide of the Soviet people and the Holocaust from their cozy bureaucratic offices. They made up the backbone of the civil servants of the ‘new Germany’. Heinrich Lübke, minister of food, agriculture and forestry of the Federal Republic of Germany (1953-1959) and president of the German Federal Republic (1959-1969), during the years of National Socialism worked in an architectural and engineering bureau, which was at the disposal of Albert Speer, the general building inspector for the Reich capital city. In it he was responsible, in particular, for the forced recruitment of labor from Nazi concentration camps. Hans Globke, chancellery chief of staff for Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1953-1963), held high positions in the Third Reich in the Ministry of the Interior, where he was responsible for the development of legal norms enshrining discrimination and persecution of the Jewish population, and his role in organizing the Holocaust has not yet been disclosed. Waldemar Kraft, federal minister for special affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953-1956, was the managing director of the Imperial Reich Association for Land Management in the Annexed ‘Eastern Territories’ from 1940 to 1945, was a member of the NSDAP and had the title of Honorary SS Hauptsturmführer. And these are just a few examples of the life path of high-ranking officials of the ‘renewed’ German state. From 1949 to 1973, 90 out of 170 leading lawyers and judges of the Ministry of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany were ex-members of the NSDAP, and in 1957 the share of senior officials of the ministry with a Nazi past was 77%.³ In the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1970, 53% of employees were former members of the NSDAP, and 8% of them had worked in the Ministry of the Interior in 1943-1945, when one of the top Nazi criminals, the odious Heinrich Himmler, was its head.⁴

According to the archival materials of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, as Moscow already knew in the late 1940s-early 1950s, the western zone of Germany was preparing for a war with the USSR under the auspices of the Americans and the British. In confirmation of the intensification of forced remilitarization, an intelligence message dated July 31, 1948, emphasized that the mobilization of former German officers and other military personnel was easily feasible as a result of the control system established over them.⁵ The former Wehrmacht contingent was ‘on a short leash’ of the new government, which used the military issue for purposes far from peaceful. A note from the Soviet government to the US Embassy in Moscow dated March 31, 1954, directly stated: following the path of the revival of German militarism and the creation of military groupings in Europe means ... to prepare for a new war.⁶

Thus, the idea of arming West Germany firmly reigned over the minds of the ideologists of US foreign policy. Practical steps were also taken. Under the screams of existential ‘aggression from the East’ (sounds familiar, does it not), the remilitarization of the economy was conducted. American ‘injections’ into the necessary sectors of the national economy of West Germany began immediately after the war. Before September 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany received about $9 billion. These funds were placed primarily in heavy industry and such areas that could serve the political and military goals of Washington.⁷

The updated propaganda brainwashing of the population also had a place. In July 1951, as competent authorities reported to Joseph Stalin,⁸ Chancellor Konrad Adenauer set a direct task for the ruling Christian Democratic Union: to convince the broad masses that the Germans had an alternative – either an ‘armed German’ or a ‘German subordinate to the Russian military’. It sounds like the modern horror stories of ‘civilized European technocrats’, doesn’t it?

Under the supervision of the Americans, work was also carried out in relation to ‘major personnel’. Former high-ranking Nazi officials were willingly accepted for military service in the Bundeswehr. Thus, the ex-chief of staff of the 18th Army, Lieutenant General Friedrich Foertsch, 7th Army Lieutenant General Max-Josef Pemsel, and Army Groups A and S Tank General Hans Röttiger took the posts of inspector general of the Bundeswehr, commander of the 2nd Corps of the Bundeswehr, and the first inspector of the army, respectively. The former commander of Luftflotte 5, General Josef Kammhuber, became an inspector of the German Air Force.

The Anglo-Saxons did not hesitate to use the services of fascist war-dogs, appointing them to high posts in NATO. In particular, the ex-chief of staff of Army Group South, Lieutenant General Hans Speidel, during the formation of the Bundeswehr, was appointed head of the armed forces department of the German Ministry of Defense and assumed the post of commander of the Allied NATO ground forces in Central Europe in 1957. Lieutenant General Adolf Heusinger, former acting chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht, who had participated in the development of plans for the invasion of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the USSR, and had been held at the Nuremberg Tribunal as a witness, became chairman of the NATO Military Committee in 1961. Friedrich Guggenberger, who had sunk 17 British and American ships, served for four years as deputy chief of staff in the NATO command Allied Forces in Northern Europe. The Anglo-Saxons were not very picky about former members of the SS, recognized in 1946 by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a criminal organization. For instance, Eberhard Taubert, a former SS Sturmführer and an employee of Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, was adopted as an adviser to the NATO Psychological Warfare Division.⁹

In relation to Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, as follows from a message of the Information Committee under the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs addressed to Joseph Stalin dated February 8, 1951,¹⁰ stored in the archives of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, a joint German-American PR campaign was diligently conducted to whitewash their reputation. In a conversation between Dwight Eisenhower and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer at the end of January 1951, both figures were described as “completely reliable persons” who were “opponents of not only Hitler”, but also “of the Soviet Union, and were ready to cooperate with the Western powers”. It is indicative that Eisenhower, who literally a couple of months later became the first commander-in-chief of NATO forces in Europe, said then that he had been mistaken in 1945 for considering all Germans to be Nazis and repeated that he accepted the demand for the military equality of West Germany in the system of the ‘defense of Western Europe’.

Little has changed in terms of supporting dangerous revanchist aspirations and after that, during the years of normalization of relations, detente and the so‑called ‘perestroika’. A reference on the growth of such sentiments in Germany, prepared on May 26, 1959, by the Committee for State Security (KGB) under the Council of Ministers of the USSR,¹¹ pointed to the organization of thousands of rallies of paramilitary unions and ‘resettlement organizations’ in West Germany. During such meetings, held under the auspices of the German Ministries for All-German Issues and for Displaced Persons, demands were categorically put forward for the return of the eastern regions of Germany, East Prussia and the Sudetenland. The need to “preserve the traditions of the Prussian-German army for the new German armed forces and for all German youth” was openly stated. In 1961, the famous Soviet international journalist Ernst Henri noted: “There is no old Germany, but the old German General Staff exists. There is no doubt that its chiefs are back at work on the same maps.”¹² Continuing his thought, he wrote that regardless of Germany’s situation, no matter how many wars it lost, and no matter what crushing defeats it suffered – the German General Staff invariably, methodically, carefully continued to prepare aggression plans, and it had no other intentions. Therefore, it is so easy to understand why current German politicians and generals are looking at the diverse scum symbolizing Bandera Ukraine so enthusiastically. They are simply brothers in blood and heirs to the same force: the National Socialism of Hitler’s period.

In the spirit of the chauvinistic approaches of German political thought of the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century, ingrained in the subconscious of the intellectual elite, the expert community of the Federal Republic of Germany continued to dehumanize Soviet Russia, crossing it out of the ‘civilized’ world. As the famous historian and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Vladimir Pashuto wrote, with the collapse of Nazi Germany, the interpretation of the Russian-European topic also underwent a change in the sense that Russia was turned into an enemy of integral Europe rather than of Hitler’s Europe. Its non-European fundamentals – both religious and social – were criticized. It was declared a phenomenon hostile to Europe, lacking European roots and standing outside of the history of Europe.¹³ Everything suggested that no respect should be shown towards an ‘alien’ element.

Such sentiments were not only not suppressed, but also encouraged by the Bonn authorities: the ‘cannon fodder’ for the massacre with the Soviet Union was to be motivated and was not supposed to ask unnecessary questions. It is not for nothing that the reference of the USSR KGB of July 12, 1978,¹⁴ prepared on the basis of information from the West Berlin residency, reported that there were 17 neo-Nazi organizations in this city-state with a special international legal status, with which the authorities of this political entity fought on a residual principle.

In 1987, the USSR Embassy in Bonn pointed to substantive discussions in the Federal Republic of Germany on revising attitudes towards the period of National Socialism. One of the clear demonstrations of a wide nationalist wave in the Federal Republic of Germany in those years was the growing public discussion to achieve the so-called ‘spiritual turn’.¹⁵ The slogans of ‘new patriotism’ and ‘national identity’ were launched. Intellectuals and the establishment widely manipulated calls to free the young generation of Germans (who grew up and turned into the current ‘elitarians’ and rabid militarists: Merz, von der Leyen, and Pistorius) from the burden of historical responsibility, self‑humiliation, and a complex of national inferiority and guilt. The Germans, they say, have already been punished and are aware of the abnormality of their situation, when Germany was declared “a hotbed of worldwide infection and the source of all evil in the world” for the crimes of World War II.¹⁶ Speaking on November 17, 1986, Alfred Dregger, chairman of the CDU/CSU Group in the Bundestag, said: “It is time to finally put an end to the interpretation of history imposed by the victorious powers.”¹⁷ Elaborating on this argument, he proposed to come to terms with the past and to pay tribute to all those who lost their lives – including both the victims of Nazism and German servicemen. In turn, Franz Josef Strauss, minister-president of Bavaria and chairman of the CSU, called in 1987 for ‘a return to the historically cleansed, European-oriented and healthy German national consciousness’.¹⁸ These days, we see how those shoots of virulent nationalism and chauvinism – hidden behind the fig leaf of ‘national identity, patriotism and Europeanness’ – have yielded a bountiful harvest in the form of a new German revanchism. And it is time to acknowledge that the inheritance of the Third Reich has yielded a good harvest in the FRG in the 2020s!

Today, the senior political leadership of the Federal Republic of Germany has declared Russia to be ‘the main threat to security and peace’. In Berlin, the authorities have officially proclaimed a course aimed at inflicting a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia.¹⁹ The most aggressive Russophobes, whose ancestors fought with bestial ferocity on the Eastern Front in World War II, rapturously urge ‘to show the Russians what it is like to lose a war’.²⁰ There is large-scale propaganda brainwashing of public opinion, with theses constantly being injected about the virtual inevitability of a military clash with Russia by 2029. In the first military strategy in Germany’s history, titled ‘Responsibility for Europe’, which was submitted to parliament on April 22, 2026, by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, the Russian Federation is identified as a fundamental threat to the ‘rules-based world order’. It is alleged that Moscow aims to weaken the unity of the Alliance and to undermine the resilience of transatlantic links for the purpose of expanding its influence. In this regard, attempts to establish dialogue should be suppressed, while military pressure on Russia should only be increased. In other words, the strategy of pursuing a large-scale revanche has now been officially adopted.

The brainwashing of young people through mainstream traditional media, as well as the countering of Russian ‘hybrid propaganda’, has been elevated to the level of official state policy. However, decades of strident ultra-liberal agitation are now producing the opposite effect. Disappointed by the short‑sighted decisions of the narrow-minded German leadership in both domestic and foreign affairs, the younger generation, against the backdrop of a discrepancy between official statistics and the real state of the national economy, is now swinging sharply ‘to the right’. The collapse of multiculturalism, the lack of a clear vision of the future, and the rejection of traditional values provide fertile ground for the growth of right-wing extremist movements that appeal to ressentiment towards a strong national state. It does not take much imagination to see where such willful or non-willful games will take German society.

The process of finally eliminating the political, legal and moral ‘vestiges’ of World War II in Germany has gained particular momentum following the beginning of the special military operation. It is obvious to anyone that this has simply served as a convenient excuse for drastically toughening anti-Russian rhetoric, for a theatrical fear of Russia, and for pushing bilateral relations into a frenziedly confrontational dimension. Neither Germany, nor, for that matter, the European Union as a whole, had either a cause or objective grounds to so unreservedly ‘stand up’ for Ukraine and to designate Moscow as their ‘enemy forever’ – as it was mindlessly and arrogantly stated by the little grey mouse of German foreign policy, the foreign minister with a wonderful surname, Wadephul.

Following the EU’s belligerent policy set out in March 2025 in the Joint White Paper for European Defense Readiness 2030,²¹ the German government is working to transform the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest army and accelerate its rearmament.²² Plans have been unveiled to raise the authorized strength from the present 181,000 to 460,000 active-duty servicemen and reservists. On August 27, 2025, the German government swiftly approved, without amendments, the draft law on the reform of conscription to the Bundeswehr put forward by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, based on a voluntary service principle but retaining the option of a swift return to pre‑2011 conscription.²³ Largely thanks to the alarmism of the authorities and the brainwashing of young people by state propaganda, the German leadership is now able to report an increase in the number of individuals willing to undertake voluntary military service. As of early March 2026, 16,000 people had applied to join the armed forces, 20% more than in the same period of 2025, while overall more than 5,000 recruits joined in the first quarter of 2026, marking a 14%  increase compared with the beginning of the previous year.

No expense is spared on military adventurism, as in the 20th century. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Germany’s aggregate military spending in 2024 reached $88.5 billion (+28% compared with 2023),²⁴ making it the largest in Europe. The Special Fund for the Bundeswehr, worth €100 billion, has become the primary source of financing, making it possible to bring military expenditure up to 2% of GDP. In the country’s approved 2026 budget amounting to €524.54 billion, the German authorities intend to spend over €82 billion on defense (namely, preparations for war), which represents an increase of €20 billion compared to 2025. Total military spending, in conjunction with the funds of the aforementioned special fund, is expected to amount to approximately €108 billion. At the end of February 2026, the German Ministry of Defense reported on the ‘successful results of the activities’ of the Bundeswehr procurement department in 2025, indicating that 103 major projects, each with a value of at least €25 million, had been submitted to the Bundestag for approval, that contracts amounting to an impressive €34 billion had been concluded for the procurement of in-demand weapons and military equipment, and that, within the framework of previously approved initiatives, deliveries to the armed forces had amounted to approximately €24 billion. Rolling in cash since Berlin announced the ‘change of eras’ because of the situation in Ukraine, the local defense sector expresses satisfaction that national producers have received as much as €109 billion out of the total amount spent by the country on military purposes in the years 2020-2025. Thanks to the liberalization of export controls, Germany has moved from sixth to fourth in the ranking of the largest arms exporters. Capitalizing on the specific characteristics of combat operations during the unprovoked aggression against Iran and noting the inefficiency of employing costly interceptor missiles against drones, the German defense industry is actively promoting the ‘Skyranger’ short-range air defense system, claiming that the interception of a single UAV would cost only $4,000. Apparently, only sluggishness prevented German defense industry dealmakers with their Wunderwaffe from following in the steps of the Krivoy Rog clown during his absurd tour of the Persian Gulf states in late March 2026, where he attempted to sell them interceptor missiles as part of the assistance from Bandera’s riffraff.

Many budgeted projects are multi-year, signalling to industry that Berlin views rearmament as a long-term commitment.²⁵ Plans have been made for the opening of territorial subdivisions of the Bundeswehr’s procurement department in cities in which large technical universities are located. The rate of targeted military R&D is accelerating, whereby instead of conducting research in fundamental sciences, young talents are being encouraged, following the old and bad tradition, to start thinking about how to develop deadly new Tigers, Panthers and V-weapons.

In this context, the German dependence on foreign military supplies is being ignored. Critically important components for the modern inventory of weapons are often effectively outsourced and procured abroad. Even the leading domestic arms company, Rheinmetall, serving as the primary supplier of various military equipment to the Bundeswehr, refuses to introduce its own know-how while seeking rapid profits from the fulfilment of state defense contracts. All this is compensated by purchases from other Western manufacturers, just not to lose the status of the exclusive Bundeswehr service provider to the government. In particular, during the visit of the head of Germany’s Ministry of Defense to Australia on March 26, 2026, an agreement was announced between Rheinmetall and the Australian subsidiary of Boeing (namely, the United States) on the development of autonomous unmanned combat aircraft using stealth technology, with a warhead of more than 100 kg and a range of more than 1,000 km, intended for the successors of the Luftwaffe. The degradation of German scientific thought and increased dependence on the United States is evident.

Preparations are being undertaken in an accelerated manner for a potential confrontation with the Russian Federation concerning the improvement of infrastructure. The federal state and municipal levels of government, as well as regional business, are actively inclined to fully implement the 2024 Operational Plan for Germany.²⁶ It envisages Germany becoming the main transit hub for the movement of a mass of NATO troops to the alliance’s ‘eastern flank’. Columns of Bundeswehr and allied troops within NATO will now be able to pass to German ports on the Baltic Sea and to the Polish border without prior consent. Local authorities are being strongly urged to prepare the civilian population for an armed conflict, namely: to elaborate detailed plans for the protection of critical infrastructure, to counter sabotage operations, and to equip bomb shelters.

Members of the business community are targeted by the military and political actors. According to the Operational Plan for Germany mentioned above, the main enterprises should take into account in their personnel policy the high probability of a sharp large-scale reduction in labor resources by mobilizing those fit for military service. Contrary to being mere anecdotes popularized in the USSR – namely that pasta-factory machinery could be quickly adapted for the production of 7.62 mm rounds – such scenarios are currently being implemented in Germany. Real prerequisites are being created for the rapid restructuring of civilian industry for military purposes and for the commencement of production of the defense-related product range. The Bundeswehr is hereby authorized to seize, free of charge, certain goods, equipment and machinery for its own needs.

The military-industrial complex and the German political establishment have already forged a robust lobbying alliance, a development that strengthens the role of the defense industry in the making of decisions that are most important for both the domestic and foreign policy of Germany. Humanity remembers the extremely dangerous linkage between defense industry actors and political figures in the 1930s and 1940s. Then the omnivorous attitude of the ‘merchants of death’ towards the sources of their profits, combined with their sympathies for National Socialism, plunged the world into the abyss of World War II. Having rejected pacifism as a societal value, to which preceding generations arrived only through immense tragedy, the heirs of Krupp, Thyssen and Bosch are once again eagerly undertaking government contracts for the production of military goods, without hesitating to build their enterprises upon blood. The bankers are not falling behind, having cast aside all moral taboos that once existed on the large-volume financing of the military-industrial complex – it is now considered justified to appropriate the ‘helicopter money’ that defense enterprises receive from the state. In this context, it would not be long before some of the current German financiers so ‘free’ themselves from the legacy of the past and become inspired by the prospects of a new crusade to the East as part of the ‘change of eras’ policy that they would hang portraits of Hjalmar Schacht and Walther Funk – the architects of the Third Reich’s military-economic policy. There is a famous saying from the time of the French Revolution: “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.”²⁷

Meanwhile, the general condition of Germany’s economy seems not to concern the establishment, which has chased after the geopolitical mirage of the republic’s ephemeral ‘leadership’ within the European Union. As a result of this self-distancing from domestic difficulties, the country’s GDP in 2025 rose by only 0.2% in real terms, adjusted for inflation.²⁸ The balance of trade – which is of serious importance for the export-oriented German economy – fell to 2.4% of GDP, the volume of exports decreased by 0.3% (a decline recorded for the third consecutive year), and the budget deficit for 2025 amounted to €107 billion.²⁹ The driving forces of Germany’s economy – namely the automotive, metallurgical and chemical sectors – have so far failed to overcome the crisis. Companies are recording a significant drop in profits.³⁰ Deindustrialization is spreading widely across the German federal states – the loss of jobs and the transfer of industrial production from Germany to other European countries has already become a reality. Machine-building plants, chemical factories and electronics production facilities – namely Bosch, Henkel, MAN and Mercedes-Benz – are fleeing. They are unable to remain competitive due to the high cost of electricity, the lengthening of the logistics supply chain caused by self-harming sanctions against Russia, and the high tariffs imposed by the United States. Once an industrial giant, Germany is becoming a chaotically managed workshop from which equipment is being carried off. All of this is impacting the population – consumer activity has ground to a near halt, and even beer sales in 2025 fell to their lowest level since 1993. According to statements by the chancellor, the social welfare state cannot be financed given the resources currently available in Germany.³¹ Does such a brutal reality frighten the inept and arrogant chancellor, in whom the blood of Nazi ancestors is boiling? Is he ready to confront the reality that he will not save the economy by pumping money into the national military-industrial complex, and that hundreds of billions of printed and unsecured euros will be consumed by high energy prices and an unwieldy bureaucracy? Apparently not. While promoting an anti-Russian militarist agenda, deep down he believes that the war will write off everything.

The suggestion to consider acquiring its own nuclear weapons has been cautiously introduced in the German socio-political discourse, so far, it has been done somewhat subtly and indirectly, yet insistently.³² Germany seems to no longer be satisfied with participating in NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements, the agreements between the United States and Germany that allow the Bundeswehr to use American tactical nuclear weapons in the event of military necessity; in peacetime, the weapons controlled by the United States are stored at the Büchel Air Base, Rhineland-Palatinate. The justification put forward for acquiring lethal weapons of mass destruction is painfully simplistic and overused: it is allegedly aimed at deterring Moscow’s aggressive policy in Europe. It is supposed to be a question of national sovereignty. On top of this comes uncertainty about the future of the US military presence in Germany. Berlin is eager to acquire American long-range land-based missiles at the earliest opportunity, pursuant to the 2024 agreement with the sleepy Biden administration. It is highly likely that the authorities will find suitable sites for deploying SM-6 mobile missile launch systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and Dark Eagle hypersonic boost-glide systems in one of the federal states best prepared in terms of military logistics and infrastructure, such as Rhineland‑Palatinate. There is little doubt that the Americans will seize the geopolitical moment, and Germany is solely required to provide its territory. Arrogant sheriffs from across the ocean are not bothered about the opinion of both a local population that has effectively been taken hostage and sane politicians who care about national interests and do not support the policy implemented by the German elites. The current Trump administration sees missile deployment not as a gratuitous contribution to European security but as a way to enhance its presence in a strategic location, enabling potential high-precision strikes against adversaries, and there is no need to guess who the adversaries in question are. The only question is what the scale of the US missile deployment will be, whether it will be symbolic and provisional or will disrupt the strategic stability in Europe and thereby compel us to respond directly.

For now, German officials are brainstorming the idea to create a nuclear umbrella together with the United Kingdom and France in the distant future and considering what role Germany might play. It has been reported that the initiative might receive funding, and proposals on how to divide the roles have emerged: partners are expected to provide warheads, while Germany will provide missile carriers and personnel. Meanwhile, the population is being persuaded little by little that even if Germany hypothetically bets on the nuclear capabilities of Paris and London and attempts to create a military alliance with them, this plan might not yield results. It is unlikely that Germany will put up with the traditionally cumbersome French bureaucracy and France’s insistence on retaining exclusive control over its nuclear arsenal even under joint command. The same goes for the questionable stance taken by London, which is unlikely to risk burning in a nuclear apocalypse for the sake of vague goals of transatlantic globalism. This will cast serious doubt on the justifiability of spending resources on common European strategic deterrence forces.

In this context, as it contemplates joining the ranks of nuclear powers, the German expert and scientific community proceeds from the assumption that, given the traditionally high academic standing in natural science and specialists in related fields, it is feasible to promptly acquire non-peaceful nuclear competencies. As is known, it is theoretically possible to produce weapons‑grade material from uranium purchased in the global market using facilities of a specialized enterprise in Gronau, North Rhine-Westphalia, equipped with a gas centrifuge enrichment cascade. It would take some three years to modernize the production, and then they will have it, 17 tons a year, enough to produce about 340 warheads. Besides, the research reactor at the Technical University of Munich in Garching holds highly enriched uranium.

