Tag: ukraine

Who Will Be The Next President of Ukraine?

Apresidential election was supposed to be held in Ukraine on March 31, 2024. However, due to the extension of martial law for 90 days in February 2025 (until May 9, 2025), the scheduled election was postponed for the 14th time.

Ukrainian citizens are well aware that, in fact, Ukraine is currently led by an illegitimate President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was elected in 2019 for a term of five years. And although, on February 26, 2025, after the previously postponed vote, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) was still able to pass a resolution that presidential elections should not be held yet, the Ukrainian people understand that, due to the end of Zelensky’s term of office in 2024, the laws he signs and decisions he makes are illegitimate and can be challenged in court over time.

On February 19th,U.S. President Donald Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator”[1] and warned that he needed to act quickly to secure peace or he risked losing his country. This intensified the animosity between the two leaders, which alarmed European officials. Washington suspended military aid and intelligence-sharing with Kyiv. Meanwhile, Donald Trump also said that Ukraine requires presidential elections and territorial concessions for further talks.

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Putin Says No Peace Possible With Zelenskiy, Suggests UN Govern Ukraine In Near Term

Russian President Putin declared peace is next to impossible with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy in power. He questioned yesterday how Russia could negotiate with an illegitimate government that is not legally elected.

Putin suggested in the speech that the United Nations could be brought in to govern Ukraine, as there is precedence for this action.

Zelenskiy recently said Putin will die soon as negotiations are ongoing with Washington and Ukraine. These are not the actions of a Ukrainian leader who wants peace.

The EU and Zelenskiy, as well as elements within the U.S. government, are working to sabotage any effort by the Trump administration to secure a peace deal in Eastern Europe.

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Ukrainian Dictator Zelensky Says Putin ‘Will Die Soon’ & War ‘Will Come To An End’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boldly claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “will die soon” and the ongoing war “will come to an end.”

The comment came during an interview with a French news outlet just after Zelensky met with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday.

Rumors of Putin battling through major health issues have been spread for several years now.

Zelensky’s inflammatory remark could throw a wrench into ongoing peace negotiations between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia last week.

History suggests Zelensky, not Putin, is in danger of coming to an early demise as Western puppet leaders are often discarded after the globalist system is finished using them.

And, if Zelensky’s Western handlers don’t take him out to cover up their loose ends, he could be targeted by the Kremlin or even his own people who he’s been sending into the deadly meat grinder in the war against the Russia.

Infowars founder and host Alex Jones wrote on 𝕏, “If I was placing a bet on who is going to live longer, my money would be 20 to one on Putin. My money is on Putin out living Zelensky.”

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Even if the war ended tomorrow, Ukraine could end up broke by 2026

There is no plan in place to fund the Ukrainian budget after 2025.

Even if the war ends by the summer of 2025, it will take some time to reduce military expenditures, leaving European nations on the hook. It’s not clear that European elites have fully understood the political costs, however much longer the war continues.

With intensive, U.S.-brokered negotiations ongoing in Saudi Arabia involving separate Ukrainian and Russian delegations, hopes are rising that the Trump administration will finally be able to bring an end to the war.

But even if the war ends tomorrow, it would be unwise to assume that Ukraine could reduce military spending close to prewar levels.

Ukraine now has almost 900,000 men and women at arms, a threefold increase from peacetime, and that doesn’t take into account irrecoverable losses through death and injury. Estimates vary widely, but the casualty rate is commonly thought to number in the hundreds of thousands, with compensation provided to the injured and families of the deceased.

The war in Ukraine has therefore come at a vast financial cost to that country. Ukraine’s defense spending has risen tenfold since the 2021 budget was announced, when social welfare payments were the country’s biggest expenditure.

This has left a gaping hole in Ukraine’s finances that no amount of tax increases or Western donations will be able to fill over a sustained period without political consequences.

Since 2022, Ukraine has run an average budget deficit of over 22% of GDP. Based on the current exchange rate, Ukraine’s budget shortfall in 2025 amounts to around $41.5 billion. And that assumes defense spending falling slightly this year. In the hopefully unlikely event that war continues to the end of the year, the Ukrainian state would need to revise its budget upwards as it did in 2024.

