The EU faces a growing budget squeeze after borrowing hundreds of billions for pandemic recovery and Ukraine. Rising repayment costs threaten future spending and rushed payouts raise fraud risks, its chief auditor has warned. Brussels is nevertheless seeking billions more for Kiev.
Speaking to Rapporteur, Tony Murphy, president of the European Court of Auditors, described the budget situation as a “pressure cooker,” with EU debt potentially reaching €1 trillion (1.12 trillion) by the end of 2027. The bloc’s debt stood at €739 billion (825 billion) in 2025, up from €601 billion ($671 billion) a year earlier.
“You have to pay it back at some time. It’s not free money,” Murphy said. He emphasized that “it’s real money that has to be paid back.”
However, concerns have repeatedly been raised about the EU getting back any of the billions it has spent on Ukraine, including its recent €90 billion ($100 billion) loan, which Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico recently slammed as “gifts” that Ukraine will “never pay back.”
Kiev is required to repay the loan only after receiving Russian reparations – something Moscow has vehemently ruled out. Ukraine’s own former Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov has also acknowledged that such scenarios are “just fairy tales” and that Brussels will never get its money back, which is being actively embezzled by Kiev.
The EU, however, must still repay the money it borrowed. According to Murphy, servicing pandemic debt alone would consume 8% of the bloc’s proposed 2028–2034 budget and governments have yet to agree on new revenue to cover the repayments, leaving Brussels with less money for other priorities.
The squeeze comes as households and businesses continue to face high energy costs following Europe’s break with Russian supplies, compounded by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Murphy also warned about how quickly money is being spent. He called the requirement to process €90 billion in remaining pandemic recovery payments by December “crazy,” describing the impending payouts as a “tsunami.”
Pressure to meet deadlines could also encourage weaker checks and more abuse, he said, as European prosecutors are already investigating hundreds of suspected fraud cases involving recovery funds.
Despite the crisis, Brussels is again looking for more money for Kiev after Vladimir Zelensky requested another €70 billion ($78 billion) for 2027, beyond existing commitments. European Council President Antonio Costa said Friday that the EU expects to cover roughly two-thirds, with a decision potentially coming in November.
Israeli regime’s airspace – the airspace over the occupied territories – is widely regarded as among the most heavily defended in the world.
Yet the scale of its protection cannot be explained by Israeli military technology alone. Russia, China and even the United States do not benefit from an equivalent network of allied support dedicated to intercepting threats before they reach their territory.
Israel’s own defenses are indeed formidable. Arrow 3 is designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere, while Arrow 2 targets ballistic missile threats within it. David’s Sling is built to counter medium-range threats, and Iron Dome intercepts rockets and other short-range projectiles.
These systems are backed by fighter jets and an extensive radar network, creating multiple layers of protection against incoming attacks.
But Israel’s air defense shield extends well beyond its own arsenal. From October 2023 through Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone operations in 2024, 2025 and 2026, a group of allied states has played an active role in protecting the regime.
They have provided interceptors, radar capabilities, fighter aircraft, military bases and personnel, helping the Tel Aviv regime detect, track and counter incoming threats.
What emerges is not simply a domestic air-defense network, but a wider umbrella sustained by the resources and involvement of powerful allies – from the US to Europe to Arab countries.
This ironclad commitment of regional and extra-regional countries to Israel’s protection has come at a considerable cost.
The price goes well beyond dollars and shekels. It includes depleted weapons stockpiles that could take years to replenish, damaged radars and military bases, soldiers killed or wounded, and governments facing domestic political backlash for a costly partnership that much of their own public fiercely opposes and protests against.
The burden, however, is not shared equally. The United States has shouldered the largest financial and military inventory costs. The Persian Gulf monarchies and Jordan have faced intense operational demands and direct security risks. European states have incurred more limited but still significant costs, particularly in munitions and the political fallout from a war that has driven up energy prices and compounded the cost-of-living pressures facing their populations.
The Israeli bill
The Israeli regime’s direct costs are the easiest to track because they fall on its own treasury. In April 2024, after Iran launched a large number of drones and missiles at the occupied territories, Brig. Gen. Reem Aminoach, an economic adviser to a former Israeli military chief of staff, estimated in an interview with Ynet that defending against the attack that night had cost 4-5 billion shekels, or roughly $1.1–$1.35 billion at the exchange rate at the time.
Haaretz later put the total cost of defending against the same retaliatory attack at around $1.5 billion. That was just one night. Many more retaliatory strikes have hit the occupied territories since then.
The cost structure follows a clear logic. Iran uses inexpensive drones and mass-produced missiles, while Israel relies on some of the world’s most expensive interceptors to defend against them.
This disparity lies at the heart of the war’s financial burden. Israel’s broader budget picture adds another dimension. Sustained, high-intensity defensive operations have forced the regime to spend far more than it did previously.
With a net budget of about 60 billion shekels in 2023, the Israeli military could not sustain repeated nights of interceptions without substantial increases in funding and continued US support.
Israel has been able to sustain this costly imbalance largely because of extensive financial backing from American taxpayers. Much of its interceptor production is funded or co-developed through US programs, and the Arrow missile defense system is produced with American participation.
US Congress has also repeatedly approved emergency supplemental funding for Israeli missile defense. These ties mean that Israel’s financial burden and America’s are deeply interconnected and difficult to separate, which explains the public anger in the US.
The American inventory crisis
No country has spent more on Israel’s defense than the United States, and no factor is more consequential than the state of its interceptor stockpiles. Washington may be willing to spend the tens of billions of dollars required to protect their genocidal ally, but willingness alone cannot resolve the US military’s primary challenge: replenishing its dwindling missile interceptors.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank, has published some of the most widely cited public estimates of US missile interceptor inventories.
Its analysis, updated following the 40-day war against Iran, found that American Patriot and THAAD inventories had declined dramatically.
According to CSIS estimates, the US inventory of Patriot interceptors fell from approximately 2,330 before the war began on February 27, 2026, to between 759 and 827 by July 27, 2026, marking a decline of roughly two-thirds.
The THAAD inventory also dropped sharply, falling from an estimated 452 interceptors before the war to between 239 and 257 by July 27, representing a decline of approximately 43 to 47 percent.
Estimates of remaining American Interceptor inventory (Source: CSIS)
Many military experts believe CSIS’s estimates are overly optimistic. Some, for instance, argue that the United States may have fired as many as 290 of its roughly 360 THAAD interceptors during the early phase of the war. That would amount to more than 80 percent of its pre-war stockpile.
Whatever the exact figures, Washington’s decision to prioritize Israel’s defense has left the US military dangerously underprepared and more vulnerable to another round of war if it breaks out.
The cost of replenishing stockpiles
The US Army’s FY2027 figures put the unit cost of a PAC-3 MSE interceptor at roughly $5 million and that of a THAAD interceptor at nearly $12 million.
Based on these figures, replacing the Patriot and THAAD interceptors expended would cost an estimated $10 billion. The Congressional Budget Office has offered a higher estimate, putting the cost of replacing the depleted interceptors at approximately $13.1 billion.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in recent remarks noted that the US spent about $11 billion on missile defense for Israel over three years. In a post on X, quoting a tweet of a former Obama administration official, he said US forces had fired 609 interceptors in defense of the Israeli regime between October 2023 and June 2026, including SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, Patriot, and THAAD missiles.
The naval picture
The US Navy’s missile interceptor inventories are also under severe strain. The SM-3 and SM-6 are among the principal naval weapons used to counter ballistic missiles and other high-speed threats.
Public estimates vary widely, with some reports placing combined naval inventories in the low hundreds. A figure of 150–200 for the two interceptor types combined is plausible as a rough order of magnitude, but no precise public count is available.
The broader concern is that naval interceptors are expensive and slow to manufacture, while the Navy must preserve sufficient stocks to address other potential threats, including those posed by China and Russia. Every interceptor expended in the defense of Israel is therefore one fewer available for other contingencies until it can be replaced.
Not all US and allied defenses against Iran relied on ground-based or naval interceptors. Fighter jets also engaged Iranian drones using air-to-air missiles, including the AIM-9X and AIM-120. The AIM-9X reportedly costs several hundred thousand dollars per missile, while the AIM-120 AMRAAM costs more than $1 million.
Using such expensive weapons to destroy drones that cost only thousands of dollars compounds the economic imbalance, even when the immediate tactical objective is achieved.
The trade-off
By the final phase of the 40-day imposed war, following the initial ceasefire, it had become clear that US commanders were holding back dedicated SM-3 and THAAD interceptors rather than expending them to protect American bases in Jordan and elsewhere.
Footage of nighttime defensive missile launches appeared to show almost exclusively Patriot interceptors, with only one exception. The implication was stark: stocks had dwindled to the point where US commanders could no longer afford to use these missiles freely.
The apparent logic was to preserve the remaining interceptors for a larger war, prioritizing the future defense of Israel over the immediate protection of American service members.
That decision carried its own cost. Aircraft on the ground were hit, and US personnel were killed in some of the retaliatory attacks. This matters because it illustrates the full price of managing depleted stockpiles. A shortage of interceptors weakened the US military’s defensive capacity across multiple theaters, leaving American personnel exposed to attacks that more robust defenses might have helped repel – all in the effort to protect the Israeli regime.
Cost, however, is only part of the problem. Production capacity is the more consequential constraint in a prolonged campaign.
Patriot and THAAD interceptors are manufactured in limited quantities, and expanding output takes time.
CSIS estimates that restoring Patriot and THAAD inventories to their pre-war levels will take at least three years. Interceptors ordered in fiscal year 2027 are not expected to arrive until 2029, leaving a prolonged gap between expenditure and replenishment.
The China and Asia-Pacific dimension
The most serious long-term cost to the United States may emerge far from the West Asia region. As US interceptor stocks are depleted in the region, the Pacific is left more exposed.
The Indo-Pacific is where Washington faces its most formidable strategic competitor. Taiwan’s defense depends in part on US air and missile defenses, while Pentagon war plans for a potential war with China assume that American forces can withstand and respond to large-scale missile attacks.
