Dmitry Medvedev (Дмитрий Медведев)
Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council
RT.com / Pravovedenie (.pdf)

"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" – The world keeps changing, and not always for the better. We have witnessed the rapid degradation of many supranational legal structures, which have fallen victim to their dependence on the will, funding and values of the so-called collective West. This is true, for instance, for the International Criminal Court (the Hague Criminal Court). The good intentions which guided those who established it two decades ago have evidently paved the road to hell. The further, the more so.

Deplorable as it may seem, it is more than natural. Suffice it to remember the history of this legal institution, which has gone a short way from alleged demand to full uselessness on the edge of absurdity, bias and cynicism. It is important to understand what its current actions are conditioned by, how to react to them and what, in the end, shall replace this international body, which has compromised itself so quickly.

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

Trump’s China plan is like fishing with hand grenades. But what is floating to the surface?—America is heading towards an abyss which it has never seen before and a new all time low of poverty is coming its way.

Trump’s got a lot on his plate at the moment as he wakes up to the reality that you can’t give a radical boost to the U.S. domestic economy at the flick of a switch. The dream of tariffs being able to do this might have been somewhat realistic in the mid 80s when the U.S. imposed a similar radical measures against Japan on electrical goods. Reagan’s thinking at that time was more rational and level-headed and, given that the move to hike up Japanese goods by 100 percent was expected to not even affect the prices of electrical goods in U.S. stores (as there were many U.S. products competing, which were manufactured locally), the move seemed far from radical. But today’s China is not Japan of the 80s.

Trump’s overarching agenda is pretty clear to most economists. He sees Germany, Japan, and China as exploiting their economic relationships with the U.S. He criticizes their trade practices, alleging that currency manipulation and withholding of dollar reserves contribute to an inflated dollar exchange rate, which of course harms the U.S. economy.

The currency manipulation accusation is of course particularly relevant to China whose government barely denies it. But there would appear to be more about this stunt based on geopolitics than meat-n-gravy economics. Even Trump, who doesn’t appear to understand international trade at all, can’t be this stupid. He must have known that hitting China so hard would impact the U.S. economy as the tariffs themselves are imposed on U.S. firms who actually import the goods from China – and so the prices will be hiked in Walmart and other huge retailers. Americans have nowhere else to go for their cheap goods as, in many cases, the items themselves are not produced by U.S. firms. The other consequence of the childish spat with China is that there is an argument that China’s goods may be heading towards the EU on a scale never seen before as compensation.

Katherine Watt
Bailiwick News

The work of Antoine Bechamp has crossed my field of vision mostly through the work of Tracey Northern. Last week, Bechamp's name appeared in a chapter of Fr. Denis Fahey's 1953 book, The Church and Farming, at pp. 98-101.

💬 Chemical Fertilizers and Microzymas – An important point stressed by Lord Geddes in the English House of Lords, in February, 1944, must be mentioned here. In the course of a very interesting debate on the soil in relation to the health of man, animal and plant, Lord Geddes said:

"There is no doubt whatever that you can produce from the fields a great quantity of food by the use of chemical fertilizers. You can boost production, and that is what I think has blinded a great many people to the real problem. The food that we eat and the foodstuffs which we absorb into our body fluids, and through them into our body tissues, are divided sharply into two parts, possibly more, but certainly sharply into two parts — the part which is required as fuel to provide the energy for movement...and the part which is required to repair and replace and recreate our actual bodies themselves.

The German school — Virchow, Schwann, Liebig — laid the emphasis upon the cell out of which in their millions our bodies are created and they regarded food for the cell as all that was required....

Elena Panina (Елена Панина)
Елена Панина/Telegram

Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed today in a car bombing in Balashikha. This is a serious loss for our country. The GOU is the main body of the General Staff. Its tasks include, in particular, “strategic and operational planning of the use of the Russian Armed Forces, operational management of troops (forces) in peacetime and wartime.”

