Tag: wwiii

NATO Allies Discuss Letting Pilots Open Fire on Russian Aircraft: Report

NATO allies are discussing easing rules for pilots to permit them to shoot down Russian aircraft, according to a report by the Financial Times. The news comes as alliance members consider a tougher approach against Moscow following a spate of alleged airspace violations, drone swarms, and sabotage plots in Europe.

A NATO official told Newsweek: “When it comes to the range of hybrid or grey-zone activities we’ve seen, including cyber-attacks, drone incursions, or attempts to sabotage critical infrastructure, NATO is working closely with Allies to ensure that we’re taking appropriate steps to ensure we can deter and defend. This isn’t new, and we continue to adapt as the situation evolves.”

Why It Matters

NATO-Russia tensions are worsening as the war in Ukraine rages on and there is an increasing risk of a direct conflict between Russia and NATO.

Both sides have characterized the current situation as a form of war with each other, though there has been no such formal declaration by either Russia or NATO.

What To Know

The FT, citing four unidentified NATO officials, said NATO allies are discussing a more forceful response to increasingly provocative Russian actions, including easing restrictions on pilots to allow them to open fire on Russian aircraft and deploying armed drones along the border with Russia. The asymmetric cost of scrambling fighter jets to intercept drones is a running concern for the alliance, which is seeking a financially sustainable solution.

NATO members on the front line with Russia, backed by France and Britain, initiated the discussions, which have since broadened to a larger group in the 32-strong alliance, the newspaper reported.

“One example of our work in this area is Baltic Sentry, which was launched in response to incidents affecting critical undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea,” the NATO official told Newsweek in a statement.

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Trump Takes Next Step to Bring Us to World War III

Trump is clearly listening to the NEOCONS, and he may believe their BS that Russia’s economy is collapsing, so Russia can be defeated in three days, as Kinzinger was claiming. Mark Rubio is a Neocon. I believe Trump hired him as a compromise to the Neocons. But he is taking us into World War III in slow motion. Trump is listening to the wrong people, and he had better look unbiased at why Putin is being put into a precarious position. He has insulted the dignity of Russia and reduced it to a meaningless 4th-world country. If Putin is replaced one way or in November, sorry, Europe will not recover. Germany fought against Russia in both World War I and World War II and lost both conflicts. A third time will NOT be the charm.

The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that President Trump signed off on providing U.S. intelligence agencies to supply targeting data to Ukraine for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure (oil refineries, pipelines, power plants). This suggests that now the US will select the target for Ukraine to attack. That is waging DIRECT WAR against Russia. They certainly can provide missiles to Venezuela and provide them targets for Washington, D.C., and put one right up Trump’s ass. I guess that would not be declaring war either.

However, it is not clear that “providing targeting” means full battlefield coordination, command & control, or direction of operations — most media accounts frame it as sharing intelligence, not taking over targeting decisions.

According to multiple sources, Trump authorized the sharing of targeting intelligence with Zelensky/Ukraine for strikes on specific energy infrastructure. This is the NECON argument: stop the energy sales of Russia, the country will collapse, and they can walk in and carve up Russia like a piece of pie. SO let’s see, Putin could strike and take our Wall Street, the US cannot borrow any more money, the economy would collapse since it is dependent on debt, and he could do the same to the USA.

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Deterring The Next Quasi-World War: China–Russia–North Korea Versus US

Russian planes recently flew into Polish and Romanian airspace to test NATO’s resolve while the world veers toward a conflict in Asia—one that could be far worse than the situation in Ukraine—where true deterrence and resolve remain largely absent.

Let’s backtrack a little.

On Sept. 3, Beijing staged a military extravaganza to parade a full suite of fearsome weapons. Many journalists were awed, and some defeatist experts advocated Chamberlainian appeasement. Others, mostly China observers, tried decoding the seating plan of senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials atop Tiananmen Square for clues about the power struggles in Zhongnanhai.