Today, Ukraine’s domestic revenue, including taxes, excise, and duties, just about covers the cost of the defense effort, which in 2024 accounted for 64% of its total budget expenditure. That includes significant tax increases as the war has gone on. Total tax revenue will have risen by more than 100% since the war started and personal income taxes by over 200%. This in a country in which, according to the Wilson Center, 50% of the population lives at a basic subsistence level.

As Ukraine is cut off from international capital markets, it has had to meet the difference through aid and loans from Western nations.

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Mainstream Media Criticizes Ceasefire Negotiations in Ukraine: Don’t Believe Them

The mainstream media continuously points out that while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed readiness to accept the Trump administration’s proposed thirty-day ceasefire without preconditions, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said only that he supports the idea of a ceasefire while attaching preconditions that render it unworkable.

Neither claim is true. Zelensky has attached preconditions, and Putin’s preconditions are not a priori designed to render a ceasefire unworkable.

Zelensky has said, not that he has no preconditions, but that “We do not set conditions that complicate anything.” Though largely omitted from the mainstream narrative, Zelensky has agreed to negotiations with certain key preconditions. According to reporting by The Independent, Kiev stipulates that negotiations must guarantee the return of children abducted by Russia and of Ukrainian civilians illegally held by Russia. Two key red lines are that no territory beyond that already occupied by Russia be ceded and that adequate security guarantees be given. Those security guarantees, Zelensky has previously made clear, must be NATO membership or must be international forces that include the United States.

Though those two key red lines have escaped criticism, they are not categorically different from Putin’s key preconditions. Putin, too, has made territorial demands to address Ukraine’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements and to protect the rights and lives of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. And Putin, too, has made security demands to address NATO’s failure to implement its promise not to expand east, a broken promise that has made its way all the way to Ukraine and threatened Russia’s security. The Kremlin has recently called this its own “ironclad” security guarantee, and the Russian readout of the conversation between Trump and Putin refers to “the root causes of the crisis” and “Russia’s legitimate interests in the field of security.”

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Chronicle of An Unnecessary War: How the West Provoked Russia and Squandered Peace

Scott Horton’s 900-page masterpiece, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, is a hugely important work that meticulously documents how three decades of Western encirclement provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This long review aims to provide a broad and comprehensive overview of the many crimes, miscalculations, and failures by all sides that led to an unnecessary war.

Scott Horton, founder and director of the Libertarian Institute, is best known for conducting over 6,000 in-depth interviews with experts on U.S. foreign policy. His impressive new book Provoked is a monumental indictment of Western foreign policy follies, tracing how NATO expansion and regime-change wars fueled Russia’s hostility. With thousands of citations, Horton’s research persuasively shows that Western actions—cloaked in rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism—provoked Moscow’s response.

From NATO’s broken promises to the arming of extremists, Horton exposes a pattern of Western hypocrisy, painting Russia as an expansionist aggressor while sabotaging peace talks in Ukraine. The book is not a defense of Putin’s regime but a forensic audit of how Western overreach and ideological hubris transformed post-Cold War optimism into nuclear standoff. With the precision of a historian and the tenacity of an investigative journalist, Horton challenges the mainstream portrayal of Russia as the sole architect of global instability, arguing instead that U.S. and NATO policies exacerbated conflicts from Chechnya to the Donbas.

By weaving diplomatic cables, declassified documents, battlefield testimonies, and historical analysis into a gripping narrative that is as engrossing as it is unsettling, Horton encourages readers to challenge the myths that threaten to destroy us. Every pivotal claim is substantiated with quotes and data from unimpeachable sources, even establishment figures and outlets. Horton’s reliance on mainstream-respected voices, paired with granular archival research, grants the book a rare authority, transforming what might read as contrarian revisionism into an irrefutable counter-narrative. Horton’s sharp analysis and dark humor make Provoked compelling. This is not a polemic but a forensic use of the West’s own records to expose its missteps.

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Ukraine guilty of human rights violations in trade union massacre, top European court finds

The European Court of Human Rights has found the Ukrainian government guilty of committing human rights violations during the May 2, 2014 Odessa massacre, in which dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators were forced into the city’s Trade Unions House and burned alive by ultranationalist thugs.

