Tag: perpetual war

More Mystery Drone Incidents In EU Skies As Putin Mocks: “The Russians Are Coming!”

Flights at Germany’s Munich Airport were once again temporarily suspended on Saturday after a drone sighting was reported, eliciting a response from a large number of police and security services personnel.

Euronews reviews in the wake of the incident, which ended with the key European hub resuming regular operations after no UAV was found or identified, “Munich Airport closed twice within 24 hours in October following suspected drone sightings.”

This is the latest in a months-long spate of similar air traffic disruptions due to mysterious reported drone incursions, with European officials frequently voicing suspicions of a Russian sabotage and disruption campaign of EU airspace.

But the biggest incident this week happened in Romania, where local officials described that during the Russian military’s assault on Ukraine Thursday night, a Russian drone slammed into the residential building in the southeastern city of Galati – resulting in an explosion and a fire that injured two people.

The Romanian Foreign Affairs Ministry condemned the “grave and irresponsible escalation from Russia” while further declaring it has issued formal request for more anti-drone defense measures from NATO.

“Romania has informed allies and NATO’s secretary-general about the circumstances and requested measures to accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities to Romania,” the ministry said.

While Romania and other countries which border Ukraine have witnessed ‘errant’ drones and missiles come across the border before, this was the first time Romania in particular has suffered casualties as a result of a projectile hitting a densely populated city or area.

President Putin himself has weighed in, demanding that forensic proof that this was indeed a Russian drone – and not a Ukrainian one – be handed over to the Kremlin for an investigation.

He also used the opportunity in Friday remarks to highlight that Russia is always blamed for any and all drone incursions into European airspace due to Russiaphobia. Putin said according to TASS:

Ukrainian drones have previously entered the airspace of various countries, and initial reports consistently claimed it was “a Russian attack,” President Vladimir Putin said in response to a TASS question about the drone incident in Romania.

“We know that Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, Poland, and several Baltic states. The initial reaction was exactly the same as it is now in Romania. ‘Oh no, the Russians are coming, it’s a Russian attack!'” Putin recalled.

While the Russian leader was being deeply ironic with his ‘the Russians are coming’ comment, it is true that just earlier this month NATO jets were scrambled over Estonia and shot down an errant Ukrainian-origin drone which had drifted into Baltic/EU airspace.

Keep reading

EU Commissioner Blames Stagflation on War

Europe is now openly admitting it faces a stagflation shock, but this crisis did not suddenly appear because of the Iran war. The war merely accelerated a collapse that was already well underway due to years of catastrophic policy decisions. Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commissioner for Economy and Productivity, described the situation as a “stagflationary shock” as oil prices surged again on fears the conflict could drag on and destabilize energy markets further.

I have warned repeatedly that Europe was heading into a depression long before a single missile flew in the Middle East. Germany was already in industrial decline. Manufacturing across Europe was already contracting. Energy costs had already exploded after the sanctions war against Russia. The politicians destroyed their own energy security and then pretended green energy fantasies would somehow replace reality.

Now they act shocked that oil moving above $110 a barrel is feeding inflation again. Reuters reported that G7 borrowing costs have surged from roughly 3.2% to nearly 4% since the war began as markets fear inflation will remain entrenched. The International Energy Agency also warned global oil supply could fall short of demand by 1.78 million barrels per day this year because of the conflict.

This is precisely how stagflation unfolds. Economic growth stalls while the cost of living continues rising. The average person gets crushed from both directions simultaneously. Wages cannot keep pace with food, fuel, transportation, and housing costs. Washington Post noted US inflation has already climbed to 3.8%, the highest since 2023, largely driven by energy prices. Europe faces even worse structural problems because its economy is far more dependent on imported energy and heavily burdened by regulation and taxation.

The political class keeps pretending this is temporary. That is exactly what governments said during the 1970s oil crisis before stagflation spiraled into years of economic misery. The difference now is governments are entering this crisis carrying record sovereign debt levels. They cannot raise rates aggressively without detonating their own bond markets.

The stagflation wave was already in place before the first bombs fell because governments destroyed productive economies through sanctions, climate mandates, reckless spending, and endless monetary manipulation. The Iran conflict merely exposed how fragile the global economy had already become.

Keep reading

‘Ceasefire Is a Joke’: Israeli Soldiers Recount Ongoing Indiscriminate Killings in Gaza

Israel Defense Forces soldiers interviewed for an article published Friday by The Associated Press described ongoing indiscriminate killing of Palestinians – including civilians – despite a purported ceasefire.