If SM-3, SM-6, and Patriot inventories fall to a fraction of their previous levels, the margin for absorbing such an attack narrows considerably. A few hundred interceptors would be insufficient to sustain even several days of high-intensity combat in East Asia.
The extent to which US military capabilities in the South China Sea and across East Asia have been weakened cannot yet be quantified.
Nevertheless, the underlying concern is widely recognized among defense analysts: a shortage of interceptors in one theater affects the military’s ability to respond in every theater, and the Pacific is particularly difficult to reinforce quickly.
Persian Gulf states and early-warning network
The Persian Gulf monarchies and Jordan contributed to Israel’s defense in a different but equally consequential way.
Their role was not primarily to supply interceptors, but to provide sensors, airspace access, military bases, and the political authorization needed to put these assets to use.
Missile defense depends on early warning. A THAAD battery cannot intercept a missile it has not detected, and detection depends on radars capable of identifying and tracking threats at sufficient range and speed. The AN/TPY-2 radar used by THAAD is a large, transportable system. The US Missile Defense Agency’s 2025 budget puts the cost of each unit at approximately half a billion dollars.
In March 2026, during the first days of the 40-day imposed war of aggression, the American THAAD radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan was struck and destroyed. Imagery showed craters around the site, suggesting that multiple strikes may have been involved.
Buildings housing similar radar systems were also hit at two locations in the United Arab Emirates. Another THAAD radar, at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, was destroyed as well.
Iran also targeted and struck the AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar in Qatar, which was used to track Iranian missile launches.
Taken together, these incidents point to a broader pattern of Iranian retaliatory attacks on US-aligned early-warning radars and THAAD sites across the region.
This interpretation is consistent with the available satellite imagery, which indicates that the campaign extended beyond individual military installations to the sensor network underpinning regional missile defense that has been at the service of the US and the Israeli regime.
Such radars are expensive and exceptionally difficult to replace. Their value lies not only in the hardware itself, but also in their integration with interceptor batteries and the data links connecting them to other sensors.
Destroying a single radar can compromise an entire interceptor network’s ability to detect and track threats approaching from a particular direction. Replacing these systems can take months or even years, and rebuilding them does not necessarily restore the coverage they previously provided.
Radar losses therefore carry a strategic cost as well as a financial one. Once a radar is destroyed, the states that depend on it must decide whether to rebuild it at an exposed location, relocate it, or accept a gap in their defensive coverage.
By providing Israel and the United States with tracking data on Iranian projectiles, Arab monarchies exposed themselves to Iranian retaliation and risked becoming direct targets in a war they had helped shape.
These losses also raised questions about Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability as the wider regional confrontation extended to other fronts.
Yemen is a prominent example. Damage to radar and air defense assets across the Persian Gulf may have further complicated Saudi Arabia’s position in its prolonged war against Yemen.
Although the Ansarullah-led Yemeni military possesses independent capabilities, and Saudi Arabia’s difficulties in Yemen stem from numerous military, political, and strategic factors, the decision to contribute to Israel’s defense added another layer of risk for the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Their involvement exposed critical military infrastructure to retaliation and potentially weakened their ability to respond to threats beyond the immediate confrontation with Iran.
Jordan’s exposed position
Jordan’s case is perhaps the most striking because of its small military and fragile economy. The country hosts US occupation forces, including a THAAD battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, and lies along the flight paths of missiles and drones traveling between Iran and the Israeli-occupied territories.
During Iran’s 2024 retaliatory strikes, Jordan’s air force was reported to have intercepted many of Iranian drones and missiles crossing its airspace. The Jordanian government defended these actions as necessary to protect its territory and citizens – a lame justification.
For a country with limited military resources, however, the cost was significant: every interceptor fired and every fighter jet scrambled placed additional demands on an already constrained defense budget.
The political cost was even greater. Jordan has a large population of Palestinian origin, and public opinion is strongly sympathetic to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as well as the Axis of Resistance.
Jordan’s decision to intercept Iranian projectiles launched in retaliation for Israeli strikes proved controversial domestically, with Jordanians slamming their government for helping protect the Israeli regime.
Jordan made this choice despite facing its own concerns about Israel’s regional ambitions. Members of Israel’s ruling regime have openly advocated annexing the occupied West Bank, while some have promoted proposals that would displace Palestinians into Jordan.
This context makes Amman’s involvement in regional missile defense particularly sensitive. The country faces the dual risk of Iranian retaliation against US military assets on its soil and growing domestic anger over its role in protecting Israel.
Jordan’s economic vulnerabilities compound these pressures. Public debt, energy costs, and the burden of hosting refugees already strain its finances. Against this backdrop, even a relatively modest additional military expenditure can have significant consequences.
Jordan’s experience illustrates how participation in regional missile defense can impose not only military and financial costs, but also serious domestic political risks.
Royal Jordanian Air Force F-16s were used numerous times to intercept drones launched at Israel
Europe’s price
European states paid in a different currency. Most did not expend large numbers of interceptors against Iranian drones, but their involvement carried costs across three main areas: munitions, military operations, and the economic shock of the war imposed on Iran.
France deployed air assets to the region to intercept drones and missiles over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. Some reports suggested that French stocks of air-to-air missiles, including the MICA, came under strain.
Such shortages would be significant, given France’s other military commitments. Its air force and weapons inventories are already stretched across support for Ukraine, operations in the Sahel, and the maintenance of its own strategic deterrent. Each additional deployment reduces the resources available for other missions.
Britain used its bases in Cyprus, including RAF Akrotiri, as well as its military presence in the Persian Gulf, to support operations against Iran. Reports indicated that RAF aircraft intercepted drones and missiles. The British armed forces are considerably smaller than they were at the height of the country’s military power, and sustained operations of this kind consume substantial flying hours, spare parts, and personnel capacity.
Europe’s greatest burden, however, has been economic and political. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the collapse of Persian Gulf energy exports drove up oil, gas, and diesel prices.
Europe’s dependence on imported energy meant that the shock quickly fed into household bills, transport costs, and food prices. Many European governments were already grappling with public dissatisfaction over the cost of living before the 40-day war. The war intensified those pressures as is evident now with protests raging across European countries.
European governments that committed military resources to Israel’s defense and offensive operations now face a difficult question: will their own citizens view that commitment as a principled security measure or as complicity in policies that have contributed to worsening economic conditions?
There is no straightforward answer, but the issue has become part of Europe’s domestic political debate. The costs of defending Israel have reached far beyond the battlefield, affecting budgets, energy security, and public confidence in government policy.
Defending the indefensible
The costs of protecting Israel have been substantial, although they have fallen unevenly across the countries involved.
The United States has spent billions of dollars and depleted significant portions of its advanced interceptor stockpiles, with replenishment expected to take years. The Persian Gulf states and Jordan have suffered damage to radar and air defense assets while assuming additional security risks.
European countries have borne the costs of munitions and military operations, alongside an energy shock that has intensified public anger over the cost of living.
Yet the financial figures tell only part of the story. The more fundamental question is whether the policies driving these expenditures serve the interests of the governments and populations bearing the costs.
The costs are real and continue to mount: public expenditure, depleted interceptor stockpiles, damaged radars and military bases, and the heightened risk of retaliation against countries drawn into a war beyond their borders. Meanwhile, rising fuel, food, and housing costs have placed additional pressure on ordinary households, deepening public frustration with government decisions.
Israel’s regional military campaign has drawn its partners further into a confrontation whose consequences extend well beyond the immediate battlefield. For these governments, the challenge is no longer simply how to sustain their support for Israel, but how to justify its mounting costs to their own populations.
The question is how much more they are willing to spend, how much additional risk they are prepared to accept, and how long their citizens will continue to support a policy whose burdens are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
South Korea is rebelling against U.S. dominance. It is witnessing a formidable opposition movement against the United States’ historic control over the Asian country’s military forces.
There is also growing pressure on the South Korean government to refuse demands by U.S. President Donald Trump for Korean troops to deploy in the Persian Gulf.
A major driver of this surging opposition movement is the widely held concern that Washington is maneuvering South Korea to fight a war with China.
Political analyst KJ Noh explains that the Korean people perceive the United States as positioning their country as a proxy to fight an eventual war with China, in a similar way to how Ukraine is being used as a front line to provoke Russia.
“The U.S. empire is making South Korea into the next Ukraine,” says KJ Noh. “It is weaponizing South Korea.”
This is analogous to how Ukraine was groomed and weaponized since 2014 to serve as a proxy for the U.S. and NATO to confront Russia.
He points out that China has always been the main target for American imperial planners seeking to extend U.S. hegemony. Pentagon Generals have openly spoken about going to war with China since 2025. Several strategic documents cite the imperative of confronting China for the U.S. to pursue its ambitions of global dominance.
Recently, the American commander in South Korea, General Xavier Brunson, referred to the country as “a dagger pointed at China” and “an unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier.” Such brazen comments have sparked even broader opposition.
KJ Noh contends that U.S. strategists assumed defeating Russia and Iran would be relatively easy, paving the way for the main target: China. However, the protracted war in Ukraine and Trump’s debacle in the Persian Gulf have delayed the war plan against China.
Nevertheless, Korean people understand that when the U.S. empire gets around to attacking China, their country will be deployed as Uncle Sam’s proxy.
Historically, for the past 76 years, Washington has exerted full control over the South Korean military. This was enabled by the U.S. using fascist collaborators from the Second World War to control South Korea – a legacy that persists among the deep state in South Korea.
KJ Noh surveys a history of genocidal violence perpetrated by the U.S. empire in South Korea to wipe out political opposition movements. The scale of mass murder and mass graves is shocking and hardly known in the West.
Despite the brutal oppression over many decades, there is still a defiant consciousness among Koreans who refuse to be vassals of the U.S.
Koreans do not want to do Uncle Sam’s dirty work any longer, and they do not want their country to be dragooned into a proxy war against their Asian neighbor, China, with which much of the Korean economy has beneficial relations.
