Zelensky covering up ‘dire’ frontline situation – Moscow
RT, Fri, 21 Nov 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/628091-un-nebenzia-zelensky-ukraine/
Vladimir Zelensky has barred the Ukrainian military from admitting the loss of key towns to Russia, Moscow’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has said. This is being done to hide the actual situation on the ground in the hopes that the flow of Western aid to Kiev remains unhindered, he suggested.
On Thursday, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov,told President Vladimir Putin that Russian forces have liberated the key logistics hub of Kupyansk in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region.
The Ukrainian General Staff, however, has claimed that the city remains under the control of Kiev’s troops.
Zelensky had previously denied the encirclement of Ukrainian forces in Kupyansk and as well as in Dmitrov-Krasnoarmeysk (Mirnograd-Pokrovsk), an urban area in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), accusing Moscow of exaggerating its gains on the battlefield.
During his speech at a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday, Nebenzia insisted:
“The situation on the front line for Ukraine “remains dire, if not catastrophic. Russian troops are successfully advancing on essentially all fronts.
“Despite the encirclement of a significant number of Ukrainian troops, massive losses, forced mobilization, and threats to civilians, the head of the Kiev regime forbids acknowledging the loss of cities, orders his troops to hold their positions ‘until the last soldier,’ and bans retreat.
“The policy pursued by the Kiev government has nothing to do with military reality and is purely political in nature. Zelensky wants to show his Western sponsors that the front is holding, because he counts on continued funding for his war with Russia. He needs billions of dollars to keep the war going for him and his cronies to line their pockets and stay in power.“
Last week, the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced a probe into a “high-level criminal organization” allegedly led by Timur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky. Its members are suspected of siphoning around $100 million in kickbacks from state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom.
The graft scandal has led to the sacking of Ukraine’s energy and justice ministers, with other prominent figures such as Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andrey Yermak, and the head of the National Security Council Rustem Umerov also being linked to the scheme.
The Palestine Laboratory: Exporting Occupation Technology (w/ Antony Loewenstein) | The Chris Hedges Report
Gaza has become a testing ground for Israeli and Western weapons and surveillance tools — technologies that will inevitably be used to target populations across the globe.
Chris Hedges, Nov 20, 2025, https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-palestine-laboratory-exporting
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.
Loewenstein joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what he has learned from writing The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World and producing The Palestine Laboratory, a documentary based on the book.
“I think the whole idea of what Israel…has been showing the world, I say two things. One, what weapons you can use to murder, kill, target Palestinians but also how to get away with it. I think Israel sells that concept,” Loewenstein explains.
As spyware companies like Pegasus and Paragon and arms companies like Elbit and Rafael see business boom, Loewenstein argues countries have a moral imperative to end trading with Israel. These same technologies perpetuating the genocide in Gaza, Loewenstein explains, will come back to haunt the citizenry of purchasing countries.
“All these governments around the world, whether they’re so-called democratic or repressive, are obsessed with these tools. They can’t give them up. They’re desperate to listen to their opponents, to the journalists, to activists,” Loewenstein remarks.
“It’s very hard for these regimes to give them up because there’s no regulation. There’s just none. It just doesn’t exist.”
Ukraine’s energy sector corruption crisis – what we know so far and who was involved.
Luke Harding, 19 Nov 25,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/19/ukraine-energy-sector-corruption-crisis
Anti-corruption investigators allege high-level kickback scheme involving Energoatom
Ukraine’s national anti-corruption bureau, known as Nabu, says it has uncovered a high-level criminal scheme at the heart of government. It involves Ukraine’s nuclear energy body, Energoatom, that runs three nuclear power plants supplying Ukraine with more than half of its electricity.
What is the scandal?
A group of insiders allegedly received kickbacks of 10-15% from Energoatom’s commercial partners. If these suppliers failed to pay up, they were removed from a list of approved counter-parties or not reimbursed for services already given. About $100m (£76m) was received in this way, Nabu says.
The alleged conspiracy had old-school touches. Its beneficiaries used code names for each other, such as “Professor”, “Karlson” and “Sugarman”. They carried blocks of cash around Kyiv in large and unwieldy bags, sometimes delivering it on foot. On one occasion, a plotter allegedly sent his wife to collect a stash of dollars, which she hid in her car.
