Tag: perpetual war

Record Tanker Rates Leave Heavy Crude Stranded In The Americas

The Middle East crisis has driven tanker rates to all-time highs and created a shortage of vessels. This oil logistics problem is now causing a ripple effect, tipping the heavy crude market in North and South America into oversupply – while Asia and Europe grapple with a shortage of heavy grades.

Canada is producing over 5 million barrels of crude daily, most of it heavy crude. Some 4 million barrels daily of that goes south to U.S. refineries. Venezuelan production has also moved higher after the U.S. disposed of the country’s government and took control of the oil industry. According to Reuters, a lot of this heavy crude is stuck at home because of the record freight costs that have dampened appetite, pressuring prices in Canada, Colombia, and Ecuador. Venezuelan crude goes mostly to the U.S. Gulf Coast, so it is not as vulnerable to freight rate developments.

Prices for Canadian, Colombia, and Ecuadorian heavy crude have all shed some $10 per barrel in recent weeks, the report said, citing Argus data. All the flagship grades are now trading at the lowest in six weeks, with Western Canadian Select reaching $74 per barrel last week, before rebounding to $79.50 at the time of writing.

Ecuador’s flagship heavy crude grade, Oriente, has also recovered, after dropping to $76 per barrel last week, now trading at over 84 per barrel. Colombia’s Vasconia was the most expensive of the three last week, trading at $84 per barrel, and it has also probably gone up this week, as all oil gains on the flurry of tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.

These prices cited above seem quite enticing on a market where Russian Urals fetches close to $120 per barrel, and Iran Light sells for $104 per barrel, despite the U.S. Navy blockade. However, these prices exclude freight costs and insurance, and these have reached up to $40 per barrel of crude, at a time when heavy crude is in especially strong demand because of the global diesel crunch. Heavy crude yields more diesel than lighter grades, which is quite a hot topic right now.

“You need a ship and the price of ships are going up, and the availability ships are going down,” TP ICAP analyst Scott Shelton told Reuters. Global tanker rates have soared this year due to Middle Eastern producers taking to ship-to-ship transfers outside the Strait of Hormuz. For this, they use shuttle tankers, including smaller carriers, to sneak the oil through Hormuz and then load it on supertankers in the Gulf of Oman. As a result, supertanker rates from the Gulf to Asia hit $1.4 million daily earlier this month.

Shipping costs on the route from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Europe, meanwhile, have surged to $46 million in total, equal to $24.50 per barrel of crude. That compares to $6.5 million, or some $4 per barrel, before the war. The price is even higher on the route from the Americas to Asia, at over $80 million or $40 per barrel. It is little wonder why refiners in Europe and Asia are balking at the price and staying away from purchases.

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Russians Not Welcome In Europe?

Finland wants the European Union to stop issuing tourist visas to Russians until Moscow ends its war against Ukraine. Finland’s Foreign Ministry says Schengen countries issued close to 500,000 tourist visas to Russians in 2025. Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen declares that “Russian citizens should not be issued tourist visas,” adding, “The same must finally happen at the EU level.” Her argument is that Russians should not enjoy European freedoms while their country attacks Ukrainian homes. But who, exactly, is being held accountable here? The person applying for a holiday visa did not necessarily order the invasion, support it, or possess any means of stopping it.

I question the logic of making someone’s freedom to travel conditional upon a decision made in the Kremlin. What is an ordinary Russian supposed to do to satisfy that condition? Walk into Putin’s office and demand that he withdraw the army? Europe describes Russia as an authoritarian state and then treats its citizens as though they personally control its foreign policy. You cannot have it both ways. If political power is concentrated and opposition is repressed, the responsibility of the individual must be judged by what that individual has actually done.

The people with money have more options. Russian businessmen Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, for example, hold multiple nationalities and have challenged sanctions through European courts. That does not mean wealthy Russians are untouched by sanctions; many have faced asset freezes and travel restrictions. It means a billionaire’s position is very different from that of someone with one passport, a salary, and no team of international lawyers. A blanket nationality restriction is easiest to apply to the person least equipped to contest it.