This is why Koreans are demanding that the United States finally hand over Operational Control of the country’s military. President Lee Jae-myung reflects the popular will by calling on Washington to comply. It is also why the Korean people and government are refusing Trump’s peevish calls for deployment in the Persian Gulf. Given the history of loyal Korean service in U.S. wars, this latest defiance is a watershed in relations.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei says a meeting in Tehran with senior officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia could lay the groundwork for a regional security framework based on the interests and decisions of countries in the region.
Speaking at a weekly press conference on Monday, Baghaei said Tehran would host Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Pakistan’s army chief and Turkey’s intelligence chief as part of an initiative to discuss regional security.
He stated that the initiative was proposed during Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir’s visit to Tehran and was welcomed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Responding to a question from IRNA about the purpose and format of the gathering, Baghaei said the participation of senior officials from the three countries reflected efforts to explore mechanisms for regional security.
“From our perspective, the fact that regional countries are seeking to establish, or at least consider, regional security mechanisms based on their own interests and concerns is a welcome development,” he said.
“This meeting could serve as a prelude to further steps toward shaping endogenous security, an issue we have insisted on for decades. We have consistently emphasized that regional security can only be ensured by relying on the will and security considerations of the countries of the region,” Baghaei added.
He noted that developments over the past two years, particularly the past eight months, had demonstrated the importance of cooperation among regional countries.
“Recent events have shown that sustainable and reliable security in our region can only be achieved through building trust and cooperation among regional countries,” the spokesman said.
Baghaei said the visiting officials would hold discussions with the Iranian president and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
As this is the first meeting of its kind, he said, a range of issues would be on the agenda, with regional security challenges expected to feature prominently.
“Such a meeting cannot be held without taking into account the consequences of the United States’ military aggression against Iran for the security of the entire region,” Baghaei said, describing the issue as another important subject that should be considered within the framework of regional security discussions.
Deputy Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Bagheri Kani said the three senior officials are scheduled to meet with SNSC Secretary Major General Mohsen Rezaei and participate in a joint session on Monday.
Regional countries must strengthen capabilities to counter Israel
Responding to reports of disagreements between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli army chief over a possible attack on Iran, Baghaei said such differences would have no impact on Iran’s defensive preparedness.
“Despite possible differences in tactics, this group is united in its aggression and expansionism,” he said, adding that the regime’s actions across the region showed it was pursuing a common course aimed at undermining regional security.
He stressed that regional countries must enhance their capabilities to confront the Israeli regime’s threats and destabilizing actions.
Iran unconcerned about who rules in Israeli regime
Commenting on the upcoming Knesset elections in the occupied territories, Baghaei dismissed the process as a genuine democratic election, describing it instead as competition among rival groups seeking to commit greater crimes.
“For us, it makes no difference who ultimately takes the helm of the Zionist regime,” he said, noting that its record had brought nothing to the region but violence and bloodshed.
Armed forces will firmly counter threats
Responding to reports about the deployment of drone bases near Iran, Baghaei said Iran’s relevant authorities were closely monitoring developments surrounding the country, including reports of drone bases near its borders and Ukrainian activities in Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
“Those responsible for monitoring these developments are following the situation carefully and will act whenever necessary to defend the country and repel hostile actions and threats,” he said.
He emphasized that Iran’s armed forces had firmly defended the country whenever threats or hostile activities targeted its territory and would continue to do so.
Europe part of the problem
Baghaei expressed doubt that European countries had genuinely changed their approach toward Iran, pointing out that their renewed emphasis on diplomacy could amount to a political gesture.
He slammed Europeans for contributing to the crisis by aligning with the United States over the so-called snapback mechanism and failing to condemn US-Israeli military aggression against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Baghaei said Tehran hoped the three European countries would assess regional developments more realistically and adopt an independent and constructive approach toward West Asian affairs.
Brazilian people resisted unfair pressure
Commenting on Brazil’s presidential election and the defeat of the right-wing camp aligned with US President Donald Trump, Baghaei said the outcome demonstrated the Brazilian people’s determination to make independent political choices.
“The people of Brazil showed that they would not submit to misleading narratives and unjustified pressure, and that they would choose what they consider to be in their country’s best interests,” he said.
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News.
Following the report, the topic “Japanese drama Vivant smears China” quickly became a trending topic on Chinese social media.
One Chinese netizen Luoxuchen noted that while previous content avoided sensitive topics by setting the story in a fictional country, this season directly names China, signaling that anti-China narratives in Japanese cultural entertainment have shed their disguise and become open.
Some netizens pointed out that Japan’s acts of distorting history are commonplace. “This is a familiar tactic of Japan, and vigilance must never be relaxed.”
The drama has even drawn criticism from some Japanese netizens. One netizen and history scholar @mas_yamazaki said that while the drama explicitly names “China,” it portrays Chinese people as “cruel,” “stupid” and “incompetent,” shows viewers weekly scenes of Japanese people being brutally tortured, and then coolly depicts SDF members slaughtering dozens of the “evil Chinese.”
“TBS broadcast this kind of drama in 2026, with major companies such as Japan Airlines as sponsors. The country is sick,” the netizen said.
“I’m quietly intrigued by the process of how content like this gets approved within the framework of commercial broadcasting,” another Japanese netizen @kyou_kore_mite wrote.
In the 2026 defense white paper released in August, Japan smeared and accused China, hyped up the “China threat,” while continuously accelerating its remilitarization.
China has already repeatedly urged Japan to reflect on its historical crimes, earnestly draw lessons from history, stop making excuses for its military buildup, and not go further down the wrong path, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian during a press conference.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared a new military operation in the occupied West Bank to collectively punish the people of al-Khalil, all in the lead-up to the scheduled national elections early next week. Is the Premier playing with fire?
Following years of ever-escalating settler violence and the intensification of Israel’s military occupation across the occupied West Bank, two Palestinian men in their twenties – Hamouda and Firas al-Ja’ba – decided to carry out a resistance operation against an Israeli army guard post.
The two resistance fighters carried out their attack, injuring four Israeli soldiers and killing two, using pistols and a rifle near the Farsh al-Hawa checkpoint in al-Khalil. The Israeli army called in backup, leading to an armed clash in which both of the Palestinians were killed during a 20-minute clash.
From the CCTV footage of the clash, it appears as if the two Palestinians were not professionally trained and acted alone. No Palestinian movement claimed the attack, although it was widely praised. Israel was quick to blame Hamas and then launch a new military campaign targeting the entire city of al-Khalil.
There are a number of reasons that the attack, which, although the most significant carried out in the West Bank in over a year, is not exactly unusual, has been reacted to in the way we see today.
One reason for this enormous overreaction is that Netanyahu is looking for a boost in the polls. He evidently believes that by launching a brutal crackdown in the West Bank, his population will respond positively and he may win some more votes come Tuesday.
This is why the Israeli Prime Minister claimed that the planned campaign against al-Khalil will be an operation “unlike any seen since the Six-Day War”. He is trying to play on Israeli nationalism, referencing the June 1967 war, during which the Israelis occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Evidently, this is hyperbole, but it doesn’t mean that the campaign will not be brutal.
Another reason why the attack has been transformed into such a major issue is that it is massively embarrassing to both the Israeli army and Netanyahu personally. Although the two Palestinian fighters do not appear to have had any professional training and did not act on behalf of any resistance group, the Israeli media, military, and government are saying the opposite.
The Israelis are claiming that Hamas was involved; they are also spinning a hero story that by calling in backup they managed to thwart a much larger attack that was planned on Israeli settlers and that what happened was actually a success story of sorts.
This is because the truth exposes the unprofessionalism and cowardice of the Israeli occupation soldiers. Two untrained individuals managed to kill a Staff Sergeant and a Sergeant, injured four others, while all the female soldiers on scene hid from the attackers. In addition to this, it took 20 minutes for them to take care of the threat posed to their forces; they also needed to call in backup despite clearly outnumbering the two gunmen already. Accepting the reality would mean accepting that the army is pretty incompetent, and the Israeli public will believe any narrative that allows them to ignore this truth.
Another element of this is that if you tell the public that the Israeli army managed to thwart a major attack, it shows that under Netanyahu’s leadership, he has learned the lesson from October 7, 2023. The narrative being sold to Israelis is that now the army is acting pre-emptively; it is launching a major campaign to prevent another major attack like the one that happened on October 7. Israelis also simply enjoy watching Palestinians suffer.
However, by launching such a collective punishment campaign, there is a chance that the Israelis could end up getting burned, even if not immediately. West Bank Palestinians have been placed under tremendous pressure; by launching an intensive campaign of this nature, it could end up pushing some people over the edge.
Although the rhetoric surrounding the campaign suggests that the Israeli military is seeking to turn the largest populated city in the occupied West Bank into Gaza, this is unlikely to be what they will do. Instead, they will carry out raids, make life an inconvenience, even more than before, likely killing some innocent people while kidnapping random Palestinians while going through their neighborhoods.
The most intensity will be focused on a few specific neighborhoods that will get the worst treatment. But escalating too hard, too fast, could end up triggering a unifying event, especially due to the Israeli soldiers being psychotic and not even following their own rules. Ultimately, it is because of the checkpoints, killings, torture, and daily harassment that Palestinians carry out resistance attacks like the one we saw this Friday morning.
It is only a matter of time until the pressure being placed upon the people of the West Bank will explode. What makes this predicament starkly different from that of Gaza is that when the situation deteriorates, the Israelis have already entrenched themselves so deeply within that territory that they are extremely exposed.
Netanyahu loves to pledge his intentions to collapse the Palestinian Authority (PA) and annex the West Bank, but this is just posturing for gullible Israeli fanatics who don’t understand how everything works. If the PA does collapse and there is a push to annex the territory officially, then the settlements will be indefensible.
Just as the Israeli public truly believes that they have “the most moral army on earth”, they also believe that they are physically superior too. The former is about as accurate as the latter.
