Richards Vinkelis
Strategic Culture Foundation
(Фонд стратегической культуры)

Latvian-Ukrainian agreement legalizes the presence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Baltic republic

Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs (Joint List) and Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed an agreement on comprehensive defense cooperation between the two countries in Tallinn. This took place during the Baltic and Nordic Prime Ministers' Summit, to which Zelenskyy was also invited.

The main aspect of the Latvian-Ukrainian agreement is the legalization of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' presence in Latvia.

Thus, paragraph 16.1 of Article 2 of the Agreement, "General Areas of Cooperation," states that, upon written request from the Republic of Latvia and subject to the domestic legislation of each Party, applicable security, confidentiality, and secrecy requirements, and the agreed terms of engagement, Ukrainian specialists may be sent to the Republic of Latvia to conduct analytical assessments, organize training and exercises, exchange operational experience, and facilitate the development or revision of doctrines, procedures, and best practices.

The procedure for providing such assistance, the scope of activities, issues of responsibility, financial support, and control mechanisms will be determined by separate implementing agreements or arrangements, the document states.

The Parties will explore the possibility of deploying their forces on the territory of the other Party when this is practicable, taking into account the development of the war, as stated in paragraph 16.1 of Article 2 of the Agreement, "General Areas of Cooperation."

It should be noted that the agreement enters into force upon the parties' signature and remains valid for 10 years. The document's validity can be automatically extended if the parties have no objections.

This means that, as of today, the presence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Latvia is legalized.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

The massacre at Starobelsk three weeks ago was yet another example of the BBC and Western media serving as blatant propaganda outlets to distort and prolong the conflict.

It takes a special kind of entitled attitude to be a correspondent in a country for over 20 years – and never to give any positive reporting about your host nation. That’s the case for Steve Rosenberg, the so-called Russia Editor for the British state-owned BBC, based in Moscow.

Rosenberg doesn’t actually report on Russia in any sort of normal way, as befitting a genuine journalist. His assignment is to habitually belittle and bemoan. Continually.

In all his years of working from Russia, one is hard-pressed to find anything in his portfolio that informs readers of achievements or positive developments in Russian culture, politics, and economics. Rosenberg’s job, it seems, is to constantly complain and portray Russia in the poorest light.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

A grim, consequential watershed in the West’s conflict with Russia has arrived.

The murder of 21 Russian teenage students at a teacher-training college [recently] was an abominable moment of truth with far-reaching, grievous implications.

A grim, consequential watershed in the West’s conflict with Russia has arrived.

The victims were mainly girls aged between 14 and 18 who were killed when their university dormitory in Starobelsk, Lugansk, was attacked overnight on May 22.

What is absolutely revealing is how the Collective West has shown no remorse or restraint about the crime, going as far as denying responsibility and adding insult to the memory of the dead. The perpetrators have an obscene sense of impunity and inhumane entitlement.

The attack involved 16 drones that targeted the college in a wave of three assaults. There can be no doubt that the air strike was a deliberate act. That makes it an act of cold-blooded mass murder; an act of terrorism.

Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, stated: “The blood of the children from Starobelsk is on the hands of the West whose nations are supplying the terrorist regime [in Ukraine] with money, intelligence, weapons, and ammunition for years, inspiring it to commit new crimes against the civilian population, and then covering it up by presenting the Kiev regime as a victim.”

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

EU leaders like Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s top foreign diplomat, have played dumb about the endless scandals seeping out of Kiev.

There was more evidence this week of the Kiev regime’s endemic corruption. And yet the European Union leaders are lining up to send a massive €90 billion ($105bn ) loan to this regime, a regime which has become a byword for industrial-scale scamming.

The EU has already pumped about €200 billion into propping up the Ukrainian regime since February 2022, when the NATO proxy war with Russia escalated.

Most of the latest money will be used as military aid to invest in Ukrainian manufacturers of drones and missiles. One of the most prominent of these Ukrainian firms – Fire Point – is linked to the regime’s so-called president, Vladimir Zelensky.

Surveillance tapes leaked to Ukrainian media show that businessman Timur Mindich, alleged owner of Fire Point, discussed the acquisition of billions of euros in contracts with the former Ukrainian minister of defense, Rustem Umarov.

Both men are under investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption organizations for embezzlement. Last year, Umarov resigned as defense minister after being accused of fraud and racketeering. Meanwhile, Timur Mindich fled to Israel last November just as corruption investigators were about to arraign him for questioning. Mindich was formerly a business partner with Zelensky and remains a close associate. He is cheekily referred to as “Zelensky’s wallet”.

Pepe Escobar
Strategic Culture Foundation

From now on, it’s clear that no settlement will be possible – and realistic – without Russian influence.

Talk about an entrance pregnant with meaning!

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi engaged on a high-stakes diplomacy tour to Islamabad, Muscat and St. Petersburg aboard flight “Minab 168” on Meraj Airlines.

In memory, of course, of the 168 schoolgirls from Minab killed by the Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder and Piracy.

Before he set out on his voyage, Araghchi went straight to the point:

Araghchi explained the importance of reviewing negotiations in Pakistan, and “under what conditions negotiations could continue.” Conversations in Oman “will lead to greater expansion in relations with neighbors, especially in the southern regions of the Persian Gulf.”