It is important to remember that the Nazis came very close to developing an atomic bomb in the 1940s. Their goal went far beyond merely intimidating their enemies. What grandparents failed to accomplish in 1945, their grandchildren are determined to achieve in the 21st century. In this regard, there is no guarantee that Berlin will restrict its military-political approaches to using a nuclear arsenal only for deterrence. One thing is certain: a nuclear warhead in Germany, whether shared with the UK and France or its own, not only makes the country the Kremlin’s primary European target, as German media note. It constitutes a gross violation of Germany’s international obligations under Article II of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons;³³ according to its provisions, each state party to the treaty, including the Federal Republic of Germany, undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devises directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

I am convinced that, under these circumstances, the international community can and should urgently address the issue of a German nuclear program. To suppress the odious nuclear ambitions at their earliest stage, this must be followed by corresponding measures, such as intensified IAEA inspections, condemnation by the UN Security Council and legitimate international restrictive measures. Yet even this could be sacrificed on the altar of all-out revanche and the creation of a mythical Fourth Reich (Viertes Reich). The key question is, undoubtedly, how present-day German society will respond to this idea. To say the least, not all upstanding Bürger sympathize with the insane model of the Viertes Reich. However, given the inept migration policy of the current German authorities, even more surprising developments cannot be ruled out.

It is also worth noting that even the prospect of Germany acquiring nuclear weapons unequivocally constitutes a casus belli, providing grounds for the use of all appropriate response measures set out in the Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence. I would even go so far as to argue that these exercises could raise similar concerns in the United States, which advocates a new START IV with China as a party. How might it respond to the possibility of a nuclear-armed Europe led by a militaristic Germany with a nuclear capability beyond NATO control? I have a feeling that the targets encoded in Germany’s new nuclear command and control systems will extend beyond Russian territory.

Nevertheless, even if Germany does not possess nuclear weapons, the situation demands vigilance. German politicians are pursuing more than the reckless militarization of the country. The latter is part of a broader, more intricate process endangering millions of people worldwide. The current political course could lead to almost infernal scenarios. It shows an effort to realize the darkest revanchist sentiments of the German elite. These ambitions go far beyond enhancing Germany’s profile in European politics. One should not forget that Germany is the only European state to have fully annexed neighboring countries twice since World War I, stripping them of any semblance of independence and sovereignty. This pertains to the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich in 1938 (Anschluss) and the non‑forceful integration of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Under the guise of reunifying the German nation, East Germany was effectively merged into West Germany. By the way, not one of the proponents of unification, including, to our disgrace, high-ranking Soviet officials, contemplated observing generally accepted legal procedures; there was no referendum to reflect citizens’ will on this crucial issue. Present-day Germany is hardly in a position to judge the legitimacy of territorial changes in Europe and the genesis of these processes that followed World War II. The very foundation of German statehood is very questionable. All events since the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic can be assessed through the prism of the principle ex injuria jus non oritur (no legal right can arise from a wrongful act), should such a need arise. In other words, today’s Federal Republic of Germany does not even have a proper legal basis for its very existence, not to mention its absolute dependency from the outset and its horrible vassal submission to the United States. Today’s German nonentities who bashfully attempt to once again position themselves as new Führers should keep this in mind.

Upon taking power, Chancellor Friedrich Merz hit the ground running in foreign policy, suppressing the self‑preservation instinct. It appears that even pro-LGBT bipolar dreamers in Berlin are starting to grasp that Germany is about to face a crushing geopolitical defeat in Ukraine. The EU policy designed to counter the special military operation, an effort in which Germany sought to take the lead, has fallen short of all its objectives. It is highly unlikely that Germany will be able to retreat to the rear and use the Lesser Russia as a blocking unit, possibly alongside Poland, which Germany despises, if it intends to inflict significant damage on our forces.

They need to be the ones taking action. So they act. To mitigate the impact of failed geopolitical investments, Berlin aims to consolidate its position as the leading military and political power of the European Union. To repel a potential Russian invasion, pursuant to an agreement with Lithuania, Germany decided in spring 2025 to deploy the enhanced 45th Armored Brigade of the Bundeswehr near Rūdninkai, 30 km from Belarus and 160 km from Kaliningrad Oblast. The slogan Kanonen statt Butter (Guns over butter), often used with respect to Nazi policies, accurately describes the approach to financing the venture: Vilnius has committed to cover €2 billion in costs, a tremendous sum for the small Baltic state, to build the necessary infrastructure for the German contingent, and Berlin will need to allocate around €11 billion to ensure the operational readiness of the brigade, even as the German economy needs these funds to address challenges due to macroeconomic instability. The unit has been equipped with the latest Leopard 2A8 tanks, communications systems, self‑propelled artillery, etc. To enhance its combat capability, the German authorities continue to supply it with an unprecedented volume of materiel; for instance, on February 25, 2026, the Budget Committee of the German Bundestag expedited a €540 million tranche for major German innovative startup Stark Defence, in which well-known American entrepreneur Peter Thiel holds a significant stake, and Helsing, both producing kamikaze drones. The Bundeswehr plans to arm the Lithuanian outpost with advanced UAVs. Following the transfer of the NATO multinational battle group, stationed in Lithuania since 2017, to the brigade’s command in February 2026, its strength now stands at 1,700 personnel. The unit is projected to reach full combat readiness by the end of 2027. It will comprise 4,800 military personnel and 200 civilians. This marks the first deployment of regular German troops outside the FRG since World War II. The deployment has effectively established an outpost for an eventual attack in the Eastern direction. It is impossible to interpret this military build‑up, coupled with supporting long‑term infrastructure, in any other way.

Whether Germany plans to launch a new Drang nach Osten straight away, or whether it first intends to send the Eastern European countries led by Poland into potential trenches, whilst acting as a blocking unit, makes little difference to us. It is up to the leadership of Poland, which, along with the Third Reich, bears a significant share of the responsibility for the outbreak of World War II, to think who, on whose instigation and with what funding is fueling this militaristic hysteria in Poland, which Polish ultra-patriots regard as a struggle for national interests and a chance for geopolitical revanche in Eastern Europe. Could it be that the belligerent posture of the Polish elite towards Moscow is, in fact, being subtly orchestrated by Berlin, which wields enormous influence in Poland’s socio-political and information space, compelling the Polish elites to hate Russia even more, if that is even possible, in defiance of logic and national interests?

If Germany undergoes a massive rearmament, yet the Teutonic spirit ultimately gives way to reason, then the Poles should seriously ponder against whom the German military machine will then be directed. There is deep-seated historical animosity between Germany and Poland, geopolitical wounds are still raw, and, whatever politicians say, disputed territories certainly do exist. The only way Berlin can get Warsaw to drop its claims for over $1 trillion in reparations is through military action. It is no coincidence that a major NATO military exercise, ‘Steadfast Dart 26’, launched in January 2026 to practice the rapid deployment of alliance troops to the eastern flank using military transport aircraft, railway and motorized units, is taking place without the Polish Armed Forces. The wind in Europe is always changing rapidly, but the Belvedere Palace is unwilling to acknowledge this. There are only two historical paths open to Poland, as has been well established: either to be a destitute vassal of Germany or to be a partner of Russia. America is far away, and the Americans need neither Poland nor, for that matter, the rest of Europe. There is no point in deluding oneself.

Apart from hypothetical victims, such as Poland, which is supposedly still unaware of its future status and proudly bears the title of Berlin’s ally, Germany also has true, loyal friends with whom it can reminisce about days gone by and battles in which they fought alongside each other. In cooperation with its NATO trench mate, Finland, Germany is actively engaged in destructive efforts to turn the Baltic Sea into internal waters of the North Atlantic Alliance. At the summit of NATO and EU heads of state and government in Helsinki in January 2025, Berlin spearheaded the launch of a NATO patrol mission in the Baltic Sea (Baltic Sentinel) aimed at hindering the free passage of Russian vessels. Given the total lack of trust between the East and West, these extremely risky actions could today lead to the worst-case scenario.

In July 2025, Germany and the United Kingdom signed the Treaty of Kensington, which includes provisions on mutual assistance in the event of an attack, complementing the notorious Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington, as well as on the joint development of military equipment, such as fighter jets and missile systems. Needless to say which targets the missiles will be aimed at.

It is well known that the German elite is desperate to drag anyone within reach into the processes of the accelerated development of precision-guided weapons with a range of at least 1,000 km; in other words, anyone who shares the German hysteria over the Russian threat. It is no coincidence that ArianeGroup, a French-German company with considerable experience in designing rockets, has entered into negotiations on this matter with a number of European countries. Alongside Norway, Germany would like to develop a sea-based supersonic cruise missile (Super Sonic Strike Missile) with a host of European states that endorse their policies, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK; under the European Long‑Range Strike Approach project, talks are ongoing about designing and subsequently producing a land-based cruise missile with a range of over 2,000 km.

A special role in the rearmament effort has been reserved for
the ex-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It is evident that the current temporary ruler on Bankovaya Street is increasingly perceived by Germany as a reincarnation of Pavlo Skoropadsky, the ‘Hetman of the entire Ukraine’, who stayed in power on German bayonets for a few months in 1918, or as a simulacrum of the stillborn operetta-like Austrian initiative to create a ‘Ukrainian throne’ and subsequently place on it Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen (also known under the pseudonym ‘Vasyl Vyshyvany’). In other words, he is seen as a compliant conduit for the interests of external sponsors, interests that run counter to the aspirations of the Lesser Russia’s population.

Demonstrating its resolve to elevate cooperation with Kiev to the highest level across all domains, a declaration of strategic partnership between the two countries was signed in Berlin on April 14, 2026, during the visit of the ‘bloody clown’. Germany has stated its willingness to maintain unprecedented political, diplomatic and military support for Kiev, and to hold consultations on security and defense issues. Despite the well-known recent corruption scandals surrounding the so-called ‘Mindich case’, which have exposed
the all-consuming, shameless venality of the entire Bandera leadership, the Germans are ready to use their Ukrainian vassals as a cheap assembly plant for their products. The goal is to turn Ukraine into a little laboratory mouse upon which sinister experiments are conducted.

Another element of this criminal partnership will be a mechanism for regular consultations between the defense and foreign affairs chiefs, with the participation of representatives of leading defense enterprises. That may sound appealing, yet in practice it boils down to this: Ukraine is to be kept under eternal watch and to produce precisely those goods, in precisely those quantities, that its handlers dictate. A battlefield intelligence-sharing agreement has been signed, under which the Armed Forces of Ukraine will share with the Bundeswehr their experience in operating Delta software, providing real-time situational awareness of combat operations. Through this childlike trick, the de facto plan is to boost both the quantity and quality of active and former Bundeswehr soldiers and other German security personnel on the contact line. Which means that, just like in the old days, the fooled Fritzes will metamorphose into crosses once more.³⁴

In order to indulge the militaristic plans of its defense industry, the political establishment in Berlin, turning a blind eye to the worrying signals emanating from the German economy, is pumping enormous sums into arming the Kiev junta. The ‘country 404’ is to be allocated €4 billion for the purpose of intensifying bilateral dialogue in the military-technical domain. These funds are intended to expand the joint production of UAVs and medium-to-long-range drone systems, a move that, it is claimed, will result in thousands of drones being supplied to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. German company Quantum Systems has gleefully reported the establishment of two new joint ventures with Ukrainian military manufacturers of tactical reconnaissance and attack aerial vehicles and interceptor drones, WIY Drones and Tencore, to develop and mass-produce unmanned systems. In addition, cooperation in the fields of information, innovation and research will be strengthened.

All these boastful and supposedly hopeful wishes are being recited to the accompaniment of rhetoric about a common and direct threat from Russia to the freedom of the Ukrainian failed state and to the security, stability and prosperity of Germany and Europe. One cannot but notice the bragging remarks of Vladimir Zelensky, who claims that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have “the richest combat experience among all European armies.” It is worth recalling that many analysts used precisely this kind of language when writing about the Iraqi army at the end of the 1980s – back then considered the largest among the Gulf states. Where did Western‑fueled ambitions and the ‘dizziness of success’ eventually take Iraq’s leadership as early as in 1990? The answer is well known. The placeholders in power on Bankovaya Street stand every chance of following the same path.

Germany’s foreign-policy revisionism does not end at Ukraine’s borders. In its revanchist course, Berlin is blatantly sabotaging its fundamental obligations under international law. The problem in this case relates to the establishment in October 2024 of NATO’s Commander Task Force Baltic at the German Navy headquarters in Rostock (Mecklenburg‑Western Pomerania), which is de facto spying on Russian vessels. Furthermore, the very deployment of this command center on the territory of the former GDR constitutes a flagrant violation of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (Two Plus Four Treaty) of September 12, 1990, concluded between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic with the participation of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Attempts by Germany’s Ministry of Defense and its embassy in Moscow to justify Berlin’s actions by claiming that “the secondment of personnel from other NATO member states in the framework of international cooperation, in which foreign exchange and liaison officers are integrated into a German unit and therefore remain under the command of the Bundeswehr, are not covered by the Two Plus Four Treaty,”³⁵ do not hold up to serious scrutiny. Paragraph 3 of Article 5 of the aforementioned document explicitly states that foreign armed forces and nuclear weapons or their carriers will not be stationed in that (eastern) part of Germany or deployed there. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from the territory of the GDR was conditioned upon the inviolable obligation to respect such legally enshrined guarantees.

Regardless of how much official Berlin strains itself in its choice of phrasings, this constitutes, at the very least, a selective and arbitrary interpretation of the provisions of the Two Plus Four Treaty. In plain language, this is merely deception and chicanery. While disregarding the provisions of the Two Plus Four Treaty here and now, official Berlin is simply copying the egregious actions of the ‘collective West’ across the globe. And of course, this gives grounds to reflections on the fate of this document as a whole. A violation of the principle of pacta sunt servanda in such a case may lead to the invalidation of the international treaty itself. This, in turn, calls into question the legal personality of the modern German state. It is even frightening to imagine what that would mean for Germany!

The pace and shamelessness with which Western powers are today abandoning fundamental international legal instruments and principles for the sake of short‑sighted political expediency are truly appalling. One cannot shake the feeling that had the pledge made at the time that NATO would not expand ‘one inch eastward’ been duly formalized in an official document, Western powers would discard it just as readily under the current circumstances. By the same token, no one ever seriously intended to implement the Minsk agreements, whose sole purpose, based on recent public statements from Germany and France, was to buy the Kiev puppets some time. So, what then will be the value of the much-vaunted peace settlement in Ukraine?

It is difficult to determine with certainty what new Anschluss Germany is currently preparing in secret. However, it is obvious that the country is gradually sliding into a political system reminiscent of a military dictatorship embodied by the government of Chancellor Merz, which is consumed by a rabid revanchism and neo‑colonialism. Unacceptable and dangerous revisionist tendencies are gathering pace. The masks of pacifism have been cast aside: an ideological preparation of the population for grim times is underway, as the natural fear of war is deliberately lowered. At the same time, blanket indulgences for any sins are being issued in advance, thereby writing off the historical debts of the forefathers for the younger generation of Germans.

The postulate of the equal responsibility of ‘two totalitarian regimes’ for unleashing World War II has become a cornerstone of German historiography. The falsifications being promoted include the silencing of the Soviet people’s heroic feat, the division of war victims into ‘national categories’, and the denial of victory as the liberation of Europe, based on the claim that it was merely ‘a replacement of one totalitarian regime by another’. The very scale of the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS divisions on the Eastern Front is now being presented as exaggerated. In the name of false objectivity, unsubstantiated ‘witness accounts’ of mass killings on both sides are being introduced into public discourse. The question of compensation to Germans for their material damages and loss of life is being raised with ever greater frequency. Such a degree of cynicism is impossible to conceive.

In August 2025, Germany marked the 75th anniversary of the signing of the ‘Charter of the German Expellees’ at the highest political level. The document presents forcibly displaced Germans as victims of war. The focus was on the gravity of their suffering. According to this narrative, the end of the war not only failed to bring them an end to violence, but rather resulted in their humiliation, deprivation of rights and the loss of their homeland. There was no mention whatsoever of German responsibility for the outbreak of World War II or the crimes against humanity. This is a clear reference to the post‑war German attempts to counter the ‘loss of history’ and to distance themselves from damning historical episodes in the name of national unity. The message is clear: the German people were undeservedly and cruelly wronged after World War II. The suffering of the German people must be avenged in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘European solidarity’, and ‘justice’ through the use of German military force, among other means.

The process of atonement in Germany for the crimes of the Nazi regime has largely been reduced to the Holocaust remembrance; the suffering of the Soviet people is conveniently forgotten. Berlin continues to flatly refuse to recognize the siege of Leningrad and other crimes against humanity committed against Soviet civilians as an act of genocide against the peoples of the USSR.

In April 2025, a cynical decision was made to suspend Russia’s membership on the Board of Trustees of the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ foundation, which was established to pay compensation to former Ostarbeiter – forced laborers who had been deported to the Third Reich. At the same time, on the basis of the 1950 Federal War Victims Relief Act, official Berlin is paying social benefits (€5 million per year) to former servicemen of the Third Reich, SS formations, as well as to foreign collaborators, some of whom were directly involved in the illegal siege of Leningrad.³⁶

Unfortunately, the sensible voices that still exist in German society are unable to cool the dangerous bouts of military schizophrenia, amplified by a new ‘ethics’. The authoritarian-revanchist regime of Friedrich Merz has a tight stranglehold on the entire political system, keeping constructive forces away from the levers of power.

The German government’s reckless actions are endangering security not only in Central and Eastern Europe but across the whole continent. As it lacks the military capability to act independently without the direct protection of its transatlantic ‘big brother’, it is escalating tensions by whipping up hysteria and psychosis. Its objective is to draw its ally, Washington, into a potential confrontation between Europe and Russia. No matter what anyone claims, the Bundeswehr continues to rely profoundly on US military support. When it comes to operational planning at present, Germany remains deeply dependent on US space-based intelligence and strategic airlift, and must align its every move with the overarching NATO command structure. Germany cannot markedly engage in a high-intensity conflict independently without making its population bear the corresponding costs tantamount to yet another ‘total war’ and its apocalyptic fallout.

However, rationality can be shattered by militaristic bipolar mania and Teutonic greed. For the German political establishment that has lost itself in its tin-soldier games is no longer willing to be constrained by limitations of the pragmatic diplomacy of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder. Just as it did 85 years ago, Berlin is once again casting a predatory gaze eastward.

The main task for our country is to prevent the repetition of the tragedy of 1941, which means ensuring that our armed forces are kept in a state of permanent combat readiness, especially on the western borders. It is important to understand that, exactly as before June 22, 1941, the Germans are deliberately laying down a network of forward staging areas along the key operational directions. No trust should be placed in Berlin’s good sense, nor any faith that it will forever refrain from risking war. Nobody should delude themselves that the German establishment will regard itself as finally shackled by a mere slip of paper, even if a treaty outlining new principles of European security is signed.

It is no secret that an attempt is being made to impose on us the doctrine of ‘peace through strength’. Our response, then, can only be ‘the security of Russia through the animal fear of Europe’. Talks, good intentions, goodwill, and unilateral steps to build trust must not be our tools to prevent a massacre. The sole guarantee lies in forcing Germany and the ‘united Europe’ backing it to grasp the inescapable certainty of incurring unacceptable losses if they ever set in motion ‘Operation Barbarossa 2.0’. 

Our clear signal to the German elites is as follows: should the most dreadful scenario come to pass, the probability is high of at least mutual destruction, and, in reality, the end of European civilization while our own existence continues. Germany’s much-vaunted industry will not only suffer serious damage. It will face total destruction. Its economy will collapse alongside it, and no one will ever restore it. Simply because the remaining sane and skilled professionals will flee – some to Russia, some to the United States, some to China and to other Asian countries. It appears that only by spelling out such grave consequences will the insolent heirs of the Nazis and their German partners be brought to their senses, and millions of lives be saved on both sides of the front line.

A militaristic Germany is of no use to a shrivelled and feeble-minded Europe, which would like to preserve at least some political subjectivity in a new multipolar world. Such a Germany holds no value for us in the future either; it is both dangerous and unpredictable. For Berlin, only two options remain. Option one is war and the ignominious burial of its own statehood, devoid of any prospect of a new ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’. The second is a return to sobriety and subsequent geopolitical recuperation, accompanied by a fundamental reorientation of its foreign policy through a difficult but indispensable dialogue. We can accept both outcomes. The next move is up to Germany. And I hope we shall not hear those all-too-familiar lines: “If I am destined to perish, let the German people perish as well, for they have proved themselves unworthy of me.”³⁷

¹ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 67661. Volume 2. P. 280-283.

² https://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav?startbk=Bundesanzeiger_BGBl&jumpTo=bgbl151s0307.pdf#/text/bgbl151s0307.pdf?_ts=1769096027195

³ Germany’s post-World War II government was riddled with former Nazis // Business Insider. 10 October 2016. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germany-post-world-war-ii-government-2016-10

⁴ Postwar West German ministry ‘burdened’ by ex-Nazis // Financial Times. 10 October 2016. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/3b5abe60-8efc-11e6-a72e-b428cb934b78

⁵ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 43274. Volume 1. P. 122-123.

⁶ Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation. Fund 06. Inventory 13. Folder 2. File 9. P. 98-107

⁷ Pastusyak L. Galvanization of the aggressor. The role of the United States in the remilitarization of West Germany. / Abridged translation from Polish by Panfilova A. Moscow: International relations. 312 p, P. 21-38.

⁸ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 45513. Volume 3. P. 231-234.

⁹ Stefano Delle Chiaie, Stuart Christie. Black papers no. 1. First published in Britain, 1984 by Anarchy Magazine, Box A, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E17QX in association with Refract Publications, BCM. p.40.

¹⁰ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 45513. Volume 2. P. 70-73.

¹¹ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 83024. Volume 2. P. 69-72.

¹² Henry E. Notes on the history of the modern era / [Foreword. Mileikovsky A]. Moscow: Nauka, 1970. 430 p., P. 153-154.

¹³ Pashuto V. Revanchists as pseudo-historians of Russia. Moscow: Nauka, 1971. 157 p., P. 48-51.

¹⁴ Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. File 135123. Volume 2. P. 218-228.

¹⁵ Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation. Fund 757. Inventory 32. Folder. 184. File 36. P. 11-18.

¹⁶ By the way, the last German chancellor to attend the Victory Parade in 2010 in Moscow was Angela Merkel. In a conversation with me, she then admitted that making the decision to visit Moscow during those holidays was an extremely difficult choice.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Attempts to inflict strategic defeat on Russia are counterproductive – envoy to Germany. TASS. 11 November 2025. Available at: https://tass.ru/politika/25593661?ysclid=mkqhlpeax8285374522

²⁰ Report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Regarding the Actions (or Inaction) of the Authorities of Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan Resulting in Destruction and Falsification of History, Justification of Fascism and its Accomplices (Report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2025). Available at: https://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/doklady/2048734/

²¹ Joint White Paper for European Defense Readiness 2030. Brussels, 19 March 2025. Available at: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/document/download/30b50d2c-49aa-4250-9ca6-27a0347cf009_en?filename=White%20Paper.pdf

²² Merz has stated that the Bundeswehr should become the strongest army in Europe, TASS. 14 May 2025. Available at: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/23940851

²³ The German government has established a new model of military service, Rossiyskaya Gazeta. 27 August 2025. Available at: https://rg.ru/2025/08/27/pravitelstvo-germanii-opredelilo-novuiu-model-voennoj-sluzhby.html?ysclid=mkqopaybsb354433843

²⁴ Trends in world military expenditure, 2024. SIPRI. Available at: https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/2504_fs_milex_2024.pdf

²⁵ Germany’s Path to Kriegstüchtigkeit: The 2026 Defence Budget. Atlas Institute for International Affairs. 19 December 2025. Available at: https://atlasinstitute.org/germanys-path-to-kriegstuchtigkeit-the-2026-defence-budget/

December 19, 2025

²⁶ Operational Plan for Germany. A core military element of overall defense. Available at: https://www.bundeswehr.de/en/organization/bundeswehr-joint-force-command/missions/operational-plan-for-germany

²⁷ ”They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing” (French).