During the Gaza Genocide, the West Bank strategy has been to subdue the Palestinians through brute force and to collaborate with the PA in order to ensure there is no major uprising. It has, until now, worked. However, that strategy of constant torment and increasing pressure also “worked” until October 7, 2023.
People will not live under such horrendous conditions forever; it is only a matter of time before the situation there dramatically changes. Such a shift could occur over something relatively small. When you constantly play with fire, you get burnt.
If the West Bank’s population were to enter a sustained popular uprising, the Israeli military would struggle to subdue it. In the event that other fronts of its regional war were to open, this could be a major strategic catastrophe.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
The speaker of the Yemeni House of Representatives has denounced the European Parliament’s push to blacklist the Ansarullah resistance movement, saying the step is rooted in hypocrisy and double standards.
In a statement on Saturday, Yahya Ali Ahmed al-Raee emphasized that the legislature’s stance on Yemen is nothing more than a political cover for the war crimes being perpetrated by Saudi Arabia and its forces against the Yemeni nation.
“The European Parliament’s latest resolution is a clear sign of double standards and hypocrisy. It is an attempt to distort the position of the Sana’a-based Yemeni government, and blatantly ignores its repeated guarantees and commitment to international maritime security,” he noted.
Raee stated that the European Parliament should have designated Israel as the source of terrorism, given the genocidal crimes it is committing in the Gaza Strip.
The senior Yemeni official noted that the legislative body of the European Union has turned a blind eye to the crimes of genocide, murder, siege, and starvation that the Yemeni people have been enduring for more than 12 years as a result of vicious Saudi assaults and blockade.
He also called on the European Parliament to dispatch a parliamentary delegation to Yemen and document the firsthand crimes and aggression that Saudi Arabia is committing against the Yemeni people.
On Thursday, the European Parliament called on the Council of the European Union to designate Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement as a terrorist organization, including its political and military wings, leadership, and military and security apparatus.
In a resolution, the lawmakers also called for dismantling the group’s funding channels and freezing its funds, economic resources, and assets belonging to entities facilitating its activities.
The resolution strongly condemned retaliatory Yemeni missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, as well as attacks targeting energy infrastructure and commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
The Sana’a administration announced a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia on July 20, in retaliation for “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen that has continued for almost 12 years.
The Yemeni military has reported multiple successful operations targeting ships associated with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies enacted a blockade on Yemen and initiated a large-scale war on the Arab country, with support from the United States and various Western nations in terms of military, political, and logistical resources.
The war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemenis. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia has not succeeded in achieving its goal of restoring a puppet government that aligns with its interests.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf says a United Arab Emirates diplomat’s bid to become the next United Nations secretary-general aims to clear the diplomatic runway for Israel’s expansionist and aggressive ambitions under the so-called “Greater Israel” scheme.
Qalibaf made the remarks in a post on X on Sunday, saying UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh’s candidacy for the UN’s top job also aims to whitewash Israel’s “systematic genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
He added that defending the Gaza tragedy had become a résumé for the UAE’s decision to seek the UN post, drawing a comparison between the country’s pursuit of the position and a fox seeking a job guarding a henhouse.
“Defending the Gaza tragedy is the résumé; the fox is updating the LinkedIn profile to apply for the henhouse guard job,” the top Iranian parliamentarian wrote.
Qalibaf’s post came after Nusseibeh announced her candidacy for the post of United Nations secretary-general on Wednesday, becoming the first woman to seek to lead the world body in its 80-year history.
Nusseibeh, a former UAE ambassador to the UN for more than a decade, brings Palestinian roots and defense of her country’s historic relations with Israel to her candidacy.
She has also faced sharp criticism over the UAE’s alleged role in backing paramilitary fighters who have killed thousands in Sudan’s civil war. The UAE has denied the claims.
In a post on her X, Nusseibeh said she is entering the race because the UN needs to act more urgently, bring people together, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results.
“That is how we rebuild trust in the United Nations and ensure it delivers meaningful change for the people it exists to serve,” she wrote.
More than 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on the beseiged territory.
Pakistan has reopened a major border crossing with Iran that handles key energy and commodity supplies between the two countries amid improved security in the region.
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported on Sunday that the Gabd-Rimdan border crossing, also known as Gate 250, in the country’s Gwadar region, had reopened a day earlier following a weeklong suspension that began on October 17.
The report quoted Mir Naveed Jan Kalmati, president of the Gwadar Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as saying that import and export operations between Pakistan and Iran had resumed.
It said the decision came amid dwindling LPG supplies in Pakistan ahead of the winter season.
The closure of the border crossing on October 17 left hundreds of trucks stranded on both sides of the border.
An attack was also reported in the region earlier this week, when unidentified gunmen targeted parked trucks, setting dozens ablaze and damaging several others.
Dawn said local administrators had deployed additional forces to protect trade convoys before reopening the border crossing.
Meanwhile, Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan, Reza Amiri Moghadam, said in a post on his X account on Sunday that the disruption to cross-border trade between the two countries was mainly due to changes in Islamabad’s import rules.
He denied that Iran had made any decision to reduce LPG exports to Pakistan.
“… Changes in the implementation of Pakistan’s E-Form procedure for imports from Iran have created a situation in which traders are effectively and literally unable to dispatch cargo from Iran to Pakistan,” Amiri Moghadam said.
He said cross-border trade between Iran and Pakistan “serves the mutual interests of both countries and their people,” adding that Iran had made every possible effort to facilitate and promote trade with its “brotherly” neighbor.
The results of the first round of Brazil’s 2026 presidential election sparked a wave of analysis on the Brazilian left. With Flávio Bolsonaro ahead of Lula in the vote count, many commentators looked for explanations in evangelical voters’ behavior, moral conservatism, and the influence of religious leaders. These factors matter, but they do not explain everything. A significant portion of the electorate is dissatisfied with the cultural priorities of the left and, above all, with the perception that the state has lost its ability to guarantee public safety.
Public security occupies a central place in this debate. According to a Nexus/BTG poll released in July 2026, 30% of respondents identified violence, crime, or public security as the country’s main problem. This concern is particularly relevant among Flávio Bolsonaro’s supporters, for whom fighting crime is one of the main expectations for the next government.
The situation in Rio de Janeiro illustrates the scale of the problem. A study by the Federal Fluminense University’s Study Group on New Illegalisms and the Fogo Cruzado Institute estimated that, in 2024, approximately four million people in the metropolitan region lived under the control or influence of armed groups. This represented 34.9% of the region’s population. Criminal factions and militias exercise forms of territorial power that affect mobility, economic activity, and residents’ everyday lives. Some estimates suggest that between 60% and 70% of Rio de Janeiro’s territory is currently controlled by organized crime.
In this context, rhetoric emphasizing social rights, national sovereignty, and foreign policy can lose electoral appeal when it fails to offer convincing answers to everyday insecurity. Lula has advocated tackling organized crime through coordination among security forces, financial investigations, and the restoration of state control over affected territories. Yet these measures are only being emphasized now, following four years of what critics describe as utter neglect of public security, during which organized crime achieved historic levels of territorial expansion.
Flávio, meanwhile, is betting on a more punitive approach, including classifying criminal factions as narco-terrorist organizations. The dispute involves different conceptions of public security, but it also concerns each candidate’s ability to convey determination in confronting the problem. Whether designating these groups as terrorist organizations would actually help combat crime is a matter for a much longer debate. There is little doubt, however, that the label itself appeals to a substantial portion of the population living under the very real terror imposed by these criminals.
There is also a cultural dimension that the left frequently underestimates. Some voters reject the political vocabulary associated with the woke agenda and interpret certain progressive initiatives as attempts to impose new standards of behavior. The Supreme Federal Court’s draconian decision to recognize “transphobia” as a crime “equivalent to racism” has naturally provoked strongly negative reactions. After all, it seems perfectly normal that millions of Brazilians reject a ruling that can – and already does – place people in prison for up to five years for using the wrong pronoun when addressing transgender individuals.
Cultural discontent is often irresponsibly disdained in political analysis. Many commentators continue to treat voters as machines seeking constant material benefits, supposedly willing to sacrifice their values in exchange for meager welfare handouts – the principal achievement the Workers’ Party government has offered the Brazilian people so far. This analysis is mistaken. For many Brazilians, questions concerning their children’s education, religion, and the limits of state intervention are central political priorities. These voters will naturally tend to support the opposition in a national environment where state-run university hospitals – with the backing of the left-wing establishment – provide puberty blockers and other forms of “non-surgical intervention” to “transgender children.”
Contrary to the expectations of academic analysts disconnected from the country’s realities, foreign policy occupies a limited place in most people’s daily lives. Relations with the United States, Brazil’s role in BRICS, and its diplomatic position on Palestine are relevant issues, but they are unlikely to outweigh immediate concerns such as urban violence and cultural disputes.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s electoral support must be understood through this combination of factors, without attributing a single motivation to millions of voters. Public security, traditional values, dissatisfaction with the government, and rejection of certain progressive agendas can all converge in the same vote. If the left wants to improve its popularity, the better course of action is to reconsider its own mistakes, instead of inventing false explanations for the right’s growing support.
Even as the US diesel deal with Russia that was brokered by Donald Trump could help bring the price of oil down, the Democrats’ Russophobia “is leading them to try to sabotage the deal,” Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of CovertAction Magazine, tells Sputnik.
“Trump may be making some steps at the beginning to try to end the conflict in Ukraine, whereas the Democrats, I think, want to escalate that conflict. And they are totally irrational,” he adds.
Only a small number of Democrats opposed the anti-Russian sanctions bill, arguing that it is “totally irrational and is going to have a very negative effect on the US economy.”
“This is a case in point where this hysteria about Russia and Russophobia reaches the extent that the government is actually advocating for positions that are very harmful to the American economy and to American workers or farmers — even though the Democrats purport that they are more for the working people.”
American farmers complain that they cannot stay in business due to the cost of fuel, the soaring cost of living does a number on the budgets of working Americans, and many businesses in the US are struggling.