As for espionage, does anyone seriously believe Russian intelligence depends entirely on Russians arriving with tourist visas and their real identities neatly printed in their passports? Documented cases show intelligence officers operating under commercial and diplomatic cover, as well as covert agents using false identities. Travel restrictions can complicate some operations, but they cannot replace counterintelligence. The Kremlin can recruit people already abroad or use intermediaries. Keeping out an ordinary visitor does not establish that a professional operative has been stopped.

There is also a consequence Europe seems unwilling to consider. Closing ordinary contact can strengthen the Kremlin’s claim that the West despises Russians themselves. A person who might otherwise discover that Europeans distinguish between a government and its citizens instead encounters a policy telling him that his passport is sufficient reason for exclusion. That outcome would serve propaganda far better than diplomacy. If the objective is to weaken hostility between societies, treating an entire nationality as suspect deserves considerably more scrutiny.

In truth, Russians already feel the hostilities from Europe. The arrogance is believing that another restriction on ordinary people constitutes a meaningful blow against rulers who remain in office. Finland is promoting the hatred of Russian people. The distinction between the Kremlin and the Russian citizen disappears.

Once an entire nationality is treated as suspect, people find it easier to dismiss the suffering of its ordinary citizens and harder to imagine any future reconciliation. Demonizing the population makes it politically easier to maintain confrontation. The rulers remain insulated while ordinary people learn to distrust one another. Europe should ask whether closing those human connections weakens the Kremlin or merely gives it another reason to tell Russians that the West hates them.

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Russia Arrests Japanese Journalist On Espionage Charges, Tokyo Summons Ambassador

Relations between Russian and Japan have been on a downward spiral of late, as Tokyo continues cozying up to the US military as well as NATO, and amid a long-simmering dispute over the Kuril Islands, which Japan identifies as its own Northern Territories.

Russia on Tuesday arrested a Japanese journalist, which the Kremlin says is actually a spy operating on behalf of the Japanese government.

The detained Japanese national has been identified as Yuki Imai, who works for Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper – a regional outlet for Japan’s northern island. Hokkaido is one of the country’s four main islands and the daily paper he writes for has large dissemination.

The FSB security agency has accused the man of utilizing media sources to gather intelligence, specifically on Russia’s defense and intelligence capabilities.

Russian officials say they caught him retaining and storing sensitive data, in a saga that sounds parallel to the saga of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in 2023-2024.

Imai was reportedly preparing to exit the country upon his detention in the far eastern Sakhalin region.

Tokyo did not immediately issue a full-throated condemnation, only saying that the government is gathering more information on the identity of the detained and the circumstances of the case.

Toward this end, the Russian ambassador to Japan has been summoned, with a protest lodged over the detention, centered on the Kremlin issuing strong accusations yet without providing any explanation to Tokyo.

Japanese and European officials are now seeking access to the detained suspect, even as Russian state media has been airing footage of him in handcuffs.

The footage shows security raiding where he was staying and proceeding to search his electronic devices and belongings while he was held on the floor.

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The Sheer Ignorance Of What’s At Stake Globally

This is a textbook case of how someone can reach the top of one field and still be utterly clueless about everything else. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg served as National Security Advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence and later as Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. He is Co-Chair at the Center for American Security, America First Policy Institute, USA, which is a Neocon think tank. The man’s ignorance is staggering. He has made no effort to examine the facts—or, more likely, he knows them and deliberately refuses to discuss how Victoria Nuland helped select the interim government that started this civil war and attacked the Donbas on Neocon orders.

He advocates that Zelensky should tell President Trump to go to hell and destroy every refinery in Russia. To illustrate his sheer stupidity: forget the food crisis he would cause in Russia, knowing that would lead to nuclear war—he completely ignores that Africa and the Middle East account for over 80% of Russia’s wheat exports, making those regions the most directly tied to Russian grain. Iran is 100% dependent on Russian grain. That would be a surefire way to make the Middle East explode into a full-blown war, which would then merge with the Russia-versus-EU war, and China and North Korea would join.

It is these Neocons, who simply hate the Russian people, who are cascading the world into World War III over a war they instigated using Ukraine. He would fulfill our model by pushing diesel to the extreme, projecting $8, which would hit the U.S. economy, reduce trucking, and result in a U.S. food shortage. This is what I mean. Expertise in one field does not qualify you to argue about things that will impact the rest of the entire world with zero comprehension of where that leads.