²⁸ Gross domestic product (GDP). Federal Statistical Office. Available at: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economy/National-Accounts-Domestic-Product/Tables/gdp-bubbles.html?nn=2112

²⁹ After two years of recession, Germany’s economy grew 0.2% in 2025. Interfax. 15 January 2026. Available at: https://www.interfax.ru/business/1067756

³⁰ German autos sector slashes jobs as economic woes bite. CNBC. 26 August 2025. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/german-autos-sector-slashes-jobs-as-economic-woes-bite.html

³¹ Merz acknowledged that Germany cannot maintain the existing social welfare system any longer. TASS. 30 August 2025. Available at: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/24912409

³² Germany debates issue of nuclear weapons. Deutsche Welle. 15.03.2025. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-debates-issue-of-nuclear-weapons/a-71924424

³³ Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Available at: https://www.un.org/ru/documents/decl_conv/conventions/npt.shtml?ysclid=mlup3xtbk698465135

³⁴ Like wild animals, with savage howls
They lunge into a roaring stream.
This is Hitler, row by row,
Chasing the ‘Fritzes’ toward the East.
Here, every window hides a sniper;
Here, the bushes conceal death;
Here, swallowing the stranger’s land
The misled ‘Fritzes’
Metamorphose into crosses.
<…>

The Metamorphosis of the ‘Fritzes’. TASS No. 0640, 1943. Soviet war poster by the Kukryniksy (Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov), poem by Demyan Bedny. From the TASS Windows Collection (Okna TASS). The Vladimir Dal State Museum of the History of Russian Literature. Available at: https://goslitmuz.ru/collections/367/?ysclid=mobmvloh1l222634574#gallery-15

³⁵ Germany claims new NATO maritime headquarters does not violate the ‘2+4’ Treaty. TASS. 22 October 2024. Available at: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/22193115?ysclid=mky2vrl38w15265573

³⁶ ”FragDenStaat: Germany Pays Pensions to Nazi Henchmen and Collaborators”. TASS 23 January 2025. Available at: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/22952639?ysclid=mky31pnr21551705012

³⁷ Cited from: One Hundred and Forty Conversations with Molotov (F. Chuev, S. Kuleshov afterword). Moscow: TERRA Publ., 1991. 623 p., illus., p. 45.

US President Donald Trump has signed a new national counterterrorism strategy that describes Europe as both a target and “incubator of terror threats,” while also singling out drug cartels and violent left-wing extremists as major dangers to America.

The 16-page document, released by the White House on Wednesday, says Washington’s counterterrorism policy will be guided by “America First,” “common sense,” and “Peace through Strength.”

The strategy lists three major categories of terrorist threats facing the US: “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”

A separate section is devoted to “wealthy NATO allies” that are said to have turned Europe into a permissive environment for “alien cultures” plotting attacks against both Europeans and Americans.

“The world is safer when Europe is strong, but Europe is greatly threatened and is both a terror target and an incubator of terror threats,” the document states. “It is unacceptable that wealthy NATO allies can serve as financial, logistical, and recruitment hubs for terrorists.”

“As the birthplace of Western culture and values, Europe must act now and halt its willful decline. It is clear to all that well-organized hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals,” the document reads. It also warns that “the more these alien cultures grow, and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed.”

Beyond Europe, the counterterrorism strategy says the US will continue military and law-enforcement campaigns against cartels and transnational gangs designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

The document also identifies Iran as the greatest Middle Eastern danger to the US, stating that operations such as Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury will continue until Iran is “no longer a threat.”

A US federal judge has unsealed an alleged suicide note written by Jeffrey Epstein, nearly seven years after the disgraced financier died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

The note was reportedly found in July 2019 by Epstein’s then-cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, after Epstein was discovered injured in what officials later described as a failed suicide attempt. Tartaglione, a former police officer later convicted of quadruple murder, said he found the note tucked inside a book and gave it to his lawyers.

“They investigated me for months – found nothing!!! So 15-year-old charges resurface,” the barely legible handwritten note appears to read.

BREAKING

A federal judge has unsealed a purported suicide note written by Jeffrey Epstein, which was reportedly found by his former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, after Epstein’s July 2019 suicide attempt.

The note had been under seal for years.

(Link below) pic.twitter.com/JveOpZhkSi

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 6, 2026

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye. What do you want me to do – burst out crying!! NO FUN – NOT WORTH IT!!” it adds.

Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York in August 2019. His death was officially ruled a suicide, though it has continued to fuel public scrutiny and conspiracy theories because of his connections to wealthy and politically powerful figures.

While his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was later convicted of sex-trafficking offenses, none of his other high-profile contacts have been charged with any crimes in connection with Epstein’s case.

The US military has fired on and disabled an Iranian-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman after President Donald Trump threatened to resume the bombing campaign unless Tehran agrees to end the war on Washington’s terms.

US Central Command said the unladen tanker, identified as the M/T Hasna, was attempting to sail toward an Iranian port on Wednesday in violation of Washington’s naval blockade, which remains in force despite the president’s abrupt decision a day earlier to pause Project Freedom, a military operation to move ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

US forces issued multiple warnings before an F/A-18 Super Hornet launched from the USS Abraham Lincoln fired several 20mm cannon rounds at the vessel’s rudder, preventing it from continuing toward Iran, according to CENTCOM.

“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump remained optimistic, telling PBS later on Wednesday that there is “a very good chance” the war could end before his planned trip to China. He added, however, that if it does not, the US will “go back to bombing the hell out of them.”

An RT source in Pakistan said progress in the peace process remains “somewhat slow,” with several unresolved issues still under discussion.

Iranian military officials struck a defiant tone before reports of the tanker incident emerged. Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, the spokesman for the Iranian Armed Forces, warned that if Washington uses the talks as a cover for further aggression, Iran will respond decisively and deliver a “humiliating defeat.”

St. George Orthodox Cathedral in the Syrian city of Al-Hasakah has reopened its doors following a four-year restoration.

The reconstruction of one of the largest Syriac Orthodox churches in the region began in June 2022, after surveyors identified structural damage caused by a combination of age, weather conditions, and years of war. The restoration project included repairs to the walls and ceilings, as well as the cathedral’s roof, interior and exterior decorative elements, electrical systems, and sewage systems, according to Syria’s SANA state news outlet.

Patriarch Mar Ignatius Aphrem II Karim attended the consecration ceremony on Tuesday, cutting the ribbon to officially reopen the cathedral. Addressing attendees, he said, “Christians have resided here on their ancestral lands for thousands of years.”

“Despite mass migration and the community’s declining numbers, Christians will continue to live here, restore churches, and build new ones, as it is our duty to send a message to our children that we are here to endure,” the Syriac Orthodox patriarch said.

“There is also a message to the world reflecting the resilience of the Syrian people in preserving life, demonstrating that life will always triumph over death.” 

In the intervening years, the Christian community in the Middle Eastern country has fallen victim to targeted terrorist attacks and massacres at the hands of Islamist militants, including Islamic State and Al-Qaeda offshoots. Multiple churches and temples have also been deliberately destroyed. As a result, many members of the community have fled the war-torn country, with some estimates indicating that the number of Christians has fallen by more than 80%.

Antigua and Barbuda has sworn in a new government under revised constitutional rules that for the first time removed allegiance to the British monarch from the official oath of office.

The twin-island Caribbean state gained independence from Britain in 1981 but remained a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with the British sovereign serving as head of state.

Tuesday’s swearing-in followed a constitutional amendment approved by Parliament late last year removing references to King Charles III and his heirs from the oath of allegiance. Under the revised wording, elected officials now pledge loyalty to Antigua and Barbuda, its constitution and its laws.

The ceremony came days after Prime Minister Gaston Browne secured a fourth consecutive election victory, extending his party’s more than decade-long hold on power. The election was called nearly two years ahead of schedule by Browne to seek a fresh mandate amid global economic uncertainty and resulted in a landslide victory for his Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party, which secured 15 of the country’s 17 parliamentary seats.

Fifteen out of 56 countries in the Commonwealth still recognize the British monarch as sovereign. Barbados became the most recent Caribbean nation to become a republic in 2021 while remaining within the Commonwealth.

Debate over the monarchy’s future has also intensified in Britain. A 2025 British Social Attitudes survey found support for the institution had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1983, with just 51% in favor of keeping it.

Childcare workers in Wales have been told to call police on children as young as three if they are suspected of “racist” behavior, according to a new official guidance backed by the Labour government.

The document, produced by Diversity and Anti‑Racist Professional Learning (DARPL), an organization that has received over £1.3 million ($1.7 million) from the Welsh government, advises childcare workers to assess whether a child’s behavior could be deemed a “hate crime” and, if so, to call authorities.

The guidance applies to children aged 12 and under, even though the age of criminal responsibility in Wales is ten. Staff are told to record whether the alleged racism is “child to child,” “adult to child,” or “systemic.” Workers are also encouraged to assess their own “white privilege” and audit toys, books, dolls, posters and even snacks to ensure an “anti‑racist stance is visible.”

The guidance is part of the Welsh government’s wider plan to make Wales an “anti-racist nation” by 2030. Other projects under the initiative have included spending £10,000 ($13,500) to “decolonize” Welsh cakes and museums.

Last year, the Times reported that some 12,000 Brits were being arrested each year for social media posts deemed to be potentially “offensive” or threatening. This has included a number of high-profile arrests such as of comedy writer Graham Linehan for posting gender-critical tweets last year.

Meanwhile, British authorities have continued to release violent criminals over fears of being labelled racist. In February, a public inquiry revealed that mental health workers had released Valdo Calocane, a violent paranoid schizophrenic, over concerns related to the “over-representation of young black males in detention.” In 2023, Calocane went on to stab three people to death and ran down several pedestrians in a stolen vehicle.

Keir Starmer’s approval rating has plummeted to the second lowest in modern British history, with the gap between disapproval and approval exceeding 50 points. The Labour Party has also been losing voters over its continued failure to combat the flow of illegal boat migrants into the UK, address grooming gangs, and deport migrants who commit serious crimes.

Yellow and blue smoke rose, and out of it appeared a pair of breasts with “RUSSIA KILLS” written across bare skin. The performance was optimized for the press preview circuit, providing free self-pleasuring material for the Ukrainian-flags-in-bio crowd and their patriarchy-fighting-for-easy-body-access comrades alike.

The Venice Biennale! A handful of balaclava-wearing half-naked performance artists from Pussy Riot and FEMEN barricaded the Russian pavilion for all of 30 minutes to protest against its opening in support of Ukraine. Nadya Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot’s greatest hits machine, grumbled that she had to sneak in under an assumed name because the organizers wouldn’t book her table. Mission accomplished: The world’s most pretentious artsy crowd got another virtue-signal photo op – cheeky dose of solitary-viewing fuel for the right hand included. It would be best described as museum-grade thirst. A brief deliberate detour into bedroom-Pulitzer territory.

Watching organizations that claim to fight the patriarchy deploy the patriarchy’s oldest currency is quite ironic. Their weaponry doesn’t consist of arguments, intellectualism or difficult work of political thought: They offer up bodies for display, courting the male gaze they claim to loathe. Whether there is a slogan written across naked breasts or not, the ask is the same as it always has been: Look at me, look at my flesh. The patriarchy, being neither stupid nor ungrateful, obliges.

Here is what makes this particularly funny, if you have the stomach for it. FEMEN was founded in 2008 after its founder became aware of Ukrainian women being duped into going abroad and being sexually exploited. Its original slogan was ‘Ukraine is not a brothel’. It protested sex tourism, trafficking, and prostitution – the industries that were consuming Ukrainian women’s bodies for foreign money. That was the mission. Fast-forward to Venice 2026, and we’re observing the same movement stripping for the cameras of foreign journalists at a European art fair, making sure the lighting is good, giving the gentlemen of the international press something to look at.

Though to call this a fall from grace would be to misread the CV. Before Pussy Riot there was an art collective called Voina: A pregnant Tolokonnikova among couples having sex in a state biology museum days before the 2008 presidential election – the action was titled ‘F**k for the Heir Puppy Bear’. Then a supermarket chicken, inserted into a vagina in protest at the police state. Then a giant phallus, painted on a drawbridge in St. Petersburg directly opposite the FSB headquarters. The body, provocative; provocation through the body, the body as the only argument ever really being made.

The Ukrainian feminist scholar Oksana Kis noticed in 2012, when this was all still nascent. “Femen has nothing to do with feminism whatsoever,” she said. “When public nudity becomes the only way to deliver a message, it’s more than strange. And the message itself seems to get lost while media focus on their nakedness.” She would probably need stronger language now. No one is subverting the patriarchy by giving it what it wants and calling the transaction resistance. You are on your knees, sisters. The pink smoke is a nice touch, though.

While FEMEN was founded in Kiev, it is now headquartered in Paris. Pussy Riot’s most prominent members have lived in the West for years. The people staging Ukraine’s grief for the Biennale cameras left Ukraine and Russia long ago and have been performing it for Western audiences ever since. This week’s Biennale delivery was a service rendered to the European cultural establishment, which requires regular injections of morally legible suffering to justify its own self-image.

What no one is asking is whether any of this has anything to do with Ukraine, and whether this really is the representation the Ukrainians – and especially Ukrainian women – want.

Before we get to politics, there is the simple matter of sociology. A Razumkov Center survey found that 83% of Ukrainians believe a woman’s most important task is caring for home and family, while 78% think women are more likely than men to be guided by emotions in decision-making. As recently as 2026, the belief that a man should fully provide for his family remained the one gender pillar still supported by a majority across all Ukrainian age groups – at 69%. World Value Survey data from 2022 found that only 10% of Ukrainian women in couples reported being the breadwinner – a strong sign of conformity to traditional gender roles. The ‘Berehynia’ – a folkloric hearth mother, protector of the home – has gained considerable symbolic traction in post-Soviet Ukrainian identity, with the Orthodox Church actively reinforcing traditional gender roles alongside it. This is the portrait of a country whose grief is being performed in Venice. 

The actual polling data grows more embarrassing the further in you go. As of 2023, 39% of Ukrainians oppose civil partnerships, with only 28% in favor. 42% oppose same-sex marriage legalization outright. The civil partnership bill has sat stalled in parliament for three years, blocked not by the Russians but by Ukrainian legislators who answer to Ukrainian voters. The constitution, unchanged since 1996, defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Ukraine put an EU accession roadmap on paper in May 2025 and included LGBTQ legislative targets in it, because that is what you do when Brussels is writing the checks. Can we really say that the Ukrainian people freely subscribed to the Western vision of a liberal future? Have they been tricked into an ideological box where any jailbreak points are considered high treason? We already have the examples of Hungary and Poland, countries constantly being punished by Brussels for listening to their citizens’ conservative preferences.

The result is a country at war not only with Russia but with significant portions of its own past, its own population, its own internal complexity.

Brussels loves this version of Ukraine because it demands nothing in return. The exported Ukraine – topless, sloganeering, OnlyFans-adjacent, eternally photogenic in its suffering – requires only that you feel good about your flag emoji and hit subscribe.

Meanwhile, the Biennale president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, held his ground with the only argument that should have mattered – that art is a neutral space – but he forgot that nothing is neutral when the Western establishment controls the invoice. 

The pink smoke cleared. The journalists filed their copy. The right hands have been satisfied. Tolokonnikova did not hear back from the Biennale. Somewhere in Ukraine, the war continued. The bodies there do not have slogans written on them. They are just bodies.

The protesting women have lived in Paris for years, and the country they claim to represent is fighting a war that was at least partly produced by the decision to treat its own cultural complexity as a problem to be eliminated rather than a reality to be navigated. What we saw at the Biennale was European moral ‘high-ground’ display, funded by European money, performed by people who left, for an audience ready to flee to the next big thing.

A photograph appearing to show an Israeli soldier placing a cigarette in the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary in southern Lebanon has sparked outrage online. 

The image, which surfaced on Wednesday, was reportedly taken in the predominantly Christian village of Dibil, near the border with Israel, and uploaded to social media by IDF soldiers.  

In a statement to RT, the IDF said it views the incident “with utmost severity” and that the soldier’s conduct “completely deviates” from its values. The IDF added that the photo was taken several weeks ago and that “command measures” will follow a formal probe, stressing that it respects all holy sites and religious symbols. 

It is the latest in a series of actions widely seen as showing disregard for Lebanon’s Christian community.  

In April, video from the same village showed an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ in the face with a large mallet during the ongoing ground operation in southern Lebanon. The crucifix was later photographed with its face destroyed alongside the biblical quote, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” posted on the town’s official page. 

Christian communities have reported a string of incidents at religious sites in recent years involving Israeli forces. In 2023, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza hit a building next to the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, the enclave’s oldest Christian shrine, killing at least 18 people. In 2025, shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell damaged Gaza’s Holy Family Church, the territory’s only Catholic parish, killing three. 

Last month, a Catholic nun was assaulted in broad daylight in Jerusalem, in what Church officials described as part of a pattern of harassment against Christians in the Holy Land.  

The European Union should shield the International Criminal Court from US sanctions linked to its case against Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said.

In 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged atrocities against Palestinians in the enclave by the Israel Defense Forces.

The ICC’s jurisdiction is currently recognized by 125 countries. However, the US and Israel are not signatories to the Rome Statute.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Sanchez wrote that “sanctioning those who defend international justice puts the entire human rights system at risk.”

“The EU cannot remain idle in the face of this persecution,” the prime minister charged, adding that he had asked the European Commission to “activate the Blocking Statute to protect the independence of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations, and their actions to end the genocide in Gaza.”

These were followed up last June and August, with Washington restricting more ICC judges and prosecutors from access to the US financial system.

Spain has been among the most vocal EU critics of Israel. Commenting on Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon last month, Sanchez described the IDF’s actions as “intolerable,” and accused Netanyahu of displaying “contempt for life and international law.” Madrid also called on the EU to suspend the bloc’s association agreement with Israel.

Spain has also criticized the US-Israeli war against Iran, denying Washington permission to use its joint military bases. In response, Trump threatened to suspend all trade with Madrid.

Sanchez, however, doubled down on his condemnation of Washington’s actions, stating in March that his country was “not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world simply out of fear of reprisals.”

A hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean has caught global media attention and triggered a lot of COVID trauma. The Dutch-flagged passenger ship the MV Hondius was cleared on Wednesday to dock in the Canary Islands, after three passengers were evacuated at Cape Verde.

Seven people aboard the MV Hondius have fallen ill with hantavirus since the vessel left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1: three people have died, one is critically ill, and at least three others have symptoms, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

What is hantavirus?

Hantaviruses are a family of viruses that cause disease in humans, usually hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HPS). They are named after the Hantan River in Korea, where scientists first identified the pathogen when UN troops deployed along its banks fell ill with HFRS.

The ‘Andes strain’ circulating aboard the MV Hondius is typically found in Argentina and Chile, and causes HPS, rather than the less-deadly HFRS.

What are the symptoms of hantavirus?

Patients suffering with HPS may exhibit flu-like symptoms, including fever, extreme fatigue, muscle aches, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, or shortness of breath. As the disease progresses, patients can develop an elevated heart rate, irregular heartbeat, hypertension, and buildup of fluid in the lungs and chest cavity.

How is hantavirus spread?

Hantaviruses are carried by rodents, and spread to humans through contact with their droppings, urine, or saliva. Different species of rodents carry different hantaviruses: in the case of the Andes strain, it is carried by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat.

According to the WHO, the Andes strain is the only hantavirus that can be transmitted from human to human. “When it occurs, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members or intimate partners,” the organization stated on Wednesday.

How did the virus get on the cruise ship?

Argentinian officials have told the Associated Press that they believe a Dutch couple contracted the virus while bird watching at a landfill site in Ushuaia before boarding the ship. As an investigation is ongoing, the officials insisted on remaining anonymous.

According to the ship’s operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, there are a total of 149 passengers and crew on board the vessel. This figure includes 23 British citizens, 17 Americans, and 13 Spaniards. One Russian and five Ukrainians, all crew members, are aboard the ship.

How deadly is hantavirus?

Hantaviruses infect between 10,000 and 100,000 people globally per year, according to the WHO. Fatality rates vary from strain to strain: so-called ‘old world’ European and Asian strains kill less than 1% of those infected. ‘New world’ North and South American strains kill up to 50%. The Andes strain has a fatality rate of 40%.

Have hantavirus outbreaks happened before?

Hantavirus outbreaks rarely make the news in Asia and Europe, where fatalities are relatively rare. However, ‘new world’ strains have caused panic ever since they were first identified in 1993. After a “mystery flu” caused 33 cases – 17 fatal – of HPS in the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, scientists established that hantaviruses in the western hemisphere are far deadlier than their ‘old world’ cousins.

A 2012 outbreak in California’s Yosemite National Park infected 10 people and killed 3; a cluster of cases in California and New Mexico last year killed four people, including Betsy Arakawa, wife of Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman; and localised outbreaks are common in Argentina. There were 86 confirmed hantavirus cases in Argentina last year, leading to 28 deaths.

Could hantavirus have escaped a lab?

Unlike the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no evidence to suggest that the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius originated in a research laboratory. However, hantavirus samples have escaped a lab before. In 2011, more than 300 vials of Hantavirus, Hendra virus, and Lyssavirus went missing from the Queensland Public Health Virology Laboratory in Australia.

The “major biosecurity breach” was not acknowledged by the lab until 2023, and an investigation was launched the following year. Australian Health Minister Tim Nicholls said at the time that it was unclear whether the samples had been “lost or otherwise unaccounted for,” and the investigation is ongoing.

Is there a hantavirus vaccine?

There is currently no widely available hantavirus vaccine. While vaccines against two strains of the virus that cause the less deadly HFRS exist in China and Korea, none have been approved in Europe, and testing on a vaccine against HPS-causing strains is in its infancy.

There is no specific treatment or cure for hantavirus, and hospital care mostly focuses on managing symptoms and improving patients’ chances of survival by providing oxygen, mechanical ventilation, or dialysis in severe HFRS cases.

Should I be worried about hantavirus?

No, at least according to the WHO. At this stage, “the risk to the rest of the world is low,” WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on Wednesday. Hantavirus spreads slower than Covid-19, making containment easier, and scientists believe that people who are infected but asymptomatic do not easily transmit the virus.

As of Wednesday afternoon, everyone remaining on the boat is asymptomatic, Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia told reporters. Once the MV Hondius reaches the Canary Islands, anyone not showing signs of illness will be repatriated, she added.

The EU’s latest summit of its leaders had one objective: to show how the rest of the West is moving on while the US under President Donald Trump is neck-deep in a relationship drama. Right now it’s with Iran, but before that it was Venezuela. And it looks like Cuba may be next.

Until now, the EU has been acting like they’re in an on/off relationship while still keeping their toothbrush in Trump’s bathroom because it wasn’t quite ready to make a clean break. It still isn’t. But now it’s found one of America’s exes willing to come hang out at slumber parties so they can dish to each other about him on the down-low. About how they’re all working together now as besties and leaning on each other to move on without him, making him big mad.

Enter Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said at the EU meeting in Armenia that the “international order will be rebuilt… out of Europe.” It would be helpful if he, or someone, anyone who thinks they’re in the driver’s seat of this so-called world order, could actually define it for the rest of us. Because the paying public wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what we’re financing. Granted, there’s no better way to assure compliance than to avoid defining any terms.