“Some of that also has to do with the war spending of the government and all the money they put into warfare, including Ukraine. That is the thing that Democrats are so hypocritical about. Because they just want to spend more and more billions on Ukraine,” notes Kuzmarov.
“That is what has been ruining the American economy and American society over decades now — the excessive military spending. The Democrats undercut their claim to be for the working people or for farmers if they are trying to sabotage an economic arrangement that would actually work to bring the cost of fuel down.”
Meanwhile, more and more Americans may start seeing the numerous opportunities for economic deals with Russia, potentially leading them to “put more and more pressure on the government to ease relations, restore regular diplomatic relations, end the war in Ukraine, stop the sanctions, and restore ties for the benefit of both countries.”
The Europeans are also “increasingly protesting their governments’ policies and the position they have taken against Russia,” seeing how purchasing more Russian oil and gas would have been beneficial to the European economies.
American people ended up being the losers in their government’s scheme to weaken Russia through the Ukrainian conflict, with billions of dollars that are “needed here in the United States” being lost in the process.
“Ukraine has sacrificed generations of its youth now, its economy has been devastated, and it has become more of an autocratic country under Volodymyr Zelensky,” Kuzmarov says, noting that US Democrats support the “destruction of Ukraine” rather than Ukraine itself.
“That has been destructive for everybody except the weapon contractors and maybe the Wall Street financial firms that own those weapon contractors.”
On October 22, The Washington Post reported that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had asked companies involved in Russian diesel imports to preserve relevant documents as Democrats prepared for a possible probe.
The Pentagon has designated cultural programs linked to China’s Confucius Institute as a national security threat, according to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He claims that the centers, which largely offer Chinese language courses on American college and university campuses, serve as a front for Beijing’s “propaganda” campaign – an allegation Chinese officials have previously denied.
In a video posted on Facebook on Friday, Hegseth said that while the US Congress had previously “banned” the Confucius Institutes from American educational institutions, they “came back disguised in new forms” and under new names.
Hegseth was apparently referring to several measures passed by Congress in recent years that stripped universities that hosted Confucius Institutes of federal funding. The pressure from the lawmakers has led to the closure of multiple centers on US soil.
According to Hegseth, over the past two months, the Department of War has “systematically dismantled” 80 new Chinese-backed cultural centers across 30 universities, adding “these sleeper organizations to our list of institutions that threaten our national security.”
The official alleged that the targeted entities had sought to “steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students,” but stopped short of providing any concrete evidence.
Back in 2020, the US Department of State designated Confucius Institutes as a “foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China,” requiring the institutions to regularly provide information regarding their Chinese personnel, recruitment, funding, and operations to the US government. The US Department of State characterized the China-funded cultural centers as “part of Beijing’s multifaceted propaganda efforts.”
Later that year, then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that the centers were working to recruit “spies and collaborators” at US colleges, and expressed hope that “we will get them all closed out.”
China’s Foreign Ministry at the time accused Pompeo of deliberately undermining cultural and educational exchanges “by discrediting Confucius Institutes… [out of] ideological bias and political expediency.”
Beijing urged Washington to “abandon the Cold War zero-sum mentality… [and to] stop interfering with normal people-to-people and cultural exchanges.”
Confucius Institutes have similarly come under government pressure in several other Western countries in recent years.
Last year, Australian media reported that six local universities had shut down Beijing-backed cultural centers amid government scrutiny, reducing the number of such entities in the country by half.
In 2020, several media outlets, including The Times, claimed that Sweden had become the first European nation to close all Confucius Institutes and related classrooms.
Israeli soldiers have looted and demolished the family home of Radwan Mortada, a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who directed the recent viral Al Jazeera 360 documentary “The Trap.” The filmexposes the surreptitious network and planning behind Israel’s notorious pager attack, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens wounded and maimed, and has become one of the channel’s most-watched in recent history.
Israel’s destruction of Mortada family home on October 17 has drawn condemnation from at least one international press freedom group, the Committee to Protect Journalists. On October 21, the organization issued a statement declaring that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military’s demolition of journalist Radwan Mortada’s family home in southern Lebanon. Just three weeks earlier, Mortada released an Al Jazeera documentary on the Israeli 2024 pager attack. In the days leading up to the demolition, Israeli soldiers launched a sound bomb, a tank tore down the entrance, and soldiers looted personal belongings. CPJ fears this destruction is in retaliation for Mortada’s work, marking another dangerous violation of international law and disregard for the press.”
Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada's investigation into Israel’s pager attacks is one of Al Jazeera most-watched documentaries
Mortada tells The Grayzone's @wyattreed13 how he tracked key players in the attack and got a hold of an unexploded pager
Speaking to The Grayzone, Mortada recalled how he learned that Israel’s military forces destroyed the estate he and his family had painstakingly constructed over almost a decade.
Pillaged and burned
“The story began on Friday, when someone sent me a photo of an Israeli Merkava tank parked right next to my house. A few days earlier, Israeli soldiers had arrived in a pickup truck and looted the contents of the house. And they destroyed the entrance” to the building as well, Mortada recounted.
“It never crossed my mind that they would plant explosives inside and blow it up, especially since my house is not in the Israeli-occupied area, there are no military positions nearby, and it is not a combat zone.”
Nevertheless, “at around 4 am on Saturday, they blew it up. I woke up to phone calls from neighbors in the village telling me, ‘The Israelis have blown up your house.’” Cell phone photos and footage confirmed the distressing news, he says.
“My village, Aita al-Jabal, is not under Israeli occupation, and my house is not within the so-called yellow line,” Mortada explains. There were no clashes or military activities in the area, he notes, and no military facilities or positions anywhere nearby. It is, he says, “a purely residential area.”
Exterior shots show the impressively detailed traditional Lebanese style home built by the Mortada family before Israeli soldiers looted the building and rigged it with explosives.
“Most importantly, the house was not destroyed by an airstrike or during any military confrontation,” he continues. “Israeli soldiers physically entered the property, planted explosives inside the house, and deliberately blew it up.”
While Mortada acknowledges he has no “concrete evidence” that Israel destroyed his family home in retaliation for the success of his documentary, he tells The Grayzone, “I do have suspicions, mainly because of the way the house was destroyed.”
Unlike other houses in the area that were damaged by airstrikes or shelling, Mortada notes, his house was deliberately blown up with explosives planted inside it. Israeli soldiers had occupied the house for several days before looting it and destroying it, video reviewed by The Grayzone shows.
“What makes this particularly suspicious is that my house is not in an Israeli-occupied area, nor is it within the so-called yellow line,” he says. “It is nowhere near a frontline or an active combat zone.”
He lamented, “Israeli hatred and vindictiveness seem to know no bounds.”
Mortada’s home in Aita al-Jabal was located approximately 4 kilometers outside of the so-called “Yellow Line,” a supposed buffer zone Israel unilaterally declared in Lebanese territory which it claims to be clearing of Hezbollah. If Israel’s soldiers didn’t simply rob and demolish the estate out of spite, it could signal an expansion of the areas Israel is targeting.
Interior photos provided by the Mortada family show the intricate stone archways which adorned their home prior to its demolition by Israel.
The first sign of trouble came when Israeli occupation forces assaulted a caretaker who had been living at the house with his family, looking after the garden, Mortada noted. “Israeli soldiers launched a stun grenade at him to force him and his family to leave the property.”
The grenade “was essentially a warning to the caretaker to leave the property with his family. Around the same time, Israeli forces also targeted a water tanker that was delivering water to the house. These incidents made it clear that they wanted him and his family to leave,” he says.
It’s a familiar feeling for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who’ve been forced to flee the region. Meanwhile, senior Israeli officials have spent months openly boasting of their efforts to destroy every Lebanese home south of the Litani River, and compare the campaign favorably to their systematic annihilation of Gaza. “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza,” Israeli defense minister Israel Katz declared in March.
In August, Katz deemed his mass displacement project – dubbed “Operation Silver Plow” – a success, crowing that residents of 24 villages in southern Lebanon now “have nowhere to return to; everything there has been destroyed.”
Now, the boasts have grown even bolder. With blue-and-white flags continuing to appear throughout swathes of occupied southern Lebanon, Israel’s leaders have eagerly provided live commentary of the slow-motion genocide. As an adoring audience cheered inside Israel’s Channel 14 studios on October 17, 2026, Katz declared that the number of villages annihilated by his forces had grown to 60. “Every single village — we’re talking about 23,000 homes — is in ruins.”
For Mortada, Israel’s aggression speaks for itself. “I believe Israel is undoubtedly carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon,” he says. “The objective, in my view, is clear: to prevent the people of southern Lebanon from returning to their villages and their land.”
In the past, “Israel at least attempted to justify its actions by claiming that it was targeting Hezbollah fighters or military positions. Today, however, it has become utterly brazen. Israeli officials openly speak about displacing the population, while their forces systematically destroy homes, infrastructure, and even bulldoze roads.”
“This is not simply about military operations. I believe it is a deliberate attempt to make entire villages uninhabitable and force their residents off their land permanently.”
“Perhaps, ultimately, this is also part of a broader ambition to realize the ideological vision of a so-called ‘Greater Israel,’” Mortada adds.
‘More than a home’
Combined with his testimony, photos of the now-destroyed home give a small glimpse of the loss incurred by the Mortada family when occupying Israeli soldiers seized everything of value and carried out a controlled demolition of the building.
“This house was much more than a home to us. It was a place where three generations of our family’s memories came together.”
Three generations of the Mortada family enjoying the home before its destruction by Israel. Pictured are Radwan Mortada; his daughter, Faya; his wife, Nohad, and his father, Nizar.
When Mortada’s father, Nizar, returned to Lebanon after two decades spent working in Libya, “his dream was to build a peaceful home where he and my mother could grow old together, surrounded by family and the land he had always loved.”
“He chose that particular spot for a very personal reason: There were several olive trees he had planted with his father, my grandfather, when he was just a little boy.”
