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Cashing in on war: Why stealing Russia’s assets actually makes things worse for the EU.

 

The loan is also, implicitly, seen as an invitation to keep the war going – thus not only keeping the Kiev regime afloat but complicating the prospects for a comprehensive settlement.

03 Dec 2025 , https://www.sott.net/article/503422-Cashing-in-on-war-Why-stealing-Russias-assets-actually-makes-things-worse-for-the-EU

For bloc taxpayers, it could mean Brussels has walked them into a fait accompli where they simply have to stump up for funding a corrupt regime in Kiev.

After a week of humiliation in which her much-touted plot to sequester Russian assets to fund Kiev’s war chest was outright rejected by both Belgium and the European Central Bank, European Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen has told EU member states they have two choices, both of which would send cash to Kiev’s coffers.

According to the embattled EC president, either EU countries will have to borrow cash for Ukraine and make their taxpayers foot the bill, or allow her to push through her – potentially illegal – “reparations plan” and kick the repayment can down the road.

Let’s take a look at what all the talk is about.

Russia’s frozen assets: How much is where?

It is known that Belgium-based clearinghouse Euroclear holds some €180 billion in Russian central-bank funds. Reports that Luxembourg held some €20 billion in Russian assets was denied by the country itself, which claimed it holds “less than €10,000.”

Switzerland, which is in neither the EU nor G7 and thus not subject to von der Leyen’s demands, has declared some 7.45 billion Swiss Francs (€8 billion).Germany has refused to disclose what it holds, citing data protection laws. Japan is thought to hold some €30 billion, while former French Finance Minister Bruno de Maire has spoken about immobilizing some €22.8 billion. The US is believed to hold around $5 billion.

What are the Russian assets frozen in the EU?

The assets mainly consist of European short- and mid-duration bonds that have mostly already come due. When the bonds matured, the principal was paid. Because Euroclear wasn’t prepared to hold that much money itself, the proceeds were invested by Euroclear’s house bank in an account at the European Central Bank. The money is earning interest that legally belongs to Euroclear, although in ordinary circumstances the clearinghouse would send those funds (minus fees) to the client (the Russian central bank).

What is the proposed reparations loan?

The plan entails the EU loaning Ukraine up to €140 billionusing the Russian assets as collateral. Technically, this would involve Euroclear making an interest-free loan of the same value as the Russian assets it holds.

The EU would sign for the cash and give it to Kiev where it would ostensibly be used to fight the war and cover budget expenses, although past experience indicates that much of it could end up in offshore accounts belonging to insiders close to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.

The sweetener for Kiev is that Ukraine only has to pay back the EU in the highly unlikely event that Russia loses the war and agrees to pay Ukraine reparations. In that case, Kiev would then have to pass those reparations back to Brussels, which would pay back Euroclear, which, in turn, would be able to honor its liability to the Russian central bank.

Why is Belgium afraid to go through with the scheme?

Continue reading →

December 12, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why this nuclear energy stock could face a meltdown in 2026

by Devesh Kuma, Dec 9, 2025, https://invezz.com/news/2025/12/09/why-this-nuclear-energy-stock-could-face-a-meltdown-in-2026/

  • Nuclear stocks soared in 2025 as AI-driven energy demand boosted investor enthusiasm.
  • Licensing deadlines, dilution, and execution challenges threaten its 2027–2028 targets.
  • High valuation and rising losses make this stock one of the most vulnerable nuclear plays in 2026.

At a time when the stock markets across the world are focusing on artificial intelligence, long-term players are also looking at sectors that will power the future of the AI space, most notably nuclear energy.

The year 2025 was massive for nuclear energy stocks, which saw exponential growth on the backs of AI boom and high-profile partnership.

Oklo stock (NYSE: OKLO) exploded nearly 379% in 2025 on soaring enthusiasm for small modular reactors, but is facing sharp headwinds next year in the form of regulatory approvals, dilution risks, and execution challenges.

As Oklo races against a July 2026 Department of Energy deadline and faces a fresh $1.5 billion share offering, 2026 will reveal whether the company’s promise is genuine or merely speculative froth.

Will Oklo stock clear the final hurdles?

Oklo’s entire business model hinges on clearing one of the nuclear industry’s most daunting challenges: winning approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while delivering a first-of-a-kind reactor on time and on budget.

The company completed Phase 1 of the NRC’s pre-application readiness assessment in July and plans to submit its Combined Operating License Application by late 2025, but the real tests arrive in 2026.

The agency is expected to issue a draft evaluation of Oklo’s Principal Design Criteria in early 2026, a shortened timeline compared to traditional reviews, yet still unproven territory.

Any regulatory surprise or request for additional design modifications could cascade into months of delays, directly threatening the company’s stated goal of reaching commercial operation at Idaho National Laboratory by late 2027 or early 2028.

What amplifies the risk is that Oklo remains entirely pre-revenue and dependent on federal support.

Cash burn is accelerating, with operating losses widening from $17.8 million in Q2 2024 to $28 million in Q2 2025, even as the company boasts a $683 million cash buffer.

Sky-high valuation and the reversal risk

The market has priced in perfection. Oklo’s stock has swung wildly from a low of $17.42 to a peak of $193.84 in 2025.

Analyst price targets diverge sharply, ranging from $14 to $175, reflecting deep uncertainty about whether the company can justify a $16.3 billion market capitalization without any revenue streams visible before 2027 at the earliest.

In his latest article in The Motley Fool, analyst Adam Spatacco outlined that the nuclear energy sector has already priced in a lot of future optimism.

In 2026, I think investors will witness sharp corrections across a number of nuclear energy stocks, with Oklo being by far the most vulnerable in my opinion.

Oklo’s aggressive dilution, boosting share count by roughly 50% since 2024, creates a precarious scenario.

Even if the Aurora reactor succeeds, the accumulated shareholder dilution may offset long-term returns.

Investors should weigh Oklo’s long-term promise against the near-term gauntlet of approvals and capital raises.

December 12, 2025 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

Schemes of Bankruptcy: The United Nations, Funding Dues and Human Rights

 Increasingly shrivelled and shrunken, the UN’s far from negligible role in seeking to conserve peace, flawed as it can be, or distributing aid and protecting human rights, risks vanishing into history.

11 December 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/schemes-of-bankruptcy-the-united-nations-funding-dues-and-human-rights/

The United Nations, in turning 80, has been berated, dismissed and libelled. In September, US President Donald Trump took a hearty swipe at the body’s alleged impotence. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he posed to gathered world leaders. All it seemed to do was “write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words and empty words don’t solve war.” Never once did he consider that many of the wars he has allegedly ended have not so much reached their pacific terminus as having gone into simmering storage.

While harsh geopolitics has become violently fashionable and sneery of international law, an organisation whose existence depends on solidarity, support and cooperation from its often uncooperative Member States, is seeing itself slide into what has been described as a “worsening liquidity crisis.” The crisis was given much stimulus by the organisation’s US$135 million deficit as it entered 2025. By September’s end, it had collected a mockingly inadequate 66.2 per cent of the year’s assessments.