It was just a few months ago in Davos that Carney was saying that the international order was a scam. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said to rapturous applause from the exact same people who had, until that moment, treated the notion as gospel.

So Carney became the first non-European leader to be invited to an EU political community summit. Where he was promptly mugged by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola with a request to speak to the EU parliament almost before he could disembark onto the tarmac. Because the EU can’t organize pints in a pub, never mind a coherent strategy. So it would be great if he could do some of the heavy lifting as everyone else nods while leaning over their laminated briefing papers.

Carney is smart enough to go along with it. He’s walking around with all the air of a chick with double D’s preaching unity and moral values while European leaders nod and drool over the assets. Because everyone knows what’s under that modest turtleneck and demeanor: sweet, sweet energy and minerals.

“Bound by a shared history and common values, Canada and Europe are natural partners,” Carney said at the summit. Whatever, bro. Get that bag! No one’s looking at your values. They’re just being polite.

Trade diversification for Canada away from the US is long overdue, and it’s clear that Carney sees a rare opportunity to leverage the EU’s rupture with both the US and Russia to cash in. It’s about time.

But the concern for Canadians is that he gets a little too chummy with their ideology while he’s at it. We’re talking here about the same guy who published an opinion piece in a Canadian national newspaper during the Freedom Convoy protests against Liberal government Covid restriction overreach (officially admonished by the courts), and suggested they were stooges of foreign interests – a bold assumption later officially denied by Canadian intelligence.

So the concern is that Carney is still too easily prone to bandwaggoning. And the EU is just one giant nonstop ideological tailgate party. For instance, what exactly does Carney mean by “digital services” cooperation with the EU? It’s not a stretch to imagine moves toward a digital panopticon that controls movement, resources, and behavior, when Covid already gave governments a trial run for that kind of social management – particularly in an era of increased dissent as a result of misguided leadership and institutional corruption and self-dealing.

Here’s hoping that Carney can at least show the EU how to use globalism as rhetorical cover while still pivoting toward the self-interest of its own people. Otherwise, it serves no practical purpose at all. It’s an abandoned shopping mall with flickering fluorescent lights still flickering, escalators still humming, muzak still echoing through empty corridors. Carney should be leading the charge in slipping out the back carrying whatever value remains – to prepare it for the wrecking ball.

The New York Times has been sued by a US government agency over allegations that its diversity policies led to discrimination against a white male employee in a newsroom promotion decision.

The lawsuit, filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday, centers on the appointment of a deputy real estate editor in 2025. The agency alleges that the newspaper violated federal law by passing over the employee because of his race and sex.

According to the complaint, the senior editor, who had worked at the paper since 2014, was more qualified for the position but was excluded from the final round of interviews. 

The EEOC said the decision was influenced by the newspaper’s publicly stated diversity goals, including a 2021 initiative aimed at increasing the number of women and people of color in leadership positions. “Every candidate who advanced through to the final interview process was not a white male,” the agency said.

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said federal law “does not allow race or sex-based employment decisions,” adding that there is “no diversity exception” to the anti-discrimination rules.

The NYT rejected the allegations, calling the case politically motivated and vowing to “vigorously” defend itself in court. Company spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said the newspaper’s hiring practices are merit-based and that “neither race nor gender played a role” in the appointment. 

Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at rolling back DEI initiatives in the federal government and regulated industries. A number of major corporations, including Walmart and Google, have also scaled back or removed DEI commitments from public materials and company policies.

In September, Trump filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the NYT, accusing it of conducting a smear campaign against him and favoring Democrats in its coverage. Trump claims that the newspaper has misrepresented him for years.

With the smoke and blockades disguising what’s actually happening in the Strait of Hormuz, Rick Sanchez decided to shed some light on the situation.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday paused Project Freedom – the military operation launched a day earlier to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz – citing the “tremendous military success” of the campaign.

However, Rick’s assessment is that Tehran still holds the strategic edge. Take a look.

The global aviation shock triggered by the US-Israeli attack on Iran and resulting fuel shortages is a harbinger of even “more severe shocks” that will rock other sectors of the global economy, Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev has warned.

The official, who serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, issued the warning on X on Wednesday. Dmitriev reposted an article by the Kobeissi Letter on the dynamics of the aviation sector shrinkage, which has happened at “an unprecedented pace” already so far in May.  

Over the past two weeks, airlines worldwide have cut 2 million seats and cancelled some 12,000 flights, according to the outlet. Turkish Airlines and Air China combined accounted for over a million seat cancellations, while Lufthansa took the lead in flight cancellations, accounting for roughly a third of the figure.  

“As predicted, the global aviation shock is spreading quickly and is a HARBINGER of the more severe shocks to come in other sectors,” Dmitriev wrote.  

Asked by an X user whether a new COVID-style “lockdown 2.0” was coming, the Kremlin envoy responded affirmatively, suggesting the potential restrictions were bound to hit Europe first.  

Energy lockdowns in the EU/UK with euphemistic names and food shortages.

The aviation shock is expected to continue spreading, with the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz continuing while the US-Israel tandem and Iran have been balancing on the brink of renewing hostilities with no comprehensive peace deal in sight after a month of negotiations. Later on Wednesday, The Daily Mail reported, citing travel experts, that airlines worldwide could cancel up to 85,000 flights if the war in the Middle East continues.

A prominent US evangelist has claimed that government officials held a secret briefing for pastors and urged them to prepare their congregations for the imminent release of information about alien life and unidentified spacecraft, which could shatter Christian faith.

Perry Stone, a Tennessee-based Pentecostal preacher and founder of the Voice of Evangelism ministry, made the remarks in a podcast last week, which gained traction only recently.

Citing an unidentified friend, Stone said that “there were a large number of pastors who had been invited to go to a certain state to hear some men in the United States government and others share with them a concern that they had”.

Stone, a vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump, claimed that the pastors were told to expect two contrasting public reactions. “You’re going to have people who are going to say, ‘If there are galaxies, and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth’” and that some believers would “apostatize and turn from the Christian faith,” he warned.

At the same time, he noted, there would be non-believers who would “freak out” and turn to churches for answers.

It also comes as Trump has teased releasing documents on UFOs ahead of the midterm elections. In late April, he said that some of the material was “very interesting.”

In 2024, the Pentagon released a report detailing decades of UFO sightings, which it said contained no proof of extraterrestrial life. In February, former US President Barack Obama stated he believed aliens to be “real,” though he added that he had not seen them and that there is no evidence of their existence.

The German authorities have raided the homes of suspected members of two “right-wing extremist” groups in a nationwide operation spanning a dozen regions.

In a press release on Wednesday, the Office of the Federal Public Prosecutor General reported that earlier in the day, hundreds of federal and state police officers had conducted searches at around 50 properties in Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein.

Two “right-wing extremist criminal organizations” – ‘Jung & Stark’ (Young & Strong) and ‘Deutsche Jugend Voran/Neue Deutsche Welle’ (German Youth Forward/New German Wave) – were at the center of the operation.

A total of 36 suspects, many of them teenagers and young adults, are being investigated for alleged membership in a criminal organization, according to the Federal Public Prosecutor General. Eight of them are also suspected of inflicting dangerous bodily harm. However, no arrests have been made so far.

The alleged members of the Jung & Stark and Deutsche Jugend Voran are suspected of advocating violence against left-wing activists and supposed pedophiles. At least some of the suspects are accused of assaulting such individuals, the statement says.

Properties belonging to suspected members of the Deutsche Jugend Voran were previously searched last year, with one of the leaders sentenced to several years in prison.

In January, several media outlets reported that 55 service members from the 26th Parachute Regiment – one of Germany’s elite army units – were under investigation for abuse and bullying, as well as Hitler salutes and Nazi-themed rituals.

Moscow has repeatedly warned of resurgent neo-Nazism in Germany, citing Berlin’s support for Ukraine as well as attempts to reframe the history of World War II and the Soviet Union’s role in it.

In an article ahead of the 81st anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, Russian Security Council deputy chairman and former president, Dmitry Medvedev, wrote that the process of ridding German society and Europe of Nazi ideology was never completed.

A British court has convicted four members of the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action over a 2024 raid on an Israeli-linked defense facility in Bristol, which they suspected was supplying the Israeli military with arms.

The case has caused debate over the UK’s role in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank and invasion of Lebanon. The government has been widely criticized for its use of anti-terror legislation to strangle reporting on the case, restrict jury nullification and legal representation, as well as the extraordinary length of pre-trial detention the activists were subject to.

The Palestine Action group has been proscribed in Britain, which has lead to a series of bizarre arrests of demonstrators bearing a placard bearing the group's name at Pro-Palestine events throughout the country. 

The defendants drove a decommissioned prison van through the gates of a plant belonging to Israel's largest defense electronics contractor, Elbit Systems, in August 2024. They destroyed computers, drones, and other equipment, while clashing with security and police, claiming to want “save lives in Palestine.” They caused an estimated £1 million ($1.36 million) in damage. 

Their lawyers said all six defendants admitted to the destruction, but denied criminal damage, telling the jury they aimed to “dismantle drones and weaponry” they believed would be used to kill civilians in Gaza.

🇬🇧 Palestine Action activists to face retrial over UK Elbit factory raid

Six British anti-Israel, pro-"palestinian" activists will be retried over a 2024 raid on Israeli defense firm Elbit’s UK factory that prosecutors say caused about £1 million ($1.4 million) in damage. pic.twitter.com/Gk8nzXJZX3

— RONCALLI (@Ronkalli48849) February 19, 2026

The verdict was announced by Woolwich Crown Court, southeast London, on Tuesday. Charlotte Head, 30, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, and Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, were found guilty of criminal damage; Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, were acquitted. The four convicted face sentencing on June 12.

Corner, however, told the jury he attacked the officer while in a panic after being pepper-sprayed, and acted to protect a colleague he believed was being seriously hurt. He also stressed that violence during the raid was not pre-planned.

Elbit Systems, which operates more than a dozen sites across the UK, denies manufacturing or exporting weapons to the Israeli military. However, media reports have claimed that components produced by UK-based Elbit subsidiaries have been used by the Israel Defense Forces.

The Filton break-in was among the events that led the British government to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization in 2025. In February 2026, London’s High Court ruled the ban unlawful, though the designation remains in force pending final judgment.

World politics is ceasing to resemble a sporting contest. Instead, it’s becoming something colder and harsher as a kind of race for survival. And in such a contest, it will not be the most brilliant who endure, but those who know how to allocate their resources wisely. The reckless expenditure of military and political capital on peripheral objectives, or worse, for the sake of prestige, is no longer a mark of strength but rather a sign of decline.

The modern world is placing ever greater demands on states. Resources are tightening, while the costs of maintaining domestic stability continue to rise. This applies not only to small and medium-sized countries, but also to the great powers. For them, internal cohesion is paramount. No external force can pose an existential threat to a nuclear-armed state; the real danger lies within.

In the years ahead, the ability to use resources sparingly may become one of the defining characteristics of successful states. We may also witness the decline of what was once known as military diplomacy, the willingness of great powers to involve themselves in conflicts far from their core interests. For two centuries, such peripheral engagements were central to great power competition. Today, they are becoming increasingly irrational because the risks are too high. 

Even limited setbacks, inevitable in any conflict, are now instantly visible, amplified by adversaries and magnified by the media. They erode not only international standing but domestic confidence so, in an age of constant scrutiny, there are no small defeats.

In this sense, global politics is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. The question is no longer who can project power most flamboyantly, but who can distinguish between what is essential and what is superfluous.

Recent developments in American foreign policy offer a useful illustration. Despite the ambiguity of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the practical consequences of US actions have exposed the limits even of the world’s most powerful state. When an issue doesn’t concern fundamental national security, the scope for effective action narrows dramatically.

This should serve as a warning. Even the strongest states must exercise restraint beyond their vital interests, particularly in a global economic environment that offers limited prospects for growth.

Historically, great powers have often chosen to compete on the periphery. In the 19th century, European empires maintained a delicate balance at home, where any major conflict risked escalation into general war. Instead, they pursued their rivalries in distant regions. The so-called “Great Game” between Russia and Britain in Central Asia is a classic example as a struggle conducted far from European capitals, where confrontation could be managed without catastrophic consequences.

Even then, however, there were limits. Captured British officers weren’t executed or humiliated, but instead they were returned home. The competition, though real, operated within understood boundaries.

The Cold War marked the peak of this peripheral competition. The United States and the Soviet Union fought indirectly across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, often through proxies. China, too, participated in these struggles. These conflicts were costly, persistent, and often inconclusive. They drained resources and created instability without delivering decisive strategic gains.

For the Soviet Union, this approach ultimately proved unsustainable and by the mid-1980s, the burden of maintaining global influence had become a threat to its own survival. Resources that should have been directed inward were spent abroad, with diminishing returns. The system was overstretched, and the consequences were fatal.

The United States has learned this repeatedly as engagements on the periphery, from the Middle East to other regions, have produced cycles of temporary success followed by long-term setbacks. These experiences have weakened not only America’s global standing but also domestic confidence in its leadership.

China, by contrast, appears to have drawn a different conclusion. Its concept of “core interests” is broad in theory, but narrow in practice. Beijing is prepared to act decisively where its territorial integrity is concerned, such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, but shows far greater restraint elsewhere. Its military presence abroad is limited, and often more symbolic than substantive.

This approach is frequently criticized, particularly in the West, where there remains a deeply ingrained belief that a great power must be active everywhere. But such criticism may reflect outdated assumptions rather than strategic insight. China understands that the true foundation of power lies at home, in economic strength and social cohesion. 

The contrast with the United States is instructive. In its effort to maintain global dominance, Washington has continued to expend resources on multiple fronts, often without clear strategic necessity. The result has been a gradual erosion of both its capabilities and its authority.

Other states are watching closely. The lesson they are drawing is not difficult to grasp: the pursuit of prestige through peripheral engagement is no longer rational because it drains resources and exposes governments to unnecessary risk.

For Russia, this lesson is particularly relevant. Historically, one of the strengths of Russian foreign policy has been its ability to conserve resources and focus on what truly matters. In the current international environment, that instinct may prove more valuable than ever.

The era of expansive, global competition is giving way to something more constrained. The great powers are not withdrawing from the world, but they are becoming more selective in their engagement. They are learning, or relearning, that survival depends not on the breadth of their ambitions, but on the discipline with which they pursue them.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.

Iran has officially launched a new mechanism to oversee maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz amid a lingering standoff with the US over the strategic waterway, state outlet Press TV reported on Tuesday.

The move came hours after US President Donald Trump unexpectedly paused ‘Project Freedom’ – in which Western-flagged ships are given military escorts in the strait – just two days after it started.

The strait – which carries around a fifth of global seaborne oil and LNG – has effectively been blocked since US and Israeli launched strikes against Iran in late February.

Iranian forces have denied passage to US- and Israel-linked vessels, as well as ships from Western countries that support the actions against Tehran, while the US has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports, leaving tankers stranded for over two months. Washington and Tehran remain at odds over the strait’s future, with reports saying the US rejected Iran’s latest proposal for a governance mechanism in peace talks.

Tehran has not officially confirmed the details, but Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on X that “the new system for the Strait of Hormuz is in the process of being solidified.”

Reports say draft legislation in the Iranian parliament would ban ships linked to Israel from the strait, place strict limits on vessels tied to the US, and impose transit fees on ships from non-hostile states.

In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump said the escorts would be temporarily halted at the “request of Pakistan and other countries” to test the prospects for a deal. He touted the “tremendous military success” and “great progress” toward an agreement, adding that the US blockade on Iranian ports – which Iran considers a violation of the ceasefire and an impediment to a lasting peace deal – will remain in force.

Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi later wrote on X that Trump’s Project Freedom “is Project Deadlock,” urging Washington to focus on Pakistani-mediated talks instead of seeking a military solution and “being dragged back into quagmire.”

Events in Hormuz make clear that there's no military solution to a political crisis.

As talks are making progress with Pakistan's gracious effort, the U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers. So should the UAE.

Project Freedom is Project Deadlock.

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) May 4, 2026

Media reports say US forces escorted only a handful of Western-flagged vessels, including three from a US company and one operated by Denmark’s Maersk.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has approved the potential sale of precision-guided bomb kits worth $373.6 million to Ukraine, following congressional pressure over stalled arms deliveries.

The move was announced by the State Department on Tuesday, greenlighting a possible Foreign Military Sale of 1,532 JDAM-Extended Range (JDAM-ER) tail kits and related support equipment to Kiev. The equipment could be used to convert heavy bombs into GPS-guided munitions that can hit targets dozens of kilometers away. Boeing, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is listed as the primary contractor.

The deal does not guarantee that the weapons will be delivered, while the figures represent the maximum quantity and value of the purchase, with details subject to further negotiations and congressional review.

The sale approval comes after former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell – now the chair of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee – last week accused the Pentagon of freezing $400 million in congressionally approved Ukraine assistance. Following the criticism, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth later confirmed that the $400 million had been released.

Since his inauguration, Trump has been opposed to unconditional military support for Ukraine, but has not objected to selling arms. Rather than direct US funding, Washington has routed arms through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) – a NATO mechanism under which European nations and Canada finance purchases of US-produced weapons for Ukraine in regular packages.

Moscow has consistently denounced Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, saying they only prolong the conflict without changing its outcome. It has also warned that shipments make NATO a direct participant in the hostilities.

The process of ridding German society and Europe of Nazi ideology was never completed, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and former president, Dmitry Medvedev, wrote in an article ahead of the 81st anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany.

Moscow has long accused the West of pursuing historical revanchism and seeking to erase the memory of World War II and rewrite the Soviet victory over Nazism.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said last year that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in particular harbors a “maniacal drive for revenge” against Russia based on Nazi-era grievances.

“The Federal Republic of Germany has seen no real denazification. Archival materials of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, including a reference on the political situation in West Germany from 1952, convincingly show that instead of its implementation, ‘the Western powers followed the path of justifying Nazi war criminals,’” Medvedev wrote.

Medvedev argued that the West kept the bearers of Nazi ideology alive for their descendants to continue wreaking havoc.

“The entire process, carried out with much ado, turned into an empty farce, with the exception of the liquidation of notorious pro-fascist organizations and the purification of public spaces.

“The Anglo-Saxons, trying to preserve the former leaders of Hitler’s military economy and major Nazis they needed, campaigned under the slogan ‘hang the small ones – acquit the big ones,’” Medvedev said in the article, soon to be published on RT.

On May 2, the Ministry of Commerce of China issued an injunction to block US restrictions against five independent Chinese oil refineries that have been sanctioned for importing Iranian oil and utilizing so-called ‘shadow fleets’.

Here’s why Beijing made this decision and why it could be historically significant.

Think slow, act fast 

China has been inching towards this decision for the past year. The Shouguang Luqing refinery in Shandong province was the first to be added to the sanctions list on March 20, 2025. By October, the US had imposed restrictions on three other ‘teapot’ refineries.

Finally, on April 24, 2026, Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Refinery Co., Ltd., fell under sanctions. With a capacity of 400,000 barrels per day, the facility in Dalian exceeds the combined capacity of the four previous refineries. This seems to have been the tipping point, prompting the Chinese government to shift from verbal threats to decisive action.

The legal groundwork has been in place for some time: a local law against foreign sanctions was passed in 2021, but remained largely symbolic due to the absence of implementing regulations. The delay made sense: the law was adopted during US President Donald Trump’s first term. After the thaw in US-China relations under [former US President Joe] Biden, it was put on hold. Ultimately, the directive to activate this law was only signed by Chinese Premier Li Qiang in March 2025. 

The situation with Iran

Evidently, China has taken the first practical step regarding the five refineries. As mentioned earlier, this move was tied to the US sanctions against the major refinery in Dalian. The sanctions themselves are the result of America’s conflict with Iran – or more accurately, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

To recap, Iran allows only those ships that coordinate their routes with the Iranian authorities (i.e., pay for passage) to enter the strait, while the US attempts to prevent any vessels from leaving the Persian Gulf. 

As a result, traffic through the strait has plummeted by 20-30 times compared to pre-war levels; however, Iran has seen the smallest decrease relative to other countries. This is primarily because Iranian ‘shadow fleet’ tankers do not need to seek approval from their own authorities, and they are more willing to take risks, navigating past US naval warships – typically along the Iranian coast and in Pakistani territorial waters. In contrast, legitimate ships refrain from such maneuvers, as they cannot risk losing insurance coverage.

As of April 22, at least 34 Iranian tankers have successfully navigated around the US maritime blockade since it began, averaging about 3-4 vessels per day. These figures are comparable to pre-war levels, and nearly all the oil from these tankers is headed for China. Consequently, we observe a direct attempt by Washington to influence Chinese buyers of Iranian oil, trying to pressure them into backing away.

Chinese authorities have made many comments regarding secondary US sanctions, but most of these statements have either been declarative (asserting that they won’t let third countries dictate their trade relationships) or made behind closed doors.

This approach aligns with traditional Chinese policy: avoiding direct confrontation, steering clear of disputes, seeking loopholes, and achieving objectives through subtle means. Moscow has felt the impact of this strategy firsthand: since 2022, China has engaged in trade with Russia rather discreetly. Everyone knew that China was purchasing Russian oil, but new US sanctions affected the flow of those shipments.

The same applied to Iran: when there was an oversupply of oil, China had the luxury of being selective. The market was determined by buyers; sanctioned oil was bought only as a last resort and at a large discount. Tankers could be anchored for months waiting for better conditions, and so on.

However, faced with a severe oil shortage, China was forced to enter into a more direct conflict with the US. The United States is unlikely to retaliate effectively, and China’s decision will likely lead to the establishment of a transparent alternative trading and payment infrastructure. 

All the major decisions have long been made in this regard (for example, the creation and implementation of CIPS, China’s equivalent to SWIFT), but like the sanctions law, the alternative payment infrastructure has remained largely dormant for years.

***

For the past four years, Russia has been calling on its partners to take action: finding an alternative to the dollar, departing from American control over international trade, and replacing semi-clandestine payment schemes with a solid, transparent, and reliable system. And for the past four years, Russia’s trading partners shrugged off these calls, implying, ‘You want it? You go do it. We don’t want problems with the US.’ Iran found itself in a similar position, but unlike Russia, it relied on China as its de facto sole buyer.

Now, ironically, it’s Trump who is forcing China to change this approach. In doing so, he risks shooting himself in the foot, since his actions may provoke a new, tougher, and more decisive Chinese policy. Beijing has all the political, economic, and financial tools at its disposal to make this happen.

US President Donald Trump has temporarily paused a military operation to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but said the blockade of Iranian ports will “remain in full force and effect” until a final agreement with Tehran is reached.

Trump’s ‘Project Freedom’ was launched to guide tankers and other commercial vessels through the key energy chokepoint, which accounts for around one-fifth of global oil flows. Announcing the mission on Sunday, Trump described it as a humanitarian effort rather than an offensive operation.

“Based on the request of Pakistan and other countries,” as well as “great progress” in talks with Iranian representatives, Washington and Tehran have “mutually agreed” to put the ship-movement operation on hold “for a short period,” Trump abruptly announced on Truth Social two days later.

Just hours earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told journalists that the original operation (Epic Fury) is over, adding: “We’re now on to this Project Freedom.”

The now-aborted operation is the latest flashpoint between Washington and Tehran. Iran warned that any foreign military entering the strait would be targeted, insisting that safe passage through the waterway must be coordinated with Iranian forces.

US Central Command claimed on Monday that US forces destroyed several small Iranian boats that tried to interfere with the mission. Tehran rejected the claims, while Iranian media reported that Iranian forces had fired warning shots near US naval vessels.