A full-scale war with Russia would very likely cause a severe global diesel crisis, and in many regions, a collapse in supply is a real possibility. The system is already under extreme strain, and a broader conflict would push it past its breaking point. Our computer projects $10+ a gallon by 2032.

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AfD’s Weidel Tells Berlin The Truth: A German Company Goes Bankrupt Every 19 Minutes While Merz Sends Billions To Kyiv

German businesses are going bust in alarming numbers, claims AfD co-leader Alice Weidel. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is devoting his strength and taxpayers’ money to Kyiv, she charged. The numbers for the first part of her statement are dramatic.

“A wave of bankruptcies is sweeping across our country,” Weidel said. “Every 19 minutes, a company in Germany goes bankrupt. In the third quarter of this year alone, the wave of insolvencies affected 41,000 jobs. Many of them will disappear permanently.”

The 19-minute figure traces to official data from the Federal Statistical Office. There were 2,373 corporate insolvencies in July, 8% up on the previous year and thus the highest July figure since 2013. As small-business expert Marc Evers of the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry told n-tv: “Every 19 minutes a company in Germany goes insolvent.” In the seven months to end-July a total of 15,185 corporate insolvencies were registered, 6.9% up on the same period of the previous year. Insolvencies were most frequent in the transport and storage sector, followed by the hospitality industry and construction.

The figure of 41,000 jobs also corresponds with the third-quarter insolvency tracker from the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH). According to this, there were approximately 4,880 cases of insolvency of partnerships and capital companies in the third quarter, down 2.3% from the record high of the second quarter. However, this still corresponds with the second highest number of quarterly cases of insolvency since 2005 and approximately 41,000 jobs were affected, about 10% fewer than in the second quarter. Weidel’s assertion that many of these jobs will disappear permanently is her own assessment and not a statistic.

Smaller businesses have not yet experienced the upswing the government is predicting for this year. Instead, according to n-tv, they are slipping into insolvency more and more often. Evers said the small upswing “threatens to be short-lived, because it is based mainly on high, debt-financed government spending.”

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Calls For Europe To Get Involved In The War Are Growing, Czech PM Babiš Says: Fight For 20 Years Or 10, Or Finally Do Something?

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš says the calls for Europe to get involved in the war in Ukraine are growing, and he wants European leaders to say out loud what they are going to do. The Czech premier spoke to the press in Brussels on Thursday, as he was arriving at the European Union summit, Czech news site Ekonomický deník reported.

“Are we going to fight for another 20 years or 10 years, or are we finally going to do something?” Babiš told reporters as he arrived for the European Union summit in Brussels. There are growing calls for Europe to become involved in some way, he said.

The Czech Prime Minister saw Washington symbolizing Europe’s isolation. “Trump talks to Putin regularly,” he said, adding that Europe is completely out of the conversation. He characterized the deal about Russian diesel that Trump agreed with Putin as “not good news”. Above all, he said, Trump puts the United States first with elections coming.

Babiš then pointed at European leaders. “European leaders need to clearly say what they want, and we should agree on how we’re going to proceed,” he said. He made clear who is footing the bill: “We are paying for all of this.”

The frozen Russian assets were also expected to come up at the Summit. The Europeans were already very clear on this issue in Miami, a week ago, and told the Americans that no one would take control of these assets, the Financial Times reported.

Europe already has a military plan within the Coalition of the Willing, led by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. After a ceasefire is agreed a multinational reassurance force could be deployed inside Ukraine. The plan has already been discussed by Macron and Starmer and the UK and France signed a declaration of intent on the plan in January.

This is the background to Babiš’s question. A sitting EU prime minister goes to Brussels to say that more and more voices want Europe to be involved in the war. Europe is paying for it all, and the EU leaders should now say what they want. The only concrete military initiative put on the table so far is European troops on Ukrainian soil. And a question that few people ask: will the European voters also get a say?

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The Politics of Denial: When Americans Stop Seeing the Warning Signs

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests. Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.

This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way.

When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength.

When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This is not simply about Donald Trump.

The machinery of the American police state has been assembled over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Presidents have expanded executive authority, waged undeclared wars, authorized drone killings, built surveillance networks, militarized domestic policing, and invoked national security to justify extraordinary powers.

What makes the present moment so troubling is the extent to which the public is encouraged to accept increasingly aggressive exercises of government power as necessary demonstrations of strength and resolve.