In October, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in speaking to the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly responsible for the entity’s budget, warned that the organisation was facing a “race to bankruptcy” unless Member States forked out their dues. Last year, arrears totalled US$760 million. With the need to return credits worth US$300 million to Member States at the start of 2026, some 10 per cent of the budget would be emptied. “Any delays in collections early in the year [2026] will force us to reduce spending even more … and then potentially face the prospect of returning US$600 million in 2027, or about 20 per cent of the budget.”

While discussing finances can induce a coma, some preliminary discussion about the structure of contributions to the UN is necessary. Assessed or mandatory contributions for 2025, measured by the “capacity to pay” formula, comprised the regular budget of the organisation covering administrative and operational costs (approximately $US3.7 billion); funding for international tribunals ($US43 million); the Capital Master Plan covering the renovation of the UN headquarters in New York; and peacekeeping operations (US$5.4 billion). Voluntary contributions are self-explanatory enough, comprising optional donations from Member States and various other entities for humanitarian and development agencies, in addition to sustaining the broader UN system.

States discharging their obligations in making contributions to the regular budget receive proud mention in the Honour Roll of the UN. Those not doing so risk losing their vote in the organisation if their financial lethargy continues for two years or more after the due date of contributions – not that this injunction has been well observed. The United States remains famously tardy, and under Trump, boisterously so. As the body’s primary contributor to the regular budget – assessed as 22 per cent in 2025 – and 26 per cent to the peacekeeping budget, this is particularly galling.

Since January, the current administration has savaged funding to various UN bodies. On his first day of office, the President signed an executive order withdrawing his country from the World Health Organization due to its “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”

The UN Human Rights Council was the next fashioned target, with February’s withdrawal from the body justified on the basis that it had “protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny”.  In sympathy for Israel, funding was also frozen to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), citing the allegation that employees had been “involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.”

Revealing its crass, impulsive philistinism, the Trump administration proceeded to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in July. “UNESCO,” declared State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, “works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.” Amidst all of this, the parochial agenda was made clear: UNESCO, in admitting Palestine as a Member State was “highly problematic, contrary to US policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”

Washington has been singular in this regard only in terms of scale. China and Russia are also conspicuous in being late with their contributions while other Member States have simply pared back their UN contributions for reasons of defence and domestic expenditure. War mongering is proving catching, while peacemaking, despite the boasts of the US President, is falling out of vogue. A most conspicuous area to suffer has been human rights.  

In October 2025, the International Service for Human Rights identified an ongoing campaign to defund the UN human rights agenda being waged in the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee. In a report using material gathered from 37 diplomats, UN officials and experts, along with data analysis of UN documents and the organisation’s budget from 2019 to 2024, the ISHR identified a campaign of “coordinated obstruction” by Member States steered by China and Russia. Coupled with Washington and Beijing’s “failure to pay their assessments in full and on time (respectively)”, the UN’s means of funding and implementing its human rights programs has been stymied.  

Most to suffer has been the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which finds itself $90 million short of what it needs for 2025. Some 300 jobs have already been shed by the organisation. “Our resources have been slashed, along with funding for human rights organisations, including at the grassroots level, around the world,” warns UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk. “We are in survival mode.”  

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), responsible for humanitarian aid and crisis, has had to resort to the beggar bowl. Facing its own budgetary razor, the body is seeking US$23 billion as a matter of immediacy, with the hope that it will save 87 million lives. “Ultimately, in 2026,” the body announced on December 8, “the aim is to raise a total of US$33 billion to support 135 million people through 23 country operations and six plans for refugees and migrants.”

While wobbly, scarred by imperfections and marked by contentiousness, an organisation built from the ashes of murderous global conflict in 1945 risks becoming the very model of impotence Trump claims and no doubt wishes it to be. In this, he can count on a number of countries, friendly or adversarial to the US. Increasingly shrivelled and shrunken, the UN’s far from negligible role in seeking to conserve peace, flawed as it can be, or distributing aid and protecting human rights, risks vanishing into history.

December 12, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, politics international | Leave a comment

Nuclear power? Its account is (almost) OK

In France, it has been decided that widespread electrification will mean a nuclear revival. But the feasibility and viability of this revival are questionable. Technically, industrially… and also economically and financially. Laure Noualhat delivers a damning indictment of the cost of nuclear power for the coming years and envisions France defaulting on its debt due to this investment choice. A provocative statement designed to shock: intrigued, the public might be inclined to watch her documentary, ” 
Nuclear Power Will Ruin France, ” or read her book of the same name to discover figures recently validated by the Court of Auditors. Perhaps even underestimated.

Science involving nuclear power is nothing but the ruin of the state.

This new nuclear perspective rests on a risky gamble, devoid of any studies or clearly established facts. The long-awaited third multi-year energy program (PPE) has not yet been published, but the decision is already considered final: 
three pairs of EPR2 reactors have been announced, with four more expected to follow. And the current dithering at the highest levels of government will not allow for the swift publication in the Official Journal of the implementing decrees for the corresponding laws passed in 2019 and 2021, relating to renewable energies and nuclear power. While the second PPE was largely dominated by the question of the pace of reducing the share of nuclear energy in electricity production, this third version intends to prioritize nuclear power, while curbing the development of wind and solar power.

Plans drawn up without much detail regarding the financial arrangements. A vague understanding of the economic impact of such investments in France. This is the general observation, which is hardly reassuring given the sums involved.

Aside from the future design and construction of new reactors ( whose final design is not yet complete ), the nuclear sector faces expenses related, for example, to the annual operating costs of the existing fleet. While considered minor compared to the initial investment and expected to decrease continuously, these costs are actually increasing each year for an aging fleet due to so-called “refurbishment” investments and safety upgrades (the “major overhaul” plan). These are all bills to be paid, essential for ensuring the fleet’s operation beyond 40 or 50 years and beyond, and considerably larger than initially anticipated.

This is clearly considered in the numerous reports conducted by the Court of Auditors (CC) on EDF ( 
2012 report , 
updated in 2014 , 
2021 report ). Given the difficulty of extracting the precise elements for a comprehensive analysis of the situation from EDF’s financial reports, the Court’s reports prove to be a valuable journalistic contribution. Valuable, but still incomplete. The Court of Auditors itself admits that the reports are systematically produced with little cooperation from the national company: the CC emphasizes that projections sometimes had to be established “without EDF’s data,” disregarding “hidden costs,” “concealed amounts,” and “difficult calculations,” despite the various accounting methods that are always prone to significantly altering the evolution of the different parameters.

So much so that the CC finally admits to having to put forward the figures ‘with caution’, not without difficulty since EDF is playing with the withholding of sensitive information…………….