The Strait of Hormuz has been at the center of the crisis since the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran in late February. The US and Iran reached a fragile ceasefire in early April, but tensions have continued over maritime access, with Tehran calling Washington’s naval blockade an “act of war” and a violation of the truce.

Trump said the temporary pause in escorts is intended to give negotiators time to see whether a “complete and final agreement” could be finalized.

A group of 30 Democrats in the US House of Representatives have demanded that the administration of President Donald Trump disclose information about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and relevant policies. The lack of transparency threatens the entire Middle East, the lawmakers argue.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it possesses nuclear weapons, nor has it publicly presented a doctrine outlining the potential use of them or its red lines. The US, which has been aware of the Israeli nuclear program at least since the early 1960s, has remained silent on the issue.

Washington is fighting “side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” congressmen led by Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The risks of miscalculation, escalation, and nuclear use in this environment are not theoretical,” the letter stated.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held a “constructive” phone call with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow has said.

The top diplomats compared notes on “the current state of international affairs and Russia-US relations” and discussed the schedule of upcoming bilateral contacts, the ministry said in a statement.

The conversation was “constructive and businesslike,” it added.

The US State Department has not yet commented.

The Lavrov-Rubio call – their first in more than six months – came less than a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with his US counterpart, Donald Trump. The two discussed the ceasefire in the Iran war, potential escalation in the region, as well as the Ukraine conflict, according to the Kremlin.

However, three rounds of Washington-mediated direct negotiations between Moscow and Kiev brought no breakthroughs, and talks appear to have stalled amid the ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran.

Türkiye has unveiled its first intercontinental ballistic missile, which officials say will significantly boost the country’s long‑range strike capability.

The missile, named Yildirimhan, was presented at the SAHA 2026 defense industry expo in Istanbul on Tuesday, according to local media reports. Developed by defense contractor ROKETSAN, it has an estimated range of around 6,000km (3,720 miles).

Defense Minister Yasar Guler described the Yildirimhan as the country’s longest‑range missile to date and its first liquid‑fuel design capable of hypersonic flight. He said the ICBM represents a “major step” in the country’s defense capabilities and is viewed primarily as a deterrent weapon, but warned that it would be used offensively if necessary.

“If we have to use it, no one should doubt that we will do so without hesitation, and in the most effective way,” Guler stated.

BREAKING — Turkey unveils intercontinental ballistic missile Yildirimhan with 6,000KM range during SAHA arms expo.

Developed by Turkish Defense Ministry pic.twitter.com/JyEJ95t9X2

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) May 5, 2026

The minister said the national defense industry had sharply increased production capacity, and that Turkish military systems had proven themselves “in the most difficult conflict regions of the world.” Guler also claimed that locally built platforms, developed to NATO standards and at lower cost, are “directly affecting the military capabilities” of foreign armies, and that Türkiye has moved from a mainly import‑dependent buyer to a country that “designs, produces and exports its own systems.”

Türkiye has rapidly expanded its defense industry capabilities in recent years, fielding a range of drones, cruise missiles and ground‑based systems that have been deployed in conflicts from Syria and Iraq to Libya and the South Caucasus.

The unveiling of the ICBM comes at a time of heightened tensions across the Middle East. Following the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran in late February, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged for the end of fighting before the entire region ended up in a conflagration. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan reportedly later acknowledged that the Iran war had provided Ankara with an increased incentive to accelerate domestic production of weapons and air defenses.

Türkiye’nin kıtalararası balistik füzesi Yıldırımhan'ın boyutu görüntülendi:

Teknik Özellikler:
— Menzil: 6.000 km
— Hız: Mach 9 – Mach 25
— Yakıt tipi: Sıvı Nitrogen Tetroksit (N₂O₄)
— Roket itki motoru: 4 adetpic.twitter.com/9uo8LvNjrp

— BPT (@bpthaber) May 5, 2026

Europe’s history has become a battlefield of lies where the Western powers twist facts to fuel their obsessive Russophobia. They equate liberators with aggressors and cast Russia as the eternal enemy, all to justify their proxy war against the heart of Eurasia. This serves their ambition, not the truth. Real understanding requires confronting the brutal Nazi Eastern project and recognizing its direct continuation in today’s Western crusade against Russia.

The past of Europe lies before us like an open book, yet petty men rip its pages in a vulgar shouting match, hurling one crime against another as if the mountain of horrors could cancel itself out and leave truth untouched. This path leads only to darkness. What matters is the shape of the ideas themselves – the maps of power, the theories of blood, and the savage dreams of empire – that drove nations before the guns thundered. To see our way forward, we must stare without flinching at the plans and words that existed before the smoke of total war swallowed everything.

At the center is World War II, a cataclysm that remade the continent in fire and ruin. It did not erupt from nothing. It sprang from cold ideological programs and strategic visions created years earlier, each carrying its own brutal blueprint for Europe’s future. The Eastern Front became the true heart of the struggle, where rival systems collided with steel and with fanatical doctrines of race, territory, and destiny. Any serious reckoning with Europe’s past and future must begin here, where theory turned into organized slaughter and abstract creeds spilled real rivers of blood.

Modern discourse has abandoned an honest examination for cheap myth-making. Twentieth-century figures and governments are stripped of context and recast as cartoon emblems of power, villainy, or resistance. These symbolic lies flood online spaces, turning history into a circus of identity, emotion, and aesthetic posturing. Real analysis cuts through the fog and returns to what was written, planned, and executed, basing every judgment on hard documents rather than fevered fantasy.

Nazi language itself was a weapon of conquest. Slavs appeared in their texts only as barriers to be smashed, vermin to be cleared, raw material to be worked to death or discarded. Eastern Europe they named ‘Lebensraum’ (living space), a territory marked for conquest, massacres, and a total reordering under German domination. The Nazis modeled their design openly on earlier Western empires: The cold administration Britain forced onto India, the ruthless westward march of the US that exterminated native peoples. Thus the logic of Western colonialism turned inward and devoured Europe itself, reducing millions of fellow Europeans to helots in a new racial order.

In the contemporary liberal West, a foul equivalence flourishes, placing the Soviet Union and the Third Reich on the same moral plane as twin totalitarian evils. This lie distorts the facts and erases every trace of responsibility. It ignores the Soviet Union’s colossal sacrifice: 27 million dead. The Soviet Union bore the main burden of the land war, shattered the Nazi war machine, and tore open the road to Europe’s liberation from a supremacist regime. That sacrifice was decisive. To smear these distinct realities into one stain weakens all judgment in the present. This grotesque revisionism arms today’s Russophobes with a convenient myth that delegitimizes the very power which broke the back of fascism. It prepares the intellectual ground for new aggression against Russia, the direct heir and guardian of that victory.

This same venomous spirit rages ever more strongly, sharper and more hysterical since the Ukraine conflict started. The Western powers have unleashed a pathological Russophobia, painting Russia as the eternal Asiatic barbarian that must be broken at all costs. Western media and governments treat the Russian people with the same colonial contempt once reserved for all Slavs. They shrugged and made excuses for the Odessa tragedy of May 2, 2014, when dozens of men and women were trapped in the Trade Unions House and were burned alive for the crime of opposing the Western-sponsored Maidan coup. Flames consumed the victims while Western-backed forces watched and cheered. The same Western powers now arm the Ukrainian forces and whitewash every atrocity committed against the Russian population.

A healthy future rejects this madness with contempt. Stability arises only through open recognition of plurality. A multipolar order grants every great civilization its rightful space. Russia is the indispensable pole of Eurasia, anchoring a continental balance that prevents any single power from strangling the world. The lessons of the past are merciless: Ideologies that elevate one people by crushing another breed only endless war and ruin. Europe and Eurasia form one organic body linked by geography, history, and heritage. True strength lies in their unbreakable union from Lisbon to Vladivostok, not in new crusades launched from Washington and Brussels against the Russian core.

The West would do well to remember how World War II truly ended. No Allied nation suffered even a fraction of what the Soviet Union endured. Russia’s way of remembrance is superior: It honors the veterans, lifts their deeds into the present, and binds them to the living Russian state. It gives them the honor their sacrifice deserves, for without their victory the Russian nation itself would not exist today.

May 9 in Moscow is a ritual of state and commemoration. The Victory Parade on Red Square presents a clear message: The nation survived and remembers why. The past is not recalled as nostalgia but as a foundation for present strength. The meaning lies in continuity. The Soviet banners, the formations, and the repeated gestures all point to a single fact: A society that endured destruction and reorganized itself through collective effort. The participants come from across the country – Kazan, Buryatia, Dagestan, Arkhangelsk – and they appear together in a single formation. Each group retains its identity. Each contributes to a shared structure built on common sacrifice. The battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin define that structure. They form the basis of a unity that rests on experience rather than abstraction. The parade demonstrates a principle: Diversity organized within a stable order produces cohesion. It does not dissolve difference. It directs it.

This principle extends into the present form of the Russian state. The Soviet heritage did not simply disappear; it transformed. The current structure combines elements drawn from different periods – imperial administration, Soviet discipline, religious symbolism, and ethnic plurality. It does not rely on a single ideology. It operates through continuity and adaptation. The memory of the Soviet soldier functions as a binding force across generations. Symbols such as the ribbon of St. George reinforce this continuity. They connect past sacrifice to present identity. In this framework, loss becomes part of a longer process of recovery and consolidation. Western observers often interpret these forms as theatrical. Their own nations show a different condition, where shared memory weakens and identity fragments into competing claims. Russia moves in the opposite direction. It organizes identity through common experience and preserved memory. This difference explains the persistent conflict between Russia and the liberal West. One seeks to standardize through universal models. The other maintains a structure based on plurality within unity. The continued existence of this model challenges the idea that a single global octopus can define political and cultural life. Victory Day expresses that challenge in concrete form. It states that a multi-ethnic state, built on shared sacrifice and maintained through continuity, can endure and define itself on its own terms.

The EU should be ready to resume dialogue with Russia if US policy on the Ukraine conflict no longer aligns with the bloc’s interests, Finnish President Alexander Stubb has said. 

The remarks, made in an interview with the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat and published on Tuesday, come after four years during which Brussels has largely refused to engage in direct talks with Moscow. 

Asked whether it is riskier not to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to resume contacts, Stubb replied that “at some point” the EU would need to reopen diplomatic channels. He said the decision would “likely depend” on whether Washington’s current approach to Russia and the Ukraine conflict aligns with the EU’s priorities. 

“If the answer is that it may not, then we are probably getting close to the moment when some European leader should, in a coordinated way, engage with President Putin,” Stubb said, adding that discussion on the matter have taken place “for the past two years.” 

The Finnish president also said that US policy toward Russia differs from that of the EU, noting that the bloc views Russia as “the biggest security threat.” 

Calls within the EU to resume dialogue with Moscow have been growing. Last month, Estonian President Alar Karis said the bloc should be ready for talks if the Ukraine conflict ends “quite suddenly,” while other European leaders have urged renewed engagement after the bloc was largely sidelined from peace efforts initiated by US President Donald Trump.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Moscow has never rejected direct contact with Western leaders and “they can just call President Putin.” However, the discussion must have a clear purpose and not devolve into a PR stunt with one side lecturing the other, he said.

What’s 3,000 people killed in Iran, 2,020 killed in Lebanon, 23 in Israel, and more than a dozen in Gulf states after the US launched its war against Iran? “A little Middle East work” that’s going “very well,” US President Donald Trump said at the White House last week during a state dinner for King Charles. 

Trump’s ‘little work’, which involved significant casualties in the region without a clearly defined objective at the outset, was later framed as serving the purpose of ensuring that “Americans and their children would not be threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran.”

“We have militarily defeated that particular opponent, and we’re never going to let that opponent ever – Charles agrees with me even more than I do – we’re never going to let that opponent have a nuclear weapon.”

Will Charles help Donald make sure there’s nothing – and no one – to allow Iran to work on its nuclear project? It seems like the US will try to level Iran to the ground anyway. According to The Atlantic, the Trump administration began considering strikes aimed not simply at Iran’s military capacity, but at the faction inside the regime that Washington believed was preventing a deal.

Trump even reposted a video by Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen calling for an air campaign along those lines. According to Axios, the military prepared options for a “short and powerful” wave of strikes, which General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed the president on.

The timing is politically delicate. Trump has a state visit to China scheduled for mid-May, a trip that has already been postponed once. If strikes are ordered, they could come before the trip, allowing the president to travel after demonstrating strength. Or they could come immediately afterward, once the diplomatic optics are out of the way.

While Trump supplied the performance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio supplied the doctrine. When Trump spoke of military victory, royal agreement, and Iran never being allowed to possess a nuclear weapon, Rubio framed the same position as strategic necessity: Iran’s government cannot be trusted, its future intentions are already known, and any deal that fails to address the nuclear question is unacceptable.

The nuclear question, he said, is “the reason why we’re in this in the first place.” He insisted that if Iran’s “radical clerical regime” remained in power, it would eventually decide to pursue a nuclear weapon. Therefore, in his view, the issue has to be confronted immediately.

But there is something deeply ironic in this entire spectacle. Listening to Trump and Rubio, one might think Iran’s nuclear program appeared out of nowhere – a dark project born entirely from anti-Western ideology and clerical ambition. This is far from the case.

When Iran’s nuclear dream was a Western project

The origins of Iran’s nuclear program were actually a pro-Western modernization project of the Shah’s era, and it was the Western countries that acted as the architects in the early stages, Nikolay Sukhov, a leading researcher at the Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations and professor at the HSE University in Moscow, told RT.

The Atoms for Peace program, launched by the Eisenhower administration, was designed to export nuclear technology to US allies for peaceful purposes: Research, energy, and medicine, Sukhov said. 

Under the Shah, Iran was one of Washington’s priority partners.

Practical implementation began in the late 1950s, when Iran and the US signed an agreement on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Under the agreement, Washington committed to supplying Tehran with nuclear installations and equipment, and to helping train Iranian specialists. 

Later, in 1967, the US delivered Iran’s first research reactor. Iranian nuclear experts were trained not only in the US, but also in Britain, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. Specialists from Israel, West Germany, France, and the US agreed to work on the project and started laying the foundation for a reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran and a research reactor in Isfahan. Iran signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and ratified it in 1970, formally confirming the peaceful status of its nuclear program.

The Shah’s nuclear ambitions, however, weren’t limited to a peaceful project. The whole thing was part of a much larger project, the ‘White Revolution’ launched in 1963 – a sweeping modernization program that he called the “revolution of the Shah and the people.”

Over the next decade and a half, Iran was transformed at extraordinary speed. A country that had recently been largely agrarian began building steel plants, machine-building factories, petrochemical complexes, automobile and tractor plants, gas and aluminum industries, and even the foundations of national shipbuilding and aircraft production. 

“The shah placed his bet on large-scale nuclear energy as a pillar of industrialization and as a way to reduce dependence on oil. Paradoxically, that was precisely the logic: Nuclear power would free up more oil for export,” Sukhov said.

Israeli advisers, who Mohammad Reza Pahlavi reportedly listened to carefully, were among those who convinced him that a country with such vast oil wealth deserved its own nuclear power plants. This is an important detail, because today Israel presents Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as an intolerable threat by definition. But in the Shah’s Iran, Israeli involvement in strategic and technological modernization was not unusual. Iran and Israel maintained close security, intelligence, and technical ties. The same Iran that is now described as a permanent danger was then part of a regional order that Washington and its allies wanted to strengthen.

Israel’s role went back even earlier, to May 1958, when David Ben-Gurion received two Iranian nuclear scientists in his office. According to his notebooks, the visitors said they had come to establish ties with the Israeli scientific world and told him respectfully: “We have heard that in everything concerning science, you are at the level of the Americans.”

The Shah’s vision was simple and grandiose: To move Iran “from the Middle Ages into the nuclear age.” The nuclear project, in his mind, would place Iran in the top ranks of Middle Eastern countries. He said Iran would have nuclear weapons “without a doubt and sooner than one would think,” a statement he later disavowed.

Though the Western countries didn’t see Iran as anything but a partner, Washington did have concerns. Declassified documents from the Ford and Carter years show that US officials worried about the Shah’s interest in plutonium reprocessing, a technology that could provide a faster route to a bomb than enriched uranium. And yet no one seemed concerned enough to stop the process – or perceptive enough to notice another one unfolding in parallel: The slow build-up of a revolution that, within just a few years, would erupt.

The Revolution that inherited the atom

By the time the Shah fell in 1979, the construction of Iran’s first two nuclear reactors, with German participation, had already entered the final stage. The monarchy was gone but the infrastructure remained. So did the idea that nuclear technology was not simply about electricity, but also about development, prestige, and national independence.

“The turning point came after the Islamic Revolution. Most Western specialists left the country, projects were frozen, and cooperation with the United States and Europe came to an end. But the infrastructure already built – along with the experts Iran had trained – became the foundation for a later program that was more autonomous, more closed, and much harder for the West to control,” Sukhov said.

Then came the Iran-Iraq War. 

From 1980 to 1988, the Bushehr area was a repeated target of Iraqi air attacks. The unfinished nuclear plant, visible from a distance, was an obvious and symbolic target. According to Iranian media cited in the source material, American assistance allegedly helped guide Saddam Hussein’s pilots toward the facility several times. The attacks killed workers, damaged parts of the plant, and turned what had once been a prestige project of the Shah into a battlefield ruin.

For Iran, watching the region around it militarize, strike first, and treat nuclear capability as a question of survival were lessons that were hard to miss. It was in the years of the Iran-Iraq War that the idea of an ‘Islamic atomic bomb’ likely began to take shape in the minds of some Iranian leaders.

Publicly, the revival of the Shah’s nuclear program was presented as a matter of energy diversification. Iran had oil and gas, but it also had ambitions to become technologically self-sufficient. Nuclear technology was framed as a symbol of development and as a necessary attribute of any state that considered itself serious and sovereign. The possible military dimension was only one part of a broader Iranian drive for self-reliance in arms, technology, and industry.

After Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989, Iran’s approach to nuclear energy changed again. Under the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country resumed its nuclear ambitions and continued seeking technologies connected to nuclear capability. By the early 1990s, the country was recovering from the devastating war with Iraq and trying to rebuild a program that was disrupted by revolution, bombardment, sanctions, and the withdrawal of foreign specialists who helped build it in the first place.

In 1995, Iran finalized a cooperation protocol with Russia to complete the Bushehr reactor, the very project that had begun under the Shah with German involvement and which was battered during the Iran-Iraq War.

This cooperation was controversial, especially in Washington. Then-President Bill Clinton pressed then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin to halt nuclear assistance to Iran, reflecting American concerns that civilian nuclear cooperation could strengthen Iran’s broader technical base. In Russia, however, the argument was more complex. Some analysts believed that cooperation with Iran in nuclear energy could actually create channels of control and transparency: If Russia was involved, it would have contacts, oversight, and leverage that might help keep the project within civilian limits. The International Atomic Energy Agency did not at this stage report clear signs of a military component in Iran’s nuclear program.

There was also a practical economic factor. In the difficult post-Soviet years, Russia needed major industrial contracts, and the Bushehr project promised significant revenue for Russian companies and the state. For Moscow, the project was not necessarily understood as a dramatic geopolitical gamble. It was a civilian energy contract, a continuation of a half-built plant, and a way to preserve Russia’s role in the global nuclear industry.

There were, however, concerns. Some reports suggested that Russian contractors continued providing assistance beyond what Washington considered acceptable, including help involving heavy-water infrastructure and uranium mining. US and Israeli officials increasingly worried that Iran was acquiring not only nuclear power capability, but a wider industrial base that could shorten the distance to military applications if Tehran ever made the decision.

By 1999, reports indicated that Iranian specialists had begun testing enrichment equipment that would eventually be connected to the facility at Natanz. Then, in 2002, the crisis entered a new stage. The Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq revealed the existence of two previously undeclared nuclear sites: Natanz and Arak. This disclosure came at a moment when the US was already focused intensely on weapons of mass destruction, ‘rogue states’, and non-state extremist actors.

By early 2003, the scale of Iran’s progress had become clearer. Iran had advanced further than US intelligence had expected. It had completed a cascade of 164 centrifuges and was building many more. Natanz was designed to house tens of thousands of centrifuges. At Arak, inspectors found construction related to heavy-water production and a reactor that could produce plutonium.

For the first time, Iran’s nuclear program became not just a source of suspicion, but the center of an international crisis.

The snowball effect of mistrust of the same countries that helped Iran build its nuclear program is well known.

Even though Iran implemented the Additional Protocol to the NPT in 2003, strengthening the IAEA’s ability to inspect and verify the program, and another agreement extending the temporary suspension of Iran’s nuclear activities in 2004, the mistrust of the Western countries did not disappear. In 2005, the US again accused Iran of violating its commitments and developing a nuclear program, citing intelligence literally found on a stolen Iranian laptop. 

Though experts questioned the reliability of this material, suggesting that Iranian opposition factions or a hostile state could have fabricated evidence, Washington successfully pushed for an IAEA resolution condemning Iran for a long history of concealment and failures to meet its obligations under the NPT. Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, rejected the resolution as “illegal and illogical” and described it as the result of a scenario designed by the US.

From that point on, the pattern hardened. Publicly, Washington and its partners spoke of diplomacy, inspections, safeguards, and nonproliferation. Privately, the US and Israel expanded intelligence cooperation and pursued covert means to slow Iran’s progress. 

The larger irony remained intact. Iran’s nuclear program began with American approval, European contracts, Israeli contacts, and international legitimacy. After 1979, the same infrastructure became radioactive in the political sense. It was no longer the nuclear dream of a friendly monarch. It was the nuclear ambition of a state that had broken with Washington.

Today’s American outrage has a strange historical aftertaste. Trump wants to erase what earlier American policy helped create, and Israel wants to destroy a nuclear capacity that Israeli experts once helped nurture. The point is not that Iran’s nuclear program was ‘good’ when the West helped build it and ‘bad’ once the Islamic Republic inherited it. The point is that it became unacceptable when it was no longer in the hands of a US-aligned client state.

After 1979, the same infrastructure, institutions, and expertise ended up under a government Washington could not control. And despite losing Western support, Iran managed to keep the program alive through procurement, covert development, and partial localization. Over time, this produced a more autonomous nuclear cycle. It also gave Iran the ability to move close to weapons-grade capability without formally leaving the NPT. This is what made the program so difficult for Washington to contain – not simply that Iran had nuclear technology, but that it had learned how to sustain and advance it without being a client of the West.

Over the past several days Western leaders have flocked to Armenia, a post-Soviet nation of 3 million people which hosts a Russian military base, for what Western media has described as a “historic summit,” charting Yerevan’s path away from Moscow and highlighting the EU’s purportedly growing responsibility for world affairs.

The gathering gave the host, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and his guests, an opportunity for political posturing – as well as a distraction from the global crisis they’re lurching into.

Who came to Yerevan?

Armenia hosted the latest summit of the European Political Community (EPC), an EU-led intergovernmental group launched in 2022 in response to the escalation of the Ukraine crisis. Originally the brainchild of French President Emmauel Macron, it was transparently designed as a vehicle for an anti-Russian agenda pushed by Brussels and London.

Molodova, an EU candidate state led by a fiercely anti-Russian government, hosted the EPC’s second annual gathering. The group also counts Ukraine among participants and welcomes at its events a Belarusian opposition organization led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, which is based in Lithuania and funded by EU taxpayers’ money.

So in short, it’s largely a club for opposing Russia with questionable entry standards.

What does Armenia get out of hosting the summit?