One IDF combat soldier told the AP that he saw his teammates “yelling in celebration” and “congratulating one another” after blowing up a vehicle driving near the ever-expanding so-called “yellow line” dividing the Gaza Strip into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones. The strike killed everyone inside the vehicle.

“It was a jungle,” the soldier said. “After the ceasefire, the order was: If someone crosses the line, you shoot them.”

The problem is, the yellow line is often unclear, invisible, and often shifts. It cuts through farmland, roads, neighborhoods, and areas where Palestinians live and work.

Nadav Weiman, an IDF veteran who is now the executive director of the veterans’ whistleblower group Breaking the Silence, told the AP that the military’s permissive shoot-to-kill policy has “created a reality where countless civilians have and are being killed for crossing invisible lines.”

One IDF soldier interviewed by the AP said “there was a general feeling that human lives are not valuable.” The soldier said his commanding officer told him it would be “too much work” to clearly mark the yellow line, and that Palestinians were supposed to somehow know where it was.

According to the AP, one soldier said that “sometimes snipers fired warning shots at people close to the line… but commanders told troops to do more to protect themselves. The soldier understood that to mean firing more lethal shots.”

“Soldiers shooting or ordering drone strikes don’t always know who’s crossing the line,” the AP reported, citing interviewed troops. “Although soldiers must provide coordinates and get approval from superiors before striking, it’s hard to give exact information as people are moving,” and soldiers reported colleagues “calling in coordinates based on a hunch or the last place they saw someone.”

IDF troops interviewed by the AP also described “a sense of confusion” and “a lack of clarity on rules of engagement around the yellow line.” Some commanders “paid lip service” to the ceasefire agreement that’s been in effect since last October, but in practice ignored it.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israel has violated the ceasefire more than 3,005 times, resulting in more than 900 Palestinians killed and nearly 2,800 others injured, despite the truce.

“To call it a ceasefire is a joke,” one IDF soldier told the AP.

Israel claims that the entire length of the yellow line is now clearly marked. However, as Common Dreams reported this week, the IDF has incrementally shifted the boundary deeper into Gaza, where Israel now controls more than 60% of the coastal strip. This has left Palestinians sometimes waking up to learn they’re in “open-fire zones” where they are subjected to being shot on sight.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Israeli troops have previously described indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and aid-seekers.

Keep reading

Is A New Iron Curtain Inevitable?

Russia’s consequent focus on the western front might embolden US-backed NATO member Turkiye to accelerate its power play in the south at the risk of sparking another regional crisis after Ukraine.

Russian Ambassador-at-Large Artyom Bulatov warned in a recent interview that “Westerners, with energy worthy of a better cause, are erecting a new ‘Iron Curtain’, seeking to make irreversible the rupture – provoked by themselves – of socio-economic, trade, transport, interpersonal, cultural, and historical ties that have been built in the region not over years, but over centuries.” He also condemned the weaponization of regional interaction mechanisms like the Council of the Baltic States against Russia.

Truth be told, a new Iron Curtain is inevitable and has been since summer 2024 when the Baltic States and Poland combined their respective border fortification plans along NATO’s Eastern Flank to unveil what they now officially refer to as the “EU Defense Line”, which readers can learn more about here. This initiative will likely be expanded to include Finland too, thus stretching from the Arctic to Central Europe. Even in the event of a Russian-US rapprochement, which is now unlikely, these barriers will still remain.

Russian experts, who operated for so long under the influence of the wishful thinking fantasy that the EU is challenging Russia at its senior US patron’s behest and not due to its own ideologically driven hatred of Russia (contrary to its objective interests), are finally waking up to reality. New President of the Russian International Affairs Council Dmitriy Trenin, who issued an unprecedented clarion call in April for correcting foreign policy misperceptions, published a relevant piece in parallel with Bulatov’s interview.

Titled “The EU, Like ‘NATO 3.0,’ Will Remain Our Adversaries”, it dramatically begins by informing readers that “For the first time since 1945, the most pressing military threat to Russia is coming from Europe—European states themselves. This represents the most significant military-political shift for Russia since the victory in the Great Patriotic War.” The goal, Trenin believes, is “to split the Russian Federation into externally controlled components and turn them into semi-colonies of the European Union.”

This will be pursued through indefinitely perpetuating the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine together with ramping up sanctions and military pressure for undermining domestic political stability.