From this murky situation, Laure Noualhat takes on the almost sacred mission of reconstructing the future burden of nuclear power in France. And, in addition to the costs of the EPR2 reactors, it turns out that costs are also rising through operating expenses, maintenance investments, the cost of future expenses (decommissioning, waste and spent fuel management), changes in the fleet’s production, the level of economic lease payments…

This interview returns to the investment problems raised, the growing financial consequences of this technology, deemed totally unreasonable by Laure Noualhat.

Published in the  Reporterre  media collection  , the bias with which the book could be accused easily falls away: the figures are corroborated by the Court of Auditors itself.

The goal would therefore be to find €200-250 billion, a conservative estimate reconstructed by Laure Noualhat. This is equivalent to the investment costs for the construction of the 58 existing civilian reactors (€106 billion in 2018; the two reactors at Fessenheim have since been shut down ). However, the national electricity provider remains heavily indebted (by approximately €54 billion) and cannot claim to finance the new nuclear program on its own. Furthermore, the cost has increased by 100% since the announcement in 2019 (the initial estimate was €52.7 billion). Undoubtedly, all of this will require guarantees from the State.

However, there is nothing very attractive about it for investors given the hypothetical financial returns which could be considered insufficient over a period running from the construction phase to the operation phase, i.e. more than 60 years.

The costs of existing reactors will increase, particularly in the event of generic defects, combined with the risks associated with the aging of the fleet that will inevitably come to light. This growth will be difficult to control and anticipate. Therefore, given the significant investments it may require, this issue has become urgent, as it will severely impact the budget.

 The risk of insufficient performance of the nuclear fleet is among the most critical in the group’s risk assessment. It is directly affected by the occurrence of generic faults, which can reduce fleet availability while they are being addressed. This risk has been assigned the highest impact level and a control level ranging from medium to low.

It’s an open secret that all this is because the premature aging of internal materials and components has been known since 1986. The Energy Regulatory Commission itself noted that EDF believed that with the aging of the fleet, generic hazard problems would become more structural: this was the case during the episode of stress corrosion cracking discovered quite by chance, and there is reason to fear that others will occur.

Indeed. Just recently, an ASNR meeting revealed that new cracks measuring 2 to 3 millimeters had been detected and confirmed at the Civaux nuclear power plant on reactor 2 (1450 MW). The piping of the affected RRA circuit (the primary circuit under normal operating conditions) has reportedly already been dismantled and sent for analysis, suggesting that the cracks were detected well before this announcement. This specter of renewed stress corrosion cracking raises concerns about the technical and technological control of this accelerated aging process under irradiation and extreme operating conditions (temperature, pressure).

An already outdated figure

The Court of Auditors’ investigation into EDF is far from over. A new 
report was just published at the end of September 2025. The findings are alarming: EDF faces a massive investment challenge of €460 billion over 15 years…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Protected like few others, supported by the political class, the nuclear sector deviates from certain minimal procedures in terms of accounting and transparent financing. It is decidedly not subject to any of the economic rules that prevail in other industrial sectors.

The aim of this investigation, led by Laure Noualhat, was to shed more light on the expenses generated by undebated political decisions. Mission accomplished.

Will these colossal investments put an end to the new nuclear program in France? https://homonuclearus.fr/nucleaire-compte-presque-bon/?utm_source=Homo+nuclearus&utm_campaign=3e0276f781-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_12_08_27_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_338d2a581d-3e0276f781-433658419

December 12, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, France | Leave a comment

When it all comes crashing down: The aftermath of the AI boom.

Like financial crises of the past, an abrupt end to the AI bubble could inflict considerable economic pain on millions of people worldwide. But the alternative is the prolonging of an AI bubble that is increasingly unsustainable in both the financial and environmental senses, with the winners mainly being some of the wealthiest companies on the planet and their investors.

“Ultimately, for society’s sake, it would be a wonderful thing the faster this thing goes, because very few people are benefiting from it,”

By Jeremy Hsu, December 5, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/when-it-all-comes-crashing-down-the-aftermath-of-the-ai-boom/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20AI%20boom%20s%20aftermath&utm_campaign=20251207%20Monday%20Newsletter

Silicon Valley and its backers have placed a trillion-dollar bet on the idea that generative AI can transform the global economy and possibly pave the way for artificial general intelligence, systems that can exceed human capabilities. But multiple warning signs indicate that the marketing hype surrounding these investments has vastly overrated what current AI technology can achieve, creating an AI bubble with growing societal costs that everyone will pay for regardless of when and how the bubble bursts.

The history of AI development has been punctuated by boom-and-bust cycles (with the busts called AI winters) in the 1970s and 1980s. But there has never been an AI bubble like the one that began inflating around corporate and investor expectations since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. Tech companies are now spending between $72 billion and $125 billion per year each on purchasing vast arrays of AI computing chips and constructing massive data centers that can consume as much electricity as entire cities—and private investors continue to pour more money into the tech industry’s AI pursuits, sometimes at the expense of other sectors of the economy.

“What I see as a labor economist is we have starved everything to feed one mouth,” says Ron Hetrick, Principal Economist at Lightcast, a labor market analytics company. “These are now three years that we have foregone development in so many industries as we shove food into a mouth that’s already so full.”

That huge AI bet is increasingly looking like a bubble; it has buoyed both the stock market and a US economy otherwise struggling with rising unemployment, inflation, and the longest government shutdown in history. In September, Deutsche Bank warned that the United States could already be in an economic recession without the tech industry’s AI spending spree and cautioned that such spending cannot continue indefinitely. However it ends, the AI bubble’s most enduring legacy may be the global disruptions from any financial crisis that follows—and the societal costs already incurred from betting so heavily on energy-hungry data centers and AI chips that may suddenly become stranded assets.

Warning signs. Silicon Valley’s focus on developing ever-larger AI models has spurred a buildout of bigger data centers crammed with computing power. The staggering growth in AI compute demand would require tech companies to build $500 billion worth of data centers packed with chips each year—and companies would need to rake in $2 trillion in combined annual revenue to fund that buildout, according to a Bain & Company report. The report also estimates that the tech industry is likely to fall $800 billion short of the required revenue.

That shortfall is less surprising than it might seem. US Census Bureau data show that AI adoption by companies with more than 250 employees may have already peaked and began declining or flattening out this year.

Continue reading →

December 10, 2025 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

Japan pulls out of Vietnam nuclear project, complicating Hanoi’s power plans​

 Japan has dropped out of plans to build a major nuclear power plant in
Vietnam because the time frame is too tight, Japanese ambassador Naoki Ito told Reuters, potentially complicating Vietnam’s long-term strategy to
avoid new power shortages.

Vietnam, home to large manufacturing operations for multinationals including Samsung and Apple, has faced major power blackouts as demand from its huge industrial sector and expanding middle class often outpaces supplies, strained by increasingly frequent extreme weather, such as droughts and typhoons.

