Tag: russia

Western war hawks lack plan to defeat Russia – Pentagon chief

Western officials who speak of Ukraine winning the ongoing conflict don’t have a real strategy for defeating Russia, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, the Pentagon chief declined to directly say whether he views Russia as a “true adversary” or whether Washington would allow a “complete surrender of Ukraine” in order to secure peace in the region.

The Trump administration is instead seeking a settlement to the Ukraine conflict that will last, not Kiev’s surrender or Russia’s defeat.

“The situation is unfortunate, unleashed by the previous administration,” he said, referring to former President Joe Biden, whom Trump’s team blames for entangling the US in the Ukraine conflict. Biden’s government repeatedly vowed to back Kiev for as long as it took to defeat Russia militarily.

“But everyone that talks about winning and prevailing is yet to present to me a plan that’s going to push the Russian army out of those territories,” Hegseth added.

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What the giddy reaction to Ukraine’s surprise attacks says about us

A little over forty years ago, while preparing for a weekly radio address, President Ronald Reagan famously cracked wise about the possibility of attacking the Soviet Union. “I have signed legislation that outlaws Russia forever,” he said. “We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Reagan had not realized that the studio microphone was recording his joke and that technical personnel preparing for the broadcast in stations across the country were already listening. His facetious remarks were leaked. The public reaction was immediate, strong, and negative. Democratic candidate Walter Mondale admonished his election opponent for ill-considered humor, and Reagan’s polling numbers took a temporary hit.

For many, the possibility of thermonuclear annihilation was no joking matter.

Within a few short years, history veered in a much more positive direction, and concerns about either superpower pressing “the button” by accident or by design began to recede. A reelected Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev launched a set of historic accords that greatly reduced the risk of superpower war. The Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and the USSR dissolved. For many Americans, the threat of nuclear conflict faded into distant memory.

Today, we encounter those Cold War fears primarily through history books. Fewer and fewer people recall nail-biting over the Cuban Missile Crisis or sheltering under desks in elementary schools. Many have not heard about the controversy over Reagan’s radio gaffe. Millennials and Generation Z wonder why their parents and grandparents worried about a nuclear Armageddon that never, in fact, materialized.

There may be no better illustration of our much-relaxed contemporary attitudes than the public reaction to Ukraine’s surprise attacks last week on dozens of Russian strategic bombers located at bases thousands of kilometers from Ukraine. On June 1, Ukraine used swarms of drones hidden in trucks smuggled across Russia’s border to attack one leg of its nuclear triad of missiles, submarines, and aircraft.

This time, the bombing was no joke. But the Western reaction hardly took the prospect of nuclear escalation seriously.

The operation was “a brilliant technical performance” that showed “why Ukraine will win this war,” according to French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy writing in the Wall Street Journal. Rebecca Grant, vice president of the Lexington Institute, posted on the Fox News site that Americans should “savor Ukraine’s brilliant strike on Putin’s terror bombers. Too bad Ukraine can’t do it again. Or can they?”

The Washington Post editorialized that the operation showed that Ukrainians are “tough, determined – and right. Theirs is a fight the United States should be proud to support.” Legions of online armchair warriors praised Ukraine’s “bad-ass operation” that will “go down in history” and be “studied for years to come.”

Such reactions largely ignored the impact that such attacks might have on nuclear stability between the United States and Russia, which together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

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Ukrainian attacks on Russian planes ‘Western’ intel op – Jeffrey Sachs

Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian military airfields earlier this month were a “Western intelligence operation” orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, American public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs has claimed.

In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson released on Wednesday, Sachs accused Western intelligence services of covertly working to undermine peace efforts aimed at resolving the Ukraine conflict, acting on orders from the US “deep state.”

On June 1, Ukrainian drones struck several Russian airbases in a coordinated assault across five regions – from Murmansk in the north to Irkutsk in Siberia – which Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky later called Operation Spider’s Web.

Kiev claimed that around 40 Russian military aircraft were damaged or destroyed, including long-range bombers. Moscow has dismissed the numbers and extent of damage, saying some of the aircraft were damaged, but that it was minimal and will be repaired. It added that most of the drones were intercepted.

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Russia Won’t End Ukraine War Until NATO Pulls Forces Out Of Eastern Flank

A top Kremlin official was quoted in Newsweek this week warning that Russia won’t end the Ukraine war until NATO pulls its troops out of the Baltic and ‘eastern flank’ states.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov demanded that NATO must withdraw its troops from the Baltic region. Russia has long seen the Baltics as very near, and its sphere of influence, also given its territory of of Kaliningrad. 

“The American side requires practical steps aimed at eliminating the root causes of the fundamental contradictions between us in the area of security,” he had said, originally in state TASS.