Who was involved?
The alleged organiser of the scheme is Timur Mindich, an old friend and business partner of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Mindich co-founded Kvartal 95, the media production company set up by Zelenskyy before he went into politics.
Last week he fled his apartment in Kyiv’s government district hours before Nabu investigators came to arrest him, escaping abroad. He is now thought to be hiding in Israel.
Other alleged participants include Ukraine’s ex-deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, who is already under suspicion in a separate case; the justice minster, Herman Halushchenko, and his protege, the energy minister, Svitlana Hrynchuk, who were both fired. All deny wrongdoing. At least three other backroom figures allegedly took part.
How have the public reacted?
With fury. Over the autumn, Russia has destroyed much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to widespread and worsening blackouts. The hum of pavement generators has become a feature of everyday life, with electricity and heating supplies frequently interrupted. Meanwhile, Russian troops are advancing in the south and east after nearly four years of full-scale war.
In one conversation collected by Nabu in its 15-month investigation a suspect said it was a “pity” to build a structure to defend power stations from Russian bomb attacks since the money could be stolen instead. Chernyshov allegedly spent some of the illicit cash on four luxury mansions in a new-build riverside plot south of Kyiv.
The investigation, which has 1,000 hours of secretly recorded conversations, has been dubbed Operation Midas. The name seemingly refers to Mindich’s apartment, which features a gold toilet in the bathroom.
How far does the corruption go?
The big unanswered question. Was Mindichgate, as it has been called, a one-off? Or one of many similar insider schemes?
Zelenskyy has condemned the scandal, slapped sanctions on Mindich and stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship. “The president of a country at war cannot have friends,” he said last week after the news broke. He has called for investigations to run their course and for those found guilty to be punished and put behind bars. In July, however – while the Midas investigation was active – Zelenskyy had signed a decree effectively stripping Nabu and the special prosecutor’s office, another anti-corruption agency, of their independence and only backed down after the most serious street protests since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
Nabu has indicated that the scandal extends to the defence ministry, where Mindich was involved in pursuing lucrative state contracts. And possibly banking, where he also had connections.
What happens next?
The affair is Ukraine’s biggest corruption scandal since Zelenskyy became president six-and-a-half years ago. Civil society activists, opposition MPs and prominent military veterans have urged him to take decisive action, even if that means the sacking and jailing of people who are personally known to him. The former president Petro Poroshenko has called for the current cabinet to be sacked and for a government of national unity to be formed. This is unlikely to happen. Poroshenko was himself embroiled in a defence procurement scandal, which played a role in his 2019 defeat to Zelenskyy, who promised to clean up public life.
Political commentators say corruption is the result of “mono-government”: the fact that Zelenskyy and his allies enjoy sweeping wartime powers under martial law. No elections can be held while fighting continues. The revelations have also dismayed Ukraine’s western partners and emboldened its enemies. Worst of all, there appears to be a connection with Moscow. According to Nabu, the kickbacks were funnelled through a Kyiv back office connected to the family of Andriy Derkach, a former Ukrainian politician who is now a pro-Kremlin Russian senator. Some cash ended up in Russia, the tapes suggest.
Is there an upside?
Of sorts. Some observers think the fact the scandal emerged at all is proof that Ukraine is slowly moving in the right direction – towards European norms and away from gloomy Soviet-style kleptocracy. Oleksandr Abakumov, the head of Nabu’s investigating team, acknowledged his colleagues had “faced a lot of obstacles” pursuing the Mindich case. But he stressed: “This isn’t a story about corruption in Ukraine. It’s about how the country is struggling with corruption, fighting with corruption.”
Zelensky remains a creature of the corruption plaguing Ukraine.
A small number of oligarchs still possess outsized power in all spheres of business and politics. But the truth is moving in mysterious ways.
Ian Proud, Nov 18, 2025, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-corruption/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The $100 million corruption scandal around Ukraine’s energy system that broke this past week is critical to ordinary Ukrainians for its timing. Russia has been bombarding the country’s energy infrastructure on a daily basis to deny ordinary citizens heat and electricity during the cold and dark winter months.
In November 2024, a separate scandal broke that $1.6 billion set aside to build protective bunkers around electricity sub-stations had not led to any being built.