Keep reading

The Iran Obsession

I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly from November 2007 and came across this quote:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask… We’ve got to talk about Iran – Iran is more dangerous than Iraq – and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Rudolph Giuliani, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July 2007.

Back then, the saying was that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but that real men want to go to Tehran. Weirdly, neither Iran nor Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. What those countries did have was oil – and lots of it.

The Iran obsession persists, of course, and it’s shared by both political parties. When she ran for president in 2024, Kamala Harris identified Iran as the greatest adversary the United States faced in the world.

The truth is that neither Iran nor Iraq posed a direct or imminent threat to the USA. What each country possessed was an enormous amount of oil and political leaders who didn’t want to kowtow to U.S. economic imperatives.

Keep reading

Israeli Claims About an Iran ‘Threat’ Were Always a Lie. Now We Have Proof

Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran – one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression – was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv?

Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades, might Israel’s real fear be that a stronger Iran would undermine its unique leverage over Washington, threatening its status as the region’s sole – and unmonitored – nuclear power?

Might large parts of the globe be facing economic meltdown simply so that Israel can remain the Middle East’s top dog – an unaccountable apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinian people and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon?

We got a definitive answer last week, care of the New York Times. It is an uncompromising yes to all of these questions.

The newspaper reported that Netanyahu not only mis-sold Trump on the idea of quick regime change in Iran following a short “shock and awe” bombing campaign. He also identified to the White House who was going to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.

Extraordinarily, according to the Times, Netanyahu named the man for the job as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The aim at the start of the air campaign was for Israel to kill Khamenei, then liberate Ahmadinejad from house arrest by striking the guards who were confining him.

Presumably, Ahmadinejad was then supposed to storm the citadel and seize the keys to the palace. But only Khamenei’s assassination went according to plan.

Ahmadinejad, who had reportedly been consulted on the scheme beforehand, is believed to have been injured in the Israeli strike near his home. He got cold feet, possibly suspecting he was being set up for assassination too, and went into hiding. His current whereabouts and medical condition are unknown.

Keep reading

Did Iran Get Its Hands On A US Stealth Missile? JASSM-ER Wreckage Sparks Reverse-Engineering Fears

The U.S. committed nearly its entire stockpile of stealthy JASSM-ER cruise missiles to the military campaign against Iran and has fired at least 1,000 of these long-range, stealthy, precision cruise missiles to hit high-value IRGC targets.

One of the unavoidable risks of deploying advanced weapons, such as the JASSM-ER, is that unexploded or partially intact systems can fall into enemy hands, allowing adversaries to study U.S. technology, refine countermeasures, and accelerate the development of copycat versions.

A new report from Army Recognition, citing defense journalist Babak Taghvaee, claims Iran has recovered wreckage from a JASSM-ER near Arak, potentially giving Tehran access to fragments of the missile.

“The recovered debris reportedly includes composite airframe sections, structural components, propulsion fragments, and possible avionics elements that could reveal insights into stealth construction, fuel-efficient propulsion, and survivability design,” according to the military blog.

Army Recognition cited images posted on X by Taghvaee showing what is described as badly damaged JASSM-ER wreckage recovered in Iran. The missile appears largely intact and possibly unexploded, which, if confirmed, would give Tehran higher-value intelligence on the advanced missile.

Keep reading

Nothing more dangerous than a Netanyahu scorned

The emerging deal between the United States and Iran represents an existential danger to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.

With his coalition fracturing and elections approaching, Netanyahu can’t survive a peace that leaves Hezbollah intact and Iran’s nuclear program deferred. The only path that may keep his future viable now runs through Lebanon.

This may help explain why, just hours after President Donald Trump announced that a deal with Iran was “largely negotiated” through talks that excluded Israel, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to “increase the blows” against Hezbollah, adding on Monday that “we are deepening our operation in Lebanon.”

Israel has now issued evacuation orders for two of southern Lebanon’s biggest cities, and Israeli aircraft have struck over 100 sites in southern Lebanon, adding to a death toll that has now surpassed 3,000 since the latest escalation in March, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. This comes as Lebanese and Israeli officials are engaged in historic, U.S.-brokered talks in Washington, including a security track that was due to be launched on May 29.

When the U.S. and Israel initiated strikes on Iran in late February, Netanyau framed the aims of the campaign in maximalist terms: destroy Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capacity, sever Tehran’s support for regional proxies, and, most ambitiously, overthrow the Islamic Republic.