 ■ The terrorist attack is similar to the assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Russian Chemical Defense Forces, in the way it was carried out. But it's not just the method. The enemy is moving up the ladder of destruction of Russia's top military personnel. They killed the head of a branch of troops, now - the deputy head of the General Staff Department....

We should not be naive and think that in this matter some gradual escalation will be maintained. If the enemies had a real opportunity to assassinate the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, they would not hesitate to do so.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

From India’s perspective, the Pahalgam terrorist attack has Pakistan’s fingerprints all over it, hence why it’s considering at least one surgical strike across the border.

Terrorists massacred 26 tourists who were relaxing in the Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam in the Indian union territory of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). They specifically targeted Hindus, checking the victims’ IDs and even asking them to pull down their pants to see whether they were circumcised. The terrorists were from “The Resistance Front”, which is an Indian-designated terrorist group associated with the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, itself designated as a terrorist group by India, Russia, the US, and several others.

One of India’s responses has been to hold the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, which prompted Pakistan to threaten that any curtailment of water to it will be considered an act of war. Pakistan also suspended the 1972 Simla Agreement that ended the third Indo-Pakistani War. Observers now expect that the 2021 ceasefire will soon be annulled. Surgical strikes by India against Pakistan might soon follow after Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to “pursue [the terrorists] to the ends of the Earth.”

Amidst the uncertainty over what might come next and whether it could set into motion a possibly uncontrollable escalation that ultimately leads to a nuclear exchange, it’s arguably the case that Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir has the most to gain and lose from the latest tensions. Beginning with how he might benefit, the most obvious way is by trying to rally the entire nation behind him, especially in the event of tit-for-tat strikes or worse with India.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

The possibility exists, but it should be centered on enduring economic interests that are less likely than political and security ones to shift with a change in government.

Chairman of the Committee on the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region Dragan Stanojevic told Izvestia late last month that Serbia wants to ally with Hungary and Slovakia, which preceded the signing of a new military cooperation pact between Belgrade and Budapest in early April.

This analysis here argues that any Hungarian-Serbian alliance of the sort that President Aleksandar Vucic proclaimed is in the works would have very real limits since Hungary is unlikely to go to war with Croatia in defense of Serbia.

The same holds true for Slovakia if it signs a similar pact with Serbia, but the trilateral convergence between them and Hungary could set the basis for a new Central European integration platform. Before elaborating on its contours, a few words will be shared about why there’s even an interest in this.

The most effective regional integration platform by far is the Visegrad Group comprised of Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland, but internal disputes over the Ukrainian conflict rendered it dysfunctional.

Vladimir Kornilov
Pravda-EN / РИА Новости

Will NATO survive or not? This issue is being increasingly discussed in the West. If we follow the evolution of the headlines of the mainstream media over the past few weeks, we can identify a fairly straightforward trend, indicating a shift from doubts to increasingly confident answers about this issue. Here are just a few such examples:

February twenty-third, Politico: "NATO may die soon";

March 17th, Vox: "Has Trump already killed NATO?";

On March 20th, The Daily Telegraph reported, "Trump won't kill NATO; the alliance is already dead."

It's a funny roll call of headlines, and it can be continued indefinitely — too many analytical articles have been written about this in recent days. Although opinions sound different, in the vast majority of cases, the authors agree that NATO will not stand up for some minor member of the alliance "if the Russians attack it" (and Russia, of course, has nothing else to do but attack a poor, unhappy and defenseless member NATO).

It is clear that most often some Baltic country is mentioned in the list of potential victims of the coming aggression. Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, for example, urges us to think about a scenario in which the Russian population of Latvia will turn to Moscow for help in protecting their ethnic rights. The author, of course, does not suggest thinking about how to eliminate the cause of the problem a priori: did the British ever care about the rights of the Russian population in a particular country? No, he's more concerned about what NATO will do when Russia "attacks Latvia." "Even if we had enough troops and ammunition to fight, are we ready to see British guys die for Riga?" Kemp wonders. Well, what follows is the development of this exciting scenario.: "And if we don't fight for Latvia, will we fight for Poland or Romania" when their turn comes?