Citing the “relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odessa,” the court ruled unanimously that Ukraine violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. The judges also condemned the Ukrainian government’s failure “to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.” 

42 people were killed as a result of the fire, a bloody bookend to the so-called “Maidan revolution” that saw Ukraine’s democratically-elected president deposed in a Western-backed coup in 2014. Ukrainian officials and legacy media outlets have consistently framed the deaths as a tragic accident, with some figures even blaming anti-Maidan protesters themselves for starting the blaze. That notion is thoroughly discredited by the verdict, which was delivered by a team of seven judges including a Ukrainian justice.

As dozens of anti-Maidan activists burned to death, the ECHR found deployment of fire engines to the site was “deliberately delayed for 40 minutes,” even though the local fire station was just one kilometer away.  

In the end, the judicial body determined there was nothing which indicated Ukrainian authorities “had done everything that could reasonably be expected of them to avert” the violence. Officials in Kiev, they said, made “no efforts whatsoever” to prevent skirmishes between pro- and anti-Maidan activists that led to the deadly inferno, despite knowing in advance such clashes were likely to break out. Their “negligence… went beyond an error of judgment or carelessness.”

The case was brought by 25 people who lost family members in the Neo-Nazi arson attack and clashes that preceded it, and three who survived the fire with various injuries. Though the ECHR found Ukraine violated their human rights, the court demanded Ukraine pay them just 15,000 euros each in damages.

The ruling also stopped short of acknowledging the full reality of the Odessa slaughter, as it largely overlooked the role played by Western-supported neo-Nazi elements and their intimate ties to the sniper massacre in February 2014 in Maidan Square which has been conclusively determined to have been a false flag. In the judges’ decision, they downplayed or justified violence by the violent Ukrainian football fans and skinheads, charitably describing them as “pro-unity activists.”

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Trump’s Ukraine Deals: No Blank Checks, No World War

President Trump vowed to end the war in Ukraine, and true to his word, he has offered President Zelensky two smart, mutually beneficial deals: defense in exchange for access to minerals and defense in exchange for energy cooperation.

Both proposals would have strengthened Ukraine’s position while advancing U.S. strategic interests—yet Zelensky rejected them. It appears he prefers unconditional aid, giving nothing in return.

Meanwhile, Europe seems determined not only to prolong the war indefinitely but also to risk provoking Russia into a broader conflict that could spiral into World War III.

The first major deal President Trump offered to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a strategic defense-for-minerals agreement that served the interests of both nations.

Under this deal, Ukraine would grant the U.S. access to critical mineral resources—such as rare earth elements—in exchange for increased American defense support.

This arrangement provided Ukraine with much-needed funding and a de facto security guarantee, as the presence of American personnel on the ground to safeguard mineral operations would serve as a deterrent to Russian aggression.

Crucially, the deal accomplished all of this without requiring Ukraine to join NATO, making it more acceptable to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had long opposed NATO expansion.

The presence of Americans on key sites would have raised the stakes for any Russian attack, potentially deterring an invasion due to the risk of direct conflict with U.S. forces.

However, European leaders harshly criticized President Trump for proposing the defense-for-minerals deal, demanding instead that the United States continue its open-ended military support for Europe and financial aid to Ukraine.

Many in Europe labeled Trump a bully and an extremist for attempting to reshape the terms of engagement.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also rejected the offer, preferring unconditional financial aid over a mutually beneficial agreement.

Ironically, while condemning Trump’s proposal—which could have de-escalated tensions and provided a peaceful resolution—European nations have moved in the opposite direction.

They are rearming, expanding their militaries, approving a massive EU-wide military spending loan program, and even considering deploying troops directly to Ukraine, a move that could risk triggering World War III.

All the while, they continue to criticize the United States for stepping back from the war and exploring a diplomatic solution.

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Is The EU’s New Army The Final Nail In The Project’s Coffin?