With his golden years approaching, Mortada’s father expressed a desire to build his home beside those same trees. “For him, it was a way of returning to his childhood, his roots, and the memory of his own father,” he explains.
Mortada explained that the home also “carries the memory of my brother Ali,” who died in 2016 at age 29. Ali suffered medical malpractice after having contracted a bacterial infection during Beirut’s garbage crisis, a tragedy which Mortada says “reflected the corruption and failure of Lebanon’s political system.”
When Mortada family buried Ali in the village of Aita al-Jabal, the family resolved to build a home that would keep his memory alive, and bring them together in their time of grief. “Until then, my siblings, Jawad and Nada, and I had never felt such a deep connection to the village,” Mortada said. “Losing Ali changed that. We wanted to be close to him, and building the house became our way of keeping that connection alive.”
Photos provided by the Mortada family show Radwan’s now-deceased brother, Ali.
The family broke ground on the house in March 2016, shortly after his death.
Having “always loved traditional Lebanese architecture,” Mortada wanted the house to preserve as much as possible of the country’s rapidly-disappearing aesthetic traditions. “At a time when beautiful old houses were being demolished to make way for concrete buildings, we did the opposite,” he says. “We collected stones and architectural elements from ruined heritage homes and used them to create something beautiful again.”
The family spent nearly eight years working on it, carefully considering every detail.
“I approached the process as though I were painting a picture,” Mortada recalls. “It was a labor of love, and we poured so much of ourselves into it.”
Stained-glass windows and hand-painted frescoes lined the home’s walls and ceilings. It’s unclear exactly which paintings and treasures were looted by Israeli troops.
His wife, Nahod, recalled her husband’s excitement in a social media post explaining the significance of the home that Israel demolished later that day: “When I told my husband that I was pregnant with my first child, he was silent for a few seconds. His pupils were shrinking, he seemed to be doing a precise calculation. “When you give birth, the house will be finished,” he said with an enthusiasm I had never heard before.”
“He meticulously attended to every detail, carefully selected the furniture, altered some of the rooms to suit his unborn child, and even built a chicken coop “so my children can experience village life.””
In addition to paying tribute to the memory of his brother, the lovingly-constructed house was also the culmination of a lifetime of hopes and dreams of the entire family, Radwan Mortada tells The Grayzone.
“For my father, the house represented the peaceful retirement he had worked so hard for. For my mother, it was a family home filled with love. And for my siblings and me, it was a place where we could feel close to Ali,” he says.
“That is what the Israeli soldiers destroyed. Not simply walls and furniture, but a home built around the memories of people we loved, including those who are no longer with us.”
Left: Radwan’s brother, Jawad, and father, Nizar, are filling the backyard pool. Right: Radwan’s daughter, Faya, with her father and grandfather.
Compounding the pain of the loss of the family home, Mortada says, is “the feeling of abandonment” by the country’s leaders, who were imposed on Lebanon’s populace by the United States and Saudi Arabia in an effort to force Beirut to normalize relations with Israel. He names Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as among those principally responsible for the impunity enjoyed by Israel as it bulldozes dozens of villages in the South.
“The Lebanese government has done virtually nothing to protect the people of southern Lebanon or provide meaningful support to those who have lost their homes. People feel they have been left entirely on their own. We have seen no serious action capable of stopping the destruction, nor an adequate diplomatic or legal response, even at the level of the UN Security Council.”
“I believe what is happening in southern Lebanon amounts to ethnic cleansing. Homes are being destroyed, villages are being emptied, and people are being prevented from returning to their land, while the international community remains largely silent.”
Left: Nizar outside the gates of his newly-finished family home. Center and right: Radwan and his wife, Nohad, are seen playing with their daughter, Faya.
“We can rebuild a house. We have done it before, and I hope we will do it again. But how do you replace the years, the memories, and the love that went into creating it?”
“My father wanted to spend his final years beside the olive trees he planted with his father as a child. My siblings and I wanted to have a home near the grave of my brother, and I wanted my children, Faya and Azer, to grow up there, surrounded by our family’s memories. Is that too much to ask?”
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Good news, everyone. The war is over, at least in the United Arab Emirates. That is the only conclusion you could draw from this month’s headlines. On October 14, Bloomberg reported the International Energy Agency’s estimate that UAE oil supply hit a record 5.3 million barrels a day in September. Fujairah, the port the Emirates built so they would never have to worry about the Strait of Hormuz, loaded a record 2.62 million barrels a day. The giant Ruwais refinery was declared back at full capacity at the end of August. Pop the (non-alcoholic) champagne.
Then Karl Miller sent me his October 22 assessment of the UAE’s oil and gas system, and spoiled the party. The Emirates have indeed recovered their crude exports. What they have not recovered is everything else. The gas business is still limping, the petrochemical plants are starving for feedstock, and the fuel reserves that are supposed to carry the country through the next attack have been drained to about a third of their prewar level. The UAE is setting production records with its gas light on.
The safe haven that wasn’t
For years the UAE sold itself as the Switzerland of the Gulf: stable, diversified, insulated from the region’s chaos, a place where hedge funds and oil majors could sleep soundly. Then came 2026. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, UAE crude and condensate production fell from about 4.0 million barrels a day at the start of the year to an average of 2.4 million in March through May. A 40 percent collapse. Switzerland, it turns out, is within drone range of Iran.
The damage list reads like a sightseeing tour of Emirati industry. The Ruwais refining complex caught fire on March 10 and shut down. The Shah sour-gas plant, built to process 1.28 billion cubic feet a day, burned on March 16. The Habshan gas complex, the beating heart of the UAE’s gas system, was hit on April 3 and, in case anyone missed it, again on April 8. Borouge’s petrochemical plant was damaged on April 5. The Emirates Global Aluminium smelter went dark on March 28. And on May 17, a drone hit an electrical installation supporting the Barakah nuclear power plant, which is the sort of sentence nobody in Abu Dhabi ever wanted to read in a Security Council transcript.
Then there is Fujairah, the bypass port, the whole point of which was to keep UAE oil flowing no matter what happened at Hormuz. Reuters counts at least 19 attacks on it since the war began. In the week of March 16, loadings fell to 440,000 barrels a day. After a strike on May 4, refined-product exports essentially stopped for a month, with exactly one product tanker leaving between then and June 1. One. The insurance policy turned out to need insurance.
Available, just not working
Crude came back. Gas did not. ADNOC Gas’s second-quarter numbers compared with a year earlier: domestic gas production down 32.5 percent, export liquids such as LPG and naphtha down 54.5 percent, the company’s share of LNG down 63 percent. Export liquids sales fell from 252 to 117 trillion British thermal units. LNG sales fell about 71 percent. Revenue fell 39 percent, EBITDA 47 percent, net income 52 percent. That is $2.3 billion of revenue that evaporated in one quarter, at one company.
But my favorite statistic in Miller’s entire deck is this one. ADNOC Gas proudly reported that its assets were 99.9 percent available in the second quarter, better than the year before. Its actual asset utilization, meanwhile, fell from 80 percent to 54 percent. The plants were ready, willing and able. They just could not run, because the feedstock, the storage and the export routes they depend on had been knocked out. It is the corporate equivalent of announcing that your car is in perfect condition while it sits on blocks without wheels.
The recovery since then has been real but partial. Habshan’s gas supply was 85 percent restored as of August 10. Borouge had fixed its plant by the end of June, then discovered it had nothing to feed it, and ran at 60 percent utilization. The aluminium smelter had restarted a quarter of its pots by late August and now expects to finish the job sometime in early 2027. Repairs, as it happens, are faster than recoveries.
Running on fumes
Here is the number that should ruin a European energy minister’s weekend. On October 19, Fujairah held 7.25 million barrels of refined products. Before the war it held about 20.7 million. That is a 65 percent drop. Gasoline and naphtha stocks are down 87 percent. Fuel oil is down 53 percent. Diesel and jet fuel are down 23 percent, and fell 18 percent in a single week this month, just in time for winter.
Fujairah is not a corner gas station. It is one of the world’s great bunkering and product-trading hubs, the place where ships refuel and traders park cargoes between Asia and Europe. With a third of its normal stocks, it has about a third of its normal ability to absorb a shock. Miller’s arithmetic is unforgiving: lose a million barrels a day of export outlets with 10 million barrels of usable storage to fill, and you have roughly ten days before the oil fields have to shut in. Ten days. That is not a strategic reserve. That is a long weekend.
A bypass for a third of the traffic
The UAE’s answer to a closed Strait of Hormuz is the ADCOP pipeline from Habshan to Fujairah. It is designed to carry 1.5 million barrels a day, maybe 1.8 on a good day. ADNOC claims 4.85 million barrels a day of production capacity. So the escape hatch fits about a third of the passengers. A second pipeline is planned, for 2027, which will be a great comfort to anyone planning to hold this war in 2028.
And that record September? Some of it reflects genuine repairs. Some of it reflects the UAE’s exit from OPEC, which conveniently ended its production quotas in May. And some of it, by the IEA’s own account, came from drawing down inventories that were already at a record low. Selling your savings is a fine way to post record income for a month. It is not a business model. Meanwhile, across the region, refined-product shipments in September were 1.9 million barrels a day against 4.7 million before the war, and LPG shipments were 670,000 barrels a day against 1.5 million. The recovery is real for crude tankers. For everything else, it is a press release.
One more round, anyone?
To be fair, and Miller insists on being fair, nobody can prove that 30 to 40 percent of the UAE’s energy system is still destroyed. There is no complete public register of damage and repairs, and he gives full credit to the recoveries at Ruwais and in crude output. But the shape of the problem is plain. The UAE has rebuilt its ability to ship crude. Its gas business, its petrochemical feedstock and above all its fuel reserves remain badly depleted.
Which brings us to Washington’s latest bright idea: another round of strikes on Iran. Iran has already demonstrated, at least 19 times at Fujairah alone, that it can reach the UAE’s export system. The last time the Emirates absorbed a blow, they had 20 million barrels of products in Fujairah to soften it. Next time they will have about seven. Record output and empty tanks is not resilience. It is a country standing on the edge of a cliff and posting about the view.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has found a novel way of solving Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. By bombing Yemen.