The Constitution was never intended to protect only the innocent, the popular, the patriotic, or the politically acceptable. Its restraints on government power matter most when the government is dealing with people whom society has already condemned.

Yet what happens when the public becomes so accustomed to government overreach, corruption and brutality that it no longer recognizes them as warning signs? What becomes of a constitutional republic when its leaders and citizens stop asking whether government actions are lawful, justified or necessary, and concern themselves only with whether those actions punish their enemies, advance their political interests or preserve their sense of security?

We are witnessing a political culture in which demanding due process for an accused criminal is treated as defending criminality, questioning a military strike is equated with sympathy for the enemy, and opposing government cruelty is portrayed as weakness.

The government doesn’t have to abolish the Constitution outright when it can persuade the public that certain people should no longer be entitled to its protections.

That is how constitutional rights cease to be rights at all and become privileges granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion.

And that is how a population becomes conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see—or are made to see—and then there’s the one we sense and occasionally catch a glimpse of, which bears little resemblance to the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by those in power and amplified through an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

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IDF Veterans: Post-10/7 Rules Allowed Hundreds of Civilian Deaths to Kill Single Hamas Member

Former Israeli military and intelligence personnel affirmed that rules for targeting confirmed and alleged Hamas members in Gaza were dramatically loosened after the October 7, 2023 attack, allowing strikes expected to kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians to target even low-ranking members of the Palestinian resistance group, according to a report published Monday.

In an article published by Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Yaniv Kubovich gathered testimonies from former Israel Defense Forces intelligence personnel that add to the body of evidence from Israeli whistleblowers, military officials, and investigative journalists documenting how the IDF expanded its targeting practices during its devastating US-backed annihilation of Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in the coastal exclave over the past three years.

One change described by some of those interviewed by Kubovich was “the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.”

“People arrived at military intelligence who weren’t from the unit, reservists who’d never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places,” said one veteran, identified as “A.”

“They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them,” A added. “Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry.”

Another veteran, “D,” who was assigned to a strike cell – units that coordinate drone and other aerial attacks – said: “Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That’s how far it went.”

Kubovich wrote that “a recurring theme in the accounts is the gap between a target’s importance, the scale of the strike and the civilian toll deemed acceptable.”

For example, on October 31, 2023, IDF warplanes dropped 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs supplied by the United States on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in order to kill one Hamas commander, Ibrahmi Biari.

“We knew Biari was underground, beneath several large buildings, but we couldn’t pinpoint which building he was under,” said D. “So they chose several buildings that were still occupied and decided to bring down all the buildings above the tunnel he was in. We didn’t initiate an evacuation because it was important to kill him before he could get away.”

A, who was also involved in the mission, said the decision to bomb the buildings was referred to the IDF chief of staff for approval, since intelligence officials estimated that there would be hundreds of civilian casualties. The IDF calculated that roughly 100 people would be killed or wounded in the proposed attack.

“We couldn’t get any more intelligence to pinpoint his exact location,” said veteran D. “They told us, ‘He’s killing soldiers right now. We have to strike him,’ out of concern for the troops on the ground, and in the end the strike was approved. They really wanted to kill this guy.”

Hamas said that 400 people were killed or wounded in the attack.

“Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren’t 100% accurate,” veteran A told Kubovich. “As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn’t even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on.”

The UK-based civilian casualty monitor Airwars said that at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, were killed in the attack, which wiped out whole families.

“You can’t authorize the potential killing of 300 civilians for a battalion commander, or the killing of 20 civilians for every Hamas truck driver, and still tell the public we did everything we could to avoid harming innocent people,” Nadav Weiman, executive director of the IDF veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, told Kubovich.

Referring to the Jabalia massacre, D said: “I can’t say this particular strike is what really messes with my head. What’s much harder for me is the system of strike after strike after strike, with collateral damage running into dozens of people, sometimes hundreds. Being part of a system like that bothers me more than taking part in any particular strike.”

The veterans’ accounts raise further questions about Israel’s repeated assertions that its military operations have been conducted in accordance with international humanitarian law, which requires parties in armed conflicts to distinguish between civilians and combatants and prohibits attacks expected to cause excessive civilian harm relative to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage.

