Tag: ukraine

NATO Mulls ‘Preemptive Strike’ Against Russia’s Hybrid Warfare, Claims ‘More Aggression’ Needed

At a moment Washington under President Trump is busy issuing rare calls for restraint, de-escalation, and to enact a peace deal in Ukraine, a top NATO commander says the conflict needs more aggression by the Western military alliance directly against Russia.

Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, has told Financial Times as part of a fresh report that NATO is currently mulling more proactive measures in response to Russia’s escalating hybrid warfare. The report cites an alleged rise in Russian-backed cyberattacks, sabotage operations and airspace violations over Europe – which NATO could mirror and more, as any potential “pre-emptive strike” on Russian targets would be justified.

“We are studying everything… On cyber, we are kind of reactive,” Dragone said. “Being more aggressive or being proactive instead of reactive is something that we are thinking about.”

That’s when he explained his view that a “pre-emptive strike” could under certain circumstances and context be classified as a defensive action. “It is further away from our normal way of thinking and behavior,” he conceded.

“Being more aggressive compared with the [aggressiveness] of our counterpart could be an option” – but he said that the questions that remain are: “legal framework, jurisdictional framework, who is going to do this?”

Multiple diplomats and officials from Eastern European and Baltic states are calling for this more proactive stance, or a less merely ‘reactive’ approach, to make Moscow feel real pain.

“If all we do is continue being reactive, we just invite Russia to keep trying, keep hurting us,” one Baltic diplomat was quoted in the FT as complaining.

“Hybrid warfare is asymmetric – it costs them little, and us a lot. We need to be more inventive,” the diplomat said.

And yet, there already have been years of covert sabotage operations in place, aimed at Russia and overseen by the West. These efforts, some which long ago were exposed in mainstream publications, are a large reason of why there’s been constant escalation of the Ukraine war. 

This has in turn resulted in escalation of nuclear rhetoric and threats between Russia and the West. But the temperature needs to be drastically turned down, but these latest comments by the chair of NATO’s Military Committee will only do the opposite.

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Cenotaphs of US Mercenaries Who Died in Ukraine Appearing in US

Empty graves, or cenotaphs, of American mercenaries who fought on the side of Ukraine are appearing in the United states because their families are unable to retrieve their bodies, a RIA Novosti correspondent revealed.

There are no official figures on the number of US mercenaries killed since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation. Publicly available information suggests the number is over 100. According to publicly available data, at least one American mercenary was killed in November, at least three in October, and the same number in September.

One of the first US citizens to die this year was 23-year-old Robert from Pennsylvania, who was rejected by the US Army due to health issues. As a result, as relatives told local publications, the young man felt there was no meaning in life, working as a night security guard and wanting to become a soldier. In the spring of 2024, he joined the Ukrainian military. His family was expecting him to go on leave in January 2025. According to publicly available information, the mass desertion of foreign mercenaries led to the Ukrainian command canceling his leave, throwing him into battle near Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), where he was killed on January 3.

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Joe Biden Tells Ukrainians in Nantucket that He’s Engaging in Shadow Diplomacy and ‘Pushing Hard’ for Ukraine 

Did Joe Biden forget that he is no longer in the White House or is he engaging in shadow diplomacy?

The Biden family took over Nantucket against this year and enjoyed a lavish Thanksgiving vacation while staying at billionaire David Rubenstein’s sprawling mansion.

The Bidens completely shut down Main Street of Nantucket on Wednesday to shop at ritzy stores. Wednesday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year when people are trying to get ready for Thanksgiving.

On Friday, Joe Biden was shuffling around Nantucket like a zombie before the Christmas tree lighting.

At one point, Joe Biden made his way over to Ukrainian women in Nantucket and told them he was engaging in shadow diplomacy.

“Thank you so much for your support of Ukraine,” a woman said to Joe Biden.

Biden told the women that he’s pushing hard for Urkaine.

“By the way, I keep pushing as hard as I can [for Ukraine],” Biden said.

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Poland Announces Foreign Spy Plot Busted, Involved Photographing Secretive Facilities 

Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office announced Friday that five individuals have been charged with working on behalf of a foreign intelligence service, following coordinated arrests which spanned November Tuesday through Wednesday of this week by the Internal Security Agency and police.

Those taken into custody include two Ukrainian nationals – identified only as Oleksandr S. and a minor, Sofia Ch. – and in addition three Belarusian citizens identified as Viktoryia M., Anton M., and Uladzimir U.