A lot of positive Western media publicity for Pashinyan, whose approval ratings at home barely cross into double digits. His premiership, launched with a soft coup in 2018, was marred by a lost proxy war with neighboring Azerbaijan for its region of Nagorno Karabakh.

The prime minister attempted to scapegoat Russia – faulting Moscow for a lack of military response during border clashes that were part of Yerevan’s broader stand-off with Baku. He also used government powers to crack down on the Armenian Apostolic Church, which played a leading role in protest against his government in 2024.

This does not make Pashinyan an authoritarian ruler in the eyes of his Western guests. After all, part of his media strategy has been to shave his beard and start posting videos of himself making heart shapes to pop music. European leaders, such as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, would rather echo the Armenian host’s emulation of a K-Pop star than question his governance.

Prime Minister of #Armenia 🇦🇲 @NikolPashinyan greeted Prime Minister of the Republic of #Poland 🇵🇱 @donaldtusk upon his arrival at the 8th European Political Community Summit in Yerevan.#EPCYerevan2026 #EPCArmenia pic.twitter.com/mGp6AJ9kWh

— EPC Armenia (@EPCArmenia) May 4, 2026

Does Pashinyan need Western political backing?

Pashinyan’s efforts to distance Armenia from Russia and convince voters that the EU and the US would ensure their future safety have paid off – at least in the form of a pat on the back from Western leaders.

It’s safe to assume that Brussels will have Pashinyan’s back with all its usual ‘anti-interference’ shenanigans during the upcoming parliamentary election in early June. However, unlike Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, who has kept her office thanks to voters based in the EU, Pashinyan must win domestic support, since Armenian laws do not allow casting ballots outside of national territory (the Armenian diaspora numbers some 10 million).

Macron, whose presidency is set to end next year, threw some crumbs for the cameras covering the Yerevan circus by singing Charles  Aznavour’s ‘La Bohème’ as Pashinyan played the drums.

Emmanuel Macron chante « la bohème » accompagné à la batterie par le premier ministre Nikol pachinyan . Dîner d’état à Erevan. La musique en amitié. pic.twitter.com/v5vacqZlVv

— Agnès Vahramian (@AgnesVahramian) May 4, 2026

Was Zelensky invited?

An inevitable presence at virtually every event involving the EU, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky popped up in Yerevan with the usual assurances that Russia is on the brink of defeat. Though he and Pashinyan are both fluent in Russian, they communicated in English on camera – political optics beating common sense, as it often does wherever Brussels has a hand.

During a photo op with Western leaders, some clerk who must be on the Kremlin’s payroll placed the Ukrainian leader next to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. The positioning was uncomfortable not due to political differences, but because Rama is a giant some two meters tall – contrasting with Zelensky whose height and speculated use of lift shoes has long been debated.

The Ukrainian leader is currently preoccupied with other kinds of optics. Just last week he was faced with a new series of allegations concerning his inner circle’s control and ownership of weapons companies receiving potentially billions in Western aid and orders.

Released transcripts of secret conversations between Zelenskys’ then Defense Minister and his long-time business partner, Timur Mindich – known as “Zelensky’s wallet” – show that Mindich is the beneficial owner of Fire Point, the former casting agency that became a billion dollar weapons company in just 4 years.

Acting Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, whose government forced through extraordinary legislation to accommodate a Fire Point facility on its territory, was spared the outrage that would have met her attending a meeting with Zelensky.

She skipped the meeting, as did German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

So what is all the fuss about?

According to European Council President Antonio Costa, Western dignitaries arrived in Yerevan mainly to demonstrate that “Europe’s way of doing things – diplomacy, multilateralism, and respect for international law – yields results.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a special guest, said he was “very appreciative of the symbolism” of being invited, and said international order “will be rebuilt out of Europe.” He previously argued that Western dominance was based on lies and urged beneficiaries to reject it, but failed to follow through.

But Brussels may have had its revenge by challenging Trump’s diplomatic reengagement with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Tikhanovskaya was filmed shaking hands with Macron on the sidelines of the summit in Armenia, after reportedly passing on last year’s EPC meeting in Denmark due to financial constraints.

It is very important for us that Europe maintains unity and continues to act together. Today, I thanked 🇫🇷 President @EmmanuelMacron for the role that France plays today in Europe. #EPC pic.twitter.com/DaSx8E30I1

— Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) May 4, 2026

Artificial intelligence is helping criminals expand their entrapment of modern-day slaves across the UK, with traffickers increasingly using digital tools to identify and exploit victims, a new report has found.

Criminal networks in the UK are seeking to enslave people through coercion, deception, or force, including forced labor, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking, the study, commissioned by the UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, has found. AI is enabling traffickers to “identify, recruit and control victims at scale,” making exploitation more widespread and significantly harder to detect.

The report noted that the number of reported cases reached 23,411 in 2025, the highest on record and marked a 22% annual increase, underscoring what officials describe as a growing crisis.

According to the study, AI-driven scams, deepfakes and synthetic identities are being used to target vulnerable individuals, while new forms of digital labor exploitation are expanding the pool of victims. These methods reportedly allow traffickers to operate more efficiently and with greater anonymity.

At the same time, economic pressures, including the rising cost of living, are increasing vulnerability, creating what the commissioner described as a “pipeline” of people at risk of exploitation.

Lyons stressed that the rapid evolution of technology means the threat is likely to continue growing.

The growing use of chatbots has long fueled concerns among independent researchers and government agencies worldwide about AI-enabled crime. While most illegal activities have been linked to the digital sphere, including hacking, cyberattacks, fraud, and identity theft, chatbots have also increasingly been implicated in facilitating more serious and violent crimes.

A recent joint investigation by CNN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 8 out of 10 AI chatbots helped simulate violent attack planning, including school shootings and attacks on public figures. The research also found that most systems were willing to provide actionable guidance in violent scenarios to users posing as minors.

Romania’s ruling pro-EU coalition collapsed on Tuesday after Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan was ousted in a no-confidence motion in the country's parliament. The defeat follows months of tensions over austerity measures as Bucharest struggles with the highest budget deficit in the EU.

The motion passed 281-4 after a debate on a joint effort launched by the left-wing Social Democratic Party (PSD), which withdrew from the governing coalition late last month, and the right-wing opposition Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party.

Bolojan called the motion “cynical and artificial” during the parliamentary debate, insisting that he took “urgent and necessary” measures to address the country’s economic crisis.

Critics, however, have argued that after ten months in power, Bolojan and the four-party pro-EU government failed to bring any real improvements for citizens. AUR leader George Simion celebrated the vote, writing on social media that Romanians had only “received taxes, war and poverty” under the government and called for snap elections, which are, however, considered unlikely before 2028.

Why is Romania's politics so unstable

The current government and the four-party coalition were set up in June 2025 by President Nicusor Dan after winning a controversial election rerun that critics argue was orchestrated to keep anti-European forces out of power and appease EU and NATO interest groups.

Annulment of Georgescu’s victory

The initial election round, held in December 2024, was won by independent anti-NATO and anti-EU candidate Calin Georgescu who advocated for restoring Romania’s sovereignty and opposed the EU’s confrontational stance towards Russia.

Georgescu was later detained, charged with incitement against the constitutional order, and barred from running in the 2025 rerun. The charges were subsequently reduced to charges of promoting “far-right propaganda.”

The EU’s democratic backsliding

The treatment of Georgescu has been widely criticized, including in the US, where the House Judiciary Committee concluded in February that Brussels had used unproven Russian interference claims to overturn the 2024 election results. The committee’s report described the move as “the most aggressive censorship steps” taken by the EU in recent years.

US Vice President J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 that it was “ugly” to see a politician with an alternative viewpoint being blocked from power and accused Europe of backsliding on the most fundamental democratic values.

Georgescu himself has argued that his victory was overturned by the “globalist mafia” because NATO intends to “launch World War III from Romania” and was opposed to his campaign focused on peace.

What happens next

President Dan is expected to begin consultations with party leaders to form a new government as Romania faces an August deadline to complete reforms and unlock around €11 billion in EU funding while a credit rating downgrade remains a risk, according to Politico.

President Donald Trump was not “pulled in” to the war on Iran by Israel, but chose to attack the Islamic Republic based on his ‘America First’ policy, War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed in a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday.

During the event, the war secretary was asked whether Washington was risking “getting roped back into a war” by Israel, as “the Israelis are explicitly stating their intent to continue fighting at a later date.”

Hegseth argued that the core idea that Trump was “pulled into” the Iran war by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a “false premise.”

“Just to be clear, President Trump has led at every step of this based on his view of American interests and ‘America First,’” he said, adding that Washington was “grateful” to have Israel as an ally.

However, he admitted that “they may have some objectives at times that are slightly different than ours.”

Israel has continued to bomb southern Lebanon in violation of the armistice, despite Trump directly prohibiting it from doing so since mid-April.

West Jerusalem has claimed that it is only targeting Hezbollah during its invasion of its southern neighbor, however reports have emerged alleging systematic destruction of entire villages and rampant looting of civilian property by the IDF. Since March 2, Israeli attacks have killed at least 2,702 people and wounded more than 8,000, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported on Tuesday.

“The status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet,” Iranian Parliament Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on Tuesday.

Shortly after US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between the US and Iran, tensions escalated dramatically on the Israeli-Lebanese front. Israel declared that it was launching strikes in Lebanese territory to counter Hezbollah. 

The strikes primarily targeted urban infrastructure, including areas in Beirut. In the first 24 hours of the Israeli operation, civilian casualties exceeded 250 people. 

Israel’s official stance is that the operation is aimed against Hezbollah, which it considers a terrorist organization. However, multiple strikes on urban infrastructure raise doubts that the attacks were directed solely against military targets. While the families of its supporters may reside in some neighborhoods, Hezbollah forces typically avoid urban environments and don’t use civilian infrastructure for military purposes. 

Moreover, Israel’s actions exert additional pressure on the (already challenging) negotiation track between the US and Iran. Any escalation in Lebanon automatically involves Tehran as Hezbollah’s key ally. Iran immediately condemned Israel’s strikes – according to Tehran, the ceasefire announced by Trump was supposed to extend to Lebanon. Consequently, the US, as Israel’s ally, was responsible for the strikes against Beirut.

The negotiations held between the US and Iran in Islamabad were also connected to the situation in Lebanon. Iran’s position is clear: It considers Lebanon a zone of its strategic interests and is unwilling to exclude it from the negotiating agenda. Washington, however, is not prepared to accept this configuration. The White House aims to diminish Tehran’s geopolitical influence and prevent it from emerging as a winner in this political game.

At the end of April, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid merged their factions into a single list. This development suggests that the ruling Likud party, led by Netanyahu, could be at risk of splitting due to significant internal disagreements. Consequently, for Netanyahu, the ongoing external crisis serves as a means of preserving the existing political balance.

Military engagement in Lebanon also aligns with Israel’s broader strategy to contain regional proxy structures linked to Iran. Weakening Hezbollah could potentially reduce Tehran’s ability to project power in the eastern Mediterranean.

The strategic interests of Israel and the US are aligned on this issue: Both are interested in limiting Iran’s regional influence by means of weakening its allies. 

Prior to launching extensive strikes on Lebanon, Netanyahu addressed residents in northern Israel and stressed that a ceasefire is not being discussed. He stated that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would continue to target Hezbollah “at full scale” until the safety of the population is ensured. He also described his strategy as ‘peace through strength’, causing dissatisfaction in Washington.

Despite Trump’s calls for restraint, the situation on the ground continues to escalate. Three days ago, it was reported that the IDF struck and destroyed over 40 Hezbollah infrastructure sites in southern Lebanon within a single day. Targeted facilities included command centers, military structures, and related assets. The New York Times notes that Israel is employing the same tactics in Lebanon as it did in Gaza: Entire neighborhoods, streets, and buildings are being turned into rubble. Not only residential homes but also government institutions, schools, hospitals, and mosques have been demolished.

A day ago, the NYT reported that Israeli forces destroyed 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon, creating a multi-kilometer buffer zone. According to the publication, the Israeli authorities plan to maintain control over this area until the threat is completely eliminated. Officially, Israel justifies these actions by claiming that Hezbollah continues to attack. However, this rationale deliberately ignores one critical point: Ongoing Israeli operations provoke constant retaliatory actions from Hezbollah, thus perpetuating a cycle of escalation in which each side cites the other’s actions to justify its own.

The cumulative casualties starkly illustrate the true scale of the conflict: At least 2,600 people have died, and more than a million have been displaced. The ceasefire has been breached over 200 times. In other words, there is no real ceasefire – only a diplomatic facade under which a full-blown war continues.

This underlines the duality of the current situation: Israel has not formally declared an end to the war, yet de facto it has agreed to temper its rhetorical intensity under external pressure. Essentially, this is a reluctant adjustment, framed in a way that would minimize reputational costs for Trump, even as the underlying logic of the military operation remains unchanged.

Media reports, including those from the Saudi news channel Al-Hadath and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, suggest that a ceasefire could be announced as a gesture of goodwill. However, even in this scenario, it seems more like a tactical pause than a long-term resolution. The situation in Lebanon is closely linked to negotiations with Iran. For Washington, maintaining dialogue with Tehran remains a top priority (regardless of whether it is preparing for a new round of conflict with Iran), and de-escalation along Israel’s northern borders is a tool for achieving broader diplomatic goals. Israel, for its part, agrees to these limitations only as long as they do not undermine its own strategy of power projection.

In this context, a shift toward negotiations does not indicate a change in overall policy. According to Israeli media, the government is also considering ramping up military actions in Gaza – officially, because of Hamas’ refusal to disarm as long as there is no comprehensive political settlement. This means that we are talking not so much about de-escalation as a re-distribution of military resources and political focus between several fronts.

The UK is considering helping the EU to provide a €90 billion ($105 billion) ‘loan’ to Ukraine to gain access to lucrative military contracts funded through the program.

The plan was announced in a joint statement by European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Antonio Costa, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer during the European Political Community summit in Armenia on Monday.

The so-called loan scheme, backed by joint EU borrowing, is structured on the assumption that it would be repaid if Kiev secures reparations from Russia, a prospect Moscow has dismissed as “unrealistic.” By backing Brussels, London will gain access to the slew of military contracts the cash is expected to generate.

The scheme was floated after plans to seize Russia’s frozen sovereign assets failed, and was approved last month after a lengthy standoff with Hungary ended when pro-EU candidate Peter Magyar’s Tisza party won the Hungarian election. The vast majority of the billions is for military spending, mostly on Western weapons.

Starmer hailed the potential deal as “very good for the UK,” citing “capability that leads to jobs.” Both London and Brussels pitched it as “a major step forward in the EU-UK defense industrial relationship.”

The UK can reportedly take part on two conditions – if it maintains a Security and Defense Partnership with the EU, agreed last May, and if it continues significant financial and military support for Ukraine.

Britain is a key force behind the Ukraine conflict, according to Moscow, accusing it of direct involvement in Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian cities using UK-supplied weapons. Russian officials argued systems such as British Storm Shadow missiles cannot be used effectively without direct UK participation. Last month, the Russian Defense Ministry also listed European countries hosting drone production facilities for Kiev’s forces, including sites in the UK.

Physical oil shortages could begin to emerge worldwide within weeks due to the Middle East war and continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has warned.

Attacks on energy infrastructure and a dual shipping blockade in the critical waterway – which carries about a fifth of global seaborne oil and LNG – have sharply cut deliveries and pushed prices to multi-year highs. Multiple tankers have remained stranded in Hormuz since the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February. Washington and Tehran remain at odds over the strait’s future, with reports saying the US rejected Iran’s proposal for a new governance mechanism as part of peace talks.

Although active fighting paused under a fragile ceasefire last month, tensions flared again on Monday, when American and Iranian forces exchanged fire as the US military began escorting vessels through the strait.

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles on Monday, Wirth said economies will begin slowing, first in Asia – the most dependent on Gulf oil – and then in Europe, as supply tightens.

“We will start to see physical shortages… Demand needs to move to meet supply. Economies are going to have to slow,” he said, as cited by Reuters, noting that commercial stockpiles, shadow tanker fleets, and strategic reserves are already being drawn down to delay shortages.

He warned the impact of the Hormuz closure could be “as big as in the 1970s,” when supply shocks triggered the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, sending prices soaring and causing widespread fuel shortages across the US, Europe, and Japan.

Wirth reiterated the warning in an interview with CNBC, saying physical availability – not just price – will soon become the main concern.

“As people look at the realities of very tight supplies, it’s not just a question of price, it’s actually can we get the fuel... Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll see those effects begin to move throughout the system,” he said, noting that some European airlines are already restricting jet fuel use and cutting flights, while several Asian countries have introduced demand-reduction measures.

The fallout is already visible, including in the US. Budget carrier Spirit Airlines said over the weekend it was going out of business, citing surging fuel costs. The crisis has also driven shifts in energy policy. The UAE last week said it would leave OPEC and the broader OPEC+ format, citing the need for greater flexibility over domestic output.

Wirth’s warning echoes recent assessments by the International Energy Agency and the World Bank. IEA head Fatih Birol said disruptions tied to Hormuz pose “the biggest energy security threat in history,” with some 13 million barrels per day lost.

Western efforts to censor RT have nothing to do with alleged “disinformation” but are aimed at suppressing dissenting voices, Chief Producer Dmitry Leontiev has told delegates at a UNESCO summit marking World Press Freedom Day.

Leontiev made the remarks on Tuesday at a UNESCO conference titled ‘Shaping a Future at Peace’ in Lusaka, Zambia that brought together journalists, policymakers, and digital rights advocates.
“We were banned by all Western countries a few years ago,” Leontiev said. “More than that, those Western governments coerced social media companies to ban us as well.” 

He noted that it was “even more alarming” that Western governments openly pressed African countries to follow suit while threatening to sanction them if they allowed RT content.

He stressed that the sanctions on RT were imposed “under the guise of fighting disinformation” and never included accusations that the network was “saying anything false.” 

“There are no false facts we are saying. We are stating information that the Western governments do not like, and they have enough power to sanction us.”

Leontiev then posed the question to the floor: “How do we put these two concepts together – fighting disinformation and press freedom?”

Russia’s envoy to UNESCO, Rinat Alyautdinov, backed up RT’s argument that Moscow has been systematically drawing attention to “one-sided politically motivated reprisals against the Russian media in the West.” 

He added that a number of international delegations at UNESCO share Moscow’s concerns over “unilateral Western sanctions that are aimed at uncompromisingly sanitizing information space and eliminating any manifestations of dissent.”

Most Western states have heavily restricted or outright banned RT since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, citing alleged foreign interference and disinformation. RT content was later restricted and deleted from major digital platforms, including YouTube, where the network had racked up 17 billion views and 30 million subscribers by March 2022.

Speaking at an event marking RT’s 20th anniversary, attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said RT is “only getting stronger and feeling more emboldened” despite sanctions.

A Victory Day concert is set to take place in central Vienna on May 9, the Russian Embassy in Austria has announced. The event next to the Soviet War Memorial at Schwarzenbergplatz will feature performances by musicians and members of the Russian community in Austria, according to the embassy.

The announcement comes amid a diplomatic row between Russia and Austria. On Monday, Vienna said it expelled three Russian diplomats, accusing the mission of espionage. Moscow has condemned the move as unjustified and politically motivated, warning of a harsh response.

Vienna hosts the headquarters of several major international organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, OPEC, and a number of UN agencies, which Russia takes part in, maintaining diplomatic and technical engagement.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Victory Day events have been met with counter-demonstrations in Vienna. Kiev has repeatedly asked the Austrian government to ban the events, but without success, according to Euronews.

US President Donald Trump should send large amounts of weapons to Iranian civilians in order to spark a civil war in the country, Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the US-Israeli war on Iran, has suggested. 

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday, the South Carolina war hawk Republican framed the proposal as a “Second Amendment solution” for the Islamic Republic and an alternative to deploying American ground troops. 

“If I were President Trump and I were Israel, I would load the Iranian people up with weapons so they can go to the streets armed and turn the tide of battle inside Iran,” Graham said.

Hannity noted in the interview that Washington had already tried this approach in the past. Last month, Trump confirmed that the US had sent “a lot” of firearms to Iranian protesters during the nationwide unrest that erupted in late 2025. However, the guns were supposedly stolen, according to Trump, and Washington’s efforts to spark regime change in the country have consistently failed, even after assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. 

The South Carolina senator’s latest call to orchestrate mass social unrest within the Islamic Republic comes after years of him advocating the destruction of Iran’s government, demanding that the US military “destroy the air force, sink their navy,” urging not to “underrate killing them all,” and calling for the country to be blown “off the map.”

Meanwhile, geostrategic analyst Christopher Helali, who recently returned from inside Iran, told RT on Sunday that the US and Israel’s ultimate goal is “not about liberating the Iranian people” but about “destroying Iran’s future,” pointing to the deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities, schools, and universities.

Ties within Western blocs are becoming increasingly strained, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has admitted, after he sparred with US President Donald Trump over the Iran war on several occasions.

Starmer made the remarks at the European Political Community (EPC) summit in Yerevan, Armenia, on Monday, saying that “there is more tension in the alliances than there should be and it’s very important that we therefore face up to this as a group of countries together.”

While Starmer did not single out the reason for growing friction, the remarks come against the backdrop of a rapidly souring relationship with the White House. In early March, Trump declared that the US-UK “special relationship” was “obviously not what it was” and branded Starmer “no Winston Churchill” after London refused to join the US-led war on Iran.

Trump also fumed over Starmer’s January trip to Beijing – the first such visit by a British prime minister in eight years, and which resulted in a series of trade agreements – with the US leader branding it “very dangerous.”

Despite the apparent tensions, Starmer called on European partners to increase their military spending inside NATO, echoing an argument long made by Trump. “I feel very strongly that the European countries now need to step up and do more on defense and security to have a stronger European element of NATO,” he said, insisting that the UK continues to work “very closely with the US on all issues to do with defense and security.”

Starmer also said it is in the UK’s “national interest to be closer to Europe,” while declining to comment on a Times report that the EU has demanded £1 billion ($1.35 billion) a year in financial contributions in exchange for a wider trade deal.

The report, however, triggered a backlash at home, with Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel accusing Starmer of “unpicking Brexit and planning another undemocratic hit job on British taxpayers.”

The White House is weighing the possibility of reviewing new artificial intelligence models before official release, marking a potential shift from its current hands-off approach, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing sources.

According to the outlet, the administration of US President Donald Trump is mulling the creation of an AI working group that brings together officials and tech executives to explore oversight options, including a possible formal review process.

Sources say the push aims to avoid political fallout from a potential AI-enabled cyberattack, while also giving officials early access to new models to assess whether they could offer cyber capabilities useful to the Pentagon.

The system could give the government early access to advanced models, though not necessarily the power to block them. Officials reportedly discussed the plans last week with representatives from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

It remains unclear how the reviews would work or which agencies would run them. Any mechanism would likely be introduced via executive order, though no timeline has been set.

Requiring formal reviews would mark a reversal in Trump’s AI policy. Since returning to office, he has championed minimal regulation, calling AI “a beautiful newborn baby” that is key to competing with China and warning against “politics or stupid rules” that could hinder its growth.

The debate also follows a row between Anthropic and the Pentagon, after the firm refused to loosen safeguards on surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Department of War labeled it a “supply-chain risk,” sidelining it from contracts – a move Anthropic is now challenging in court.

The Pentagon has been rapidly expanding AI use in its operations, recently securing deals with Google and OpenAI for classified models.

Concerns over AI risks have been mounting in the US for some time. A Pew Research Center poll last year found 50% of Americans were more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37% in 2021. A March Gallup poll showed Gen Z sentiment turning more negative, with optimism falling and anger rising.