Those claims stand in stark contrast with statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, who began calling for the genocidal destruction of Gaza and its 2.2 million people in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant – his former defense minister who ordered the “complete siege” of Gaza, explaining that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly” – are currently fugitives from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where they are wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague, is currently conducting a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by more than 15 nations. While a ruling in the case isn’t expected until at least 2029, a United Nations commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and other experts – including many Israeli and international Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others – have already concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The new Haaretz investigation adds to the body of reporting on Israel’s loosened rules of engagement and their disastrous implications for Gaza civilians, including a December 2024 New York Times exposé involving interviews with over 100 IDF soldiers and veterans, Israeli officials, dozens of airstrike victims, and experts on the law and conduct of war.

Kubovich’s revelations also come as the documentary NAZA, directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, brings testimony from Israeli military and intelligence insiders to international audiences. The film features 24 anonymized insiders describing the surveillance, artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, and military procedures used during the assault on Gaza.

IDF veteran testimonies are consistent with earlier investigations into the IDF’s use of artificial intelligence to generate targets at extraordinary speed, often with limited human scrutiny.

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The EU-NATO Establishment Is Waging A Hybrid War Against Europe

The (fake) elite which currently leads in many European countries as well as the European Union in Brussels is determined to wage a war against Russia.

Unfortunately for them the people they rule over have no interest in that. The leaders are waging a massive propaganda campaign to change their minds.

They are following a line set by Hillary Clinton who, after losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, blamed Russia for interfering with it.

Accusations against Russia of interfering with elections elsewhere have since been repeated many times. The claim of ‘Russian bots’ waging ‘Russian influence’ is trotted out whenever populist outsiders manage to win.

Another allegation is that Russia is waging a ‘hybrid’ war against Europe. The meme goes back to the false claim by journalist Mark Galeotti who, in 2014, had claimed that there existed a ‘Gerasimov doctrine’, named after Russia’s highest general, which was leading Russia to wage ‘non-linear’ or ‘hybrid’ wars.

It took Galeotti four years, during which his thesis had gained some massive following, to recant his claims:

[T]o my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake.
…
Gerasimov was actually talking about how the Kremlin understands what happened in the “Arab Spring” uprisings, the “color revolutions” against pro-Moscow regimes in Russia’s neighborhood, and in due course Ukraine’s “Maidan” revolt. The Russians honestly — however wrongly — believe that these were not genuine protests against brutal and corrupt governments, but regime changes orchestrated in Washington, or rather, Langley.

There never was and is no Russian ‘hybrid’ war.

There is however a strong western campaign to blame Russia for each and every thing:

Lately, not a day goes by in Europe without some drone scare, fire or blackout being blamed on Russia. We are told that these incidents are all part of a relentless “hybrid war” that Russia is waging against Europe — one that involves drone incursions, airspace violations, sabotage, arson, cyberattacks and more. We are told this “includes plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes, blow up railroad tracks in Poland, and burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe”, as well as “acts of sabotage against defense companies and the defense industry in Europe”, and “attacks on European critical infrastructure” — but also, apparently, sending secret agents to defecate in the lavatories of Finnish MPs. We are also told that “[s]uch attacks began occurring shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, and have escalated in recent months and weeks. According to Kaja Kallas, “Europe faces a fast-proliferation of sabotage attacks and airspace violations”.

There is however no evidence, none, that any of the alleged incidents had anything Russian to them.

There is though a ‘hybrid war’. But it is one waged by the western ‘elite’ against its own people:

Ultimately, serious scrutiny of the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative can only lead to one disquieting conclusion. A “hybrid war” is indeed being waged against Europe — but it is being waged by the EU-NATO establishment itself, against its own population. Europeans are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia, and that these hybrid attacks are a prelude to conventional hostilities — a claim for which, by and large, there is little or no proof. What the record points to, in fact, is a deliberate campaign of threat inflation in which governments, media outlets and defence-funded “think tanks” have colluded to instill a permanent sense of fear in the population, through relentless coverage of “incidents”, “attacks”, “sabotages” and “campaigns” that, in most cases, simply do not exist.

Yesterday Andy Burnham, the unelected Prime Minister of Britain, blamed Russia for the outcome of Britain’s Brexit vote:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham sparked fury in Britain on Monday with his assertion that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 Brexit vote that took the country out of the European Union, breaking with previous premiers who said there was no evidence Moscow had meddled.