Leo Hohmann
LeoHohman.com

The Argentine Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, died Monday morning, the Vatican announced. He was 88 years old.

The Vatican said Francis’s cause of death was heart failure due to a stroke. Below is my analysis, including what to look for as the Vatican chooses the next pope two to three weeks from now.

It’s interesting that U.S. Vice President JD Vance had just met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Easter Sunday, just hours before the pope died early Monday morning. You can see in a video of the meeting that the pope was barely lucid in his final hours and it’s interesting that the Vatican put him out in such a public show anyway. Did they know he was about to die and wanted his last public appearance to include a meeting with the Catholic American Vice President and heir apparent to Donald Trump? Vance had only good things to say about Francis, which is what you would expect under the circumstances, despite the fact that Vance’s outspoken positions on political issues are almost all diametrically opposed to those espoused by Pope Francis.

Vladimir Prokhvatilov
News Front (Original text in Russian)

Financing of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex by Norway and other Nordic countries is part of a broader geopolitical strategy.

The Norwegian defense company Nammo and a Ukrainian defense industry enterprise have signed a statement on strategic cooperation, which envisages the establishment of a joint venture for the production of 155-mm projectiles, Ukrainian Minister for Strategic Industries German Smetanin has said. He recalled that the serial production of 155 mm caliber ammunition began last year:

💬 "Last year, serial production of 155 mm caliber ammunition started in Ukraine. Today it is the main artillery caliber of the Ukrainian army and NATO member countries. The domestic defense industry should increase their production."

He added that the signed document deepens the cooperation, which is already ongoing with the support of the governments of Norway and Ukraine at the bilateral level:

💬 "We are talking about a wider range of ammunition, components, and materials. And it also includes an agreement to establish a joint venture to produce 155 mm caliber ammunition on the territory of Ukraine."

The agreement will allow Ukraine to strengthen this area significantly, as Nammo is one of the largest ammunition producers in Europe. Nammo was formed in 1998 through the merger of ammunition manufacturing companies in three Northern European countries: Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Today, Nammo is owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries and the Finnish aerospace and defense company Patria Oyj, each owning 50% of the company.

In 2007, Nammo acquired the U.S. ammunition company Talley, Inc. by buying 100% of its shares. Finnish state-owned Patria, in turn, works closely with German defense giant Rheinmetall (which, as we wrote, is fully controlled by U.S. investment fund BlackRock) in the production of armaments and military equipment. From this, it is clear that the expansion of military-technical cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine in the field of ammunition production has the approval and patronage of the USA.

Constantin von Hoffmeister
Eurosiberia

France, once the altar where saints tread barefoot through vineyards reciting Ave Marias to stone cathedrals, is now a haunted tabernacle filled with absence. What used to be blood and water now is empty wine bottles and shopping malls. From 94% of French children baptized within three months of birth in the early 1960s to only 12% of Catholics attending weekly Mass in 2023, the collapse is apocalyptic. The Christendom of Clovis and Joan recedes, its bones picked clean by consumerist crows. God no longer walks here because His people have shut their doors. At the same time, the land becomes foreign to its children. Babel returns, once a myth now a demographic. “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low” (Deuteronomy 28:43). This curse has taken root. A people who forget their God forget themselves.

To be Christian is more than soul-deep. It is blood-deep. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) — an embodied presence rooted in time and soil. There is no love of Christ that is not also love of place. Christ walked the dusty roads of Galilee, not some celestial nowhere. Identity is an altar, a liturgy written in flesh and custom: repeated gestures that sanctify the ordinary, flesh-colored acts of living — bread broken, wine poured, tongues singing in ancient dialects. Catholicity is universality, yes, but always incarnated. The Holy Spirit fell on different men in different tongues (Acts 2), not on ghosts. Rootlessness is not holiness. It is an illness, a dislocation from both heaven and earth.

