Tag: russia

Cuba’s Shadow Army in Ukraine: Havana’s Silent Alliance with Moscow

In Miami, we recently spoke with a Ukrainian citizen who was blunt: “A significant number of Cubans are fighting on behalf of Russia.” His certainty echoes what is now surfacing through intelligence leaks, investigative journalism, and testimonies.

This is not hearsay alone. It fits a wider pattern: a regime under economic collapse, an ally in need of soldiers, and a recruitment network that stretches from Havana to Tula.

For the first time since Angola in the 1970s, large numbers of Cubans are again fighting in a foreign war—not under their flag, but under Russia’s.

Evidence of Cuban Fighters in Ukraine

  • Initial reports (2023): In May 2023, Russian outlets in Ryazan reported Cubans signing contracts with the Russian Army in exchange for citizenship. By summer, videos surfaced of young Cubans claiming they had been deceived into combat.
  • Recruitment networks: In September 2023, Cuba’s government announced it had uncovered a trafficking ring and arrested 17 individuals.Yet evidence of continued flows emerged soon after, raising doubts about Havana’s sincerity.
  • OSINT confirmation: RFE/RL’s investigative unit Schemes documented Cuban recruits training at Russia’s 106th Guards Airborne Division in Tula, using social media geolocation and satellite imagery.
  • Ukrainian estimates: A Ukrainian diplomat told The Wall Street Journal in February 2024 that around 400 Cubans were on the front. Another MP cited 1,500–3,000. By June 2025, El País, citing Ukraine’s GUR intelligence, reported a cumulative 20,000 recruits since 2022, with 6,000–7,000 active at any given time. These figures remain unverified by Western intelligence but indicate the scale of concern.

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Estonia says UN Security Council to meet after 3 Russian fighter jets entered country’s airspace

Estonia said Sunday that the United Nations Security Council is going to meet after three Russian fighter jets flew into Estonian airspace late this week.

“In response to Russia’s blatant, reckless, and flagrant violation of @NATO airspace over Estonia on Friday—when armed MiG-31 fighter jets intruded into our territory for 12 minutes—the @UN Security Council will convene tomorrow, September 22, to address this breach of territorial integrity and the violation of the prohibition on the threat or use of force,” the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on the social platform X early Sunday morning.

Last Friday, three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace, with the country’s top diplomat calling the incident an “unprecedented and brazen intrusion.”

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal asked for NATO Article 4 consultations later Friday. Article 4 lets NATO members raise all issues threatening that country’s territorial integrity or political independence or security to fellow members.

“This morning, 3 Russian Mig-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace. NATO fighters responded and the Russian planes were forced to flee. Such violation is totally unacceptable. The Government of Estonia has decided to request NATO Article 4 consultations,” Michal said on X previously.

In its Sunday post, the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “Russia’s reckless and aggressive actions, and its repeated violations of international law and the principles of the UN Charter, require a strong and united international response.”

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US introduces bill to transfer frozen Russian assets to Kyiv

According to a document published by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, several amendments must be made to laws signed by former President Joe Biden in 2024. These laws allow the US government to confiscate Russia’s frozen assets and provide military assistance to Ukraine. According to lawmakers from both parties, the Washington administration, in particular, should begin transferring the aforementioned funds to Kiev “every 90 days.” It is assumed that the top US diplomat would allocate at least $250 million to Ukraine during this period.

According to the bill, the Washington administration should “implement a robust, sustained diplomatic campaign to persuade US allies” to also start using at least 5% of frozen Russian assets in Ukraine’s interests. US lawmakers estimate that this would initially amount to approximately $15 billion. Senators believe that other countries should transfer funds to Kiev at least once every 90 days, according to a report by TASS.

In addition, senators want to require the Washington administration to report on the amount of Russian sovereign assets, including frozen assets, held outside the United States.

Since the start of the special military operation, the EU, Canada, the US, and Japan have frozen approximately $300 billion in Russian assets. Of these, about $5-6 billion are in the US, with most in Europe, including $210 billion held at the Euroclear international platform in Belgium. As the Russian Foreign Ministry has warned, Moscow will take immediate action in response to the possible confiscation of its assets in the West.