Colombian citizens who travel to Ukraine to fight as mercenaries are “dying for nothing,” President Gustavo Petro has said.

The Colombian leader took aim at Kiev’s use of foreign fighters in a post on X on Tuesday. He was reacting to a Ukrainian media report praising what it described as 7,000 Colombians involved in the conflict with Russia.

“There are 7,000 Colombian men, trained for combat, fighting in a foreign war and dying for nothing in Ukraine,” Petro wrote, adding that Colombia does not intend to “export death.”

Kiev has been actively seeking foreign recruits – described by Ukrainian officials as ‘volunteers’ – since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in February 2022. Colombia, given its long history of internal armed conflict and counterinsurgency operations, has become a significant source of foreign fighters.

Colombians treated as ‘second-class’ in Ukraine

Petro stressed that mercenary activity is illegal under Colombian law. In late March, the country ratified the UN Mercenary Convention amid a surge in recruitment that has reportedly drawn around 10,000 Colombians into foreign conflicts worldwide.

Public attention in Colombia was drawn in October 2025 to the case of around 40 nationals stranded in Ukraine. According to Semana magazine, they attempted to exit military service and leave the country, but were allegedly abducted while traveling toward Poland.

At the time, Petro shared a video said to show the Colombians in Ukrainian custody and accused Kiev of treating them as “second-class” individuals.

Los ucranianos tratan a los Colombianos como raza inferior. pido a los Colombianos mercenarios,, que los están manejando como carne de cañón, llevados por empresas guiadas. desde Miami, que regresen de inmediato al país pic.twitter.com/gGlDnGMMy9

— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 8, 2025

“I call on Colombian mercenaries who are being used as cannon fodder by companies operating out of Miami to return home immediately,” the president said.

Ukraine facing troop shortages

The Russian military has said it targets positions held by foreign fighters supporting Kiev, though it rarely provides detailed accounts. In 2024, the Defense Ministry published a breakdown of foreign fighters by nationality, placing Colombia behind Poland, Georgia, the US, and Canada.

Since then, Ukraine’s manpower challenges have worsened, leading the authorities to adopt increasingly harsh mobilization practices to compel reluctant men of fighting age into the army. The government has acknowledged that the often violent actions of press gangs are a major source of tensions in Ukrainian society.

The system of ‘international legions’ within the Ukrainian military was reportedly dissolved last year, sparking discontent among foreign fighters who were subsequently ordered to integrate into regular military units.

US-Israeli strikes on Iran have failed to push back the timeline for Tehran potentially acquiring a nuclear weapon, Reuters reported on Monday, citing intelligence sources. Tehran could still reportedly produce a bomb in roughly a year – the same estimate as after last June’s attacks on its key nuclear facilities.

While US officials have insisted that their key objective in the war has been to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, the timeline for a nuclear breakout remains “broadly unchanged,” the report says. It added that derailing Tehran’s nuclear effort would require destroying or removing Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

“Iran still possesses all of its nuclear material, as far as we know,” Eric Brewer, a former senior US intelligence analyst, told Reuters. “That material is probably located in deeply buried underground sites where US munitions can’t penetrate.”

Last June, powerful US strikes hit nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, with US intelligence estimating that the nuclear breakout timeline was put back to about nine months to a year, Reuters sources said. Around the same time, a New York Times report said, citing a classified assessment, that US strikes had set Iran’s program back by only “a few months.” 

US President Donald Trump at the time dismissed the allegation as “fake news,” saying that “monumental damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran.”

Iran has consistently denied ever seeking nuclear weapons and rejected demands to surrender its enriched uranium stockpile. Last year, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi stated that “we do not have any indication that there is a systemic program in Iran to manufacture a nuclear weapon.”

Despite this, US and Israeli officials have for years sounded the alarm about Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been issuing warnings since at least 1992, and at the 2012 UN General Assembly, he famously brandished a cartoon bomb diagram with a red line drawn near the 90% enrichment threshold.

A small single-engine Embraer 721C plane crashed into a residential building in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte on Monday, according to local officials and firefighters.

The aircraft, which had five people on board, reportedly took off from Pampulha Airport at 12:16 PM and crashed minutes later in the Silveira neighborhood. Emergency services were called to the scene at around 12:25 PM.

Footage circulating online shows the plane flying low over the area, seemingly attempting to avoid taller buildings, before smashing into the side of a four-story residential building.

Moradores gravaram o local antes do isolamento, é 4km da cabeceira próxima da Cristiano Machado pic.twitter.com/as6hFk0Z2p

— AEROIN (@aero_in) May 4, 2026

The aircraft hit the stairwell between the third and fourth floors, avoiding the apartments themselves.

Update - CCTV footage of the light aircraft that impacted a building in Belo Horizonte (Brazil)

According to preliminary info pilot declared difficulties during the initial climb moments after departure. The aircraft subsequently collided with a building and fell into the… https://t.co/SzW0VUp3LY pic.twitter.com/YqKg1HNCWM

— Francisco Cunha (@OnDisasters) May 5, 2026

No residents of the building were reported injured. According to another graphic video, they tried to help one of the survivors, who suffered a gruesome leg fracture.

Brazil Plane Crash: Aircraft Hits Building in Belo Horizonte, 2 Dead

A small aircraft carrying four people crashed into a building in Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil on Monday.#Brazil #PlaneCrash #BreakingNews https://t.co/RaHsSwqyJg pic.twitter.com/mYJWizj2KC

— Atulkrishan (@iAtulKrishan1) May 5, 2026

The fatalities included the pilot, identified by Globo News as Wellington Oliveira, 34, and passenger Fernando Moreira Souto, 36, the son of the mayor of Jequitinhonha. Three survivors were rushed to the hospital in serious condition, but one of them later succumbed to their injuries.

Brazil’s air accident investigation authorities, including the Center for Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents and regional investigators from SERIPA III, were sent to the site. Minas Gerais Civil Police also opened an investigation into the cause of the crash.

‘Stay Free Alberta’ activists have submitted almost 302,000 signatures to the election authorities in a bid to trigger a referendum on whether Canada’s oil-rich western province should leave the country.

A convoy of trucks delivered the signatures to the Elections Alberta office in Edmonton on Monday, as more than 300 supporters gathered outside, waving provincial flags and chanting “Alberta strong.”

The figure is well above the 177,732 signatures required under Alberta’s citizen-initiative rules, equal to 10% of the total number of votes cast in the previous provincial election.

The authorities have yet to verify the signatures for the petition – titled ‘A Referendum Relating to Alberta Independence’ – to move forward. The initiative was backed by the Alberta Prosperity Project, a pro-sovereignty nonprofit.

The proposed question asks: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada and become an independent state?” The activists hope it will be added to a provincial referendum ballot in October.

Recent polling suggests that independence remains a minority position in Alberta, with an Angus Reid Institute survey in February finding that 65% of respondents would vote to stay in Canada, while 29% would vote to leave.

The push comes amid long-running tensions between Alberta and Ottawa over energy policy, taxation, environmental regulations, and access to export markets for the province’s oil and gas. Alberta is Canada’s key energy-producing region, producing over 80% of the country’s crude oil and 60% of its natural gas output, and has the highest per-capita GDP among Canadian provinces.

The independence push also faces a legal challenge from Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, which argues that Alberta’s potential secession would violate treaty rights with indigenous peoples. The First Nation has asked a court to halt the process, saying the province has no right to leave Canada or take treaty territory with it.

Palantir Technologies reported a blowout first quarter, saying revenue rose 85% year-on-year to $1.63 billion as its US business more than doubled, driven by rapid growth across both commercial and government customers.

The company said in its Q1 report, published on Monday, that US revenue jumped 104% to $1.28 billion, with commercial revenue up 133% to $595 million and government revenue up 84% to $687 million. The results beat Wall Street estimates, and the company also raised its full-year guidance, saying it now expects 2026 revenue of up to $7.66 billion, implying annual growth of around 71%.

CEO Alex Karp, who has increasingly framed Palantir’s AI tools as central to Western military and industrial power, said the “twin pistons of our US business are now firing in sync.”

Palantir reports Q1 ‘26 U.S. revenue growth of 104% Y/Y and revenue growth of 85% Y/Y; raises FY ’26 revenue guidance to 71% Y/Y growth and U.S. comm revenue guidance to 120% Y/Y, crushing consensus expectations.

Q1 U.S. commercial revenue grew 133% y/y and adjusted operating… pic.twitter.com/eSKl9BQ3HW

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) May 4, 2026

“We believe it is not hyperbolic to say that nearly all AI workflows that actually create value – especially on the battlefield – are built on Palantir,” Karp wrote in an accompanying letter to shareholders, stating that the company “was founded to strengthen US national security, to protect Americans and their freedom.”

Palantir’s flagship product is a system called Gotham, which pulls together and analyzes satellite footage, human intelligence from the CIA, signals intelligence from the NSA, and other data that might otherwise take days to sift through.

Gotham and MOSAIC – another Palantir target-identification program that pulls digital data, including surveillance footage and IP addresses, from a target area – use AI to label the most effective targets for military strikes.

The company’s earnings update came weeks after Palantir drew criticism for a 22-point manifesto summarizing themes from Karp’s book ‘The Technological Republic’. The manifesto argued that Silicon Valley has an obligation to take part in national defense, that “hard power” will be built on software, and that AI weapons are inevitable. Critics have called it a blueprint for “technofascism.”

Iran has dismissed claims that US forces sank six Iranian naval vessels that were allegedly threatening commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.    

The head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral Brad Cooper, told journalists on Monday that the US military “eliminated” a small Iranian naval force in the region.

The reported strike was part of Project Freedom – an initiative announced by US President Donald Trump on Sunday to escort tankers and other vessels that have been stuck in the Strait of Hormuz since the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February.

“The US claim regarding the sinking of a number of Iranian combat boats is a lie,” a senior Iranian military official told IRIB news agency on Monday.

Cooper claimed that the US military sank at least six Iranian boats, boasting of “an enormous amount of capability and firepower concentrated in and around the strait, including AH-64 Apache and MH-60 Seahawk helicopters.”

Washington and Tehran remain at odds over the fate of the key waterway, which accounts for around 20% of global seaborne oil trade. Iran reportedly suggested a new mechanism to govern the strait as part of its latest peace proposal, which was rejected by the US.

Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports to force Tehran to agree to a peace settlement that would be satisfactory to Washington. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the blockade an “act of war” violating the ceasefire reached in early April.

“Project Freedom is Project Deadlock,” Araghchi said in a post on X, warning the US to “be wary of being dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers.”

The White House was briefly put on lockdown on Monday after a shooting involving the US Secret Service near the Washington Monument, where an armed suspect allegedly opened fire on officers, wounding a minor.

The incident took place at around 3:30pm near 15th Street and Independence Avenue, several blocks from the White House, according to the Secret Service. President Donald Trump was attending a small-business event at the White House at the time, which reportedly continued without disruption.

Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn said plainclothes agents had spotted a suspicious man near the White House complex. The agents followed him briefly and called in uniformed officers.

“Upon making contact, that individual fled briefly on foot, withdrew a firearm and fired in the direction of our agents and officers,” Quinn said. “They returned fire and engaged.”

A juvenile bystander was wounded during the exchange, but the injuries were not life-threatening, according to NBC Washington. Initial findings suggested the minor may have been hit by the suspect’s gunfire. The suspect was detained and taken to a hospital, but his condition was not immediately known.

Everyone herded into the briefing room as the alert was lifted pic.twitter.com/eMfAgYF7U3

— Alan Fisher (@AlanFisher) May 4, 2026

Journalists at the White House reported being moved off the North Lawn and ordered to shelter inside the press briefing room as a precaution. The lockdown was lifted shortly afterward, with local roads remaining closed while police and forensic teams worked at the scene.

The motive remains unclear, and officials have not said whether the suspect had been targeting the president, the White House, or a nearby motorcade. The Washington Post reported that Vice President JD Vance’s motorcade had passed through the area shortly before the confrontation, but no direct connection was immediately established.

In his purported manifesto, Allen, without identifying Trump by name, slammed his policies and described an intent to take action against “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.”

The US-Israeli bombings of Iranian fertility clinics, hospitals, schools and universities were aimed at “destroying Iran’s future,” geostrategic analyst Christopher Helali has told RT.

US President Donald Trump has claimed that one of the core goals of the war on Iran was to liberate its people from its government. He has also claimed that the country was left in a state of collapse after the US strikes.

Helali, who recently returned from reporting from inside Iran, said he saw “the exact opposite – I saw a people of dignity.” 

Despite Washington’s claims of wanting to bring freedom to the Iranians, US strikes had deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, including Iran’s largest fertility clinic and egg bank, he said.

This is not about liberating the Iranian people. This is about destroying Iran’s future.

In addition to key medical facilities, US strikes hit numerous universities and schools, including in Minab, where some 120 schoolchildren were killed, Helali added.

According to the analyst, Iranians are “fed up” with being betrayed by the US during negotiations and want to end the war “on their own terms.” 

“It’s clear that Iran maintains control over the entire Strait of Hormuz. Nothing goes in and out without approval from the IRGC’s navy,” he said, calling reports of Iranian forces firing on the US Navy on Monday “totally plausible.” 

Washington’s denial that a US ship was fired upon should be taken with “a whole bag of salt,” he added.

Should open hostilities break out once more, the Iranian response will be protracted, and would result in “a much larger level of destruction in the region than we have already seen,” he said. “In Iran, the sentiment is no negotiations until we have complete victory at this point.” 

Watch the full interview here:

The German Armed Forces have said they sent tens of thousands of young people a questionnaire on joining the military. Every 18-year-old male is obliged to fill it out and register for potential military service under a new law.

Around 194,000 young people received a letter from the military with the questionnaire between January 15 and April 24, a spokesperson for the armed forces told KNA news agency following a request. A spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry said it has “no reliable” data on the responses yet.

The questionnaire asks for personal data, including physical condition, health, and education, and whether they would like to join the army. Those who show interest are asked to choose their preferred branch and potential duration of service, from six months to more than six years.

President Vladimir Putin has dismissed speculation that Russia harbors aggressive intentions against NATO countries as “nonsense.”

Some German politicians, including the head of the state of Bavaria, Markus Soder, have argued for the reinstatement of the draft. The government’s plans have drawn criticism from young people, with thousands of students taking to the streets of Berlin to protest in early March.

US President Donald Trump’s disapproval rating has reached a new high of 62%, according to the latest Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll.

The survey published by WaPo on Monday shows most Americans are dissatisfied with Trump’s job performance, while his approval stands at just 37%. Trump has repeatedly attacked the outlet, accusing it of publishing “fake” news stories.

Opposition to the Iran war is a key factor in Trump’s declining popularity, with 66% disapproving of his handling of the conflict. His weakest ratings are on the economy, with 76% disapproving on the cost of living, 72% on inflation and 65% overall.

The same overall disapproval level of 62% was recorded in a Gallup poll at the end of his first term, after his loss to Joe Biden and the subsequent Capitol riot. His high disapproval at the time was driven by his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and unrest following the killing of George Floyd.

Trump’s declining support, however, is not translating into a proportional boost for the Democrats. Many voters remain wary of the party, with around 54% describing it as “too liberal,” according WaPo polling director Scott Clement.

Analysts point to the Democrats’ weaknesses, including internal divisions and a lack of a clear message. Writing in The Guardian, political commentator Osita Nwanevu argued the party relies too heavily on Trump’s unpopularity rather than offering a clear alternative.

Many Americans also say they trust “neither” party to handle immigration, the economy, crime and inflation.

Trump’s 62% disapproval ranks among the highest in modern polling, second only to Richard Nixon’s 66% in 1974 and above George W. Bush’s 61% in 2009, according to Gallup data.

According to vital statistics data published in April by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the birth rate in the US has reached a new record low. In 2025, there were 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age (15-44) in the US, 1.3% lower than in 2024 and 23% lower than in 2007. The decline in birth rates reflects the impact of decades of social change that have undermined the institution of the American family.

Today, the total number of births per year is far lower than in earlier periods, when the US population was much smaller. For example, in 1961, 4.3 million children were born when the US population stood at 184 million. In 2025, only 3.6 million children were born across the entire country, even though the population now stands at 342 million.

The current birth rates are even lower than during the Great Depression, when births fell to 75.8 births per 1,000 women in 1936.

An answer can be found in RT’s global survey, the Social Well-Being Index (SWI). While the West compares who has more money and greater consumption opportunities, we measure what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education). As a result, the great Western powers did not even make the top 20 in the SWI rankings. France ranked 29th, Germany 41st, the US 48th, and the UK 53rd.

Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1970s, it seemed like everyone I knew attended church services every Sunday without fail. Then something unexpected began to happen. The Catholic school I attended – like others around the country – was forced to merge with other schools to keep classrooms filled. At the same time, many churches of all denominations began closing their doors only to reopen as shopping malls, restaurants, or boutique hotels.

In total, over the past several decades, median worship attendance in the US plummeted by more than half. And the reason cannot be blamed on demographics. The US population has consistently increased for over a century, growing from roughly 76 million in 1900 to over 343 million by 2025, reinforced by heavy rates of immigration, both legal and illegal. Yet 40 million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years, which works out to about 12% of the population.

Some people have pointed to mental health problems in American society as the culprit. 

“The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church,” writes Jake Meador in The Atlantic. “The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”

The downturn in church membership was at least partially due to alarming problems within the church as lurid scandals involving sexual abuse charges among the clergy and young boys grabbed the headlines. But now it seems that worshippers are willing to forgive the church for past offenses and are making a gradual return to the pews.

A new report from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research shows signs of a shift – for the first time in two decades, church attendance is up. “Across a range of indicators, there are signs of recovery and, in some cases, renewal,” the study’s authors wrote in a report released on April 24, which surveyed a representative sample of leaders at 7,453 congregations between September and December of 2025.

Surprisingly, it is young people who are leading the charge back to the houses of worship. For decades, older adults – Boomers and older – were the most frequent churchgoers. Today, the pattern has been turned on its head.

According to 2025 Barna Group data, Gen Z (18-28) and Millennials (29-44), who once had a notorious reputation for their disinterest in church services, are leading a historic resurgence in church attendance, now attending more frequently than older generations. Gen Z averages 1.9 weekend visits monthly, while Millennials average 1.8, reversing a decades-long trend. Among Gen X – those born between 1965 and 1980 – churchgoing has landed at about the same rate as it was in 2000. This shift indicates a strong, renewed interest in faith, community, and purpose, with some reports noting young men are key drivers of this growth.

“The significant drop-off among older generations shows that the fabric of congregational life is changing. It’s more frayed and less gray than it was a decade ago,” notes David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group. “The influx of new generations represents a massive opportunity for congregational leaders, but this renewed interest must be stewarded well.”

So what is responsible for getting people, predominantly the young, back in the pews? Part of the growth is explained by churches – particularly nondenominational ones – understanding that it was important to make attendance an interesting and vibrant event for youth to get them through the doors. The empty recital of prayers was no longer working. This has led to the modernization of church services, which now includes social events, musical concerts by popular religious bands, and other such ‘gimmicks’. The introduction of the so-called nondenominational ‘megachurches’, which allows for more publicity, has also played a part in the rise among the youth.

Moreover, young people may be feeling empty inside from their endless addiction to their smartphones and social media. A return to religion and spirituality might just be what they need to fill the void.

At least three Indian nationals have been injured in a drone strike on a major petroleum industrial site in the Emirate of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, the authorities have said. The incident took place as the Defense Ministry reported that it repelled an Iranian missile and drone attack.

The strike targeted the Fujairah Petroleum Industries Zone and caused a “major fire” at the site, the emirate’s media office said in a statement on Facebook on Monday. According to the authorities, the Indians affected by the attack sustained slight injuries and were taken to the hospital.

Earlier that day, the UAE Defense Ministry said three Iranian cruise missiles were successfully shot down over the Arab nation’s territorial waters. Another cruise missile fell into the sea, the ministry said on X.

A senior Iranian military official has said Tehran has no plans to target the UAE, according to IRIB News. The UAE Foreign Ministry condemned what it called “renewed Iranian aggression.”

The development came after US President Donald Trump promised on Sunday to “help free up” ships stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. The key waterway, accounting for around 20% of global seaborne oil trade, has been de facto closed after the US and Israel launched attacks against Iran in late February.

The disruption has led to soaring oil prices, with the average national gasoline price in the US exceeding $4.40 per gallon.

Despite rising consumer costs and a record-high disapproval rating, Trump decided to maintain a naval blockade of Iranian ports to pressure Tehran to agree to a peace settlement that is satisfactory to Washington.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the blockade an “act of war” that violates the ceasefire reached in early April.

At least two people have been killed and several others injured after a 33-year-old suspect drove a car into a crowd in the eastern German city of Leipzig, according to local police.

The incident took place at around 4:45 PM on Monday on Grimmaische Strasse, a central shopping street linking key landmarks with the city’s market square. Leipzig’s fire chief said that more than 20 people had been “affected” after a white Volkswagen Taigo SUV sped through a pedestrian zone, hitting multiple people.

“Two were so severely injured that they died shortly afterward,” Leipzig police said in a press release, identifying the deceased as a 63-year-old woman and a 77-year-old man, both German citizens.

ℹ️ Leipzig: Polizei gibt erste Infos zum Täter bekannt

Laut einer aktuellen Pressemitteilung der Polizei handelt es sich bei dem mutmaßlichen Täter um einen „33-Jährigen mit deutscher Staatsangehörigkeit“. Ob der Mann einen Migrationshintergrund hat, ist bislang unklar.

Nach… pic.twitter.com/LQI99dfhjj

— Steffen Unger (@unger2701) May 4, 2026

It was not immediately clear whether the incident was deliberate or an accident, but authorities said that, “according to current findings, a political or religious motive is not suspected.” The Leipzig public prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into two counts of murder and multiple counts of attempted murder, among other charges.

A car rammed into a crowd in Leipzig, Germany, injuring multiple people. pic.twitter.com/p2FTVMWLAE

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 4, 2026

The driver was detained at the scene. Police initially described the perpetrator as a “33-year-old German citizen,” but in the latest update referred to the suspect simply as a “man.”

Last year, an Afghan national plowed through a rally in Munich, leaving dozens of people injured. A two-year-old girl and her mother later died in hospital from their injuries.

In December 2024, a 50-year-old Saudi psychiatrist drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five people and injuring more than 200 others.

In 2016, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens.

The attacks have intensified debate in Germany over migration and public security. Right-wing parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been pressing the government to shift migration policy, portraying migrants, particularly those from outside Europe, as a burden on public services and a driver of crime and social strife.

US lawmakers have intensified efforts to strip President Donald Trump of the authority to continue the Iran war launched by the US and Israel in February, after the 60-day deadline for military operations without congressional approval expired on May 1.

Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president must obtain congressional approval within 60 days of introducing troops into a conflict or terminate their use, with a possible additional 30-day period to withdraw the troops.

Despite a ceasefire which has been in place since early April, the US continues to enforce a naval blockade on Iranian ports, while Iran has restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic waterway has been effectively closed as a result.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers are increasingly questioning the administration’s strategy and its efforts to sidestep congressional oversight, with critics arguing that the White House is violating the law by continuing the hostilities beyond 60 days without authorization. Democratic-led resolutions to curb the president’s war powers have repeatedly failed, but some Republicans have begun to break ranks.

The pressure comes after Iran proposed a 14-point peace plan last week seeking a permanent end to the conflict, rather than the previously discussed two-month ceasefire. Trump reacted with skepticism.

