Tag: russia

Zelensky’s reckless missile gamble: Ukraine’s new 3,000km weapon risks all-out war

  • Ukraine unveils new 3,000km-range Flamingo missile capable of striking Moscow to bypass U.S. restrictions on deep strikes into Russia.
  • Zelensky’s defiance risks catastrophic Russian retaliation, including cyberattacks, deeper NATO strikes, or even tactical nukes.
  • Ukraine’s dwindling resources, manpower, and Western support make the Flamingo a desperate last gamble rather than a war-winning strategy.
  • Russia’s military and economic superiority ensures Ukraine’s long-range strikes won’t shift the war’s outcome but could trigger uncontrolled escalation.
  • Zelensky’s provocative move signals weakness, not strength, as NATO fractures and Ukraine’s collapse becomes increasingly inevitable.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced this week that his military no longer needs U.S. permission to strike deep inside Russia, he wasn’t just boasting — he was rolling the dice on a conflict that could spiral into global catastrophe. The revelation came after reports that the Pentagon has quietly blocked Ukraine from using American-supplied ATACMS missiles to hit Russian territory since late spring. Now, Zelensky claims Ukraine’s new domestically produced Flamingo cruise missile, with a staggering 3,000km range, will let him bypass Washington’s restrictions entirely.

Speaking alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Zelensky declared, “At the moment, we are using our long-range domestically produced weapons, and we haven’t been discussing such matters with the U.S. lately.”

His timing is no coincidence. Just days earlier, he unveiled the Flamingo, a missile capable of reaching Moscow, boasting that mass production could begin as early as February. “The missile has undergone successful tests. It is currently our most successful missile,” he told reporters.

But here’s the problem: This isn’t just another weapon. It’s a provocation that could force Russia’s hand in ways Zelensky clearly hasn’t thought through.

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When the Russia ‘Experts’ Get It Wrong

The Western punditariat’s commentary on Russia is spectacularly ill-informed. This should be expected from mainstream journalists whose employment relies on the very ignorance they so readily espouse, but there is no excuse for those who promote themselves as “experts” and use this alleged expertise to help craft Western policy towards Russia.

A case in point is Michael McFaul, the Stanford Professor whose claim to fame is serving as Obama’s ambassador to Moscow. In a recent post on his Twitter account, McFaul linked to a Foreign Affairs article he penned in December of last year, outlining how he believed the incoming Trump administration could end the war in Ukraine. As is no surprise, the ambassador and NATO enthusiast recommended the suicidal strategy of admitting Ukraine into the alliance. Yet this is far from the most egregious misstep McFaul made in this piece, as he committed several factual errors that are inexcusable for someone of his experience and purported expertise.

It has become an article of faith in the West that Ukraine made a catastrophic folly in the mid-1990s by surrendering its nuclear weapons stockpile in exchange for security guarantees in the form of the Budapest Memorandum. McFaul repeats this conventional wisdom, stating that “the United States offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for Kyiv’s handing over its nuclear arsenal to Moscow.”

There is, however, just one problem with this piece of commentary: it isn’t true. Kiev couldn’t hand over its nuclear arsenal to Moscow because it didn’t have a nuclear arsenal to begin with. Ukraine’s much-vaunted nuclear deterrent was, in actual fact, Soviet nuclear weapons that happened to be stationed on Ukrainian soil. Even post-independence, Moscow retained full control of these systems. Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, then, was as much Ukrainian as American nuclear systems stationed throughout Europe are European. All debates about whether Kiev could have deterred the Russian invasion had it not signed the Budapest Memorandum are, therefore, redundant. As someone who’s bragged about making close to a million dollars a year for his supposed insights on Russia, McFaul should know better than to entertain these debates.

In fairness to McFaul, he did at least get one thing right when he said Washington offered Ukraine security assurances. Often used synonymously with guarantees, the word assurances was very carefully and deliberately selected language by Washington to ensure they would not be legally-bound to come to Ukraine’s defense, as the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer has explained:

“American officials decided the assurances would have to be packaged in a document that was not legally-binding. Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations wanted a legal treaty that would have to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. State Department lawyers thus took careful interest in the actual language, in order to keep the commitments of a political nature. U.S. officials also continually used the term “assurances” instead of “guarantees,” as the latter implied a deeper, even legally-binding commitment of the kind that the United States extended to its NATO allies”

So, when former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark said on a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored that the U.S. is essentially “giving up” on the Budapest Memorandum by failing to come to Ukraine’s aid, he is demonstrating quite a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the agreement. Clark additionally fails to mention that Washington had made their desire to “give up” on the Budapest Memorandum very clear long before the 2022 invasion. A key component of the memorandum is for the signatories of Russia, the U.S., and U.K. to refrain from exercising “economic coercion” against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latter two also had Soviet nuclear weapons that they agreed to transfer, and signed their own separate versions of the memorandum to do so).