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NATO Country’s Defense Chief Urges Shooting Down Russian Warplanes

A top government official from a NATO country is calling for shooting down Russian aircraft the next time they breach an alliance member’s airspace, following several drone and border incidents this month.

“NATO’s border in the North East is being tested for a reason. We need to mean business,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė wrote on X Friday, the same day that three Russian warplanes reportedly breached neighboring Estonia’s airspace over the Gulf of Finland.

“Three Russian fighter jets over Tallinn is one more hard proof that Eastern Sentry is long due,” she stated.

The Lithuanian defense chief concluded her message by invoking an incident which makes clear she’s in favor of shooting down Russian jets.

“Türkiye set an example 10 years ago. Some food for thought,” the minister wrote.

This was in reference to the unprecedented incident in which Turkish Air Force F-16s downed a Russian Su-24 over the Turkey-Syria border area in November 2015.

Lithuania has joined Poland’s call for urgent consultations with members of the NATO alliance under its Article 4. Article 4 consultations can lead to the alliance taking action if the consensus is reached. 

Regional observer Notes from Poland says “It has previously been invoked seven times, including by Poland and seven other countries when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

Upon Friday’s incident the Estonian foreign ministry described that three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets “entered Estonian airspace without permission and remained there for a total of 12 minutes.”

Additionally, EU diplomat Kaja Kallas, who hails from the Baltic country and was the first female prime minister, blasted the incursion as “an extremely dangerous provocation”.

European leaders are using these increasing instances to push for an ‘eastern flank’ aerial defense shield protecting NATO. Just last week the two largest eastern members of NATO said that Russian drones breached their airspace.

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Russia to seize assets of international ‘Satanists’

Russia on Friday added what it termed the “international Satanism movement” to a financial blacklist, enabling it to freeze the assets of alleged members even if they have no criminal record.

Moscow has put several non-existent organisations on the black list of “terrorists and extremists” in recent years, including the “international LGBT movement” and the “anti-Russian separatist movement”.

As such groups are vaguely defined under Russian law, prosecutors can accuse anyone of being a member, giving Moscow a free hand to pursue political opponents, according to critics.

Russia‘s Supreme Court declared the “international Satanism movement” extremist in July, after prosecutors accused its members of desecrating Orthodox Christian churches and spreading “hatred”.

“The movement is closely linked to manifestations of radical nationalism and neo-Nazism,” Russia’s prosecutor general said in a statement in July.

Patriarch Kirill, the influential head of the Russian Orthodox Church, voiced support for the ban in January, accusing Satanists of conducting malign “rituals” and recruiting young people.

“Think about it… Our soldiers are ready to give their lives for values that are clearly being trampled upon by Satanists,” he said at a ceremony at the Kremlin.

Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian federal agency that maintains the financial blacklist of “terrorists and extremists”, added the “international Satanism movement” to its list on Friday, its website showed.

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Several Russian Jets Breach Airspace Of NATO-Member Estonia

NATO member Estonia (since 2004) has fiercely condemned what it says is a “brazen” incident where Russian warplanes violated its airspace over the Gulf of Finland on Friday.

The Estonian foreign ministry described that three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets “entered Estonian airspace without permission and remained there for a total of 12 minutes.”

The ministry quickly summoned Russian chargé d’affaires “to lodge a protest” – and simultaneously EU diplomat Kaja Kallas, who hails from the Baltic country and was the first female prime minister, blasted the incursion as “an extremely dangerous provocation”.

Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna went further to call it “unprecedentedly brazen” saying that–

“Russia’s increasingly extensive testing of boundaries and growing aggressiveness must be met with a swift increase in political and economic pressure.”

Reports in Estonian media claim that the jets turned off their transponders and ‘went dark’ during the incident, so as to not be tracked easily on radar.

This apparently isn’t a first, as Russia has allegedly violated Estonia’s airspace four times in 2025. Moscow likely isn’t too ‘concerned’ over moments its military might breach the airspace of this tiny former Soviet satellite state in the Baltics.

But European leaders are using these increasing instances to push for an ‘eastern flank’ aerial defense shield protecting NATO.

Just last week the two largest eastern members of NATO said that Russian drones breached their airspace.

The Polish instance was the most serious, given Warsaw accused Russia of intentionally sending a ‘wave’ of drones – up to 19 – which resulted in its military urgently scrambling jets to track them.