With this in mind, many have responded that the highly publicized nature of this latest scandal, which resulted in the resignations of both the energy and justice ministers, offers visible proof that progress is being made in tackling corruption in Ukraine. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) of Ukraine, which is often at the spearhead of such investigations, was first established by Presidential Decree in April 2015. That it continues to function is indeed a positive sign.
It’s not possible, however, to claim that corruption has emerged as a specifically wartime phenomena. This energy scandal is hardly a one-off. In September 2021, with Zelensky having already been in power for two and a half years, the European Court of Auditors reported that state corruption and capture were still widespread in Ukraine. It pointed out that “tens of billions of Euros are lost annually as a result of corruption,” and that EU support delivered over 20 years had not delivered the desired results.
Since Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine has been flooded with hundreds of billions of dollars of aid, of a much greater value than its yearly economic output. The United States has been unable to accurately account for the billions it has sent there. No country at this point would be able to assure itself that its funds have been spent well.
The scale of each new corruption scandal has seemingly grown over time. In August 2023, Zelensky sacked all the heads of the regional military recruitment offices following widespread complaints about kick-backs, often bribes to let potential recruits escape military service. In September 2023, Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, resigned following a procurement scandal related to the marking up the cost of purchased body armour and helmets by 4-5 times. In January 2024, Ukrainian defense officials were arrested over the theft of $40 million, related to an order for 100,000 artillery shells that were never delivered.
To date, President Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to keep Western donors off his back through a sacking here or a prosecution there. What has changed this year is that the erstwhile NABU investigators have been gradually nudging closer to his inner circle.
In July of this year, as the noose was closing around his close ally former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov because of a large-scale property fraud, Zelensky made a failed attempt to hobble NABU and bring it under his personal control. As it turns out, Chernyshov has also been implicated in the current $100m energy scandal, with NABU detectives documenting the transfer of an estimated $1.3 million in cash to him and an associate. On 14 November, NABU sought an order for pre-trial detention of Chernyshov.
Timur Mindich, the man at the centre of the current scandal, is a close ally of Zelensky and co-founded the TV company ‘Kvartal 95’ with him. He was allowed to flee the country before the NABU raids, which discovered duffel bags stuffed with cash and a golden toilet. It hasn’t been lost on some commentators that, in 2014, the ousted President Yanukovych was also alleged to have possessed a toilet made of gold.
Which provides another reminder that, stepping back from the canvas, not much has really changed in Ukraine over the past decade. I first met an anti-corruption activist in Kyiv in late 2015, at the foot of the postcard perfect Andriivsky descent in the quaint Lviv Handmade Chocolate Café. Approaching two years after the ouster of Yanukovych, she was visibly distressed that little progress had been made in tackling corruption. Within weeks, the government of Arseny Yatseniuk faced a no-confidence vote over a slew of corruption scandals involving figures close to him that led, ultimately, to his resignation in February 2016.
In the midst of that scandal, Vice President Joe Biden visited Kyiv in a bid to shore up the government, anxious that Ukraine might not be able to form a better coalition than the one in power. “Corruption siphons away resources from the people. It blunts economic growth, and it affronts human dignity. We know that. You know that. The Ukrainian people know that,” Biden said.
For many ordinary Ukrainians, who protested peacefully in the Maidan in late 2013, rooting out corruption was at the core of the so-called “revolution of dignity.” Biden’s 2015 visit was an attempt to paper over the cracks, and close down moves to unsettle the pro-western government. Yet the endemic corruption carried on.
When it released its recent report on EU accession states, the European Commission noted Ukraine’s remarkable commitment to its EU path. However, it downgraded its assessment to B grade, expressing concern about progress in tackling corruption. As with the 2015 Biden visit it was, I fear, another example of papering over the cracks of a much bigger problem.
The vertical of power in Ukraine, in which a small number of oligarchs possess outsized power in all spheres of business and politics, remains largely unchanged to this day. Zelensky has emerged as a creature of that system, having both clashed and aligned himself with different oligarchs at different times. With presidential elections paused, there are fewer constitutional checks and balances on his power than before the war. And for all its excellent work, NABU is not yet powerful enough to break the system.
There is a persuasive case to make that ending the war and turning off the gravy train would make it easier for Ukraine’s future leaders to refocus on the path to European membership. This would require real and measurable reform. It’s possibly for this reason that public support for an end to the war continues to grow along with outrage at every new case of graft by cronies close to Zelensky. But it may also help to explain why he is in no hurry to see the war end.