The group is accused of targeting the Polish state for espionage purposes, with prosecutors alleging that throughout much of 2024 the team collected information on sensitive locations.

“The suspects’ activities involved establishing contact with foreign intelligence representatives via Telegram and carrying out assigned tasks, including the creation and transmission of photographic documentation of critical infrastructure facilities and locations crucial to national security,” a press release translated from Polish to English read.

“For these tasks, the suspects were paid in cryptocurrencies,” it added. Likely Warsaw believes Russian intelligence was ultimately behind the plot. In some instances, Moscow is believed to have used pro-Russian Ukrainian nationals as assets in Europe.

Poland’s investigation comes amid a wider probe into espionage activities carried out by individuals of different nationalities in Rzeszów, Warszawa, Łódź – among some other regions – between March 2024 and February 2025.

But in some instances the activities seem minor, given prosecutors have cited activities as simple as putting up posters and producing graffiti, supposedly associated with foreign operations.

If convicted under Poland’s national laws, acts of espionage can result in five to thirty years in prison.

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Ukrainian Prosecutors Handling More Than 300,000 Desertion Cases

A Ukrainian MP recently made an unsubstantiated claim that there were 400,000 open and ongoing cases of desertion from the Ukrainian military since the invasion by the Russian Federation in 2022. It may have been hyperbole, or they may have had a source in the judiciary.

However, the General Prosecutor’s office wrote to the New Voice of Ukraine in early November that 310,000 criminal cases related to unauthorized absence from a military unit or place of service (AWOL) and desertion are currently registered, 162,000 of which came just this year. There have been over 21,000 desertions in October 2025 alone, claims journalist and former lawmaker Ihor Lutsenko – now commander of a Ukrainian drone unit.

“This is a record. A very bad record. Every two minutes, someone runs away from our army. By the time you finish reading this post, another soldier will have put on skis. Ukraine will be weaker by one defender, and the enemy will become stronger by one,” he wrote, according to the New Voice.He stressed that these are just official figures, and that the real number is only likely to be higher.

Suddenly, the widely dismissed total of 400,000 doesn’t seem impossible, and if a Ukrainian soldier downs his tools every 2 minutes, it leaves quite a lot of time for 400,000 to be reached by the end of the year.

The news comes as a 28-point plan for a lasting peace (later condensed to 19 points) in Ukraine was recently proposed by the Trump Administration in an effort to capitalize on talks with Vladimir Putin held during a summit in Alaska, and to bring the Ukrainians back to the table. Both Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have admitted that within the proposed plan points lies the framework discussed between the leaders in Anchorage without actually endorsing it. Both also acknowledged the “long pause” between the summit and the completion of this new document.

On the other hand, Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev told Axios, that published a full version of the agreement last Thursday, that he was “optimistic” and that “we feel the Russian position is really being heard”.

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Were The Brits Behind Bloomberg’s Russian-US Leaks?

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned earlier the same day as Bloomberg’s report that the Brits are hellbent on discrediting Trump in order to undermine his latest peace efforts for resolving the conflict from which they profit.

Bloomberg shared what it claimed to be the transcripts of calls between Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov as well as between Ushakov and Putin’s other advisor Kirill Dmitriev about the Ukrainian peace process. The gist of the Witkoff-Ushakov call was Witkoff’s proposal to have Putin suggest a Gaza-like 20-point peace deal for Ukraine during an upcoming call with Trump while the Ushakov-Dmitriev one implied that the leaked draft was Russian-influenced.

Ushakov declined to comment on his talks with Witkoff but said that “Somebody tapped, somebody leaked, but not us” whereas Dmitriev flat-out described his purported call with Ushakov as “fake”. For his part, Trump defended Witkoff’s alleged “coaching” of Ushakov on how Putin should deal with him by reminding everyone “That’s what a dealmaker does. You got to say, ‘Look, they want this – you got to convince them with this.’ That’s a very standard form of negotiations.”

As regards the possibility that the draft framework was Russian-influenced, the notion of which has been pushed by the legacy media to discredit the proposed mutual compromises therein, that was already debunked. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, said that “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”

Therefore, neither transcript is scandalous even if their contents were accurately reported, yet the question arises of who might have tapped and leaked these calls. Intriguingly, earlier the same day that Bloomberg later published their report, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned that the UK “aims to undermine Trump’s efforts to resolve the conflict by discrediting him.” Readers will recall the UK’s role in Russiagate, which they conspired with the CIA, FBI, and the Clinton camp to cook up to against him.