As early as 2006, the United States and its British partners acted in complete defiance of this commitment, sanctioning the government of Belarus. Washington placed further sanctions on Minsk in 2013, justifying this on the grounds that their pledges in the Budapest Memorandum were “not legally binding.” Feeling liberated from any legal constraints, Washington also imposed sanctions against the government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, which complemented their blatant interference in the country’s internal affairs during the Maidan revolution. Such a move was a clear violation of  the Budapest pledge to respect Ukraine’s “independence and sovereignty.”

Clark may profit from studying this and much else of the post-Soviet record. In addition to peddling mainstream dogma about the Budapest Memorandum, the general also repeated the Western media favourite that Putin wants to reconstitute the borders of the Soviet Union. As he put it, “From the time Vladimir Putin became prime minister and later president, he wanted to restore the Soviet Union’s space and territory.”

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If Ukraine Wants Security Guarantees, It Should Get Them From Europe

President Donald Trump deserves immense credit for prioritizing diplomacy in pursuit of a resolution to the Russia-Ukraine War. After three and a half years of madness and mayhem in Ukraine, and beneath a volley of overwrought accusations of “Appeasement!” from Democrats, the media, and parts of Europe, Trump has met with both sides of the conflict to discern their positions and try to bring them together to end the killing.

The substantive issues are admittedly tough. The Russians are dug in on territorial concessions and the end of NATO expansion, while the Ukrainians are dug in on security guarantees. Not surprisingly, after three years of brutal conflict, Kyiv wants outside powers to commit to going to war for it if the Russians should invade again. Rightly, Trump has declined repeatedly to commit U.S. forces to fight and die for Ukraine.

That leaves things at loggerheads: If Ukraine will not quit fighting without security guarantees, and the United States — under Joe Biden as well as President Trump — doesn’t want to provide them, who will? The natural answer should be Europe. With an economy roughly the same size as the U.S. economy, five times Russia’s population, geographic proximity to Ukraine, and already more combined military spending than Russia, surely Europe should step up.

After all, the Europeans have been quite consistent: Protecting Ukraine from Russia is of vital importance to them. Referring to the war in Ukraine, France’s Emmanuel Macron warned last year that “our Europe could die.” Macron was joined last week by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, the U.K.’s Keir Starmer, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and other EU leaders in issuing their demand for “ironclad security guarantees” to protect “Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests.”

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U.S. Bars China, Russia, Iran From Undersea Cable Supply Chains

The U.S. government is overhauling undersea cable rules for the first time since 2001, tightening restrictions to keep companies linked to adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran out of the supply chain, according to Nikkei Asia.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved proposed rules that bar adversary-based firms from working on U.S.-owned undersea cables or supplying related equipment. Approved companies will need cybersecurity plans and must certify their supply chains are free of such entities.

To encourage investment, the FCC will streamline approvals for U.S. firms and partners from Japan and Europe, cutting the typical two-year process. Reapproval will be required every 25 years instead of every three, as originally proposed.

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Has He Gone Completely Insane? Zelensky Announces That There Is Not Going To Be Peace

If you listen long enough, people will eventually tell you exactly what they truly believe. Unfortunately, we have just learned what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky truly believes about the war with Russia, and it is not good news at all. Apparently Zelensky is convinced that there will not be a permanent state of peace until all of Donetsk, all of Luhansk and all of Crimea belong to his government. Needless to say, the Russians will never hand all of Donetsk, all of Luhansk and all of Crimea over to Ukraine willingly, and so they will need to be taken by force. Since the Ukrainians cannot do this alone, they will be seeking to enlist the help of others, and that is what should deeply alarm all of us.

The mainstream media’s fawning coverage of Zelensky’s Independence Day speech makes him sounds like some sort of a great peacemaker.  Here is just one example…

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would continue to fight for its freedom “while its calls for peace are not heard,” in a defiant address to the nation on its independence day.

“We need a just peace, a peace where our future will be decided only by us,” he said, adding that Ukraine was “not a victim, it is a fighter”.

He continued: “Ukraine has not yet won, but it has certainly not lost.”

That makes him sound so incredibly reasonable.

But the mainstream media did not report on any of the troubling parts of Zelensky’s speech.

I went and found a transcript of the speech, and it reveals Zelensky’s real goals…

And now, in a full-scale war for independence, it is here, on Maidan, that one can find such important symbols. Symbols of how we fight, what we fight for, and how we are overcoming this war.

