Tag: perpetual war

UKRAINE: Justifying A False Narrative Through A Bad Picture

I was sent this picture a few days ago and asked if it reflected reality geographically or geopolitically. My answer was a simple one to start:

“No, if Russia wanted to try to invade and control the rest of Europe, there are faster and easier routes to do that. This picture reflects a false narrative whereby too many want to draw the United States and the West into another unnecessary conflict based on an unrealistic and dishonest threat scenario where Russia’s goals and capabilities are inaccurately advertised.”

Expanding on my statement, let’s consider the following from solely a geographical perspective.

· To claim that Ukraine is the path Russia would choose to use to pursue the remainder of Europe is like saying the United States intends to invade Mexico but only use the Baja Peninsula. Each of these examples is choosing the hardest path forward and would make no sense if, in Russia’s case, Europe was the goal and not only Ukraine in total or in part.

· History instructs us that any invading army would use three routes to move east or west. One is generally through the Baltics, the second through Belarus, and the third through Ukraine. As someone who planned many contingency operations for large-scale possibilities on multiple continents, I would never recommend that Russia invade Europe by way of Ukraine. There is no logical military reason to do so when the central and northern routes allow much faster access to Europe with fewer impediments. Cutting Ukraine off from Europe would also be more effective than invading Ukraine at its strongest defensive points.

· I could go on, but these points are the major ones necessary to answer the question I was asked. The contingencies I planned for in Eastern Europe take up multiple binders; there is no way to account for that in a short essay.

But it’s more dangerous than a simple lack of understanding of what is happening in Europe and the world today. This picture reflects the assumptions of those who’ve bought into the false narrative intended to lure the Western world into a wider conflict. This conflict could grow to its worst form, a nuclear exchange between two of the world’s superpowers, though I think the odds of that are low.

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How Biden Botched the Chance To End the War in Ukraine

As President Donald Trump attempts to engage Russia to end the conflict in Ukraine, supporters of the proxy war in Washington, Europe, and Ukraine claim that President Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator who cannot be trusted. The implication is that talking with the Kremlin is equivalent to surrender for Kiev because Putin wants all of Ukraine, and will use any pause in fighting to gear up for the next invasion.

However, history disproves that assertion. For Moscow, the war was never about seizing Ukrainian territory or attempting to reconstitute the USSR, but pushing back on NATO expansion after the bloc threatened to add Kiev as a member.

Before the invasion and in the early months of the war, Putin made serious offers to both Washington and Kiev to allow eastern and southern Ukraine to remain under Kiev’s control if the country agreed not to join NATO.

The Joe Biden administration outright refused to negotiate on those terms, even if they were acceptable to Kiev. Preventing those talks from occurring first provoked the Russian invasion, then prevented it from ending within a few months.

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US Considers Plan To Disrupt Iran’s Oil With Navy Interventions On High Seas

The Trump White House is currently considering a plan that would take the recently reinstated ‘maximum pressure’ campaign back to the high seas, akin to Trump’s first term as Commander-in-Chief.

This would involve US Navy ships stopping and inspecting Iranian oil vessels transiting the sea under an international mechanism aimed at thwarting “spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs),” sources in Reuters said. This had been done at times under Biden as well.

The idea is to crack down once again on Iranian oil sales in order to cut off crucial funding for Iran’s nuclear energy program, which both Israel and Washington suspect could easily be converted to an atomic weapons program.

“Trump officials are now looking at ways for allied countries to stop and inspect ships sailing through critical chokepoints such as the Malacca Strait in Asia and other sea lanes. That would delay delivery of crude to refiners. It could also expose parties involved in facilitating the trade to reputational damage and sanctions,” the sources told Reuters. 

“You don’t have to sink ships or arrest people to have that chilling effect that this is just not worth the risk. The delay in delivery… instills uncertainty in that illicit trade network,” one source clarified. 

The legal mechanism reportedly being examined goes all the way back the ‘war on terror’ 2003 Proliferation Security Initiative, which seeks to prevent the trafficking of WMDs. (Nevermind that the Bush-era ‘Iraqi WMDs’ scare was based on a complete myth and lie advanced by the NeoCons at the time).