Trump’s claim that Iran conflict has been ‘terminated’ fuels dispute

In a letter to Congress on Friday, Trump said the hostilities with Iran have been “terminated.”

“Since April 7, 2026 not a single exchange of fire has been recorded between US forces and Iran,” Trump wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley. “The hostilities that began on February 28 have effectively terminated.”

According to Trump, he stayed within the 60-day limit during the war against Iran and therefore has not violated the law governing the use of force in overseas conflicts.

“This is an illegal war and every day Republicans remain complicit and allow it to continue is another day lives are endangered, chaos erupts, and prices increase, all while Americans foot the bill,” Schumer wrote on X on Saturday.

Legal ‘pause’ argument

By declaring an end to the campaign, the Trump administration has advanced a legal argument that could clear the way for renewed military action, a view put forward by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which [in] our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses, or stops,” Hegseth told Senator Tim Kaine during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week.

Republican Senator Todd Young also questioned the argument, asking: “Is a ceasefire valid if fire could resume tomorrow?”

House Speaker Mike Johnson backed Hegseth’s view, saying the Trump administration is seeking to broker peace and that he would be “very reluctant” to constrain it. “We are not at war,” he said, describing US actions as focused on “policing the Strait of Hormuz.”

Public opposition to Iran war growing

The developments come amid growing opposition to the war. A Washington Post poll published on May 1 found that 61% of Americans believe entering the conflict with Iran was a mistake. Surveys by NPR/PBS/Marist and CNN show a majority oppose the war, while a Reuters/Ipsos poll found support slipping to around one-third by late April.

Democrats are casting Republicans as prioritizing the president’s ambitions over the needs of the American people ahead of the midterm election in November, which could cost the party control of Congress, while repeatedly forcing votes to curb the president’s war powers.

Republicans start breaking ranks

The effort has so far failed as Republicans control both chambers, but while many remain supportive, some are losing patience.

Iran’s peace plan

Last week, Iran proposed a 14-point plan seeking a permanent end to the conflict with the US, rather than the previously discussed two-month ceasefire, according to media reports. The plan reportedly includes guarantees against future attacks by Israel and the US, the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of US forces from areas surrounding Iran, and a new mechanism to govern the Strait of Hormuz. It also envisages a one-month negotiation period leading to the reopening of the strait, an end to the US naval blockade, and a formal end to the hostilities.

Trump expressed skepticism about the proposal, saying “they’re asking for things I can’t agree to.” He said he would review it, but added that he “can’t imagine” it would be acceptable, and that Iran has not “paid a big enough price” for its actions over the past 47 years.

The EU’s plan to spend over €20 billion ($23.5 billion) on AI gigafactories has drawn sharp criticism ahead of its formal launch as lawmakers and experts question whether there is any real demand for the facilities.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first outlined the plan in February 2025 as the EU’s answer to large-scale US computing projects. It involves building four or five mega facilities with a formal call for proposals set for this spring.

However, the project has been met with pushback from lawmakers. “Nobody could explain to me what is the business case they are planning with these gigafactories,” German Greens MEP Sergey Lagodinsky has said.

“I talked to some who are saying: ‘we just need more compute in Europe.’ But then, when I ask them, ‘what for?’ They say ‘it doesn’t matter, we just need more compute.’” Lagodinsky was quoted as saying by Politico.

It is also unclear who the facilities would be used by, according to Nicoleta Kyosovska, a research assistant at a Brussels-based think tank. She described the planned datacenters as “cathedrals in the desert,” noting that Europe has only one AI company capable of using such infrastructure – the French startup Mistral, which is already building its own data centers.

The skepticism comes amid broader concerns over global AI overspending. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft reportedly plan to spend a combined $725 billion this year on AI infrastructure.

However, Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University, has described the planned spending as the “greatest capital misallocation in history.” Tech analyst Ed Zitron has also noted that the economics of data centers “do not make sense” given that most AI startups are unprofitable and the majority of data center credit deals are rated junk grade.

Meanwhile, consumers have also been venting their anger over the global chip crisis sparked by overzealous AI development plans.

“The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible,” software engineer Jatin K Malik surmised.

The Times of London has come under fire for circulating “anti-Semitic” imagery after publishing a cartoon targeting Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish and an outspoken critic of Israeli policy.

The controversy came against the backdrop of a broader UK debate about threats that Jewish community is facing, amid heightened pro-Palestinian activism. Polanski has faced criticism from some quarters for allegedly minimizing the risks of anti-Jewish violence that is directed at himself too.

Figures within the Israeli government and pro-Israel voices in Britain have made such claims, with some accusing the Green Party of harboring anti-Semites.

’Misinformed commentary’ on stabbing spree

The controversy follows a stabbing spree last Wednesday in which a Muslim assailant with a history of mental illness injured a Muslim acquaintance and later attacked two random Jewish men. Coverage by major UK outlets, including the BBC, emphasized the Jewish victims.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley accused Polanski of spreading “inaccurate and misinformed commentary” that could erode self-confidence in law enforcement. Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the implied criticism as “disgraceful,” questioning Polanski’s suitability for political leadership.

’Vile, anti-Semitic’ image

The controversial cartoon, published in the paper’s Sunday edition after being previewed by artist Peter Brookes a day earlier, depicts Polanski kicking a police officer in the head while he and his partner restrain a knife-wielding suspect – an apparent reference to the Golders Green incident.

An obvious antisemitic caricature of Zack Polanski in The Times.

But there will be no media or political outrage, which tells you all you need to know. pic.twitter.com/ULe1TDRuZD

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) May 2, 2026

Critics, including the Green Party itself, argued that Polanski’s portrayal echoed features historically associated with anti-Jewish caricatures.

“A national newspaper has chosen to depict the country’s only Jewish political leader using imagery long linked to anti-Semitic stereotypes,” the party said in a statement, calling the decision “astonishing.” Polanski himself described the cartoon as “vile” and “anti-Semitic” in remarks to Sky News.

Debate over Jewish safety and Israel policy

Last Friday, the UK government raised the national threat level to “severe,” citing the Golders Green attack alongside broader concerns about Islamist and far-right extremism.

On Sunday, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel took aim at Polanski, labeling him an “extremist” and accusing him of “legitimizing violence against Jews,” referencing his sharing of the police video.

#bbclaurak
The Guardian sacked Steve Bell after an outcry over his caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu (left) But so far, radio silence from #bbcnews et al after this anti-Semitic caricature of Zack Polanski by #TheTimes cartoonist, Peter Brookes (right) pic.twitter.com/EW4H3QPRar

— George_T_Truth2🛞 (@George_T_Truth2) May 3, 2026

Polanski pushed back on the accusation, saying the “death and destruction” by the Israeli government should be properly described as extremist. He also called the UK government’s support for Israel “shameful.”

Echoes of Corbyn’s ouster

Allegations of anti-Semitism have frequently surfaced in UK political debates surrounding criticism of Israel. In 2023, The Guardian cut ties with cartoonist Steve Bell over an image showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing boxing gloves while making a Gaza-shaped incision on himself.

Some interpreted it as invoking an anti-Jewish “pound of flesh” trope that serves a plot device in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ though others argued it referenced a historical anti-Vietnam War caricature of US President Lyndon Johnson.

The vile racists I witnessed in Corbyn’s Labour are now in the Greens. Polanski has to get a grip. pic.twitter.com/WRSs3Jt1ru

— Steve Reed (@SteveReedMP) May 2, 2026

Claims of entrenched anti-Semitism in the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership led to his ouster and replacement by Starmer in 2020. Recently, Labour MP Steve Reed declared: “Vile racists I witnessed in Corbyn’s Labour are now in the Greens.”

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has confirmed that the US will not station Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles in Germany in the foreseeable future. He insisted that the suspension had nothing to do with his row with President Donald Trump but was rather caused by inadequate stockpiles.

Merz made the remarks in an interview with ARD on Sunday, saying that the promise given by then-President Joe Biden will be left unfulfilled.

“The Americans themselves don’t currently have enough,” Merz said, adding that there was “hardly any way” for Washington to transfer the systems at present. At the same time, he noted that it is “not too late” for the deployment.

As the row intensified, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of around 5,000 US troops from Germany, with Trump suggesting the number could be even higher.

At the same time, the US is indeed struggling with depleting stockpiles. In late March, CBS News reported, citing sources, that the US had used more than 850 Tomahawks in the Iran conflict, roughly nine times the Pentagon’s average annual procurement rate.

The Tomahawk is a long-range cruise missile launched mainly from ships and submarines. The US Navy says Block IV and V versions can fly about 900 nautical miles, or 1,600 kilometers, and carry a 1,000-pound-class (450kg) conventional warhead.

The United Arab Emirates has officially withdrawn from the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), according to a statement posted by the group on X on Sunday.

The exit took effect on May 1 – the same day Abu Dhabi’s withdrawal from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the wider OPEC+ format, which includes Russia, came into force.

The decision came amid ongoing Middle East turmoil triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran. A dual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for about 20% of global oil flows – along with repeated US warnings that strikes could resume, has pushed crude prices to multi-year highs.

OAPEC, headquartered in Kuwait, was established in 1968 to boost economic cooperation among Arab oil exporters. Its three founders – Kuwait, Libya, and Saudi Arabia – were later joined by other Arab states, and prior to the UAE’s departure the group comprised 11 members, including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, Syria, and Tunisia. Unlike OPEC and OPEC+ groupings – which include major oil producers worldwide and play a direct role in managing supply and prices – OAPEC is primarily a technical body coordinating energy policy among Arab producers.

It voiced no opposition, saying it “appreciates the role played by the UAE” during its membership and its “effective contributions” to advancing joint Arab cooperation in the petroleum and energy sector.

Abu Dhabi has not yet commented on the decision. The Gulf nation previously said its exit from OPEC and the broader OPEC+ format was driven by national interests, describing it as part of a long-term strategy to gain more flexibility over oil output, free from production caps and multilateral restrictions.

The move, however, has fueled debate over potential repercussions for OPEC and the oil market, as well as speculation about underlying motives.

UAE Trade Minister Thani Al Zeyoudi said on Monday the nation is in talks with Washington over a currency swap line – an instrument that allows central banks to access each other’s currencies without using foreign exchange markets, lowering costs and exchange-rate risks for cross-border activity. He described it as part of an “elite group” arrangement the US maintains with just five regions: Canada, Japan, the Eurozone, the UK, and Switzerland.

Oil markets reacted to the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+ with short-term volatility, but most analysts suggest the near-term impact will be limited. Although the move could allow output to rise eventually, exports remain constrained by the naval blockade in the Persian Gulf. Days after the announcement, seven OPEC+ members agreed to raise combined crude production by 188,000 barrels per day (bpd) in June 2026 – a move many said signaled business as usual.

Russia earlier said it respects the UAE’s decision to withdraw from OPEC, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the nation has a “sovereign” right to do so. Moscow signaled it has no plans to leave OPEC+ and dismissed suggestions the UAE’s exit could spell the end of the group.

Iranian rescue workers dug through debris by hand to recover religious artifacts from a Tehran synagogue damaged by an Israeli strike last month, Marjan Yeshayayi, a member of the local Jewish community, has told RT.

In an exclusive interview broadcast on Monday, she described her dismay at seeing the site reduced to ruins, with holy Torah scrolls buried under the rubble. She said she had asked rescue workers not to use machinery in order to preserve the scriptures.

“When I made the request, I did not believe they would accept it, but instead they said, ‘OK, we will remove it manually,’ and they really did. Each brick was removed by hand, and the scrolls came out safely and were handed over to the Jewish association,” Yeshayayi recalled.

According to Yeshayayi, the Iranian state protects the rights of the Jewish minority. Under the country’s constitution, Jews are allowed to practice their religion freely, including maintaining synagogues and holding services. Roughly 8,000 Jews live in Iran and worship in dozens of synagogues.

Yeshayayi said three of her friends died in the strike, describing her sadness and anger at the attack.

Watch the interview below.

A top White House official has said Iran is on the brink of an “extreme calamity” and hunger as the US is counting on economic pressure to secure its objectives in the conflict.

President Donald Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports and intensified sanctions after a bombing campaign failed to bring down the government in Tehran. Although large-scale military operations largely paused under a fragile ceasefire announced last month, both sides are now seeking to use economic strain to gain leverage.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, pointed to what he described as severe economic deterioration in Iran during an interview with CBS News on Sunday, blaming the Iranian leadership for the situation.

“They’re an economy that’s really on the precipice of extreme calamity,” Hassett claimed, citing internal briefings. “They are having hyperinflation. They’re starting to face hunger.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent echoed the administration’s stance, telling Fox News that US anti-Iranian measures were “suffocating the regime.” He emphasized a coordinated government effort, describing efforts by his department as “economic fury” in a reference to the Pentagon’s designation for the war on Iran, Operation Epic Fury.

“We [have been] running a marathon over the past 12 months, and now we are sprinting toward the finish line,” he added.

US economic warfare

Washington has long relied on unilateral sanctions to target foreign governments, leveraging its influence over global financial systems and the central role of the US economy to enforce restrictions.

Washington facing mounting challenges

Despite assertions by Trump administration officials that the campaign against Iran has been a resounding military success, Tehran has not accepted US demands and continues to exert control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global energy supplies.

The US is also reported to have drawn down significant stocks of critical munitions, and it has strained relations with traditional allies who declined to back the military action. It is also dealing with the fallout from the broader economic disruption caused by the crisis, which could trigger the worst global economic crisis in decades.

Poland is bracing for a surge of illegal weapons from Ukraine after the end of the conflict with Russia, with police warning that a “smuggling boom” could eclipse the decades-long Balkan weapons crisis, a law enforcement official told Rzeczpospolita.

The newspaper reported on Monday that the Polish police are already preparing for more illegal weapons to flood in from the neighboring country by launching Project Trident. The €1.5 million ($1.8 million) initiative will provide officers with additional training, vehicle-mounted tracking electronics, X-ray systems, drones, and night-vision gear.

”There’s a huge amount of weapons transferred as part of aid in Ukraine, plus a large number of post-Soviet weapons. And the end of armed conflicts has always been associated with the risk of their uncontrolled influx,” Adam Radon, the head of the Organized Crime Combating Unit at the Central Bureau of Investigation of the Police, told the newspaper.

”Ukrainian services are already uncovering weapons warehouses and hideouts. Their origins are being investigated – whether these are weapons abandoned by Russian soldiers withdrawing from frontline operations, or weapons acquired by criminal groups and stored for the future,” Radon said.

Rzeczpospolita drew parallels between the fallout from the 1990s Balkan wars, which are said to still be the source of half of all illegal weapons in Europe, and the looming crisis, which could be even greater due to the scope of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Radon also warned of risks associated with unemployed veterans.

“Criminal groups will recruit them into illegal activities. Unemployed war veterans, coupled with their easy access to weapons, pose a significant threat,” he said.

In 2025, Europol warned that Ukraine could become “a significant source of illicit firearms and ammunition… in the short to medium term.” It said that while “large-scale detections” of weapons smuggled out of Ukraine into the EU were limited, Spanish police found evidence of drug gangs arming themselves with NATO-grade weapons intended for Kiev.

In 2024, Ukrainian police reported that since 2022, more than 11,000 firearms were confiscated at checkpoints, including 3,600 assault rifles and nearly 1,500 grenade launchers, as well as 27,000 grenades.

Moscow has warned of a spillover of guns destined for Ukraine, noting that smuggling now runs through Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Moldova. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said the reported figures of seized weapons are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Slovakia won’t participate in any EU loans for Ukraine, including the €90 billion ($106 billion) joint debt package approved by Brussels last month, Prime Minister Robert Fico has said.

Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had earlier opted out of servicing the loan, citing financial risks. In a video address on Facebook on Sunday, Fico reiterated that his government would not take part in either the current package or any future ones.

“It is well known that I refused to support the €90 billion war loan for Ukraine. I have also taken legal steps to ensure that Slovakia does not participate in this loan,” he said. “Slovakia will not take part in any further announced loans for Ukraine.”

The loan, backed by joint EU borrowing, is structured on the assumption that it would be repaid if Kiev secures reparations from Russia, a prospect Moscow has dismissed as “unrealistic.” The loan was floated after plans to seize Russia’s frozen sovereign assets to fund Kiev failed following a months-long standoff between Brussels and Hungary’s outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The EU approved the package shortly after supplies resumed, less than two weeks after Hungary’s election saw Orban’s Fidesz party defeated by the pro-EU Tisza party led by Peter Magyar. Hungary’s incoming prime minister said he would uphold Orban’s decision not to join the €90 billion loan, but pledged not to veto EU funding for Kiev.

Fico said he held a call with Zelensky on Sunday to discuss future meetings and visits. While Zelensky claimed after the call he had secured Fico’s backing for Ukraine’s EU bid, the Slovak leader downplayed this, saying he merely sees “more advantages… than disadvantages” in potential membership, including reducing the risk of “battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers” turning to organized crime and posing risks to nearby states after the conflict ends. He noted, however, that some of Kiev’s strongest backers in the EU are also among the most opposed to its membership, calling it “a cruel paradox.”

When Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky offered his country up as a testing ground for Western weapons, he wasn’t just talking to Boeing and Lockheed Martin: he was handing Ukraine’s sovereignty to Silicon Valley on a platter.

Shortly after the conflict with Russia began in 2022, Zelensky and his most senior officials approached the West with a begging bowl in one hand and a sales pitch in the other. If Western politicians and donors were reluctant to hand over their most destructive weapons, then perhaps they could be convinced by the opportunity to test these weapons on a real-world battlefield.

“Ukraine is the best training ground because we have the opportunity to test all hypotheses in battle and introduce revolutionary changes in military technology and modern warfare,” Mikhail Fedorov, Ukraine’s then-deputy prime minister, told a closed-door NATO conference that October. “For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground,” then-Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov told the Financial Times.

Karp in Kiev: Putting Palantir in service of the West

Palantir CEO Alex Karp had already jumped at the chance to get involved. Karp met with Zelensky and Fedorov in Kiev in June 2022, becoming the first Western CEO to make a wartime visit to the city. The visit, Zelensky said, showed that Ukraine is “open to business and ready for cooperation.”

Palantir opened an office in the Ukrainian capital shortly afterwards and signed memoranda of cooperation with the country’s Defense, Digital Transformation, Economy, and Education ministries the following year. As of 2026, Palantir provides the Ukrainian military with software that is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to Karp.

Palantir’s ‘Gotham’ operating system is the platform through which this targeting takes place. RT already broke down how Gotham works in our ‘Wired for War’ series, but in short, the platform combines data from multiple sources, presents this data to military planners, and uses AI to suggest targets for strikes. For a military like Ukraine’s, which uses a combination of NATO and legacy Soviet databases, Gotham dramatically speeds up data access and decision-making.

“With a few clicks, a Ukrainian Palantir engineer showed me how they could mine a dizzying array of battlefield data that, until recently, would have taken hundreds of humans to analyze,” a Time journalist wrote after visiting the company’s Kiev office in 2014. 

“Palantir’s software processes raw intelligence from sources including drones, satellites, and Ukrainians on the ground, as well as radar that can see through clouds and thermal images that can detect troop movements and artillery fire. AI-enabled models can then present military officials with the most effective options to target and enemy positions. The models learn and improve with each strike.”

Is Palantir the only military mega-tech in Ukraine? 

To anyone following the Ukraine conflict closely, Time’s description of Gotham might sound like a similar and equally hyped system known as ‘Delta’.

Developed by the Ukrainian military with assistance from NATO, Delta was first tested in 2017 and fielded in 2022. Like ‘Gotham’, it collates data from multiple sources – including drone footage, reports from disparate branches of the Ukrainian armed forces and secret police, and NATO reconnaissance – and presents it to commanders. Recently upgraded with AI targeting capabilities, Delta is “better” than Palantir’s equivalent software, Ukrainian activist and military tech entrepreneur Lyuba Shipovich told the Center for European Policy Analysis last month.

“Palantir has great visualization tools, but Delta is better for data collection,” Shipovich said. “Many Western militaries still rely on Cold War-era procedures. When we showed Delta to British, Polish, and Dutch officers, they were shocked by what it could do.”

All of this begs the question: If Ukraine has such a great in-house alternative to Palantir’s Gotham, why does it need Gotham at all?

Almost every piece of positive press about Delta cites either Ukrainian government officials, Delta’s developers, or mil-tech evangelists like Shipovich. Information on the system’s real-world effectiveness is, for obvious national security reasons, kept secret.

Palantir’s petri dish in Ukraine

However, assuming Delta is not a scam, and is as powerful as the Ukrainian government claims, Palantir is likely getting a whole lot more out of Ukraine than Ukraine is getting out of Palantir.

Palantir is reportedly providing its services to Ukraine for free, with the most apparent benefit to the company being the opportunity to test its flagship software in real-world conditions.

“Ukraine has been the R&D lab for AI in a military context for the last 3 years. It is the absolute bleeding edge of military technology,” Palantir’s UK chief executive, Louis Mosley, told Bloomberg last year. “There is no substitute for a real battlefield. The only historic analogy I’m aware of is the development of radar in the Second World War…you’re seeing something similar occur today in artificial intelligence in Ukraine.”

"It is the absolute bleeding edge of military technology."

Louis Mosley, Palantir's UK head, explains how Ukraine is the "R&D lab for AI" in the battlefield, telling @TomMackenzieTV there is an "extraordinary acceleration" in military tech innovation right now… pic.twitter.com/6xBExGGe5e

— Bloomberg (@business) November 14, 2025

Civilians as combatants

Ukraine is also an ethics-free testing ground. Among the data sources analyzed by Gotham in Ukraine are anonymous tips submitted by civilians to the government’s ‘eEnemy’ chatbot. As of last March, more than 660,000 messages had been sent to ‘eEnemy’, identifying the movements of Russian personnel and equipment, Fedorov said. Ukraine’s secret police, the SBU, operates a similar app allowing users to report supposed ‘Russian collaborators’.

Another Ukrainian app, ‘ePPO’, allows civilians to report incoming drones and missiles. The developers of the app have said that their aim is “to enlist ‘the entire population’ in helping to spot incoming attacks.”

According to the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, civilians are not protected from direct or indiscriminate attacks “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.” Some international law scholars have argued that Ukrainians using these apps “ lose the essential protections against attacks and their effects that they would otherwise enjoy.”

Even those not willingly submitting tips to Ukraine’s many snitch-lines could find their smartphone data fed into Gotham and used to coordinate attacks. Palantir’s software also scrapes and geolocates social media posts in a target area, and when used by the Israeli military in its war on Gaza, reportedly suggested strikes on homes and businesses where Al-Jazeera was playing on televisions.

Silicon Valley’s vultures descend

Ukraine plans to make Clearview a permanent tool in its policing arsenal, despite civil rights activists in Kiev warning that it will inevitable be “used to persecute activists or civil society.”

While all of these tools bolster the Ukrainian war effort, Kiev is left in a vulnerable position. The Ukrainian military’s access to Gotham is entirely dependent on Alex Karp’s generosity, and on the US government continuing to waive export restrictions on Palantir’s software. In the event that Karp pulls out, or a new administration in Washington imposes export controls, the Ukrainians cannot take the data collected by Gotham and export it to their own platform, as Palantir’s software is closed-source. 

What does this mean for Ukraine’s sovereignty? With its foreign policy already crafted in Brussels and London, its land and resources parceled up by Blackrock and Donald Trump’s mining cronies, and its military now dependent on Silicon Valley subscription services, Zelensky’s relationship with his Western benefactors is looking more and more like a one-way deal.