Emails Reveal Epstein’s Ties to Mossad—But Corporate Media Looked Away
Drew Favakeh, FAIR, November 18, 2025
For years, there have been whispers that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had ties to key officials in the US and foreign governments, was involved with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.
However, the Epstein/Mossad ties were often labeled by US corporate media as “unfounded” (New York Times, 8/24/25), dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times, 7/16/25), or said to have been “largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers” (New York Times, 9/9/25). Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has claimed that “Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.”
It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News—the nonprofit investigative outlet founded in July 2024—into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence. Despite the hack’s significant revelations, US corporate media coverage remains scant.
……………………….Since the hacked information was released, numerous independent media outlets—including Reason (8/27/25), All-Source Intelligence (9/17/25, 9/29/25, 10/13/25), Grayzone (10/6/25, 10/9/25, 10/13/25), the (b)(7)(D) (10/16/25, 10/21/25) and DeClassified UK (9/1/25, 11/3/25)—have published investigations on its contents. Among the independent media outlets, Drop Site’s coverage stands out for its in-depth research and broad scope.
Drop Site’s investigations into the Handala hack have included six major stories since late September, four of which have centered around “Epstein’s work on behalf of Israeli military interests, particularly as it relates to his role in the development of Israel’s cyber warfare industry.”
Drop Site reporters Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim (9/28/25) detailed how Epstein wielded his influence to expand Israel’s cyber warfare industry into Mongolia. Drop Site wrote:
Jeffrey Epstein…exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries.
…………………………………… Failing to cover the Handala hack
Hacked information must be handled ethically by journalists—including by verifying the files, considering public interest, concealing identities when necessary, and noting its origins. This is what Drop Site has done. And its reporting has significant public interest, revealing the ways in which Epstein served Israel’s interests.
Yet in a search of ProQuest’s US Newsstream collection for “Handala,” as well as a supplementary Google search, the only US corporate media outlet found to have covered the Handala hack is the New York Post (8/31/25). Its single 700-word story, drawing from Reason (8/27/25) and the Times of London (8/30/25), focused on how Prince Andrew stayed in contact with Epstein for five years longer than previously stated—sidestepping the revelations from Drop Site about Epstein’s ties to Mossad.
Hussain, who had not seen the New York Post story, said US corporate media is “deliberately ignoring” the story:
It’s such a goldmine of stories. They’re not going through it, they don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s very difficult for them to conceive what these emails refer to because they’ve spent so much time talking about it as a conspiracy theory. And now contravening evidence is emerging, or well-substantiated evidence, showing that it’s really not a conspiracy theory.
Indeed, recent mentions of Epstein’s ties to Israeli government officials have continued to dismiss them as conspiracy theories, ignoring the hack and Drop Site‘s work………………………………….
While it is of course absurd to blame “everything” on Epstein or Israel—and right-wing conspiracy theories that incorporate antisemitism are very real and dangerous—is it really unreasonable to blame “the war in Gaza” on too much “fealty to Israel”? After all, from October 7, 2023 to September 2025, the US sent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project—more than a quarter of Israel’s total post–October 7 military expenditures. Epstein’s evident connections to Mossad do raise the question of whether there is more to that “fealty” than the $100 million the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent on both parties during the 2024 election cycle (Common Dreams, 8/28/24)………………………………………………………………………………….. https://fair.org/home/emails-reveal-epsteins-ties-to-mossad-but-corporate-media-looked-away/
US senator accuses Trump of ‘silence’ on huge Ukraine corruption scandal.
17 Nov, 2025, https://www.rt.com/news/627874-us-senator-slams-trump-silence/
Rand Paul had long called for oversight on aid to Kiev.
US Senator Rand Paul has accused President Donald Trump of staying silent on a major corruption scandal involving a close associate of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.
Last week, Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies alleged that Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s former longtime business partner, led a scheme that siphoned $100 million in kickbacks from contracts with the country’s nuclear power operator Energoatom, which depends on foreign aid. Two government ministers have since resigned, while Mindich fled the country to evade arrest.