“Among these causes, NATO expansion is in the foreground,” he emphasized. “Without resolving this fundamental and most acute problem for us, it is simply impossible to resolve the current conflict in the Euro-Atlantic region.”

NATO’s ‘eastern flank’ closer to the start of the Ukraine war – forces have since grown…

“Given the nature and genesis of the Ukrainian crisis, provoked by the previous U.S. authorities and the West as a whole, this conflict naturally acts, well, if you like, as a test, a trial, which checks the seriousness of Washington’s intentions to straighten out our relations,” he said.

Ryabkov said Moscow’s position all along has been that the Western military alliance “not deploy strike weapons near Russian border.”

“In any case, reducing NATO’s Eastern European contingent would likely boost the security of the whole continent,” he concluded.

Such a broader ultimatum was actually issued just before the full-scale invasion, but was not heeded. In fact, countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have only grown more hawkish and vocal in their anti-Moscow rhetoric, and have even taken legal action against the Russian Orthodox Church in the Baltics.

A very provocative and sensational alert issued by German intelligence…

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NATO Chief: Russia Could Be Ready to Fight the West in Five Years

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could launch an attack on the bloc within five years. He called on members to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP.

Speaking at the British Chatham House think tank, Rutte told the audience, “Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years. Five years. Let’s not kid ourselves, we are all on the Eastern flank now.” He continued, “There is no longer East or West – there is just NATO.”

Rutte argued that to combat the supposed threat from Russia, NATO states must boost military spending to 5% of their GDP, adding “3.5% will be invested in our core military requirements. While the rest will go towards defence and security-related investments, including infrastructure and building industrial capacity.” He went on to say that “5% is not some figure plucked from the air, it is grounded in hard facts.”

President Donald Trump has also called for NATO to increase its minimum defense spending level to 5% of GDP. The current requirement is 2%, and only 23 of 32 members meet that threshold.

Spain and Italy will hit the minimum level for the first time this year, while Canada is not expected to spend more than 2% of its GDP on defense until 2027.

US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker restated that demand last week. “We are currently negotiating within the North Atlantic Council the timelines and what’s included in the 5%, both from a core defense standpoint and also defense-related and security-related spending,” he said Wednesday. He added that member states must rapidly ramp up spending to reach that goal.

According to NATO statistics, in 2024, only Poland spent over 4% of GDP on its military. Four countries, including the US, spend over 3% on defense. For the US, this would mean spending $1.45 trillion annually on the war budget. 

“But let me be clear on this, we cannot have another Wales pledge style where a lot of allies don’t meet their commitments until year 10 or year 11,” he said. “We are asking all allies to increase their budgets as far as they can and as quickly as they can, understanding that this is not the United States setting this timeline, it is our adversaries.”

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Russia To Build Eight Nuclear Power Plants In Iran Amid Standoff With US

It’s been no secret that Russia has been getting more heavily involved in Iran’s nuclear program, and interestingly at a moment Moscow has offered to mediate between Washington and Tehran on the question of uranium enrichment and a new nuclear monitoring deal.

On Monday, in a surprise headline given the massive, ambitious scope, Iranian state sources have said Russia will construct eight nuclear power plants in Iran, two of which are already under construction.

“Russia is contracted to build eight nuclear power plants in Iran, including four in the southern city of Bushehr,” Ebrahim Rezaei, spokesman for the national security and foreign policy committee, announced on Monday.

This marks a monumental leap forward in the Iran-Russia relationship, after the two have deepened military cooperation in relation to the Ukraine war (where Russian forces have heavily relied on Iranian Shahed drones), given that a mere several years ago, Moscow was not even ready to sell Iran nuclear fuel.

But EIGHT? Some critics have denounced this as but PR nonsense and a disservice to the Iranian people, given that by some estimates Russia has already taken over a billion dollars from Iran for rebuilding just one Bushehr nuclear site with hardly any progress to show.

For example, of prior problems and severe timeline setbacks one industry source described:

Iran has one operating nuclear reactor, a 1,000-MW Russian-designed VVER unit at the southern port city of Bushehr, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Two more VVER-1000 units are under construction at the site. Work on Unit 2 began in 2019, with commercial operation now expected in 2029 after earlier reports said the unit could come online last year. Iranian media reported that installation of safety equipment in Unit 2 began earlier in February, along with excavation works for the water cooling pump houses of both units.

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Israel Unveils Unprecedented Transfer To Ukraine Of ‘Several’ Patriot Missile Batteries

In early May it was first reported that a US-supplied Patriot air-defense system that was based in Israel would be refurbished and sent to Ukraine. This was despite what the White House’s National Security Council said at the time in a statement: “President Trump has been clear: he wants the war in Ukraine to end and the killing to stop.”