“This mechanism could enable foreign governments to target Iran’s oil shipments at Washington’s request,” another source told Reuters.

The Biden administration had at times also sought to seize Iranian oil shipments, especially to disrupt sales in places like China, or also Syria.

As for the Syria situation, this policy helped tighten the noose around Assad in Western regime change efforts which led to his ouster – but the Syrian people continue to starve and be largely without fuel.

The US Treasury Department has frequently alleged that the Islamic Republic maintains a “shadow fleet” which sends Iranian crude oil worth hundreds of millions of dollars abroad. Tehran in response has argued it is fully its right to sell its energy resources utilizing international waters and passage.

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Europe faces ‘nightmare scenario’ on Ukraine, as diplomat says countries must pay for defense ‘every day until Trump is dead’

European leaders are finally waking up to the “nightmare scenario” that they face on the Ukraine war — and realizing that they now have to foot the bill for their own defense thanks to President Trump’s “America First” policies, diplomats said.

After years of slacking off on defense spending, Europe now needs to rearm massively “until Trump is dead,” a European diplomat was quoted as telling Politico.

“Defense spending is becoming a fixed cost. We have switched off the sun and now we need to pay every day for the heating. Every day you need to pay for ammunition, at least for several years, until Trump is dead,” the anonymous diplomat said.

The dire assessment comes as European leaders are set to meet Thursday for a summit on the Ukraine war with the hopes of coming up with an agreement that will give them some say in a peace deal.

“The nightmare scenario is that the US announces a deal soon that accepts most of Russia’s demands and then tells Ukraine and Europe to take it or leave it,” Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Politico.

During his election campaign earlier this year, Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz told voters that the continent is “five seconds to midnight” when it comes to its own defense. French President Emmanuel Macron said Europeans need “an incredible awakening.”

Macron spoke out in opposition to Trump’s ceasefire negotiations on Ukraine and also warned that Europe’s relationship with the US had changed, in a drastic ramping up of tensions.

Peace “cannot be achieved at any cost, under Russian dictates, or through Ukraine’s capitulation,” he told his nation in a TV address on Wednesday.

“We have to be ready if the US is no longer by our side,” he added.

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Europe fails to reach deal on Ukraine, rearmament after emergency talks end without agreement

Europe remains divided on how to support Ukraine and shore up its defenses in the face of Russian aggression, as emergency summit talks ended without a consensus on Thursday.

A statement on Ukraine was signed by all but one of the 27 EU members with a lone country — believed to be Hungary — holding out.

As leaders pledged to ramp up defense spending, the main European powers couldn’t agree on what exactly that support for Ukraine might look like and how Europe should adapt to what many see as a new world order under President Trump.

“Europe is weak without the United States,” Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told reporters on Thursday. He added that he hoped “the US remains committed to our collective security, which is based on shared values.”

However, there was a major point of contention between the European nations over the seizure of some $227 billion in frozen Russian central bank reserves that have been held in Europe’s financial system since the start of the Ukraine war.

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State Department To Use AI To Revoke Visas of Students Who ‘Appear Pro-Hamas’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday.

The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.”

The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”

Civil liberty groups have strongly criticized President Trump’s promises to deport foreign students who attend pro-Palestine protests since the speech of foreigners inside the US is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment.

“If we open the door to expelling foreign students who peacefully express ideas out of step with the current administration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should expect it to swing wider to encompass other viewpoints too,” Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said in an op-ed for MSNBC in January.

“Today it may be alleged ‘Hamas sympathizers’ facing threats of deportation for their political expression. Who could it be in four years? In eight?” McLaughlin added.

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This Is How The Military Wants AI To Help Control America’s Nuclear Arsenal

While it has long been a world-ending threat in science fiction, U.S. Air Force and Space Force officials see artificial intelligence (AI) playing important, if not critical roles in the command and control enterprise at the heart of America’s nuclear deterrent capabilities.