Seeing as how they can no longer collude in this way with their three prior conspirators, the UK might therefore have resorted to leaking those two calls with Ushakov that they might have tapped (possibly among many others) as a last-ditch attempt to discredit the latest unprecedented progress towards peace. This provocation might also have been meant to make Trump panic and fire Witkoff out of fear of another Russiagate 2.0 investigation if this scandal helps the Democrats flip Congress next year.

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28 Points of NONSENSE: Russia Unbothered, Ukraine RUNNING OUT of Men

The more revisions the EU and Kiev make to Trump’s 28-point plan for Ukraine, the more ridiculous it is to assume that Russia would accept the document. Especially, as Russia is the side winning this war of attrition with advantages in manpower and weaponry that are leading to signifiant advances on the battlefield, as Kiev’s defensive lines start to fall apart.

Stanislav Krapivnik, a former U.S. Army officer, supply chain exec and military and geopolitical expert, noted that while the West is branding Trump’s offer as a type of surrender for Kiev, it’s actually asking Russia to capitulate to the West’s demand for a ceasefire with a “letter of intent” to try to make it look like NATO wants an end to the war.

As for the question of what Moscow is willing to accept, he pointed out that it seems the Russian government is finally coming to the conclusion that this conflict will have to be settled on the battlefield.

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Why the Meandering Borders of Ukraine Are No Hill For America First To Die On

Here we go again. The Donald had no more than offered a constructive 28-point plan that correctly identified America’s Homeland Security interest in Ukraine as nichts, nada, nugatory and nyet – when the Washington neocon brigade that he foolishly invited back into his government to sabotage it for the second time, did exactly that. This time it pulled the guts right out of his Ukraine peace plan and did so in plain sight.

To wit, the only thing that mattered in the original gussied-up word salad of 28-points was that –

  • Ukraine would be partitioned roughly along the lines of the pre-1918 Novorussiya province of the Russian Empire, meaning that mainly Russian-speaking Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and the major parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be allowed to secede from the tyrannical, corruption-ridden, Nazi-tainted, anti-Russian Kiev regime.
  • the rump of Ukraine would forswear now and forevermore any interest in joining NATO. That is, functioning as a Cuba on Moscow’s borders just like Khrushchev foolishly attempted with JFK way back in October 1962.

Neither of these so-called “concessions” to Putin would harm America’s true homeland security by a whit because Russia with a $2 trillion GDP based on oil, grains and metals is no threat whatsoever to America’s $30 trillion high-tech economy. Nor would they have adversely impacted the so-called “rules-based international order” because the latter is but a beard for the Washington-based Warfare State and global empire, which is already bankrupting America and which remains utterly unnecessary for the maintenance of what’s left of its liberty, democracy and capitalist prosperity.

In short, the Donald was – knowingly or otherwise – fixing to make like the long-ago Senator from Vermont, George Aiken. The latter correctly and famously told LBJ the way to get out of the Vietnam morass was to “declare victory and go home”.

That’s essentially what Trump’s 28-point plan did – just like in the case of that comparable 60-years ago folly that had no bearing on America’s security, either.

But apparently to quell the uproar over its correct answer to the $300 billion financial and human catastrophe that the Washington War Party and its NATO footmen have visited upon the ashes of the Ukrainian steppes, the Donald unaccountably sent Little Marco Rubio to Geneva last weekend. His remit was to negotiate an acceptance of his 28-point plan by the crooks, sadists and war criminals who conduct the Ukrainian version of Mafia rule in their woebegone nation. But what he actually did was agree with them to essentially disembowel Trump’s plan by dropping the aforementioned provisions, which were the only thing that really mattered to the Russians.

Still, Rubio’s treachery in plain sight should not have been a surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention (not the Donald) to Washington’s machination during recent decades. After all, sending the fox into the hen house to gather the eggs is a hardly an adequate metaphor for what happened in Geneva.

To wit, Rubio was, is and always will be the enemy of America First because he is an inveterate neocon interventionist. After having hung around the Deep Swamp most of his adult life, he has no clue that the entire machinery of the Washington-based Warfare State is about selling arms and conducting live-action military exercises abroad against anyone who fails to cow-tow to the dictates of the war-makers on the Potomac and their auxiliaries and proconsuls scattered around the planet.