“Remember when the Ukraine first Uniparty opposed my call for an Investigator General for Ukraine? Trump silent on $100M Ukraine corruption scandal resignations,” Paul wrote on X on Saturday, commenting on a news story about the affair.
Paul, who frequently attacks what he calls “wasteful spending” of American taxpayers’ money on foreign projects, has repeatedly pushed for a watchdog to supervise funds directed to Ukraine “in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Trump has criticized unconditional aid to Kiev in the past, calling Zelensky “the greatest salesman on earth.” In August, he said the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “fleeced” America by committing $350 billion to Ukraine. He has since argued that the US is profiting from the conflict by selling Ukraine-bound weapons to NATO.
Kiev’s European backers have also raised concerns about corruption. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called the affair “extremely unfortunate,” while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged Zelensky to “press ahead with anti-corruption measures and reforms.”
The scandal erupted just months after Zelensky had unsuccessfully tried to strip the country’s anti-corruption bodies, NABU and SAPO, of their independence – relenting only after protests in Kiev and outcry from Western supporters. He has since imposed sanctions on Mindich, who is reportedly hiding in Israel.
Ukraine’s ‘EnergyGate’ scandal explained: Why it spells danger for Vladimir Zelensky.
12 Nov, 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/627713-energygate-corruption-scandal-ukraine/
What began as an inquiry into kickbacks at the state’s energy company has become a political firestorm circling the Kiev regime itself.
Ukraine’s anti-corruption detectives have opened Pandora’s Box. What started as a routine audit of the nuclear energy monopoly Energoatom has spiraled into a full-scale probe into embezzlement, implicating ministers, businessmen – and the man long known as Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s personal “wallet.” The affair now raises the question of how much longer the formally acting but no longer legitimate president can maintain control over his own system.
The case that has shaken the Kiev establishment
This week, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) raided the homes of several senior officials and businessmen, including Timur Mindich – a longtime friend and financial backer of Zelensky, whom Ukrainian media openly call the president’s “wallet.” Mindich fled the country before investigators arrived, while several of his associates have been detained.
The operation, code-named Midas, uncovered what investigators describe as a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme centered on Energoatom. According to NABU, officials demanded bribes of between 10% and 15% from private contractors supplying or building protective infrastructure for power facilities. Those who refused allegedly faced blocked payments or exclusion from tenders.
Wiretaps obtained by NABU include over a thousand hours of recorded conversations – excerpts of which have been released. In them, individuals identified by code names Carlson, Professor, Rocket, and Tenor discuss distributing kickbacks, pressuring business partners, and profiting from projects tied to nuclear plant protection during wartime. Ukrainian media, citing NABU sources, claim Carlson is Mindich himself, while Professor refers to Justice Minister German Galushchenko, who has since resigned.
The money trail and the missing “wallet”
NABU investigators allege that about $100 million passed through offshore accounts and shell companies abroad. Part of the funds were laundered through an office in central Kiev linked to state contract proceeds.
Mindich and several partners allegedly oversaw the network via intermediaries: Tenor – a former prosecutor turned Energoatom security chief – and Rocket, a one-time adviser to the energy minister. When the raids began, Mindich fled Ukraine with financier Mikhail Zuckerman, believed to have helped run the scheme.
While five people have been arrested, the alleged mastermind remains at large. NABU officials have hinted that further charges could follow, possibly reaching other ministries – including the Defense Ministry, where Mindich’s firms reportedly obtained lucrative contracts for drones and missile systems.
From energy to defense
At hearings before Kiev’s High Anti-Corruption Court, prosecutors argued that Mindich’s network also extended into military procurement. One company linked to him, Fire Point, manufactures Flamingo rockets and long-range drones, and has received major government contracts. If proven, these allegations would shift the case from financial misconduct to crimes threatening national security – drawing the probe dangerously close to Zelensky’s inner circle.
Rumors persist that among the intercepted recordings are fragments featuring Zelensky’s own voice. None have been released publicly, but NABU’s gradual publication strategy has fueled speculation that the most explosive revelations are still to come.
Imprisoned Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, held in connection with a $5.5 billion hole in his bank’s accounts, has told a court that beyond Mindich there are “bigger forces” in play.
Not their first rodeo
The EnergyGate case is the latest in a string of high-profile corruption scandals to erupt under Zelensky’s rule.