But American and Western arms for Ukraine have continued flowing, with no end in sight, despite what was a very brief stoppage of maybe a couple days earlier in Trump’s term. Israel has just revealed that it wasn’t merely “one” Patriot battery transferred to Ukraine, but “several”.

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky unveiled in a Sunday interview with Pravda USA that Israel has delivered several MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to Kiev, in a clear significant escalation in its military support to the Zelensky government.

During the opening years of the war Israel largely remained on the sidelines, for fear of damaging sensitive relations with Russia, which has maintained a military presence on the Mediterranean, along Syria’s coast. But times have changed, and Russia could be packing up its Syrian naval and air bases, given the December overthrow of its ally Assad and the Jolani regime being installed in Damascus.

Ambassador Brodsky told the Ukrainian media publication (according to machine translation):

The Patriot systems that we once received from the United States are now in Ukraine. These are Israeli systems that were in service with Israel in the early 90s. We agreed to transfer them to Ukraine. And unfortunately, not much was said about this. But when they say that Israel did not help militarily, this is not true. This is not true,” Brodsky emphasized.

This appears to be confirmation of what Axios reported in late January:

The U.S. military transferred around 90 Patriot air defense interceptors from storage in Israel to Poland this week in order to deliver them to Ukraine, three sources with knowledge of the operation tell Axios.

These are apparently older US-supplied systems which remained in Israel’s stockpile. Still, the NY Times had presented that merely one Patriot battery was being prepped, in this May 4 report for example:

A Patriot air-defense system that was based in Israel will be sent to Ukraine after it is refurbished, four current and former U.S. officials said in recent days, and Western allies are discussing the logistics of Germany or Greece giving another one.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, declined to describe President Trump’s view of the decision to transfer more Patriot systems to Ukraine.

Israel is perhaps only making this public now in the context of Russia’s air war against Ukrainian cities, and the capital in particular, heating up.

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Russian Forces Reach Donetsk’s Western Border and Enter Dnipropetrovsk, Taking the War Into Another Ukrainian Region

During the Istanbul talks between Russia and Ukraine, when presented with Moscow’s demand that Kiev’s troops must withdraw from territory of the four regions that they have partially conquered (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhie and Kherson), the Ukrainian delegation reacted with a strong rejection of this point.

It’s been widely reported that, at this point, Russian negotiators warned their foes: ‘Next time, it won’t be four regions, but six or eight’.

That could, of course, be nothing but bragging, except that today the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that units of the 90th Tank Division have reached & crossed the western border of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and that their offensive continues deeper into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

That the Russian offensive has now breached into a brand-new region is a serious setback for the Kiev regime, who really depends on a constant PR effort to keep allies engaged and prevent further deterioration of public morale in their country.

So, at this point, besides the four regions mentioned above, there are also Russian successes in the northern Sumy and Kharkov regions – and now Dnipropetrovsk.

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US diverted military aid for Kiev to Middle East – Zelensky

US President Donald Trump’s administration has diverted a large military aid package his predecessor promised to Kiev to American forces in the Middle East, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has told ABC. The package included thousands of anti-drone missiles Ukraine desperately needs to fight Russia’s long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), he said.

The Ukrainian leader raised the issue in an interview with ABC News’ Martha Raddatz which aired on Sunday. When asked about the importance of US support, Zelensky admitted that the Ukrainian military was struggling to deal with Russian UAVs on its own.

“We have a lot of problems with these Shaheds,” he said, referring to Russian Geran-2 long-range drones, which Kiev claims to be Shahed-family UAVs allegedly supplied to Moscow by Tehran. Both Russia and Iran have previously denied the allegations.

The Ukrainian leader then revealed that Kiev had not received a major aid package it was “counting on.” Former US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promised Ukraine 20,000 anti-drone missiles that were based on a “special technology,” Zelensky claimed. Austin served as the secretary of defense under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

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Ukraine Not Reclaiming Bodies for Fear of Admitting Losses, Paying Widows – Medvedev

Kiev refuses to accept the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers because it does not want to admit the losses and is unwilling to pay compensations to their families, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday.

“The Kiev bastards don’t want to take the bodies of their dead soldiers. There are two reasons: it’s scary to admit that there are 6,000 of them and they don’t want to pay widows,” Medvedev wrote on X.

Earlier in the day, Vladimir Medinsky, a Russian presidential aide and head of the Russian delegation to the talks with Ukraine, said that Russia had started the process of repatriating over 6,000 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers as well as the exchange of prisoners of war, as agreed at the negotiations in Istanbul on June 2. Medinsky had to comment on the situation, because the Ukrainian side did not arrive at the exchange site, although the date had been declared in advance.

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