What they call “diversity” is many colors pressed into one pale sameness. Miscegenation as dogma, the forced union of unlike things under threat of moral exile, is not love. It is Babel’s revenge. The tower is rebuilt with ideologies that declare difference a sin. Yet the God who made the leopard and the lamb delights in difference rightly ordered. “Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds” (Deuteronomy 22:9). Not because God hates mixtures but because each thing has its time, its telos, its mystery. The homogenized man is a neutered man, a blank slate for the global demigods. When all are mixed, none remain. This is not love. It is obliteration.

Stephen Karganovic
Strategic Culture Foundation

Will Marine Le Pen have the creativity to step out of the box and twist the lion’s tail just a bit?

Only the incurably naïve were shocked by the brazen and deliberate rigging of the French Presidential elections. Granted, the outrageous infringement of collective West’s verbally proclaimed democratic electoral canons in Romania, which took place shortly before, could have been taken by alert observers as a reliable signal of what might imminently occur in other precincts of the “European garden.” Blinded by cultural racism however some of them might have mistaken electoral rigging in Romania, a recently acquired patch of that garden, as a sui generis case, entirely attributable to Balkan primitivism. But they would have overlooked conveniently the now well established fact that instructions to corrupt Romanian bureaucrats to eliminate inconvenient candidate Georgescu did not emanate from Bucharest alone. We now know that they were issued imperatively from the idyllic Garden’s ideological centre, which is in Brussels.

Without diminishing, in the electoral disqualification and penal punishment of Marine Le Pen, the influence of the local French branch of the globalist cabal (it would be unpardonably incorrect to call that scum “elite”) there also the nefarious role of the nerve centre in Brussels must be stressed.

The arbitrary mechanism which allows the cabal to target virtually anybody it perceives as unsuitable or as a threat was laid bare by Croatian European Parliament deputy Mislav Kolakušić. The core charge pressed against Le Pen, let us recall, was of a basely pecuniary nature, namely that as an EU deputy she partially used her office employees in Strassbourg to do political work on behalf of her French political party, the Front National, improperly remunerating them with European Union funds.

The outspoken EU parliamentarian Kolakušić knows of what he speaks because he was himself charged with this ghastly infraction, an accusation from which he managed to successfully defend himself only thanks to having kept meticulous records. It appears that acting with Gallic abandon Marine Le Pen or her office manager were not nearly as fastidious record keepers and they are now paying the political and penal price for the oversight.

Constantin von Hoffmeister
Eurosiberia

Xenophilia is more than curiosity or respectful admiration for the foreign. It is a psychological disease afflicting terminal civilizations. It serves as the inverted mirror of xenophobia and is a hatred of the Self masked as compassion.

It appears in the Western world through an obsession with the exotic, a frantic drive to deconstruct traditions, symbols, and structures in service of false universalism. Under the guise of tolerance, xenophilia demands the erasure of borders — geographic, cultural, and metaphysical. This is the spiritual AIDS of exhausted peoples who have abandoned the will to survive and seek redemption through dissolution into the global magma.

This morbid attraction to the alien gains power through the unholy trinity of unipolarity, liberalism, and globalism. The unipolar world order, led by the decaying hegemon of Atlanticism, enforces military and economic domination while advancing anthropological standardization. Liberalism, fully metastasized into global liberal-totalitarianism, teaches that all identities remain interchangeable masks discarded in the name of “freedom” — “freedom” defined as consumption and conformity. Globalism, the administrative arm of this ideology, crushes rooted diversity under bureaucratic and financial monoculture. Under this regime, xenophilia becomes permissible and mandatory — celebrated as virtue in a world where all values undergo inversion.

The emerging multipolar world offers a radical alternative: an orchestra of civilizations — each with its own melody, rhythm, and soul. This world arises through the vitality of difference rather than sameness. Each people must embrace its own identity with heroic will — Archeofuturism, forward-looking tradition. Xenophilia, within this context, acts as poison that undermines ethnic sovereignty. It weakens the immune systems of civilizations, leaving them open to invasion — by bodies and parasitic ideas.