“The Japanese side is not in a position to implement the Ninh Thuan 2 project,” the ambassador to Vietnam said, referring to a plant with a planned capacity of 2 to 3.2 gigawatts. The project is part of Vietnam’s strategy to boost power generation capacity.

 Asahi Shimbun 8th Dec 2025, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16208469

December 10, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, Japan, Vietnam | Leave a comment

South Carolina’s abandoned nuclear plants could be revived as company offers $2.7 billion

 South Carolina´s stalled nuclear power project could finally finish
construction as a private company has offered to pay $2.7 billion to the
state-owned utility and a small share of the power if they can reach an
agreement to get the two reactors up and running. The half-built reactors
ended up so far behind schedule that the project was abandoned in 2017.


However, the potential deal is a long way from complete. There will be up
to two years of negotiations between utility Santee Cooper and Brookfield
Asset Management on the thousands and thousands of details. The deal would also let Brookfield keep at least 75% of the power generated by the new plant that they could mostly sell to whom they want, such as
energy-gobbling data centers. The exact amount of the rest that Santee
Cooper receives would be determined on how much the private company has to spend to get the reactors running.

 Daily Mail 9th Dec 2025, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-15368257/South-Carolinas-abandoned-nuclear-plants-revived-company-offers-2-7-billion.html

December 10, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Reeves’ £150 cut in UK’s energy bills will be nuked by Sizewell costs, ex-Labour donor claims

Dale Vince’s claims over the impact of paying for Sizewell C on energy bills is one of a number of hidden costs which could see consumers pay higher bills – instead of £150 less

David Maddox, Political Editor

Rachel Reeves’ pledge to take £150 off household energy bills could be wiped out because of the costs of nuclear energy, hidden green levies andnew levies being introduced by the energy regulator, it has been claimed.
In her Budget last week, the chancellor promised to take £150 off
household bills by scrapping the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme.
But former Labour donor and green entrepreneur Dale Vince has now claimed that the impact of paying for building nuclear energy capacity will largely wipe out the £150 because of the £1bn cost in the first year and ongoing costs for nuclear power.

 Independent 7th Dec 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reeves-energy-bill-discount-nuclear-power-budget-b2878907.html

December 9, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

Russia’s economy is not about to explode.

Yet western propagandists need you to believe that it will.

Ian Proud, Dec 06, 2025, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russias-economy-is-not-about-to-explode?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=180801359&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email;

I’ve been hearing since 2014 about the imminent implosion of Russia’s economy, but this has never looked likely to happen.

In a remarkable recent article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the remarkable claim that the ‘balance of advantage is shifting in favour of Ukraine,’ on the basis that Russia may soon go into economic meltdown. He goes on to say that if we walk away now, we will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.’

However, and conveniently, he does not elucidate how Ukraine is gaining the supposed upper-hand, nor how an implausible victory over Russia might be achieved. That is because there is no evidence to support his claims.

Evans-Pritchard’s CV doesn’t show any obvious subject matter expertise on Russia. But this should come as no surprise from a newspaper – the Telegraph – whose Ukraine watcher team is stuffed with Russophobes and ex-British military types who have a vested interested in maintaining the delusion of eventual Russian defeat.

Take Dom Nicholls, who co-hosts the telegraph’s Ukraine: the Latest podcast, which grandly describes itself as the ‘world’s most trusted and award winning podcast on the war,’ even though Nicholls’ CV suggests absolutely zero subject matter expertise on the issue of Russia. His podcast never departs from the UK government line that Putin must be defeated eventually, and that only more pressure will do the trick. Nor does he allow the podcast to drift too far into real evidence about the ability of Russia to fight on longer than Ukraine can fight on.

Then take Hamish De-Bretton Gordon, retired Colonel and Chemical weapons expert with even less expertise than Dom Nicholls, who, in any case, has no Russia expertise. He regularly posts fantastical articles with titles such as ‘Putin is eating his own supporters,’ and ‘Putin will be quaking in his boots today.’

It doesn’t matter that they have no understanding of the strategic balance of power in the Ukraine war. Facts and analysis are entirely redundant for people whose top, indeed, only priority is to peddle the latest lines from the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall. This is not journalism it is government propaganda. The BBC, which in any case is a state-owned broadcaster, is bad enough in its one-sided reporting, but the Telegraph is more sinister because of its infiltration by pseudo-government operatives covering as experts.

Characteristic of most western media commentary of the in Ukraine and, indeed, of the Ukraine crisis since it started, has been the complete lack of comparison.

Focus is always and only on the negative impacts of conflict on Russia itself. And, indeed, there have been negative consequences. Russia is subject to over 20,000 economic sanctions, locked out of most trade with the west, excluded from political dialogue as an article of diplomacy, cut off from most international sports and cultural events, hundreds of thousands of its troops killed or injured since the war started, its regular citizens increasingly restricted in their movements within Europe.

The economy of Russia today looks vastly different from that in 2014 when the crisis started. As President Putin recently pointed out, economic growth is sagging from its early war highs which were stimulated by a massive fiscal splurge. Interest rates and inflation remain worryingly high, labour shortages in some industries are growing, the population continues to age, and it remains over-reliant on fossil fuel exports.

Some of these issues are long-standing, while others have become more acute since the war began. Yet, these manifest limitations are never juxtaposed against the even greater challenges that Ukraine faces, which you will seldom hear mention of in the Telegraph.

The weight of western foreign policy, bolstered by willing pro-war reporters in the media, is that breaking Russia’s petroeconomic model will force Putin to back down, and that sanctions are helping to do just that.

So, let’s take a look at Ambrose-Pritchard’s key argument that Russia’s oil exports are collapsing on the back of Trump’s recent sanctioning of Rosneft and Lukoil. This might be persuasive if true and if Ukraine’s exports were somehow performing much better.

Yet, the early evidence suggests otherwise. US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil do appear dramatically to have reduced their volumes of trade. However, there is also evidence, that trade has simply been diverted to other Russian exporters of oil, with no significant net effect. Diversion, which has been widely reported by the media, is and has been a Russian tactic to minimise sanctions impact for over a decade, after all.

Bear in mind that Russian oil has been sanctioned in one way or another by the EU since 2014, and that there has been a progressive shutting down of gas exports since the war in Ukraine started. You would therefore expect that the total value of Russia’s exports had fallen.

Except that it hasn’t.

Since 2014, the average quarterly value of Russian exports has been a fraction above $100 bn. This takes account of the huge surge in export values shortly before the war started and throughout 2022 on the back of soaring oil prices. In the four quarters from Q4 2021 to Q3 2022, Russian exports averaged $150 bn (or $50 bn per month), 50% higher than the long-term average. But on the flip side, it also averages out against troughs, in particular after the oil price collapse of 2016 and during COVID.

In the first two quarters of 2025, Russian exports have come in at $98 bn, $2bn below the long-term average, although, in fact, identical to the two-year period from Q4 2019 through Q3 2021. So, no golden bullet evidence here of sanctions having a more than marginal impact at best, given Russia’s export pivot towards Asia and the global south.