In January 2023, journalists from Ukrainskaya Pravda exposed inflated food procurement contracts at the Defense Ministry, leading to the resignation of Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov and several officials. In May 2023, Supreme Court chairman Vsevolod Knyazev was arrested for allegedly accepting a $2.7 million bribe. In 2024, the State Audit Service found large-scale violations in reconstruction projects financed by Western aid, with billions of hryvnia missing.
The European Court of Auditors, in its 2024 report on EU assistance, concluded that corruption in Ukraine “remains a serious challenge” and that anti-corruption institutions “require greater independence and enforcement capacity.”
Political consequences
The scandal has deepened Ukraine’s internal political crisis. Earlier this year, Zelensky sought to curb the independence of anti-corruption bodies such as NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) through legislation that would have placed them under presidential control. The move triggered protests in Kiev and drew criticism from Brussels and Western donors, who fund much of Ukraine’s wartime budget.
Under EU pressure, lawmakers ultimately reversed the measure, but the episode further strained Zelensky’s relations with Western partners.
Meanwhile, an informal anti-Zelensky coalition has reportedly taken shape, uniting figures connected to Western-funded NGOs, opposition leaders such as ex-President Pyotr Poroshenko and Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko, and senior officials in NABU and SAPO. Their shared goal, according to Ukrainian analysts, is to strip Zelensky of real authority and establish a “national unity government.”
The EU steps in
The EU has seized on the case as further evidence that Kiev’s leadership must remain under external oversight. The latest European Commission report on Ukraine’s EU accession progress explicitly demands that anti-corruption bodies stay free of presidential control and that top law-enforcement appointments involve “international experts.”
For Brussels, scrambling to finance Kiev’s $50 billion 2026 deficit, the scandal serves as both a warning to all potential backers that corruption is inevitable, while giving the EU leverage to tighten control over Kiev’s internal governance. For Zelensky it is another reminder that his ability to act independently is slipping away.
The stakes for Zelensky
The revelations of large-scale corruption in the energy sector weeks before winter sets could prove politically devastating for the Ukrainian leader. Public anger is mounting, while Western media have begun publishing increasingly critical coverage of his administration and its shrinking democratic space. Old allies of Zelensky’s such as Donald Tusk have claimed that they warned him of the damage such scandals will do.
With the country still under martial law and elections suspended, Zelensky remains president in name – but his legitimacy is under growing scrutiny. The EnergyGate affair has exposed the fragility of his position. If upcoming NABU disclosures implicate him directly, the fallout could be fatal to his political future.
For now, NABU’s latest video ends with a hint that more revelations are yet to come.
Nuclear waste today; consumer products tomorrow?
Extract from Trump’s new radiation exposure limits could be ‘catastrophic’ for women and girls, By Lesley M. M. Blume, Chloe Shrager | November 14, 2025
“………………………………………………………..Experts also warn that looser exposure standards might also lead to radioactive materials below a certain level being recycled into consumer products with no labeling or disclosures—effectively reviving a “below regulatory concern” policy revoked by the NRC in 1993 that deregulated low-level radioactive waste. A comparable “very low-level waste” policy was proposed in 2020 and rejected by the NRC. With weaker standards in place, some experts say, government agencies or entities that work with radioactive materials could sell materials that still emit radioactivity, albeit below the threshold newly dictated by the NRC: “There are salvage companies that they sell to. There are some [materials] that are sold at auction. There are some things that will be simply put out into regular trash instead of restricted trash,” Olson fears. If the threshold is loose enough, worries D’Arrigo, the recycling practice may become “so pervasive that it’s not going to be stoppable.”
In their 2007 report “Out of Control – On Purpose: DOE’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste into Landfills and Consumer Products,” D’Arrigo and Olson provided a detailed timeline tracing Energy Department and NRC policies—and specific cases—of deregulated or mishandled radioactive waste entering commercial landfills, recycling streams, and consumer markets since the 1960s. The report narrows in on the case of Tennessee: The state licenses private companies to import, process, and “free release” nuclear waste from across the country, and is, the authors say, the nation’s de facto hub for deregulated radioactive waste disposal and recycling.
According to the report, contaminated materials in this state can be sent to ordinary landfills, combined with chemicals at hazardous waste disposal sites, or recycled into consumer markets with minimal public oversight or recordkeeping. Tennessee is an example of how even now, though it is illegal, “nuclear materials have gotten out into the marketplace by accident,” says D’Arrigo.