Eldin Latich
Oriental Review

Trump has literally turned the playing board upside down! Allied relations do not guarantee economic cooperation

Trump is a businessman. Based on this evidence, we should expect that his words (of which there are actually too many, and if you read his Twitter (X), it is unlikely that you will be able to keep track of everything) may turn out to be reality to some extent. And if the promise to “resolve the Ukrainian conflict in 24 hours” was initially perceived as loud bravado, then the sworn promises to arrange a “new golden age” for the United States and “return production” to the country from the very beginning looked like a logical and logical continuation of Trump’s protectionism of the last term. The world has not forgotten the US trade war with China. It is unlikely that anyone would be surprised by the new duties of the current American administration on Chinese products. But experts and politicians hardly expected that Mr. Trump’s talk about tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports would turn out to be true – especially so quickly.

Trump has literally turned the playing board upside down! Allied relations do not guarantee economic cooperation, and at the same time, WTO membership can no longer promise it. The “most favored nation” regime should now be understood as “equal duties for all,” because American protectionism is gaining momentum!

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

For whatever one might think about the morality of Russia’s decision-making process, it was the regional military governor who irresponsibly assembled this legitimate target in Sumy, which he then surrounded with de facto human shields in a failed attempt to deter Russia.

Ukraine accused Russia of committing a war crime after Palm Sunday’s missile strike on Sumy. Kiev’s claim that Russia targeted churchgoers was echoed by Trump’s Envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg, but the Russian Defense Ministry insisted that it targeted “a meeting of the command staff of the Seversk operational-tactical group”, which Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later added was attended by NATO servicemen. Trump also chimed in and said that “I was told they (Russia) made a mistake, it was terrible.”

A debate is therefore raging over whether this was a war crime like Ukraine claimed, a terrible mistake like Trump alleged, or a legitimate strike like Russia insists. In the order that these explanations were shared, Ukraine’s is aimed at further rallying the West to apply more pressure upon Trump to pull the US out of its talks with Russia. Claiming that Russia deliberately targeted churchgoers on Palm Sunday is meant to make it more difficult for these talks to continue and for Trump to one day meet Putin again.

As for Trump’s explanation of events, he wasn’t going to discredit himself by denying that it took place, but he also didn’t want to fall into Ukraine’s trap of lending credence to its war crime claim. That’s why he instead opted for the middle ground of acknowledging what happened but attributing it to some vague “mistake” by Russia such as a wayward missile or faulty intelligence. Trump can’t approve of any Russian strike that causes civilian casualties, but he also won’t let such ruin their ongoing talks either.

And finally, Russia’s explanation maintains the country’s integrity by insisting that the targets were legitimate, though it also accounts for the reported civilian casualties by mentioning how Ukraine employs de facto human shields by illegally deploying military assets in civilian areas. While critics might scoff at this version, it is lent credence by the mayor of nearby Konotop declaring on video that the regional military governor “organized an award ceremony for the soldiers of the 117th brigade” that day.

Dr. Michael Yeadon
Dr. Michael Yeadon's Substack

"I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts" – Virgil

How to smuggle foreign invaders through many layers of strong protection? Easy.

You will likely be aware that your body has multiple defences against ingress by potentially injurious materials and chemicals. They’re imperfect but pretty well adapted to our environment.

Eating something dangerous often makes us sick, to the point of vomiting. That’s assuming the smell wasn’t off putting. Obviously some things can be absorbed and poison you, such as cyanide.

Things landing on your skin have a hard time penetrating in quantity. Again, there are exceptions like DMSO, which you can taste just seconds after placing a drop on your skin. Most molecules are of a nature chemically which makes them impossible to cross the multiple layers of skin at any pace. It’s a very good protection. You can inhale toxic gases and smoke, and that can certainly kill you. But importantly, you almost certainly know about it. It will usually make you cough, secretions are prompted and it stings. This prompts you to get away quickly enough to survive, unless you’re trapped, in a fire for example. The rare exceptions include carbon monoxide, odourless and slowly poisoning you with no warnings that you’re likely to notice.