In any case, the value of exports is a less helpful reference than the overall trade balance, i.e. the difference between exports and imports. It doesn’t matter how big a country’s exports are if they are importing more.

Let’s take a historical look back to the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Russia’s quarterly current account surplus – its balance of exports over imports – has averagfed $17.9 bn. Right now it is lower, at $11 bn with oil prices falling and imports higher than average. In 2022, Russia pulled in its highest ever current account surplus, with a quarterly average of $59.5 bn, when oil prices were soaring.

However, the key point is that Russia is able to stay in surplus every year and hasn’t experienced a full-year current account deficit since 1997, and even then it was less than $1 bn.

Consistently exporting more than it imports, Russia has built its international reserves over time, giving it resilience against external economic shocks and pressure. Russia’s international reserves have steadily grown from around $400 bn in late 2014, to $725 bn now. Even if western powers expropriated all of the approximately $300 bn in immobilised assets, Russia would still possess more than it had in 2014, the year the Ukraine crisis started.

In a quite bizarre comment, Evans-Pritchard says ‘Putin can keep selling Russia’s reserves of gold, all the way down to the Tsarist double eagles at the bottom of the vault beneath Neglinnaya Street,’ (the location of Russia’s Central Bank). This hints strongly, that Russia is on the verge of running out of gold, right?

And yet, Russia’s reserve stock of monetary gold has grown from $132 bn when the war started in 2022, to $299 bn today, which includes an increase of $17bn in October 2025.

I don’t say this out of any desire to prove Russia to be right, but rather from a determination to let our analysis of the situation to be driven by data, not vacuous sound bites.

The ridiculous announcements in the Daily Telegraph lack credibility precisely because they consciously and intentionally avoid hard evidence about Russia while avoiding all mention of Ukraine’s difficulties. Readers are invited to believe that Ukraine is doing just fine, and that if we just keep pumping money in, they will eventually win.

So, let’s look at Ukraine in comparison. Since 2014 through 2024, it has consistently imported more than it exports, with an average yearly trade deficit of $13.1 bn. During the first three full years of war, that rose on average to $25.6 bn, and in the first ten months of 2025, it is already at $39.8 bn. Expressed another way, Ukraine exported $24 bn less in 2024 than it did in 2021 and imported $2.5 bn more. War and European restrictions on the import of cheap Ukrainian agriculture have hit the value of its exports hard. That might bounce back when the war ends, even though Evans-Pritchard wants it to continue.

But, even so, Ukraine’s current account has shown an average deficit of $2.8 bn since 2014; the figure is so much lower than the trade balance because of big inflows of foreign donations, in particular in 2015 and in 2022, which led to a current account surplus in those years. Critically, while Ukraine had a current account surplus of $8bn in 2022, it slumped back into deficit in 2023, with a shortfall of $9.6 bn which rose to $15.1 bn in 2024. In the first 10 months of 2025, the deficit already stands at $26.9 bn.

That means Ukraine will need at least $30 bn in foreign exchange this year just to keep its currency afloat. The only credible way right now in which Ukraine can easily fill the hole in its international reserves is to receive donations from western nations. And as we are starting to see, in respect of Europe’s faltering efforts to agree a bizarrely named ‘reparations loan’, that is proving increasingly difficult because of Belgian and European Central Bank resistance.

So, War hungry pundits in the Telegraph talk about the imminent collapse of the Russian economy are only deflecting attention from the real problem. When the western money stops flooding into Ukraine, the country may quickly find itself having to devalue its currency and, in so doing, deal with spiralling inflation, high interest rates and a sovereign default.

Of course, Ukraine is already bankrupt, as it refuses to make payments on its existing debt while nonetheless asking for more loans. Western IFIs have conveniently turned a blind eye to this right back to 2015 when Ukraine defaulted on a loan it had received from Russia. They’ve done this under pressure from western governments who also, no doubt, drive outlandish Telegraph headlines about Russia’s imminent implosion.

The sad truth is, people like Evans-Pritchard need the war to continue so they have something to say. They certainly couldn’t care a jot about Ukraine itsel

December 7, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, Russia | Leave a comment

Europe could be on the hook for $160 billion to keep Ukraine afloat.

Belgium is holding the line on using Russia’s frozen assets for now, which leaves Europe obligated to keep the lights on and the war going

Ian Proud, Dec 04, 2025, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/europe-could-be-on-the-hook-for-160?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=180637110&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Below my article of yesterday in Responsible Statecraft on the issue of the spuriously named ‘reparations loan’ to Ukraine. Since going to print, the European Central Bank has come out to torpedo the Commission’s expropriation of $140 bn in immobilised Russian assets to fund the Ukrainian war effort. This should come as no surprise, as Christine Lagarde pointed out the risks at the October European Council meeting, and Bart de Wever leaned heavily on her advice in his subsequent remarks to the media.

Not surprisingly, western mainstream pro-war hacks have come out a-howling at this outrage. The eternally moronic Anders Aslund questioning the ECB’s right to have an opinion on European financial assistance to Ukraine. Bill Browder simply suggesting Europe should expropriate the funds anyway, even though they are housed in Belgium, and the Belgians won’t permit it.You can see why he made so much money in Russia in the nineties. Less clear which clown in Whitehall decided he should be knighted.

The level of idiocy is truly off the charts. And the clamour now is so loud simply because Ukraine will shortly run out of money, Europe will need to tip more money into the bottomless pit at Bankova, and they may well have to use funds from national budgets (even if it is packaged up as common EU debt).

Meanwhile, Belgian police have raied the premises of hte former EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, arresting her on suspicion of fraud at the College of Europe. Who is surprised that yet another unelected, unaccountable EU apparatchik is on the make?

Perhaps that’s why the Commission is so desperate to support the corrupt regime in Kyiv, as they are kindred spirits. More likely, they are merely stupid and have no self-awareness. Ursula von der Leyen seems to be carrying on regardless, as if nothing is untowards. driving towards the cliff edge at breakneck speed with her and Kaja Kallas’ feet firmly on the accelerator pedal. You couldn’t make it up….

I hope you find the article interesting.

Even if war ended tomorrow, Europe could be on the hook for 135 billion euros (nearly $160 billion) over the next two years to keep Ukraine afloat. Brussels does not appear to have a plan B up its sleeve.

I first warned in September 2024 that using immobilized Russian assets to fund war fighting in Ukraine would disincentivize Russia from suing for peace. Nothing has changed since then. Russia maintains the battlefield advantage, has the financial reserves, extremely low levels of debt by Western standards, and can afford to keep fighting, despite the human cost. Putin is self-evidently waiting the Europeans out, knowing they will run out of money before he does.

For now, his strategy appears to be working, because Ukraine has no money and Europe — unwilling to see Ukraine pushed into an unfavorable peace — is groaning under the obligation to find an answer. In May I also reported that “Ukraine is already asking for more money to continue fighting into 2026, a sure sign that President Volodmyr Zelensky has no plans to end the war.”