“We can easily say that deregulating nuclear waste is going to release [more] manmade radioactive materials … into the marketplace, into everyday household items that we consume, that we use every day,” she says. This could present significant health risks, she adds, especially when those materials are repurposed into products designed for populations most vulnerable to radiation harm: “Our frying pans, our IUDs [intrauterine devices used to prevent pregnancy], our belt buckles, our baby toys… It could be plastics. It could be concrete. It could be asphalt. It could be playgrounds. There’s no limit when you send it out into the marketplace unregulated.”
Olson posits additional alarming recycling scenarios, including uranium enrichment site pipes that carried radioactive waste being reused as scrap metal for cars or silverware, and contaminated nickel from NRC sites in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee being used in rechargeable batteries, which can be subject to overheating and the associated risk of fire and explosion.
“Would everyone have laptops with radioactive batteries sitting on their laps?” she asks. Such material could be released into the international marketplace as well, or originate abroad and be legally imported and sold in the United States. Higley of the NCRP cites an example of radioactive material being melted down with other metals to make window panes in Taiwan in 1999—some of which were incorporated in kindergarten classrooms and exposed children to whole-body gamma radiation—and also cites a recent recall of imported shrimp from an Indonesian food company that the Food and Drug Administration said was contaminated with radioactive cesium. She also recalls an incident at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1984 when Mexican-manufactured rebar table bases containing radioactive cobalt 60 set off the Lab’s road radiation detectors when driven through the monitors by a steel delivery truck.
The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to a comment request from the Bulletin about expert concerns that loosened radiation exposure standards might allow contaminated materials to enter consumer markets; nor did NRC representatives respond to questions about enforcement protocol when it comes to maintaining safe radioactivity levels in materials being considered for reuse.
Despite the risks, Higley says that there is a valuable conversation to be had about sustainability and recycling reusable materials safely within the nuclear industry. But she concedes that the public is reliant on “good actors and a strong regulator” to properly clean contamination from recyclable materials and maintain the safety of consumer goods. With the Trump administration loosening NRC regulations, some experts and industry observers wonder if consumers will be at the mercy of self-regulating consumer products companies.
“We know that there is no zero risk when you’re exposed to radiation, that there could always be something that goes wrong, even [with] the smallest amounts of exposure,” says Beyond Nuclear’s Cindy Folkers. “One of the things that has struck me about this whole deal with the standards is: who’s minding the store? How are the folks that are supposed to be the regulators actually measuring how much is being released from any of these facilities, including nuclear power facilities or uranium mines, or whatever?”
“And really what they’re doing,” she adds, “is shifting the cost of having to containerize this radioactive material from themselves to us—at the cost of our health.” https://thebulletin.org/2025/11/trumps-new-radiation-exposure-limits-could-be-catastrophic-for-women-and-girls/
‘National Security Threat’? 95-Year-Old Human Rights Scholar Richard Falk Interrogated for Hours by Canada.
“Clearly, the international repression of the Palestinian cause knows no bounds.”
Jon Queally, Common Dreams, Nov 15, 2025
Ninety-five-year-old Richard Falk—world renowned scholar of international law and former UN special rapporteur focused on Palestinian rights—was detained and interrogated for several hours along with his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver, as the pair entered Canada for a conference focused on that nation’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“A security person came and said, ‘We’ve detained you both because we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada,’” Falk explained to Al-Jazeera in a Saturday interview from Ottawa in the wake of the incident that happened at the international airport in Toronto ahead of the scheduled event.
“It was my first experience of this sort–ever–in my life,” said Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author or editor of more than 20 books, and formerly the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
Falk, who is American, has been an outspoken critic of the foreign policy of Canada, the United States, and other Western nations on the subject of Israel-Palestine as well as other issues. He told media outlets that he and his wife, also an American, were held for over four hours after their arrival in Toronto. They were in the country to speak and participate at the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, an event scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Ottawa, the nation’s capital.