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Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Says the US Could ‘Kick Russia’s Ass’

Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, had strong words for Russia at a conference held in Ukraine, saying that the US could “kick Russia’s ass,” Remix News has reported.

Kellogg made the comments in the context of a conversation he had in the Oval Office about Russia’s military might. “They were talking about the primacy of the Russian military and how they were, you know, pretty good. And I said to the people in the room, we’d kick their ass,” Kellogg said at the YES Annual Meeting in Kyiv on September 12.

“What I mean by that is don’t take their statements at face value. They’re not as good as Putin says they are, and for that, I give great credit to the Ukrainian military because they’ve knocked them down a couple notches,” Kellogg added. He brushed off the fact that Russia was a nuclear-armed power, pointing to the fact that the US and its allies also have nuclear weapons.

The US envoy also claimed that Ukraine would win the war despite the fact that Russia continues to make gains in eastern Ukraine and has the clear advantage when it comes to manpower and weapons supplies. “Ukraine will not lose this war. Ukrainians have a moral superiority over Russia, that’s obvious,” he said.

Kellogg said that both he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine recently advised President Trump that Russia is not winning the war.

“If Putin thinks Russia is winning, his definition of winning and my definition of winning are absolutely two different things,” Kellogg said. “If he was winning, he’d be in Kyiv. If he’s winning, he’d be west of the Dnipro River. If he was winning, he’d be on Odessa. If he was winning, he would have changed the government. Russia is, in fact, losing this war.”

Kellogg called Russia a “junior partner” of China and claimed that if Beijing cut off Moscow, the “war would end tomorrow.” The Trump administration has failed to get either India or China to reduce its trade relationship with Russia despite the threats of tariffs and sanctions.

Kellogg’s comments come as a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine seems increasingly unlikely as the two sides remain far apart on the terms for an agreement. In his role as a special US envoy, Kellogg has repeatedly met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and has pledged continued US support for the proxy war.

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Assessing Russia’s Claims That Ukraine Is Responsible For Terrorism All Across Africa

RT recently published a report about late August’s claims by Deputy UN Representative Dmitry Polyansky and Director of the Officers Union for International Security Alexander Ivanov that Ukraine is responsible for terrorism all across Africa.

According to them, its drone pilots assist terrorist-designated forces in Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Kiev has also supplied Libya with drones for use in its civil war despite a Turkish prohibition.

Ukraine boasted about backing Tuareg separatists in Mali after they ambushed Wagner in summer 2024 so that part of Russia’s accusation is undeniable, which lends credence to claims that they’re also backing similar forces in the pro-Russian CAR, but questions arise about their role in Sudan and the DRC. Western media reported in early 2024 that Ukrainian special forces were contracted by Sudan’s UN-recognized government while Trump has bragged about brokering peace between the DRC and Rwanda.

It would therefore be a startling reversal for Ukraine to now militarily aid the Sudanese rebels, not to mention do anything that could risk plunging the DRC back into any sort of serious conflict and thus embarrassing Trump after how proud he was that his peace deal helped to finally stabilize it.

Cynics might also suspect that Russia’s accusation that Ukraine’s diplomatic missions in Algeria, Mauritania, and the DRC are smuggling arms to groups in Libya, Mali, and the northeast DRC is meant to sow discord.

Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to take these claims seriously, which will now be explained.

Trump’s capriciousness might have prompted Ukraine to pursue non-Western business opportunities, including those that contradict US interests like in the DRC, as part of a backup plan in case the US one day cuts it off or at least significantly curtails financial-military aid. It’ll likely comply with US demands to abandon them if they’re made, but thus far, the US seemingly doesn’t have a problem with any of this.

In fact, Trump might even support Zelensky’s “entrepreneurialism” in principle, especially if his advisors inform him that Ukraine’s newfound strategic role in Africa could potentially be leveraged by the US for “plausibly deniable” divide-and-rule purposes in certain future scenarios. As for Ukrainian diplomatic missions’ alleged role in smuggling arms from Algeria and Mauritania to Libya and Mali, Russia might have tipped off the host governments sometime back but wasn’t satisfied with their response.