Three months later, Iran is still standing. The deal taking shape between the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic addresses almost none of these objectives in the preliminary phase, focusing instead on restarting maritime shipping and bringing an end to direct U.S.-Iran hostilities.

The blowback from Israeli politicians and commentators has been fierce. Israeli opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the deal was “bad for Israel, bad for the region, bad for the people of Iran.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister and a key coalition partner in Netanyahu’s government, framed the proposal in similar terms, calling it “an agreement that can harm the State of Israel.”

Against this background, Netanyahu’s predicament is especially acute. He co-launched a war that degraded Iran’s capabilities but failed to bring Tehran to heel. He has been excluded from negotiations on the conflict’s outcome and now faces an electorate that is expected to hit the polls as early as September. With these elections looming, only 10% of Israelis viewed the Iran campaign as a significant success when polled in mid-April.

The dominant analysis holds that Netanyahu is trying to drag out the election timeline, hoping to buy more time to achieve something he can market to voters on the security and diplomatic fronts. Lebanon is a key part of that calculation.

The immediate trigger for the escalation in Lebanon has a tactical dimension distinct from the emerging Iran deal. Hezbollah has deployed fiber-optic drones against Israeli troops occupying a self-declared buffer zone or “Yellow Line” in southern Lebanon. These cheap drones are unjammable because they avoid radio frequencies. Multiple Israeli soldiers have been killed or severely wounded by these drones, and some have struck civilian homes within Israel.

In response, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, approved a $700 million budget for counter-drone operations and added that playing defense was insufficient. “For every explosive drone, ten buildings in Beirut should fall,” Smotrich said. The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, agreed that Beirut should be struck. Ben-Gvir went furthest: “It is time for the Prime Minister to knock on Trump’s desk and inform him that we are returning to war in Lebanon. We need to cut off the electricity in Lebanon..and return to a fierce war.”

Keep reading

3 Months of Trump’s Disastrous Iran War Has Cost US Consumers $60 Billion in Extra Energy Costs​

 Americans have made clear since President Donald Trump joined Israel in beginning an unprovoked war on Iran that they view the conflict-of-choice as damaging to their financial well-being—and that they blame the president for the higher cost of fuel since the war started in February.

On Friday, Moody’s Analytics put an exact number on the heightened financial anxiety families across the country have been feeling over the past three months as Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent fuel prices soaring: $447.19.

That’s how much the average US household has had to additionally spend on fuel-related expenses since Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanu launched their attack on February 28, Moody’s told CNBC.

Altogether, Americans have spent a total of nearly $60 billion on gas, airline fares, and other related costs as the strait, a key shipping route for oil, has remained effectively closed.

According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of regular gas stands at $4.39—up close to 50% since early March. Diesel now costs $5.52 per gallon, forcing consumers to pay $20 billion more in additional expenses on groceries and other goods.

“The economy isn’t just soft, it’s struggling,” Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, said Thursday. “The Iran war needs to end, and the Strait of Hormuz needs to be reopened soon, or recession will become more likely than not.”

As CNBC reported Friday, “higher energy costs can force consumers to raid their savings and lean more on debt to cover expenses.”

Trump flatly said earlier this month that he doesn’t consider Americans’ financial situation “even a little bit” when it comes to the war on Iran, while National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett posited earlier this week that Americans are “spending more money” not because higher prices are forcing them to but because they’re “very, very optimistic about the state of the economy.” He also bragged recently that “credit card spending is through the roof”—a sign several observers took not as a positive omen for the economy but as a sign that families are being forced to take on debt to pay for gas and other essentials.

Zandi provided a reality check Friday.

“Unless the war ends soon, financially pressed consumers will have no option but to turn more cautious in their spending, threatening the already soft economy,” he told CNBC, warning that families could end up spending nearly $2,000 extra on fuel-related costs if the war continues reaches the one-year mark.

Keep reading

Putin Warns Europeans That Moscow Can ‘Raze to the Ground’ Any Country Attempting to Attack Russian Enclave of Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad is the new powder keg.

The 5-year war in Ukraine hasn’t even finished yet, but a new conflict between Russia and the Euro-Globalists is already shaping up.

Yesterday, while talking to journalists, President Vladimir ​Putin warned that Russia has ‘all the means necessary at ​its disposal’ to destroy anyone ‌who attempts to attack the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Reuters reported:

“Putin ​was responding to a question ⁠about remarks made by ​Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys earlier ​this month who said that NATO had to show Moscow it was ​capable of penetrating Kaliningrad.”

Keep reading