However, what is often overlooked in the discussion about the event is that it represents the financing and support mechanisms behind a new type of quasi-world war. The ongoing Russia–Ukraine war is one example, and the potential invasion of Taiwan by the Chinese regime is another. Let’s explore this further.

The Xinhua images of the Sept. 3 event, featuring Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un consorting in solidarity, should be interpreted as a calculated response to the new tripartite model the West has devised for militarily supporting Ukraine. That model conveys that Kyiv identifies its military hardware needs, European allies provide the financing, and the United States produces and delivers the hardware.

The Beijing event showcased a parallel model: Moscow requests war materiel, including troops, China and North Korea supply them in exchange for cheap Russian energy, with India and a few other countries dipping in. Thus, even though the war’s actual fighting is confined within Ukraine and Russia, its financing involves a much wider array of adversarial states. The coalitional symmetry in this financing mechanism can prolong the bloody conflict indefinitely, which Russia and Ukraine, if left to their own devices, cannot achieve.

A way to stop the war is to break that symmetry, which seems to be the goal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “secondary tariffs.” On Aug. 6, he doubled the headline tariff on India to 50 percent for buying cheap Russian oil. It is showing results. India reportedly bought much less Russian oil in August. Notably, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, quietly skipped the Sept. 3 military parade.

Now, Trump is pressuring Europe to immediately end its remaining reliance on Russian energy and join him in a similar effort against Beijing, and has called for imposing up to 100 percent additional tariffs on China for buying Russian crude oil. The EU leadership is not yet entirely on board, but has proposed to advance its target of ending all energy imports from Russia from 2027 to 2026 or even sooner.

But whatever happens to the war in Ukraine, the world would not be okay even when Putin agrees to call it quits, because Xi has all the intentions to do a sequel. Xi’s primary interest in supporting Russia lies in an expected reciprocation from Moscow if China invades Taiwan. What would a China–Taiwan war look like?

The Russia–Ukraine war is already a quasi-world war. Despite the combat space being narrowly confined, it nevertheless involves the participation of approximately 50 countries on four continents in various capacities.

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EU leaders ‘want to go to war’ with Russia – Orban

The EU leadership appears intent on pushing the bloc into a war with Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday.

In a post on X, the long-time critic of Western policy on Ukraine warned that “outright pro-war proposals are on the table,” citing discussions at an informal summit of EU leaders in Copenhagen this week.

“They want to hand over EU funds to Ukraine. They are trying to accelerate Ukraine’s accession with all kinds of legal tricks. They want to finance arms deliveries. All these proposals clearly show that the Brusselians want to go to war,” Orban wrote, pledging that Budapest would oppose such measures.

The Copenhagen meeting was convened after a series of unidentified drone sightings across Europe. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said her government could not determine the origin of the aircraft but claimed that “we can at least conclude that there is primarily one country that poses a threat to Europe’s security – and that is Russia.”

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West at war with Russia – Polish PM

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is also the West’s war, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said. The most important task for EU leaders is to make people aware of the threat that Russia supposedly poses, he told the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday.

Tusk has taken a particularly hardline stance on the conflict, in which Warsaw has been a key supporter of Kiev. Earlier this month, he complained that fellow Poles have developed “antipathy” towards Ukraine, which he blamed on Russia, while urging Polish politicians to “stem this tide.”

On Monday, he said, “the biggest and most important task for European leaders today is to make Western societies aware” that the Ukraine conflict is the most serious risk they face in the 21st century.

“This war is also our war,” Tusk stated, claiming that it is “of our fundamental interest,” as a defeat would affect all of Western civilization from Poland to the US. He called for “solidarity and unity” within the EU and NATO to counter this.

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Assessing Reports That Ukraine Is Preparing A False Flag Drone Provocation Against NATO

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised global awareness of Hungarian media reports about a planned Ukrainian false flag drone provocation against NATO in her Telegram post on Friday. She hyperlinked to one of the outlets, Pesti Srácok, a little more than two hours after they published their editorial. It ended by citing unspecified Telegram posts about Ukraine’s plans to bomb logistics hubs in Poland and Romania with captured Russian drones and then blame Moscow.