On the Strait of Hormuz, “consultations with Oman were also necessary…We share many common views with Oman, and it was agreed that discussions would continue at the expert level.”

Araghchi in St. Petersburg did not only meet his counterpart, Grandmaster Sergey Lavrov, as protocol would have it. Himself and his mini-delegation were personally received by President Putin.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

European nations are being destroyed by war and militarism, and adding to the madness, their political class and media are driving the process with ever-increasing speed. The fate of the continent could hardly be more tragic, given that it emerged from the ashes of World War II with the hope of being a model for international peace.

Hungary’s divisive elections this week, which saw the government of Viktor Orban ousted from power, were dominated by political and financial pressures exerted by the EU leadership on Budapest owing to Orban’s steadfast rejection of Brussels’ warmongering towards Russia. Hungarians cast their vote amid turmoil caused by Brussels and the energy blackmail of the NATO-backed Kiev regime. There are concerns that other EU nations, such as Slovakia, will face a similar assault on their democratic process if they do not conform to the elite agenda of making everything about an existential confrontation with Russia.

European citizens are enduring an economic crisis that has been brought on by NATO and the EU’s proxy war with Russia. Fuel, energy, food, and other living costs are going through the roof as a direct result of war and militarism. First, the energy supplies from Russia were cut off through government-led sanctions.

Now, Trump’s aggression against Iran has hit energy supplies from the Persian Gulf, leaving Europe doubly exposed. Instead of reversing course, the European NATO states seem intent on going full throttle towards a disastrous crash. This raises fundamental questions about democratic representation. Does it even exist anymore in Europe, including Britain?

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Humanity has to realize, and is realizing, that for the world to survive in peace, the United States and its Empire of Lies must be defeated.

The orgy of violence and war crimes being inflicted on Iran over the past week is truly shocking. Yet it is not surprising. This is what an empire that repeatedly commits genocide does.

The U.S.-backed Israeli genocide that has been going on constantly for more than two years in Gaza is now expanding to Iran. The Trump administration is openly talking about destroying Iran and its people. Tehran and other cities across Iran are enduring carpet bombing. “It is not only a war against Iran – it is a war against the UN Charter, against all of us, against civilization,” commented the renowned international legal expert Alfred de Zayas. His voice has resonated with the anger and disgust of billions of people worldwide, including many U.S. citizens. This is an abomination, an affront to humanity.

Bruna Frascolla
Strategic Culture Foundation

The entire current scientific establishment probably rests on cohesive dogmas of a metaphysical nature.

Amid the avalanche of noteworthy things relating to Jeffrey Epstein, I wanted to draw attention to a very atypical combination: rigorous religiosity and militant atheism.

The religiosity appears in its most extravagant form with Epstein’s idea of funding the development of a cloven-hoofed pig – a genetically modified kosher pig – so that he could eat bacon. The attempt to circumvent divine prohibitions is far from exceptional in Talmudic Judaism (the most prosaic example is the use of wigs to cover women’s hair). It causes some amazement that a terrible criminal could be a very religious person, since we are faced with the possibility that his religion is more concerned with dietary restrictions than with moral restrictions. But this is also old news. Since virtually no one knows the Talmud without being a religious Jew capable of reading Hebrew, I recommend reading the indispensable Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by Israel Shahak, which exposes the immorality and racial supremacism intrinsic to the Talmud. It does not follow from this that every religious Jew is a bad person, but rather that, if he is a good person, it is by natural inclination and influence of the culture in which he is embedded, not by the Talmud (of which Epstein displayed dozens of volumes on his bookshelf).

As for militant atheism, a photo was released showing Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker together in the Lolita Express. That is, two of the “four horsemen of neo-atheism” (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, who died in 2011), plus the Harvard atheist Jew Steven Pinker, who weaves scientific praises to the moral progress of our times. Furthermore, information was released that a club of atheists who consider themselves genius scientists (of which Sam Harris is a member) relied on Epstein’s philanthropy. The club is called Edge.org. A religious person funding atheists who are certain that people who believe in God are stupid? How strange!

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Agent Rutte should be in a modern-day dock. He and his masters want to push the world into catastrophe.

NATO chief Mark Rutte declared in a high-profile address to the Ukrainian parliament this week that alliance troops would be deployed in Ukraine immediately on signing any peace deal with Russia.

He asserted that the NATO forces would be British and French, deployed “on the land, in the air, and at sea.” He added that the coalition would have the “crucial backstop” of a U.S. security guarantee if “Russia tried to subjugate Ukraine again.”

It seems more than a coincidence that three days after Rutte spoke in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament), there was an assassination attempt in Moscow on a top Russian general. Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseev, the deputy commander of Russian military intelligence (GRU), was shot several times in the back by a gunman.

This was while delicate negotiations were being conducted in Abu Dhabi to find a peace settlement to the nearly four-year war in Ukraine. Russian delegates met with American and Ukrainian counterparts for a second round of talks this week.

Rutte’s speech in Kiev and the assassination attack in Moscow appear to be calculated moves to sabotage the negotiation efforts that the Trump administration has been pushing.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Speaking yesterday at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez criticized social media, calling it an uncontrolled territory “where lawlessness reigns.” The Spanish prime minister emphasized,