At that time, the likely cost of war fighting for another year was estimated at around $43.3 billion. The bill has since gone up to $63 billion in 2026 and, according to the IMF, $136.6 billion over the next four years.

Europe simply does not have this level of funding freely available. As a result, European political leaders are descending into panic mode as the chicken of Ukraine’s enormous budget shortfall comes home to roost.

That chicken, to quote the prime minister of Belgium, Bart de Wever, in remarks after the October European council meeting, is the $140 billion in immobilized Russian assets that the European Commission would like to use to back a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. Self-evidently, this money isn’t intended for reparations, but rather to soak up Ukraine’s expected deficits going forward.

All of the money would be pumped into Ukraine’s treasury to meet day to day expenses, with the defense bill alone costing $172 million every day right now, compared to $140 million per day one year ago. And on the basis that Ukraine’s budget estimates only ever go up and not down, that money won’t last forever.

At this point, one might be tempted to think that Ukraine’s vast defense spending, which accounts for around 63% of the Ukrainian government’s budget, will fall away if the war ends this year, in response to President Trump’s peace initiative. But such an assumption is, I fear, misplaced. Europe has been pressuring the U.S. not to cap the size of Ukraine’s near one million strong army in any peace deal. In a best-case scenario, Ukraine might decide in a graduated way to reduce the size of its army over time. But that would still leave a large budget black hole for some years to come. Yet a large army won’t pay for itself and the Europeans will be left to pay the bill.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Belgians are saying “non” to the use of immobilized assets in its country to fund Ukraine’s fiscal deficit. Prime Minister de Wever claims that doing so will derail U.S.-led efforts to bring the near four-year long war to a close, by disincentivizing Russia from settling, which takes us back to the point I made 15 months ago.

However, the deeper issue for Belgium is a fear that sanctioning the expropriation of Russian sovereign assets on shaky legal ground would shred its financial reputation and scare off investors from the developing world. Belgium-based Euroclear, where the immobilized Russian assets are held, has a stock of $4 trillion in sovereign assets from around the globe. Starting to eat the chicken of these assets, as Belgium’s prime minister puts it, by essentially lending those assets to Ukraine, could “damage Belgium’s reputation as a reliable financial hub and erode trust in the euro and the EU financial system.”

Predictably, that has led to a storm of protest from other European states that are piling increasing pressure on Belgium to relent and so free up the monies for Ukraine’s cause. But as de Wever has pointed out on numerous occasions, those European states, for example, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, are not offering to unleash immobilized Russian assets in their jurisdictions and so share the financial risk. Nor are they willing to back the loan of assets held in Belgium with guarantees to repay a proportion of the cost, should Russia mount a successful legal challenge after the war ends. So, for now, Belgium is holding out and blocking the loan, with few signs that it will back down.

As a result, the matter has been kicked back to December for a final decision buying time for the Eurocrats in Brussels to sway their recalcitrant Belgian hosts. If agreement cannot be reached, Ukraine faces the prospect of running out of money to fight, on the basis that it is locked out of access to Western capital markets, given its moratorium on the repayment of debt.

That leaves the European Commission in the position of possibly having to raise capital on the markets to make a non-repayable grant to Ukraine to cover its financing needs in 2026.

How did we end up here? Since 2024, Western sponsors of the war in Ukraine have progressively shifted from offering free cash to loans, most notably the last big G7 loan of $50 billion that was agreed in June of 2024. But with Ukraine’s national debt to GDP having risen from 49% in 2021 to 109% now, piling more debt on the war-ravaged country may literally equate to killing Ukraine with kindness.

The reparations loan was clearly intended as a means to make Russia pay so that neither Ukraine, nor Europe, had to. Efforts to find off-budget means to pay for the war in Ukraine have always been “an unseemly quest for alternatives to western taxpayers funding.” Put simply, cash-strapped European governments can’t easily afford to give Ukraine their own money at a time when their governments face rising political headwinds at home from nationalist parties.

Mainstream European political leaders have remained implacably set against the idea of bringing the senseless war in Ukraine to a much-needed close. They will pay the price for this at the polls in the coming years, as the big fiscal chicken of war spending pecks away at their legitimacy at home. This is all the more depressing for having been so utterly predictable.

December 6, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Russia Dangles Business Ties To U.S. at Europe’s Expense. Kremlin pitched White House on investments and industry to end war – today’s Wall Street Journal

American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.

2 Dec 2025 By Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon , Rebecca Ballhaus , Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson

Three powerful businessmen— two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rareearth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.

The two businessmen shared President Trump’s longheld approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.

“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”

Red lines

When a version of the 28point plan leaked earlier this month, it drew immediate protests. Leaders in Europe and Ukraine complained it reflected mostly Russian talking points and bulldozed through nearly all of Kyiv’s red lines. They weren’t assuaged even after administration officials assured them that the plan wasn’t set in stone, worried that Russia— after violently redrawing European borders—was being rewarded with commercial opportunities.

As Western leaders convened to digest the plan, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”

For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace efforts, one of these people said: “It’s Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to say, ‘Look, I’m settling this thing and there’s huge economic benefits for doing that for America, right?’” A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.

Trusted friends

One sign that he may be serious is that some of his mosttrusted friends, sanctioned billionaires from his St. Petersburg hometown—Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady—have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals, according to people familiar with the meetings and European security officials. That includes reviving the giant Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged by Ukrainian tactical divers, and under European Union sanctions.

Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.

Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.

Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.

There is no evidence that Witkoff, the White House or Kushner are briefed on these efforts or coordinating them. A person familiar with Witkoff’s thinking said the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.

Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time this week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.

‘Both sides’

“The Trump administration has gathered input from both the Ukrainians and Russians to formulate a peace deal that can stop the killing and bring this war to a close,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “As the President said, his national security team has made great progress over the past week, and the agreement will continue to be fine-tuned following conversations with officials from both sides.”

As Witkoff pursued talks with Dmitriev over nine months, some agencies inside the Trump administration had a limited view of his dealings with Moscow.

In the lead-up to an August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, Witkoff and Dmitriev discussed a prisoner exchange that would have been the largest bilateral swap in their countries’ history. The Central Intelligence Agency, which traditionally manages prisoner trades with Russia, wasn’t fully briefed on that proposed exchange. Nor was the State Department’s office for unjustly imprisoned Americans. The CIA didn’t return requests for comment. The State Department referred questions to the White House.

Career officials overseeing sanctions at the Treasury Department have at times learned details of Witkoff’s meetings with Moscow from their British counterparts.

In the days after Alaska, a European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump administration had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.

Witkoff has worked closely with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the special envoy for Ukraine, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has all but been frozen out of serious talks, and said he is leaving.

To understand the administration’s Russia negotiations, The Wall Street Journal spoke to dozens of officials, diplomats, and former and current intelligence officers from the U.S., Russia and Europe, and American lobbyists and investors close to the administration.