Yes, you read that correctly. This week, Burnham authorized the deployment of British Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia for its war with Yemen.
Downing Street assured the British public that the deployment was for “defensive” operations only. The BBC and other British media outlets indulged this fantasy by repeating over and over that the Royal Air Force was being deployed for “defensive actions”. The RAF would not be engaging in attacking Yemen, it was claimed, and the British fighter jets were being sent to “protect” Saudi Arabia from “escalating” Houthi aggression.
Britain’s Minister of Defense Wes Streeting (a former health minister, please note) framed the RAF mission as necessary to counter instability in the Middle East and soaring energy prices. As if Britain was not the cause of instability and higher fuel costs by backing Trump’s aggression on Iran.
The Guardianreported: “The [British] military intervention [in Yemen] was partly justified because instability in the Middle East was driving up energy prices and affecting the cost of living.”
This logic is as absurd as it is gross deception.
Recall that Burnham was ushered into Downing Street in July to replace the hapless Keir Starmer as Labour prime minister. Burnham, formerly the Mayor of Manchester and posing with his working-class credentials, made a big public pitch that he would prioritize easing the cost-of-living crisis ravaging Britain.
However, since entering office, his most notable forays have been in foreign policy. For example, he has received the Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky in Downing Street with promises of more military aid in addition to the $20 billion that Britain has already provided (the second largest source of aid in Europe after Germany). Burnham has pledged to provide Ukraine with British blueprints for manufacturing cruise missiles.
Last month, Burnham announced that Britain was deploying an RAF in-air refuelling plane to “help” Saudi Arabia’s air strikes on Yemen. To allay public concerns about that move, Downing Street and the British media assured that the deployment was “defensive only” and for a limited period.
Ironically, Burnham made that announcement while travelling to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he hailed Britain for offering world leadership for peace and security.
Now, again this week, the RAF deployment is extended to sending Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. London is also providing a RAF A400M transport plane for troops and up to 100 military advisers.
This sounds like classic mission creep. Downing Street is aware of the exposure to public criticism. The prime minister’s office denied Britain was being dragged into the conflict. It said: “Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered, proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves from relentless Houthi attacks.”
The British government and media are distorting the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen as one of “aggression” by the Yemeni forces of Ansar Allah, referred to as “the Iran-backed Houthis”. That description makes the Yemenis sound like crazy terrorists who are being directed by Iran.
Here’s the BBC’s creative reporting: “The UK will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to defend Saudi Arabia in response to escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, the government has said.”
The BBC goes on: “The defensive mission will help defend Saudi cities and infrastructure – a move authorised by Prime Minister Andy Burnham – against aerial attacks by the Iran-backed group… Since September, Saudi Arabia has been struggling to defend its skies from Houthi attacks after a ceasefire of sorts in Yemen broke down.”
This is reality inversion by the British state-owned media outlet.
The ceasefire in Yemen was violated in mid-July when Saudi Arabia launched air strikes on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to target a delegation attending the state funeral of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, who was murdered in a U.S.-Israeli air strike on his family home in Tehran on February 28.
That ceasefire was called in 2022 to end a seven-year war of aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. The war began in 2015 to reinstate a Saudi puppet regime that the Ansar Allah-led Yemenis ousted in 2014. The Saudis bombed Yemen relentlessly for seven years with support of the United States, Britain, and France. An estimated 20,000 Yemenis were killed in air strikes, and around 300,000 died from a humanitarian blockade that the Western-backed Saudi coalition imposed on the country.
Britain’s military minister Wes Streeting referred to recent Yemeni strikes on Saudi Arabia as “despicable”. He mentioned a ballistic missile attack on October 10 on King Khalid international airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. At least 13 people were killed in the strike, and over 300 were injured.
The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces have also hit several other Saudi airports and key oil industry installations. The number of Saudi civilians killed in these attacks is relatively small, around 20, whereas Saudi warplanes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians since it broke the ceasefire in July. This week, eight Yemeni fishermen were killed in Saudi strikes. What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia is self-defense, not aggression.
London and its media propaganda are making out that Britain is “defending” Saudi Arabia. The reality is London is assisting Saudi aggression and war crimes.
Significantly, Streeting flew to Washington, DC, last week, where he met the war secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their agenda was about how to respond to “Houthi escalation.” Obviously, the junior partner got the memo: send warplanes to Yemen; we’re too busy with Iran.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an unprecedented social crisis is unfolding from poverty and a crippling cost of living. Charities report that four million families are having to go without adequate food or home heating because of soaring bills. Oxfam estimates that 13.5 million Britons, or a fifth of the population, are suffering from poverty. More than six million people rely on food charities for a modicum of sustenance.
It tells you everything about a state whose government does nothing about its own people’s dire needs but finds the resources to send warplanes to distant countries to bomb other poor people.
Andy Burnham is just another puppet who is assigned to put on a show in Downing Street for public appeasement. The imperial deep state has its hand up his rear. That’s mission creep in Downing Street.
Diplomacy, as the saying goes, is the art of the possible. A peaceful settlement to the war in Ukraine is possible if all sides were to engage in genuine diplomacy. That’s the easy, more civilized way.
If not, Russia will achieve peace the hard way through complete military victory.
Diplomacy is being prevented because European politicians, in particular, are held hostage by their own twisted ideology and false propaganda.
Ironically, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine was intended to “strategically defeat” Russia. It turns out, however, that it is the NATO axis that is staring at a historic defeat. The chaos surging across Europe is a manifestation of that failure, driven by higher energy prices and reckless, unsustainable militarism.
Thus, peace in Ukraine is concomitant with peace in Europe, and diplomacy would expedite that to obviate more instability and suffering.
But diplomacy is incompatible with parties who possess a diseased mentality of Russophobia.
Diplomatic engagement involves putting pragmatic interests first, ahead of ideological bias. The pragmatic interest of everyone surely should be to find an end to this nearly five-year war that has caused millions of casualties and runs the risk of escalating to a general war in Europe.
The Trump administration appears to be renewing peace efforts by dispatching a presidential envoy to Russia this week. Russian President Vladimir Putin cordially greeted American envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg. It is unimaginable that any European politician or envoy would be capable of that rudimentary courtesy. Putin reiterated that Russia’s door is open for negotiations.
Diplomacy can create a path to peace sooner, as internationally renowned Professor Jeffrey Sachs advocated in an eminently reasonable presentation this week.
Key issues for a peace agreement include: 1) indivisible security for all; 2) permanent neutrality status for Ukraine; 3) an armistice, not a temporary ceasefire, based on current lines of conflict; and 4) a declaration by NATO to halt its eastward expansion.
The framework for peace proposed by Sachs is similar to Russia’s position. It addresses the causes of conflict rather than only its symptoms.
Professor Sachs points out that these are not new principles. They were recognized and agreed upon in the past by the United States, its European allies, and Ukraine. In the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the U.S., Soviet Union, and European states accepted the principle that security is not a zero-sum game. All states must have a mutual right to security.
On the issue of permanent neutrality of Ukraine, that was declared in its constitution when it established independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The seeking of NATO membership for Ukraine overturns that principle. It was the United States under President GW Bush that initiated the drive for NATO membership with the Bucharest Declaration in 2008, which was repudiated by Russia with the warning that it would inevitably lead to conflict, as history proves.
Sachs also points out that the United States and its NATO allies must return to the pledge made to the Soviet Union in 1989 that there would be no eastward expansion of the military bloc. It is basic common sense that the encroachment of NATO forces on Russia’s borders is destabilizing and a source of confrontation. The relentless expansion is a violation of the principle of indivisible security. Would the United States accept a situation where Mexico was installing Russian or Chinese military forces?
As for the cessation of hostilities and the drawing of territorial lines, that is a thorny issue. Moscow claims that it has a historical right to the territories east and south of the Dniper River, including Sumy, Kharkov, Kherson and Odessa, in addition to the Donbass and, of course, Crimea.
What is unrealistic is for Ukraine to claim the total return of territories that Russia has taken since 2022 (and 2014 in the case of Crimea). From Russia’s point of view, and many international historians would concur, the post-1991 composition of Ukraine was an artifice. It arbitrarily incorporated lands that were historically always part of Russia. These lands were donated to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Soviet leaders in dubious schemes of demographic manipulation that did not respect the antecedent cultural Russian ties.
In any case, a framework for a permanent peaceful settlement is feasible if all sides engage in honest discussions that recognize the historical background.
When U.S. President Donald Trump met Russia’s Putin in Anchorage back in August 2025, there seemed to be an acceptance by the American side of Russia’s perspective on addressing “root causes”. Subsequently, Trump failed to follow through on what appeared to be a breakthrough meeting in Anchorage. Part of the problem was the Europeans and the Kiev regime thwarting Trump’s initiative and throwing obstacles in the way of negotiations. European leaders insisted on a temporary ceasefire and NATO peacekeepers, and have persisted in treating Russia like a pariah.
The international context has shifted in a way that makes Trump more amenable. His disastrous war with Iran has blown fuel prices sky-high for American consumers. With the mid-term elections only weeks away, the White House needs some good news to prevent a political wipeout for the Republicans.
Trump made a deal with Putin two weeks ago for diesel supplies from Russia to ease the pain at the pump for American voters. Essential to that is for Ukraine to stop air strikes on Russian oil facilities. The corrupt puppet president in Kiev, Vladimir Zelensky, is defying Trump with churlish remarks and threats to keep striking Russian oil refineries and depots.
One positive thing from the rift with Zelensky is Trump viewing him as the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump is now openly castigating the Ukrainian former comedian and calling for a new president in that country.