There had been an extensive parliament investigation about imagined Russian influence on the Brexit referendum which had found none. Burnham is now, without any evidence, claiming such influence because he wants to roll back Britain’s exit from the EU:

Just a few weeks ago, in his first conference speech as Labour leader, Burnham became the first prime minister to open the door to rejoining the European Union. Shortly thereafter, he suggested his party’s manifesto at the next election might include a referendum on just that question.

Burnham’s unspoken argument: If Russia has influenced the Brexit referendum the result is illegitimate and must be undone.

The argument is as fake as Burnham’s allegations about Iran being behind some fuel smugglers arrested near a military airport in Britain and let off on bail.

The propaganda about the non-existing ‘hybrid’ war Russia is allegedly waging against Europe climbed to a new apex yesterday.

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The Right-Wing Ukraine Divide Returns

President Donald Trump reignited a fierce debate within the American right on October 10, when he made some aggressive remarks about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Zelensky could’ve settled this war many times,” Trump said. “He chooses not to. Very difficult.”

Trump went on, “We said you can do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit the refineries, because that’s a world problem that it’s caused… and what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel.”

“He better damn well stop,” Trump continued. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.”

Trump’s colorful statements come in the aftermath of an oil deal he announced with Russia, in which he says Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to distribute “300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel” to the American and global markets. As the midterm elections quickly approach, Trump is making a last-ditch effort to bring down the price of gasoline and diesel here in America – an issue which has caused serious concern among voters.

The move was a brief and sudden departure from the foreign policy that has defined Trump 2.0 up to this point, which has been one that combines Bush-like hubris with a lustful attraction to militarism. Trump even seemed to have been growing fond of Zelensky, whom he had lambasted in February 2025 – saying the Ukrainian president was “gambling with World War Three.”

In response to the deal, the Russia-Ukraine war’s top boosters came out of the shadows to denounce the move as a betrayal of Ukraine. Former Vice President Mike Pence was among the pro-war figures to speak out, saying on Twitter/X that “President Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian fuel amidst Putin’s ongoing and brutal attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine makes no sense and is a betrayal of the legacy and leadership of the late Senator Lindsey Graham.”

Lindsey Graham?

Graham, who died this past summer, was one of the biggest pro-Ukraine zealots in Washington. He was working up until his final hours to pursue the interests of Ukraine in the U.S. Senate. A fierce advocate for increased American support for Zelensky’s war effort, Graham also drafted legislation to sanction Russia – a bill which was passed over the summer in his memory. He often acted as Zelensky’s voice in Trump’s ear.

To say that American foreign policy should prioritize the defense of Graham’s legacy – a man who “never saw a war that he didn’t like,” in Trump’s words – is foolish at best, and dangerous at worst. The good news is that Pence isn’t in a position to enact such policy goals. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people close to Trump, or media figures from whom Trump seeks approval, who share Pence’s perspective.

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade is one such figure. Kilmeade has always held the line on supporting America’s foreign adventures, no matter how reckless or needless they may be. The proxy war in Ukraine is no different. After the news broke regarding the Russian oil deal, a debate ignited on Sunday’s edition of “Fox & Friends Weekend” between Kilmeade and Rachel Campos-Duffy, wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Campos-Duffy gave the administration’s pitch to the Fox audience, attempting to convince Kilmeade.

“[Zelensky] keeps blowing up these refineries after the President [Trump] said ‘please don’t do that,’ especially before the midterms,” Campos-Duffy said. “It’s hurting President Trump and the administration who’s been very generous towards him and his war efforts.”

Kilmeade responded, saying “The President got ticked off because Zelensky came out and said do not buy 500 million tons of diesel, which is in violation, I thought, of the bill that they just signed, Lindsey Graham’s bill. If you buy any energy from Russia, you’re going to get sanctioned and tariffed. Are we going to tariff ourselves?”

He went on, “Zelensky’s frustrated because now all this money is going to flow into Russia, who started this whole war unprovoked, their the bad guys… there’s no plausible, practical peace effort that Vladimir Putin would participate in effectively that would end this war. There’s one person who is responsible. Vladimir Putin. That is it.”

“It would be the biggest mistake of his administration to work with Russia,” Kilmeade added.

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