These symbols are all around us. In this Independence Monument. Inside, it has a reinforced concrete frame and can literally withstand a hurricane. In the same way, our Ukraine has withstood the great calamity that Russia brought to our land. In this “Zero Kilometer” point. It is the starting point where distances to Ukrainian cities are written: to our Donetsk, our Luhansk, our Crimea. Today, these markers have a completely different meaning. They are no longer just about kilometers. They remind us that all of this is Ukraine. And there are our people, and no distance between us can change that, and no temporary occupation can change that. One day, the distance between Ukrainians will disappear, and we will be together again as one family, as one country. It is only a matter of time. And Ukraine believes it can achieve this — achieve peace, peace across all its land. Ukraine is capable of it.

This is what started the war in the first place.

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Zelensky Wants $1 Billion Per Month From NATO Countries To Buy US Weapons

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that he wants $1 billion per month from NATO countries to purchase US weapons, comments that come as a peace deal seems increasingly unlikely following the summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

NATO recently announced a new scheme under which member states commit to spending on US weapons to ship to Ukraine, known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative. So far, about $2 billion has been committed to the effort in pledges from the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Canada.

“Our goal is to fill this program with no less than $1 billion every month,” Zelensky said during a joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in Ukraine. “We also discussed our domestic drone production and joint opportunities with partners. Investments now can help not only physically but also force Russia to end this war.”

During his visit to Ukraine, Store pledged that Norway would provide Ukraine with $8.4 billion in aid for 2026, the same amount Norway provided this year. The Norwegian leader said the $8.4 billion will go toward “military and civilian support.”

Zelensky and Store also discussed the idea of security guarantees for Ukraine, an issue that could sink the peace process as Ukraine and its European backers are insisting on some type of arrangement that would involve Western troops deploying to Ukraine, an idea Moscow has made clear is unacceptable and a non-starter for negotiations.

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Left-Populist German MP Demands Zelensky Testify on Nord Stream Sabotage

German politician Sahra Wagenknecht has urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide testimony regarding the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions.

As leader of the left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), she insists on a parliamentary investigative committee to examine the incident. Her demands follow recent arrests that point to Ukrainian involvement in the sabotage.

The Nord Stream pipelines, which transported natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, were damaged by explosions in September 2022.

A 49-year-old Ukrainian national was arrested in Italy on August 21, 2025, following a European arrest warrant issued by Germany.

The suspect, identified as Serhii K. in some reports, faces charges of causing an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage, and destruction of infrastructure. He was detained while vacationing with his family in the Rimini province and is awaiting extradition to Germany.

The arrest stems from evidence linking the man to a small team that allegedly used a yacht named Andromeda to place explosives on the pipelines.

Investigators believe he coordinated the operation, which involved Ukrainian divers operating from the vessel in the Baltic Sea. Reports indicate the suspect had served in Ukraine’s military, adding a layer to the ongoing probe.

This development follows an earlier warrant in June 2024 for another Ukrainian suspect, Volodymyr Z., who reportedly fled Poland to Ukraine after authorities there failed to act on the alert.

Polish prosecutors cited issues with the suspect’s address not being registered and deferred to their internal security service. All known suspects are now believed to be in Ukraine, complicating extradition efforts.

Wagenknecht argues that the operation likely involved state backing from Ukraine and possibly the U.S. under the Biden administration.

Wagenknecht references investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s reports, which allege U.S. complicity in the sabotage.

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Direct NATO Intervention In Ukraine Might Soon Dangerously Turn Into A Fait Accompli

Trump’s negotiating strategy is to “escalate to-de-escalate” in a very risky attempt to coerce concessions, which he might soon apply against Putin after being emboldened by its success with Iran.

The White House Summit between Trump, Zelensky, and a handful of European leaders officially concerned “security guarantees” for Ukraine, which is an ultra-sensitive issue for Russia. It was therefore alarming from its perspective that Trump subsequently said that the proposed deployment of French and British troops to Ukraine “will not create problems for Russia.” To make it even worse, he also spoke about helping them “by air”, while another report claimed that 10 countries are willing to send troops.

While it hasn’t been confirmed, this sequence of events suggests that Trump’s envisaged endgame in Ukraine is the deployment of NATO troops (even if not under the bloc’s banner), which may include a US-enforced (partial?) no-fly zone and/or promises of US air support if they’re attacked. All three – NATO troops in Ukraine, a no-fly zone, and the de facto extension of Article 5 mutual defense commitments to allies’ troops there (contrary to Hegseth’s declaration in February) – go against Russia’s security interests.