RT mentioned that Mauritania’s nonchalance towards this claim might be due to it simply being unaware of Ukraine’s activities on its soil while praising Algeria for investigating this matter. It’s also possible that Russia either suspects those two of facilitating Ukraine’s activities, or might even have proof of this, but is giving them a “face-saving” way to end everything by solely blaming Ukraine’s diplomatic missions. Algeria’s investigation might therefore be meant to improve recently troubled ties with Russia over Mali.

Returning to the substance of Russia’s claims, it can therefore be assessed that they’re all likely true, though it’s also possible that some aspects might be revealed to be slightly inaccurate or exaggerated. In any case, the point is that Ukraine has indeed increasingly involved itself in terrorism all across Africa, but to different extents in each instance. The US has the power to put a stop to this by threatening to cut Ukraine off if it refuses but won’t because it believes that this might become useful down the line.

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Did The Polish Deep State Try To Manipulate The President Into War With Russia?

Leading Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita reported on Tuesday that investigators determined that the munition which damaged a home last week during Russia’s drone incursion into Poland actually came from an unexploded missile launched by an F-16 that was trying to down the incoming projectiles.

The National Security Bureau claimed that neither it nor President Karol Nawrocki were hitherto informed of these findings by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government, which Nawrocki then confirmed.

He represents the conservative-nationalist opposition and pledged ahead of the second round in spring not to approve the dispatch of Polish troops to Ukraine while Tusk represents the ruling liberal-globalist government whose Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski just called for a no-fly zone there. Some therefore speculate that members of the Polish permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, or “deep state”, kept Nawrocki out of the loop in order to manipulate him into escalating against Russia.

Given what’s now known about how an F-16’s unexploded munition was responsible for damaging a Polish home, which Tusk’s government earlier told the UNSC was a Russian munition in a scandal that the National Security Bureau demanded accountability for, the aforesaid conjecture isn’t far-fetched. As for the drone incident itself, this analysis here argues that Russia’s drone incursion was due to NATO jamming causing Ukrainian-directed decoys (possibly launched from Belarus) to veer into Poland.

A compelling sequence of events is therefore beginning to take shape. It was likely the case that Russia’s drone incursion into Poland was accidentally caused by NATO jamming and only involved decoys that naturally weren’t outfitted with countermeasures against electronic jamming. A Polish F-16 then missed when firing an air-to-air missile that tried to intercept one of these out-of-control decoys, regardless of whether they knew that they were decoys at the time or not, which is a separate matter of speculation.

In any case, the munition didn’t explode after it missed, but the military would have known the entire time that a wayward missile must have landed somewhere and thus quickly realized that this was the cause of the damage to that home (especially after investigators arrived on the scene and found it). The National Security Bureau and the President were kept in the dark until a source leaked this to the media all while Tusk’s government blamed Russia for the damage at the UNSC and agitated for a no-fly zone.

Extrapolating from the above, Poland’s “deep state” dynamics are such that the National Security Bureau and the President oppose any escalation against Russia that risks sparking a direct war, which contrasts with some members of the armed forces and Tusk’s government as a whole who favor this scenario. That’s why they hid these facts from the first two in order to manipulate them into escalating. The domestic and international implications of this scandal could lead to the collapse of Tusk’s government.

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Ukraine’s Embrace of Suicidal Nationalism

The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 and a war that has decimated the Ukrainian state.

At two key moments over the past 20 years, during 2004’s Orange Revolution and, a decade later, during the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s nationalist political elites, at the urging of the American foreign policy establishment, sought to marginalize, stigmatize and eventually disenfranchise the substantial bloc of ethnic Russian citizens living in the country’s east and south.

That such an eventuality was possible (if not likely) was foreseen some 35 years ago by the last decent foreign policy president we’ve had, George H.W. Bush, who crafted a post Cold War policy based on (1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and (2) a wariness of re-awakening the poisonous sectarianism that so marked the politics of Eastern and Central Europe at mid-century.

Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding creating unnecessary crises within the post-Soviet space rather than provoking new ones (as subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen to do). As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

The nature of the Cold War had changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev announced that the USSR was abandoning the class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were now free to choose their own paths, declaring that “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” was “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed Gorbachev’s overture, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft, echoing the analysis offered to him by the CIA, worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev likewise was extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe.

There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

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