The picture that emerges is a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to cement a peace agreement with business deals.

‘ We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.’

Witkoff was just weeks into his new job as President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine negotiator when his office asked the Treasury Department for help allowing a sanctioned Russian businessman to visit Washington.

Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker with degrees from Harvard and Stanford, spoke Witkoff’s preferred language: business. He had invited Witkoff to Moscow in February and escorted him into a three-hour meeting with Putin to discuss the Ukraine war. But Dmitriev was persona non grata in the U.S, blocked by the Treasury in 2022 for his role leading his country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which it called a “slush fund for Vladimir Putin.”

Trump had told Witkoff he wanted the war to end and the administration was willing to take the risk of welcoming Putin’s emissary to Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had questions about the unique request, but ultimately signed off.

Dmitriev arrived at the White House on April 2 and presented a list of multibilliondollar business projects the two governments could pursue together. At one point, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Dmitriev that Putin needed to demonstrate he was serious about peace. But Dmitriev felt his businesslike rapport was breaking through. “We can transition i n v e s t m e n t trust into a political role,” he said in an unpublished interview that month.

In April, Dmitriev welcomed Witkoff to the St. Petersburg presidential library for another three-hour meeting with Putin. Witkoff took his own notes, relying on a Kremlin translator, then briefed the White House from the U.S. Embassy. That same month, European national security advisers planned to meet Witkoff in London to integrate him into their peace process. But he was busy with his other portfolio— negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza—and couldn’t make it. Afterward, one European official asked Witkoff to start speaking with allies over the secure fixed line Europe’s heads of state use to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Witkoff demurred, as he traveled too much to use the cumbersome system.

Dmitriev and Witkoff meanwhile were chatting regularly by phone about increasingly ambitious proposals. The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-andgas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said. “If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”

Into position

American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.

Exxon, billionaire investor Todd Boehly and others have explored buying assets owned by Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer. The U.S. sanctioned Lukoil in October to increase pressure on Moscow, prompting the company to put its overseas assets up for sale. Elliott Investment Management eyed buying a stake in a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas into Europe.

More recently, Kremlin–linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations, according to a European security official and a person familiar with the talks. Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited, these people said.

Beach, Trump Jr.’s college friend, was in talks to acquire 9.9% of an Arctic LNG project with Novatek, Russia’s secondlargest natural gas producer— which is partly owned by Timchenko — if the U.S. and U.K. remove sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts reviewed by the Journal.

In a statement, Beach said that partnering with Novatek would “strongly benefit any company committed to advancing American energy leadership,” and that his company, America First Global, “actively seeks investment opportunities that strengthen American interests around the world.” He said he “has never worked with Steve Witkoff” but is “extremely grateful” for the efforts Witkoff and others are making to end the war in Ukraine. Trump Jr. has told people he isn’t doing business with Beach.Lynch, the Miami-based investor, had been asking the U.S. government to allow him to bid on the sabotaged Nord Stream Pipeline 2 if it came up for auction in a Swiss bankruptcy proceeding. Lynch, who in 2022 was given a license by Treasury to complete the acquisition of the Swiss subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank, had been seeking a license for the pipeline since the Biden administration, but in April dialed up his lobbying efforts by hiring Ches McDowell, a friend of Trump Jr. He would pay Mc-Dowell’s firm $600,000 over the next six months. Lynch’s representatives reached out to Witkoff for a meeting.

The road to Miami

On Aug. 6, Witkoff flew to Moscow, at Putin’s invitation, for a meeting prepared only a few days in advance. Dmitriev walked him through Zaryadye Park overlooking the Moskva River, then escorted him to the Kremlin for another three-hour session with Russia’s leader. Putin mentioned wanting to meet with Trump personally. He gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

The next day, Witkoff dialed into a videoconference with officials and heads of state from top European allies, and explained the outlines of what he understood to be Putin’s offer. If Ukraine would surrender the remaining roughly 20% of Donetsk province that Russia had failed to conquer, Moscow would forfeit its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. The European officials were confused. Did Putin mean he would withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as Witkoff was suggesting? Or, more likely, was Putin merely promising to not conquer the thousands of square miles of those two provinces that, after years of bloody fighting, remained in Ukrainian hands? Either way, Ukraine was skeptical about the value of a promise from Putin.

Witkoff wanted to strike while the iron was hot and hold a summit without delay. Dmitriev was optimistic Witkoff had taken Russia’s sensitivities on board: “We believe Steve Witkoff and the Trump team are doing a great job to understand the Russian position to end the conflict,” he told the Journal, a few days before.

Failed summit

The Aug. 15 summit fell apart almost as soon as it began. Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump arrived on Air Force One, meeting Putin, his longtime adviser Yuri Ushakov, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin launched into a 1,000-year history lecture on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The two sides canceled a lunch and an afternoon session where they were meant to check through their other issues, like the exchange of prisoners. Witkoff left uncertain where things stood, but hopeful talks would accelerate soon.

In October, President Zelensky flew to Washington, hoping to secure long-range, U.S.made Tomahawk cruise missiles. His military wanted to cripple Russian refineries, pushing Moscow to negotiate on better terms. By the time Zelensky arrived, Trump had spoken to Putin and decided not to offer the Tomahawks. Witkoff encouraged Ukrainian officials to try another tack: They should ask Trump for a 10-year tariff exemption. It would supercharge their economy, he said. “I’m in the deal settlement business. That’s why I’m here,” he told the Journal. “We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.”

December 5, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, Russia, USA | 2 Comments

Did Davey’s EDF Hinkley deal scupper tax payer?

Is EDF about to pocket extra cash due to strike price from decade ago?

 The Telegraph reports that Hinkley Point C will slap £1bn a year onto UK
energy bills the moment it starts generating. The cash will flow straight
from households to EDF under a subsidy deal locked in more than a decade
ago.

A second £1bn hit will land through the nuclear levy that bankrolls
Sizewell C in Suffolk. Campaigners are already calling the combination a
“nuclear tax on households” as ministers push ahead with the biggest
expansion of nuclear power in a generation.

Treasury and OBR documents
released after Rachel Reeves’s Budget spell out how the money will move.
CfD receipts are forecast to hit £4.6bn in 2030-31 with £1bn of that
handed to Hinkley C in its first year of operation. The root cause is the
2013 strike price agreed between EDF and Sir Ed Davey. It guarantees
£92.50/MWh for Hinkley’s output, now worth £133 with inflation and
expected to reach around £150 by the time the plant opens in 2030. If
wholesale prices hover near £80/MWh as they do today EDF can claim roughly£70/MWh from consumers and businesses to make up the difference.