AI has the potential to help speed up decision making cycles and ensure that orders get where they need to go as fast and securely as possible. It could also be used to assist personnel charged with other duties from intelligence processing to managing maintenance and logistics. The same officials stress that humans will always need to be in or at least on the loop, and that a machine alone will never be in a position to decide to employ nuclear weapons.

A group of officers from the Air Force and Space Force talked about how AI could be used to support what is formally called the Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) architecture during a panel discussion at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2025 Warfare Symposium, at which TWZ was in attendance. The current NC3 enterprise consists of a wide array of communications and other systems on the surface, in the air, and in space designed to ensure that a U.S. nuclear strike can be carried out at any time regardless of the circumstances.

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Top Trump Admin. Officials Allegedly Hold Secret Talks With Zelensky’s Possible Replacements

On Thursday Politico claimed that members of President Donald Trump’s ‘entourage’ have begun talks with rivals of Ukrainian Dictator Vladimir Zelensky in the hopes of replacing the wartime ruler with someone new in an election.

“Four senior members of Donald Trump’s entourage have held secret discussions with some of Kyiv’s top political opponents to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just as Washington aligns with Moscow in seeking to lever the Ukrainian president out of his job,” Politico said Thursday.

The discussions revolved around the possibility of having Ukraine hold elections soon, something the country’s dictator has repeatedly refused to do.

“The senior Trump allies held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a remorselessly ambitious former prime minister, and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor as president, according to three Ukrainian parliamentarians and a U.S. Republican foreign policy expert,” Politico said Thursday.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick denied the President was “weighing into Ukrainian politics,” clarifying that all Trump wants is a partner for peace.

In February Trump called Zelensky a dictator without elections, perhaps signaling he wants Ukraine to hold elections. On Monday Trump suggested that Zelensky won’t be around for very long if he refused to make a deal with Russia.

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British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles are useless in Ukraine now President Trump has blocked US intelligence from being shared with allies

Britain’s long-range Storm Shadow missiles are feared to have been rendered useless in Ukraine after President Donald Trump blocked US intelligence from being shared with allies.

In a huge blow to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s invasion, Trump froze American military aid to Kyiv before suspending intelligence sharing with President Volodymr Zelensky’s war-torn country.

The UK, which has vowed to stand by Ukraine throughout the three-year war, is among the countries who have been banned from sharing Washington intelligence with Kyiv.

It comes amid an ongoing transatlantic rift after Trump and Zelensky dramatically clashed in a heated Oval Office row last week, sparking a wave of support for Ukraine from European allies including Britain.

MailOnline revealed on Tuesday that UK intelligence agencies and military outlets have received an order expressly forbidding the sharing of US-generated intelligence, previously known as ‘Rel UKR’ – short for Releasable to Ukraine’. 

The impact is likely to have major ramifications as British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, a critical asset used inside Russia’s Kursk region by Ukraine, require US data to hit their targets. MailOnline has contacted the MoD for comment.

Storm Shadow missiles, jointly developed by the UK and France who call it Scalp, are precision-guided munitions used for deep-strike missions as they can hit targets up to 250km (155miles) away. 

The effective missiles, believed to cost roughly £2million each, allow Ukraine to penetrate hardened bunkers and ammunition stores and down critical infrastructure, command centres and logistics hubs at huge ranges.

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Houthi Weapons Arsenal Remains A Mystery To The U.S.

The U.S. remains puzzled about how many weapons the Houthis have or where they get them all, a senior  U.S. defense official told The War Zone, adding that the militants are highly innovative when it comes to developing their arsenal. Meanwhile, numerous airstrikes by the U.S. and its allies on Houthi targets in Yemen have not halted the rebel group’s ability to produce the weapons and use them at will, the official said.

“There’s some debate as to what’s in their magazine,” the official told The War Zone during a media engagement at the Air and Space Forces Association Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “There’s a good bit right now we don’t know about the Houthis.”

The official spoke a day before the U.S. officially designated Ansar Allah – the official name of the Houthis – as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. 

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