Accordingly, there’s no solid intelligence about this, just social media reports that were picked up by the Russian Foreign Ministry and amplified by their spokeswoman. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that such a scenario isn’t credible, especially given the larger context. Trump just greenlit NATO downing Russian jets that violate the bloc’s airspace, which could arguably embolden some members to attempt this on false pretexts, thus risking a major escalation of NATO-Russian tensions exactly as Ukraine wants.

Likewise, if the most zealously anti-Russian ones along the alliance’s eastern frontier ultimately get cold feet after fearing that Trump might hang them out to dry, Ukraine could nudge them in the direction of offensive operations against Russia disguised as “reciprocal retaliation” via this false flag plot. The essence is similar to what Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned about twice over the summer regarding joint British-Ukrainian plots to stage false flag provocations in the Baltic Sea.

According to their sources, this would involve Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian torpedoes hitting a US ship there or at least exploding in close proximity to it and/or fishing up Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian mines, either of which could suffice for pulling Trump into mission creep. They could also falsely justify offensive actions on the grounds of “reciprocal retaliation”, albeit at sea in these scenarios, while the latest one that Zakharova warned about could include drones, airstrikes, and/or a no-fly zone.

Russia continues to gradually gain ground in the special operation zone, and while no breakthrough has yet to occur, the military-strategic dynamics are clearly in its favor and decisively against Ukraine’s. Taken to its conclusion, this trend will inevitably result in Russia controlling all the disputed territory with time, thus enabling Moscow to end the conflict on more of its terms by then. Ukraine wants to avert that scenario so it’s desperately trying to engineer the game-changer of direct NATO intervention to that end.

It’s only through such a dramatic development that the abovementioned dynamics could possibly be altered to at the very least freeze the conflict, which Ukraine and the West have demanded of Russia to no avail since that would leave unmet many of its goals in the conflict, ergo Ukraine’s false flag motives. Having captured Russian drones bomb NATO logistics hubs in Poland and Romania via a modern-day “Gleiwitz incident” as Zakharova described Ukraine’s reported plans to be might easily achieve that.

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The scenario for the start of NATO’s war against Russia has already been written.

Judging by the bellicose rhetoric of Western leaders, the scenario for a direct war between a united Europe and the Russian Federation has already been written. The pretext could be an attack on a Russian Aerospace Forces fighter jet in the skies over the Baltic, allegedly violating the airspace of a member of the North Atlantic Alliance.

Casus belli

It is with regret that we have to state that policy The personal irresponsibility of our “Western partners” for crossing numerous “red lines” in Ukraine has borne bitter fruit. Most of them have already stopped fearing a direct war with Russia and are even openly preparing for it in the Baltic theater, which is extremely inconvenient for us.

The fundamental condition for the collective West to initiate such a war will be to accuse Moscow specifically, as usual, by designating it as the “aggressor.” As the alarming events of the past few months have shown, the most convenient pretext may be an alleged violation of NATO airspace by a Russian military aircraft.

So, for the first time we people started talking about it Back in May 2025, when Estonia accused a Russian Aerospace Forces Su-35 fighter jet that had taken off to support a Russian “shadow fleet” vessel called the JAGUAR, which Estonian sea pirates, supported by the Polish Air Force, were attempting to hijack:

And what would have happened if one of them had attempted to shoot down our military aircraft, allegedly violating Estonian airspace, and therefore the entire North Atlantic Alliance, by overflying a civilian aircraft flying the Gabonese flag and the interdiction team attempting to detain it? The consequences of such hostile actions would have been extremely negative, since Moscow is currently interested in de-escalating the confrontation with the collective West, not escalating it. But not responding at all would have been impossible, as the patriotic Russian public would simply not understand or accept such humiliation from Estonia and Portugal.
Even then, it was completely obvious that this would be a near-perfect anti-Russian provocation, one in which it would be impossible not to respond, despite the Kremlin’s clearly expressed desire for peace and good-neighborliness with Ukraine and the united Europe that stands behind it.