 Energy Live News 1st Dec 2025. https://www.energylivenews.com/2025/12/01/did-daveys-edf-hinkley-deal-scupper-tax-payer/

December 4, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

Former Heads of CIA, MI5, Mossad and CSIS Profit From Israel’s Genocide

Dimitri Lascaris, Dec 02, 2025, https://reason2resist.substack.com/p/former-heads-of-cia-mi5-mossad-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2811845&post_id=180423423&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Awz Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Toronto, is a who’s who of Western intelligence chiefs. Few people have heard of Awz before, but its partners and strategic advisors include former senior directors of the CIA, FBI, MI5, CSIS, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Israel’s Unit 8200.

The President of Awz’s Advisory Committee is Stephen Harper, arguably the most pro-Israel Prime Minister in Canada’s history.

Awz has made major investments in Israeli cyber-security firms that have exploited and profited from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

In November 2025, Reason2Resist correspondent Rami Yahia visited the Milipol Homeland Security Conference in Paris, France. Posing as a buyer of cybersecurity products, Rami gathered intel on Israeli firms that have close ties to Awz.

In Reason2Resist’s latest livestream, Rami and I discuss the closely guarded secrets that his investigation uncovered. Our report includes previously unpublished video and audio recordings of Rami’s conversations at the Milipol Exhibition with representatives of Israeli cyber-security firms.

December 4, 2025 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

UK Nuclear Projects Set to Add $1.3 Billion a Year to Power Bills

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Nov 28, 2025, 
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/UK-Nuclear-Projects-Set-to-Add-13-Billion-a-Year-to-Power-Bills.html

Subsidies and Contracts for Difference (CfD) that the UK government has promised to the two projects for new nuclear power stations are expected to add $1.32 billion (£1 billion) annually to the UK power bills from around 2030, The Telegraph reports, citing documents by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).  

The Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, developed by EDF, is expected to begin generating electricity in 2030-31, after years of delays and cost overruns.

That year, CfD is expected to generate $6.1 billion (£4.6 billion) in receipts, including £1.0 billion to fund subsidy payments to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant for its first year of expected generation, OBR said in its economic and fiscal outlook released after the UK’s latest budget announcement.    

The UK government earlier this year also took the final investment decision to build the $51-billion Sizewell C nuclear power plant on the Suffolk Coast in eastern England, which was the first British-owned nuclear power station to be announced in over three decades.

Sizewell C will be the first nuclear power station in the UK financed using a regulated asset base (RAB) model that levies an additional charge on consumer energy bills, which contributes to the financing costs of the plant, OBR noted. This levy is also expected to increase energy bills as early as January.   

UK households will pay slightly higher energy bills in the first quarter of 2026 after energy market regulator Ofgem last week raised the Energy Price Cap by 0.2%, against expectations of a 1% drop. 

The slight increase in the price cap is driven by government policy costs and operating costs. This includes funding the government’s Sizewell C nuclear project, which will bring more [?] clean power, Ofgem noted.

Opponents of new conventional nuclear plants in Britain argue that consumers will be burdened with a “nuclear tax” for the expensive projects in their energy bills.  

“The Government has a misguided belief that nuclear will be a cheap, ‘green’ solution to our energy needs, but the evidence shows the opposite – that costs of delivery and of dealing with nuclear waste – will continue to rise,” Alison Downes, of Stop Sizewell C, told The Telegraph.

“We remain opposed to the imposition of a nuclear tax on households, given the acknowledged uncertainty about the projected costs of constructing Sizewell C.”  

December 2, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

UK energy bill payers will hand £2bn a year to EDF for new power stations

COMMENT. Here is a prime example of the crookedness of the UK Labour government, in pretending that the nuclear industry is beneficial to people and the environment:

“The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has promised to cut energy bills by an average £150 for each household from April by slashing green levies.“

UK green levies are taxes imposed by the government on sources of pollution, which contribute to about 8% of a household’s energy bill. These levies raise funds for various energy-efficiency schemes and have generated £5.9 billion from household energy bills in 2024. They are essential for supporting energy-saving measures in homes and for expanding renewable energy sources, ultimately improving energy security in the UK

French government-owned company to receive funding for Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C

Rob Davies,  Guardian 28th Nov 2025

UK energy bill payers will hand over £2bn a year in subsidies to EDF, the French company building two nuclear power stations, according to government figures.

EDF, owned by the French government, will be entitled to £1bn in annual payments as soon as Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, comes on to the grid in 2030. The sum is due under the contracts-for-difference system that guarantees low-carbon energy companies a fixed price for the electricity they generate..

Separately, £1bn will be added to bills through a separate nuclear levy scheme to fund Sizewell C, in Suffolk, a 3.2 gigawatt (GW) project also led by EDF.

The result is an increase of about £2bn in bills, funding the cost of two plants that together will generate about a sixth of the electricity that Britain was using during peak demand so far this year, equivalent to 6m homes.

A government spokesperson said: “We are reversing a legacy of no new nuclear power being delivered to unlock a golden age of nuclear, securing thousands of good, skilled jobs and billions in investment.”

The government hopes the extra cost of new nuclear reactors could be offset in the future by the stable “baseload” output they offer, which can rein in the rising cost of balancing volatile output from energy sources such as solar and wind.

That balancing cost is expected to hit about £2bn this year, according to the Nuclear Industry Association. The government said Sizewell alone could save £2bn a year in future, adding that the impact on bills over the construction period was likely to be about £1 a household each month.

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has promised to cut energy bills by an average £150 for each household from April by slashing green levies.

Assessments of the nuclear subsidy were revealed in documents released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which assesses the impact of economic policy. The OBR said EDF would receive £1bn in the first year of operation at Hinkley, due to come on stream in 2030 after 12 years of construction.

“In 2030-31, contracts for difference (CfDs) are expected to generate £4.6bn in government receipts, including £1bn to fund subsidy payments to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant for its first year of expected generation,” the OBR said.

The subsidy is the result of an agreement struck between EDF and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013.

The then energy secretary, Ed Davey, now the leader of the Liberal Democrats, agreed a “strike price” guaranteeing that the French state-owned company would receive £92.50 for each megawatt hour (MWh) for electricity generated at the 3.2 GW plant.

The strike price has risen with inflation to about £133 and is projected to reach £150 in 2030, according to the Daily Telegraph, which first reported the Hinkley subsidy.

The wholesale cost of electricity is much lower, now about £80 a MWh, meaning EDF will be able to claim the shortfall from consumers and businesses that use its electricity, thanks to the CfD agreement…….

The construction of Sizewell C, which has yet to begin and is scheduled for completion in the 2030s, will also drive up bills.

From January, energy bills will be inflated by a levy supporting the plant’s construction, adding £10 a year. The levy is expected to raise £700m but will double to 2030 to fund Sizewell, whose price tag is projected to hit £100bn.

In practice, the cost of the power station could increase. Hinkley Point C was originally projected to cost £18bn but has been subject to several time and cost overruns; EDF predicted last year the final bill could hit £46bn. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/28/uk-energy-bill-payers-edf-hinkley-point-c-sizewell-c

December 1, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

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