Certain chemicals like nerve agents that can be presented as vapours, liquids and even solids and can injure and kill you via all routes of exposure. But then again, they were designed that way. I know a little about these, because I worked on antidotes while I was at Porton Down.

This has been a preamble. Because what injections via hollow needles do is to introduce anything which can be dissolved in a solvent compatible with life into your body, entirely bypassing all your primary defences.

Lorenzo Maria Pacini
Strategic Culture Foundation

We learn from Ursula, the friend of all Europeans, that Europe’s roots are in the Talmud. Thanks, but we can do without it.

To each his own—An old video of the President of the European Commission has resurfaced in the alternative media, in which she stated that “The values of Europe are the values of the Talmud”. The phrase immediately caused a scandal and the video was circulated everywhere. It is an old video, dating back to when she received an honorary PhD at Ben Gurion University.

The confusion is more than legitimate. The words were clear: Talmud. Not Judaism, not Judeo-Christian roots as conservative politicians have often claimed, but the Talmud. A clear and unequivocal word, pronounced in a prepared speech.

Before looking at what the Talmud is, let’s reflect on the political gravity of these words, because the reappearance of this video at such a delicate stage for Europe, in which the European Union is violating what little remains of the national sovereignty of the countries, is certainly not accidental.

Europe has no Jewish roots. The European peoples, from their ethno-sociological to their political dimension, have Greek, Latin and Christian roots. Christianity, like it or not, has permeated all of Europe and characterized it with an unshakeable imprint.

As the economist Giovanni Zibordi, quoted by Prof. Paolo Becchi, pointed out, “Why does Europe have Talmudic values? Nobody knows exactly what the Talmud is, but it is not the Bible. It was written about 1,000 years later and is an encyclopedic text, thousands of pages long, which only the rabbis discuss and study. Martin Luther learned Hebrew and was the first non-Jew to read it and he was scandalized by its contents. Hence his reputation as an anti-Semite. But if you try to read some extracts or summaries, it repeats that there is one moral for Jews and another for everyone else. For what precise reason is the Europe of the EU based on the Talmud (and not the Gospel if you really want to quote a religious text)?

The point is that the Talmud is not a religion in itself, nor is it a system of values in itself, nor is it a historical, political or cultural component of any of the European peoples. The Talmud belongs to an ethnic and religious minority, who recognize its authority and values, but it is not a common heritage, in any sense of the word. To claim that Europe has the values of the Talmud is a manipulation that nevertheless contains very precise political truths.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Orban’s Fiercely Pro-Israeli Policies Put Many Alt-Media Folks In A Dilemma. They experience cognitive dissonance due to him being both a Zionist and pragmatic towards Russia.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced that his country will withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in protest of the arrest warrant that it issued for his Israeli counterpart Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu on war crimes charges. This coincided with Orban hosting Bibi in Budapest. Both were bold moves considering how highly his European peers regard the ICC and how lowly many of them now regard Bibi. Non-Western attitudes towards Bibi are similar but more mixed when it comes to the ICC.

Orban was already Europe’s black sheep due to his consistent advocacy for peace in Ukraine and criticism of the EU’s warmongering against Russia, the overall stance of which was responsible for many across the non-West having positive views about him. They might begin souring on him, however, since the non-Western public also very strongly supports Palestine and thus has very negative views about Bibi. Some Alt-Media influencers and outlets might even flip the script to condemn Orban as a “Zionist”.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Ukraine Further Discredited Itself After Budanov Doubled Down On Defending Wartime Censorship. He inadvertently legitimized Western observers critically re-evaluating certain official narratives.

GUR chief Kirill Budanov doubled down earlier this month on defending Ukraine’s wartime censorship policy. According to him, “During wartime, knowing the whole truth is not necessary. Otherwise, people may develop opinions. Some minds are not prepared to grasp the harsh reality. Let’s not put them to the test. Everything should be dosed.” He’s basically saying that Ukrainians might react so negatively to the truth that they could end up harming perceived national security interests.