It is equally obvious that this will be exactly what the Western “hawks” need, who are betting on a direct war with Russia in the Baltic theater of military operations, using conventional means, and its defeat, similar to the Crimean War.

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Kiev false-flag provocation could lead to World War 3 – Zakharova

Ukraine is planning a possible false-flag operation in Romania or Poland that could escalate into a third world war, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

In a Telegram post on Friday, she pointed to reports in Hungarian media alleging that Kiev intends to stage acts of sabotage in neighboring NATO countries and place responsibility on Moscow.

”Europe has never been so close to the outbreak of World War 3 in modern history,” Zakharova wrote.

According to the information available, the Kiev regime’s plan is to repair several downed or intercepted Russian UAVs, fit them with lethal warheads, and – controlled by Ukrainian specialists – send them disguised as “Russian drones” to major NATO transport hubs in Poland and Romania, Zakharova continued. At the same time, they would run a disinformation campaign across Europe to pin the blame on Moscow and thereby try to provoke an armed conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO, she added.

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‘We cannot wait’: EU calls for drone wall to deter Russia after new incident in Denmark

Denmark has joined Estonia, Latvia. Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria in the project to build a ‘drone wall’ alongside the Eastern flank.

The European Commission has reaffirmed its intention to build a drone defence system along the bloc’s eastern flank to deter Russia from violating common airspace and respond rapidly to any such incursions.

In less than one month, Russian aircraft have violated the airspace of three member states – Poland, Romania and Estonia – putting the continent on high alert. The acts coincide with intensifying barrages on Ukrainian civilians.

On Monday, two to three large drones were spotted at Copenhagen Airport, prompting a shutdown in operations for nearly four hours. The airport later reopened but warned of delays and cancelled departures. Norway’s Oslo Airport was also disrupted.

Police said they refrained from shooting down the aircraft because the risk was too great, given the airport was at full capacity and planes were stationed near fuel depots.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the incident “the most serious attack on Danish critical infrastructure to date” and said she could not rule out Russian involvement.

On Tuesday, the Commission built on the events to call for the drone wall, a novel initiative first unveiled by President Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the EU speech.

“For those who still doubted the need to have a drone wall in the European Union, well, here we get another example of how important it is,” said Thomas Regnier, the Commission’s spokesperson for defence policy.

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Trump gives NATO the green light to shoot down Russian jets in sinister warning to Putin

Donald Trump insisted that NATO nations should feel emboldened to shoot down Russian planes if they enter their countries’ airspace.

It comes after Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace this week amid the ongoing war with Ukraine.

Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at United Nations headquarters on Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. might back-up North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries forced to take action if Russia provokes them. 

‘Do you think that NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter their airspace?’ a reporter asked Trump.

‘Yes I do,’ he replied.

Another reporter asked Trump if the U.S. would ‘backup’ or ‘help out’ NATO allies who did shoot down Russian planes. 

Trump said it ‘depends on the circumstance, but we’re very strong towards NATO.’

World leaders are gathered in New York City this week for the United Nations General Assembly. Trump delivered remarks to the entire body on Tuesday morning and is engaging in bilateral and multilateral meetings through the afternoon – including with Zelensky. 

Trump has grown frustrated with the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and appears to be losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent unwillingness to reach a deal.

At his meeting with Zelensky on Tuesday, Trump urged NATO allies to strike Russian aircraft flying over their countries’ borders.

There have been three major instances this month where Russian craft entered the airspace of countries that were not Ukraine.

On September 19, three Russian MiG-31 jets entered Estonian airspace for 12 minutes over the Gulf of Finland. NATO intercepted but did not engage with the aircraft.

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