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The Dangerous, Unhinged Reaction to Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan

President Donald Trump has magicked up some unexpected momentum in Russia–Ukraine peace talks by proposing a 28-point settlement to the war. You might think Ukraine’s Western supporters would welcome the chance for peace, considering how dreadfully the war is going for Ukrainians.

You might be wrong.

Blowhards on both sides of the Atlantic reacted with moral outrage, depicting the proposal as a forced capitulation for Volodymyr Zelensky and a wish list for Vladimir Putin. A rumor even spread that the plan was literally Russian, authored by the Kremlin and transmitted to Washington for delivery to Kiev (a rumor swiftly batted down by Axios and the White House). Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote that, if the “surrender” plan is imposed on Zelensky by Thanksgiving, then Turkey Day “will become a Russian holiday.”

This is laughable stuff. But it’s also maddeningly counterproductive. Trump’s peace plan is about as balanced as Ukraine could realistically hope, given Russia’s momentum on the battlefield. Even so, Zelensky may not have the political leeway to accept it, since doing so would risk a revolt by hardline nationalists. One idea that I heard while in Kiev last month is that Zelensky needs Trump to play the bad guy and force him to accept a deal.

If that’s right, then the Thomas Friedmans of the world—the people insisting that Trump’s plan surrenders Ukraine’s freedom, so Zelensky cannot possibly accept it—are acting as peace-spoilers, not democracy-defenders. 

They are reducing the political cover the White House is providing Zelensky to “reluctantly” make a deal. Unwittingly (I hope), they are raising the pressure on Zelensky to continue a war that Ukraine is losing, and on Trump to insert poison pills into the agreement that Moscow cannot accept. They just might succeed. As always, the ones who will pay the costs are the Ukrainians themselves.

If the Trump deal really was a giveaway to Putin, then the critics would have a stronger case. But it’s not.

The very first point—Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed—alone makes it a good deal for Kiev. Under the agreement, Ukraine would remain a sovereign nation-state free to join the European Union and become the Western-style democracy that so many Ukrainians want their nation to be. As Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute writes, “An agreement that leaves three quarters of Ukraine independent and with a path to EU membership would in fact be a Ukrainian victory, albeit a qualified one.”

So, what are the critics carping about? 


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US Peace Plan Bears Striking Resemblance to German AfD Proposal — and Nobody in the Media Wants to Talk About It

US President Donald Trump has once again blown up the scripted narratives of Western foreign-policy elites by unveiling a sweeping 28-point peace plan for Ukraine.

His proposal doesn’t call for endless spending, escalation or for NATO brinkmanship—but for neutrality, security guarantees, territorial arrangements and economic rebuilding.

And here’s the part the media really doesn’t want discussed: Trump’s plan looks strikingly similar to a peace initiative introduced back in 2023 by the AfD in the German Bundestag under foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron. In other words, the populists had the diplomatic roadmap long before the “serious” people running Europe.

Shared Strategic Premise: Endless War Is a Choice

Trump and the AfD start from the same inconvenient truth—Ukraine will not be “won” on the battlefield. Both proposals reject NATO expansion, call for permanent neutrality, and ban foreign troop deployments inside Ukraine. Both demand international security guarantees, a negotiated ceasefire and a phased military disengagement.

And both reject Washington and Brussels’ childish fantasy that shoveling weapons and cash into a corrupt war zone will magically produce peace.

Converging Approaches to Contested Territories

Even on the most explosive issue—territorial control—both plans take a sober, realistic approach. Trump outlines concrete territorial arrangements.

The AfD plan suggests internationally supervised transitional mandates followed by bilateral negotiations. Different mechanics, same logic: de-escalation, monitoring, and rebuilding instead of mass graves and propaganda slogans. The foreign-policy blob hates it because it acknowledges reality.

Key Differences Highlight Europe’s Failure

The AfD document, written in Europe rather than Washington, is actually the more diplomatic of the two. It doesn’t demand instant recognition of Russian-held territories.

It doesn’t dictate the size of Ukraine’s military or attempt to micromanage internal politics—features in Trump’s draft. Instead, it focuses on negotiations, UN or OSCE mandates and long-term stabilization. But the outcome is the same: stop the dying, stop the spending, stop the geopolitical LARPing.

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