The cocaine addict Zelensky, with his loathsome war racketeering, is hanging on to power by a thread, and only because of continuing support from European leaders. These elitist European politicians are driven by anti-Russian ideology and servility to the futile geopolitical agenda of strategically defeating Russia. Europe is witnessing a social upheaval bordering on revolution over the fallout from the soaring cost of living, which is, in turn, a consequence of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. But the elites have no way to address the chaos because they are the problem.
For all his flaws, and there are many, at least Trump is willing to engage in diplomacy. He is not encumbered with hatred of Russia. His understanding of the root causes of the war may be limited. But at least his administration has the basic quality of respecting Russia as an equal and listening to Russia’s perspective. That is a modicum for negotiations and the art of the possible.
By contrast, the European elites and their pet regime in Kiev are incapable of engaging in any diplomacy. They are obsessed with unattainable and sinister ideological prejudices that hark back to Nazi Germany and the belief that Russians are “subhumans” to be conquered. They have no respect for Russia, nor are they capable of any intelligent, honest discussion about the causes of conflict.
Jeffrey Sachs contends that Trump could promptly end the war and create peace if he were to make a clear policy announcement that the United States is returning to a position whereby it respects indivisible security for all, including Russia, accepts permanent neutrality of Ukraine with no future as a NATO member, and declares that NATO ends its eastward expansion. A rational path to peace is possible.
There will be howls of condemnation from the Kiev regime and its European sponsors. There will be howls too from within the U.S. establishment who share the European ideology of demonizing and belligerence towards Russia. Trump may be so weakened by the mid-term elections that it is not politically possible for him to make such a policy announcement.
So be it. Russia will continue to win its military objectives and demand its rightful terms of peace. Diplomacy offers an easy way to peace. But if the West insists on the hard way, then Russia will deliver that way too. The Europeans and Kiev regime will pay an even higher price with their own implosion.
Given the gush of vitriol and condemnation since Oct. 9, when Donald Trump announced his deal to import 5 million metric tons of Russian diesel, roughly 37 million barrels, one would think the president had surrendered the United States’ sovereignty to the Kremlin, or handed over the Ukrainians to the Russian army, or rankly betrayed the Europeans or altogether renounced what we picturesquely call Western civilization.
This is, indeed, what we read daily in the corporate press these days and what we are supposed to think. It is 2016 redux, it seems. Another round of Russiagate may not be far off, given 16 House Democrats have introduced a Prohibit Corrupt Russia Oil Deals Act and 12 senators now attack the diesel accord as “a gift to our adversary.”
If there is one thing essential to recall about those dreary years it is that the wobbly-from-the-first Russiagate edifice, the whole of it, was made of mis– and disinformation, hyperbole, innuendo, extravagant abuses of office and propaganda incessantly disseminated in corporate media.
It is the same again as Trump tries once more to end the war in Ukraine and refashion East–West relations, a project the old “MICIMATT”— the military-industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academic and think tank blob — simply cannot abide.
Let us listen to this new round of rubbish with the recent past in mind.
“Donald Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain.” That is Tom Friedman, writing in The New York Times last week under the headline, “Trump’s Democracy–for–Diesel Deal Shames Us All.”
“When future students search online for ‘sellout,’ ‘appeaser’ or ‘traitor to his country’s core values,’” Friedman elaborates, “their two pictures will come up first, side by side.” There is no matching our Tom when it comes to overdrawn historical reference dressed up as intellectual gravitas.
Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect Tuesday under the headline, “Why Putin Is Now Our Ally,” is unhappy that Americans are not angrier and more contemptuous than they appear to be in response to Trump’s latest démarche to Russia.
“We’ve grown so inured to Trump’s outrages,” he writes, “that his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime hasn’t yet stoked the level of horror and rage it deserves.”
Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime. We’re back to this, are we?
We’re also back to the good old Trump–Putin “bromance” bit, it seems, as in “Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail.”
This bizarre suggestion of homophilia repeats a tiresome trope from the Russiagate years — never in the slightest documented, for the record — and this time comes from Tom Nichols, a neoliberal hack of long standing. Writing Oct. 18 in The Atlantic, Nichols wants us to see matters this way:
“Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful — and powerful — security arrangement in human history.”
Are we clear on all this? The corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev is America’s friend and partner, simple as that.
The Western order as we have it is the finest thing humanity has ever managed, and Donald J. Trump has forsaken this finest-ever order.
All because the Trumpster signed an agreement whereby the United States will purchase, all in, about two weeks’ worth of Russian diesel fuel.
Paranoia strikes deep, as should be plain to all as the imperium proceeds into its self-inflicted decline. Into the pages of The Atlantic it will creep whenever the topic is “Putin’s Russia” (as against “Russia”).
Trump’s ‘Simple’ Decision
How to account for this outpouring of nitwittery from all these pseuds? Why so suddenly does the world seem to be coming to an end? These are our questions.
Trump II has proven disastrously worse than Trump I, to state the obvious. He had a few good ideas the first time around: end the wars of adventure, bring the soldiers home, decommission NATO, a new détente with Moscow.
This time — and you have to credit the Trumpster for this, strange as it is to credit him with anything — he has only one. He still wants to restore relations with Russia to a working order of some kind, and this must begin with ending the war the Biden regime provoked very quickly after Trump was voted out of office.
Trump is a Manhattan property man for whom everything is transactional, we have to remember. Exploring “deals” does not figure at the higher end of statecraft — certainly not given all that is at issue between Russia and the West — but this is a question of method, not purpose. Let us not get lost in the former while losing sight of the latter.
Peaceful, constructive relations with Russia, based on an enduring settlement of benefit to all sides, are a good thing altogether to be welcomed, however often Americans and West Europeans are told any such eventuality would amount to the horror of horrors.
As everyone thinking about this has remarked, Trump’s immediate intent in striking his diesel deal is to get prices down as best he can before the midterm elections and to pretend the price crisis has causes other than the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran.
I’m for setting the politics aside. A few days’ worth of diesel — all that can possibly arrive from Russian refineries before Nov. 3 — won’t make any difference, and Trump cannot but know this.
My mind goes to a remark Trump made on Truth Social, his digital bullhorn, at the beginning of this week in response to all the shrieking and shouting that followed his Oct. 9 announcement:
“My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
It is important to read this together with other things the Trump regime has got up to lately. While the United States is in plausible-denial mode, Kiev reports that it has disrupted some of the early-warning satellite intelligence vital to Ukraine’s defenses.
Elon Musk, apparently after consultation with the White House, has restricted Ukraine’s use of Starshield, the military-grade version of the Starlink communications system.
These are day-to-day lifelines. So is the Prioritized Ukraine Requirement List, the arrangement whereby the United States sells arms to the Europeans, who send them on to Ukraine. To date the volume of shipments through the P.U.R.L. channel has come to $7 billion. Trump is reportedly threatening to end the program.
Atop all this he has suspended implementation of a sanctions bill he signed into law only a month ago. Concurrently, the Witkoff–Kushner duo presented Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator, with a new settlement proposal that reads to me like a condensed version of the very creditable 28–point plan they presented a year ago next month.
Something is afoot, it seems to me. I see a thought-through strategy in all this. I see renewed determination on Trump’s part.
Trump is out of the closet at last — and perfectly accurate — as he asserts that Zelensky is the principal impediment to a settlement accord and, so, should be either removed from office or forced to accept defeat and recognize Russia’s legitimate interests.
Trump’s new push to bring the Ukraine crisis to a close, to be clear on this point, is not a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. It is just the opposite.
There are a lot of reasons to question how far Trump will get either in ending the war or restoring relations with Russia to a livable détente. But if he maintains the present momentum, we may be watching the beginning of the endgame in Ukraine.
This is a “may,” conditional verb required. But it is this prospect that has all the warmongers in the MICIMATT complex in a dither.
Strange it will be if a president so wrong about so much manages to achieve the peace he is after. But maybe the Tom Friedmans and the Tom Nichols and the rest of their kind are useful as a mirror.
Maybe the extent of their panic is a measure of the Trumpster’s chances of success this time around.
Billionaire Elon Musk has accused US politicians of putting Kiev’s interests ahead of their own country’s, alleging that American taxpayer money sent to Ukraine is being laundered back into political campaigns.
Writing on X on Friday, the SpaceX founder suggested that financial interests could explain why some American lawmakers remain staunch supporters of Kiev in its conflict with Russia.
“Some of that US taxpayer money comes back through multiple laundry machines to fund political campaigns in America, which is why you see some politicians caring more about Ukraine than America!” Musk wrote, without identifying the beneficiaries.
In March, US outlet Just the News cited a declassified intelligence summary describing a plan to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid earmarked for clean-energy projects in Ukraine into then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Trump shared the report on Truth Social, while then-US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard reportedly asked officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to investigate whether the alleged scheme had been carried out.
Musk also accused Ukrainian elites of profiting from Western assistance while ordinary Ukrainians bear the human cost.
“The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches,” he wrote.
Kiev’s increasingly coercive mobilization campaign has been marked by numerous documented cases of forced detentions and violent confrontations involving recruitment officers. Corruption investigations have also exposed schemes allowing wealthier Ukrainians to evade military service.
Ukraine has been rocked by major corruption scandals involving figures close to Vladimir Zelensky. One centered on his longtime associate Timur Mindich and an alleged $100 million bribery and money-laundering operation at state nuclear energy company Energoatom. The scandal forced senior officials from office, including former presidential chief of staff Andrey Yermak, while Mindich fled Ukraine.
Ukrainian investigators have also uncovered what they say is fraud to the tune of $5.6 million involving military drones purchased at prices up to 90% above market rates.
Even Kiev’s staunchest European backers have criticized its failure to deliver promised anti-corruption reforms, warning that billions of euros in assistance could be withheld.
Zelensky is seeking at least €70 billion ($81 billion) in additional foreign assistance for 2027, estimating Ukraine’s total conflict-related spending needs for next year at €155 billion.
European Council President Antonio Costa said on Friday that the EU expects to cover roughly two-thirds of the additional funding, or around €46.7 billion, with a decision potentially coming in November. That sum would come on top of the €45 billion already earmarked for Kiev next year.
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