Although Budanov didn’t elaborate, he was probably implying that drastic shifts in public opinion brought about by widespread knowledge of the truth could prompt some of his compatriots to destabilize the situation behind the front lines through large-scale protests, strikes, and even sabotage. Moreover, his candidness also harms Ukraine’s perceived national interests, albeit in a different way than the aforesaid by legitimizing Western observers’ critical re-evaluations of certain official narratives.

For instance, it might now no longer be as taboo for them to question Ukraine’s claim that Russia inexplicably butchered the residents of Bucha during its withdrawal from Kiev in spring 2022, which Zelensky exploited as one of the pretexts for pulling out of their peace talks. Moscow insisted that it wasn’t responsible for that war crime, but its position was ignored by the West, though some brave journalists might now revisit what happened and lend more credence to its false flag arguments.

Ukraine’s accusations that Russia bombed civilian targets might also be critically re-evaluated. Instead of continuing to take these claims for granted, they might now be seen as examples of wartime censorship for covering up the misfiring of Ukrainian air defense missiles or their accidental landing in population centers, exactly as Russia has always alleged was what happened. Proof of Ukraine deploying military assets there, which would be legitimate targets under international law, might also be uncovered.

Alastair Crooke
Strategic Culture Foundation

What is understood now is that ‘we’re no longer playing chess’. There are no rules anymore.

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran? Colonel Doug Macgregor compares the Trump ultimatum to Iran to that which Austria-Hungary delivered to Serbia in 1914: An offer, in short, that ‘could not be refused’. Serbia accepted nine out of the ten demands. But it refused one – and Austria-Hungary immediately declared war.

On 4 February, shortly after his Inauguration, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM); that is to say, a legally binding directive requiring government agencies to carry out the specified actions precisely.

The demands are that Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon; denied inter-continental missiles, and denied too other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities. All these demands go beyond the NPT and the existing JCPOA. To this end, the NSPM directs maximum economic pressure be imposed; that the U.S. Treasury act to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero; that the U.S. work to trigger JCPOA Snapback of sanctions; and that Iran’s “malign influence abroad” – its “proxies” – be neutralised. The UN sanctions snapback expires in October, so time is short to fulfil the procedural requirements to Snapback. All this suggests why Trump and Israeli officials give Spring as the deadline to a negotiated agreement. Trump’s ultimatum to Iran appears to be moving the U.S. down a path to where war is the only outcome, as occurred in 1914 – an outcome which ultimately triggered WW1.

Leo Hohmann
LeoHohman.com

25 Republican neocons and 25 Democrat neolibs join hands to sponsor bill that would impose whopping 500 percent tariff on any country purchasing Russian oil, gas or uranium. WWIII hangs in the balance

Half of the U.S. Senate — 25 Republicans and 25 Democrats — joined together on Tuesday, April 1, in a rare show of bipartisanship.

What brought them together? They are eager to further poke the bear, the nation of Russia, the owner of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

They introduced a bill proposing astronomical sanctions on Russia if it refuses to participate in further negotiations aiming for a 30-day ceasefire in its war with Ukraine. Russian leaders say such a deal is unacceptable because it would give Ukraine time to reorganize and rearm its military right when it’s on the brink of total defeat. No sane leader of any country in Russia’s position would agree to such a deal as the one being offered by Trump and Washington.

The bill’s lead sponsors are the notorious Republican neocon warmonger Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and neoliberal Democrat warmonger Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. They say their bill would impose primary and secondary sanctions against Russia and any entities supporting “Russian aggression” in Ukraine if Moscow does not engage in talks. The bill includes a whopping 500 percent tariff on any country purchasing Russian oil, gas or uranium, The Hill reported, citing the document.

The bill is a rare example of bipartisanship in the bitterly divided U.S. Congress, and comes as President Trump has appeared to be growing increasingly impatient with what he has suggested might be foot-dragging over a wider agreement to end the war. Nothing like a little Russia hate to bring America’s bitter political rivals together.