It used to be quite a common thing for people in polite society to say “imagine if women ran the world…we would certainly have less wars, right?”. Wrong. Women are running the world, well, at least the EU world. Three women to be precise. Ursula von der Leyen, EU commission boss, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister and of course, last but not least, the EU’s own foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas. And what do all three of these women have in common, apart from having names which sound like sexually transmitted diseases? They all want war.

In line with spectacularly poor decision making right from the beginning of the Ukraine war, with probably Russian sanctions at the top of the list of stupid ideas, the EU has only one way forward in Ukraine. At whatever cost, it must come out at least not looking like it lost. The EU project is very much like an old man on a bike moving very slowly along a Dutch cyclists’ path. The fear from the elites in the EU is that if he falls off the bike, he will never get back on. The constant worry from top EU figures is that if the EU loses its momentum with press coverage and relevance in general, then a pause – any pause – could be devastating. This, you might be surprised to hear, is what EU officials themselves confided in me when I was based in the Belgian capital. Such an expression gives you an idea of how little confidence the EU has in itself as a worthy, stable long-term project.

And so the madness escalates now to such a point where we are actually looking at draining the wallets and purses of our own very poorest people to fund the ultimate EU sex toy going: an EU army.

The idea of an EU army is not new. As a notion, it’s as old as the hills as hard core federalists in Brussels have been arguing for the EU to have its own army for at least twenty years, but until now failed. The main reason for the idea not getting off the ground is that it created too many new, worrying political problems for the EU to wrangle with. In a nutshell, there was always a risk of a new political crisis that an EU army would create as member states argue over which country gets to run it, which nationality is its head, where it would be based and how politically would it be run, based on what decision making structure? (existing EU council, EU commission, member states themselves in a new set up via defence ministries). The concern was always that Germany would have too much power and then this would open an old wound about the country re-arming and rekindling memories of 1939. And we all know where that led.

The EU army idea is actually more complicated than you might think. One of the reasons why it never got off the ground despite several serious attempts is that both the EU and member states are both confused and lack confidence about such a bold plan. They are literally concerned the idea could blow up in their faces. It’s what Americans call ‘blowback’. No, that’s nothing to do with the German foreign minister or even innuendo. It’s a military term for when a gun throws back energy in your face when it discharges and wounds whoever is holding the weapon.

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The Terrible Cost of Kursk

On March 16, The New York Times reported that “Ukrainian forces have pulled almost entirely out of the Kursk region of Russia.” After seven months, one Ukrainian soldier told the BBC, “Everything is finished in the Kursk region.”

Back on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces surprised both Russia and Western analysts with a lightning advance across the Russian border into 500 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region. Although the offensive caught the Russian military by surprise – and the area had been left relatively undefended – the territory concerned contained little of strategic significance.

If the offensive achieved anything straight away, it was to cause some embarrassment for the Russian government that Ukrainian forces could take pre-2022 Russian territory. At the same time, it certainly provided some short-term propaganda benefit at home and in the West: a small morale boost to Ukrainian military and its wider population that was no doubt getting used to bleak news from the frontline after the failure of Ukraine’s much vaunted summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Like in so many battles in this war, and like in so many battles in Russian and Soviet history, the Russian armed forces accommodated to changing circumstances. As in the war as a whole, after a seemingly reckless – or in this case careless – initial phase, they started to introduce more resources, set realistic expectations for success, became more methodical in their approach and introduced innovative new weapons and appropriate tactics to best utilize them.

Back in August 2024, there may also have been a deliberate decision of the Russian military command to push the Ukrainian troops out of Kursk in slow motion because their prolonged presence there kept the best trained and best equipped Ukrainian troops off the battlefield that really mattered in eastern Ukraine. The decision to accelerate the operation and push them out very recently was no doubt motivated by the prospect of seemingly inevitable ceasefire negotiations driven by the U.S. Trump administration.

The final stages of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive certainly did not go well for Ukraine. Only days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the Ukrainian troops were “completely isolated and under complete fire control.” He also suggested that getting out was increasingly “impossible.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that Putin was “lying.” Ukraine’s military was adamant that “[r]eports of the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units by the enemy in the Kursk region are false and fabricated by the Russians… There is no threat of encirclement of our units.”

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