Nevertheless, it’s hypothetically possible that Putin might agree to at least some of the above, but only in exchange for far-reaching Ukrainian and/or Western concessions elsewhere. To be clear, neither he nor any officials below him have even hinted at anything of the sort, instead always opposing these plans and threatening that they might even use force to stop them. Having said that, “diplomacy is the art of the possible” as some have said, and these three briefings would contextualize any such quid pro quo:

* 7 August: “What’s Responsible For The Upcoming Putin-Trump Summit?”

* 16 August: “What’s Standing In The Way Of A Grand Compromise On Ukraine?”

* 21 August: “Which Western Security Guarantees For Ukraine Might Be Acceptable To Putin?”

In sum, Trump’s carrots and sticks might convince Putin that it’s better to accept this scenario than oppose it, but it might also be presented as a fait accompli for pressuring him into accepting it as part of a peace deal if he still opposes it instead of risking an escalation if it unfolds during active hostilities. After all, the US, UK, and the EU are all actively coordinating on the “security guarantees” that they’ll soon present to Russia, and this could dangerously include plans to directly intervene in the conflict.

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Friedrich Merz, Are You Nuts?

Do you know what German Chancellor Merz did?

Amidst serious negotiations to end the bloody and destructive Ukraine war, this guy’s putting up a veritable roadblock right in front of progress.

Here’s what it is: Merz was in Washington along with several other European leaders for a Ukraine meeting with President Trump. When it came Merz’s turn to talk he expressed, “I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire.”

Clearly no one in the world with a heart would like to see the fighting go on. So at first glance a ceasefire seems like a quick fix. But Merz’s strongly spoken statement had strings. Pointedly, he wants to delay peace talks until a ceasefire takes hold.

There’s one enormous obstacle to that. There’s a strong reason why Russian President Putin would be very reluctant to accept Merz’s condition. It’s simple to understand:

Earlier in Ukraine hostilities both Germany and France achieved Putin’s agreement to a ceasefire while a negotiated a peace agreement was underway. The efforts were called the Minsk Accords.

Doesn’t that sound like what Merz is proposing now? But it turned out in an unexpected way.

After a period of ceasefire and negotiating, the German and French leaders publically admitted they had tricked Putin into the ceasefire. They confessed their real objective was not peace. It was to buy time to better equip Ukraine to fight Russia.

You may have heard the idiom, “once fooled, twice shy.” It’s a modern version of the Old English translation from Aesop’s Fables that goes, “He that hath ben ones begyled by somme other ought to kepe hym wel fro[m] the same.” That’s a position that Putin might well take with regard to Germany’s current leader. Why should he be trusted, particularly when it comes to a ceasefire?

Certainly Merz must know the background of this. He would be remiss not to understand that a ceasefire without a peace agreement might be as unattainable as the end of a rainbow. That’s what leads me to suspect that Merz must be deliberately sabotaging the peace process, as would be any other European leader who joins him in his emphatic request.

It is time to address the significant real obstacles that must be faced if a settlement of territory is to take place.

For instance, Ukrainian President Zelensky claims that his constitution is a roadblock to such a settlement. But he is only partly right.

It is true that the Ukrainian constitution does not allow him to divide territory. He also offered another roadblock in that even changing the constitution would not be a simple matter. It would require an extensive public referendum he says.

He is right on both points. But he is wrong to represent them as ultimate roadblocks or even something that would result in much delay. In the past, Ukraine, in the view of its leaders, successfully negotiated a way to deal with problematic constitutional provisions that stood in its way.

This happened when leaders found it cumbersome to remove the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych from the presidency. Some reports claimed he was impeached. But the votes weren’t there to do that according to the constitution. Other reports claimed that he removed himself by abandoning his office when he fled for his life amidst immediate threats. But the constitution wasn’t followed there either. Nonetheless, they got rid of Yanukovych.

Here’s how they did it. The Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, simply passed a resolution. It said that the current circumstance was threatening to Ukraine, a mass violation of citizens’ rights and freedom, and a circumstance of extreme urgency. As a result they removed Yanukovych while not observing the constitution.

Now, all Ukraine has to do is to repeat that technique. Is not the current circumstance threatening to Ukraine, a mass violation of citizens’ rights and freedom, and a circumstance of extreme urgency, too?

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Russia and China Are Not Threats to the US

To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not one element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.

To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.

Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.

The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine or even Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA. And, then, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.

With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US – for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence – there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.

By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.

Consequently, China’s exports soared by 14X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.5 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers across the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.

Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen.

That’s surely why Washington’s idiotic “domino theory” during the Vietnam era was repudiated in spades by subsequent history. That is, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam. Yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi because Beijing was busy building-up a massive manufacturing and export economy.

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