The event, according to the program notes on the website, was designed to “document the multiple ways that Canadian entities – including government bodies, corporations, universities, charities, media, and other cultural institutions–have enabled and continue to enable the settler colonization and genocide of Palestinians, and to articulate what justice and reparations would require.”………………………………………………….. https://www.commondreams.org/news/richard-falk-canada-gaza
The scandal Zelensky can’t escape: Inside Ukraine’s biggest corruption story
Rt.com 14 Nov, 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/627803-billion-dollar-friend-zelensky-mindich/
Timur Mindich slipped out of Ukraine hours before the raids. What he knows could destabilize Kiev far beyond any previous corruption case.
Golden toilet bowls. Stacks of dollars fresh from the US Federal Reserve. A courier complaining that hauling $1.6 million in cash “is no easy job.” More than a thousand hours of wiretaps – filled with laughter, swearing, and the careless voices of men discussing how to split state contracts, who to bribe, and who should be placed in key government posts.
These are fragments of a vast corruption saga now unfolding in Ukraine – a scandal whose scale and brazenness have stunned even the country’s Western sponsors.
The latest chapter began with raids on November 10, when officers from Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies searched the Kiev apartment of businessman and media producer Timur Mindich. A few hours earlier, he had quietly left the country – likely warned about the coming operation. That would not be surprising: Mindich is not just any fixer, but a close ally and longtime associate of Vladimir Zelensky.
What exactly lies at the heart of this sprawling corruption scandal? How far will its shockwaves travel – through Ukraine, through its Western backers, and through the war itself? And can a leader who has already outlived his legal mandate once again slip out of the crisis untouched?
The fall of the anti-corruption myth
When Vladimir Zelensky rose to power, he did so in a role that blurred fiction and reality. Ukraine was not simply electing a politician – it was electing the protagonist of a television series. In Servant of the People, Zelensky played Vasily Goloborodko, a humble history teacher who accidentally becomes Ukraine’s president and sets out to wage war on entrenched corruption.
Throughout the series, the creators hammered home one theme: the rot begins when the people closest to the president use personal access to build corrupt networks of their own.
That message became the backbone of Zelensky’s 2019 campaign. He accused then-leader Pyotr Poroshenko of surrounding himself with oligarchs, promised to dismantle corrupt patronage networks, and championed the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies.
Back then, he insisted he would never interfere with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau or Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (NABU and SAP) – the very institutions now driving the case against his closest associate.
Six years later, everything changed. In July 2025, Zelensky moved to strip both NABU and SAP of their independence, pushing to place them under a loyal Prosecutor General. At that same moment – as is now known for certain – NABU was conducting secret surveillance against his longtime friend Timur Mindich.
What once looked like political maneuvering suddenly gained clarity. The man who promised to keep anti-corruption agencies free from interference had tried to bring them under his control precisely when they were listening to his own inner circle.
NABU holds more than a thousand hours of recordings. They suggest that Mindich – a fixture in Zelensky’s entourage – used his proximity to the country’s de facto leader to build a sprawling kickback system in the energy and defense sectors. At least four ministers appear implicated. Whether Zelensky himself was directly involved remains unknown.
Mindich could have shed light on those questions – had investigators managed to question him. But before they could, he received an advance warning of the impending raid, reportedly leaked from inside the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
And somehow, during curfew, Mindich managed to pass through Ukraine’s border checkpoints and leave the country just hours before his arrest.
He is now believed to be hiding abroad – likely in Israel.
The man behind the power
To understand the shockwaves of the Mindich affair, one must first understand the man himself – a figure who rarely appeared in public, yet moved through Kiev’s political and business circles with the ease of someone who never needed a formal title.
Timur Mindich began as a media entrepreneur. He co-founded Kvartal 95, the production studio that transformed Vladimir Zelensky from comedian into a national celebrity. For years, Mindich handled business deals, contracts, casting agencies, and spin-off ventures. He was not merely a colleague – he was part of the tight inner circle that built Zelensky’s career long before he entered politics.
He also had another powerful connection: Igor Kolomoisky. Ukrainian media long described Mindich as the oligarch’s trusted fixer – a man who arranged everything from logistics and personal errands to business negotiations. Ukrainian media noted that Kolomoisky sometimes called him a “would-be son-in-law,” a reference to Mindich’s past engagement to his daughter.
For a time, Mindich acted as an informal go-between for the oligarch and Zelensky – a man who could arrange meetings, solve problems, or pass along requests.
After Zelensky took power, this relationship deepened. According to Strana.ua, Mindich gradually moved out of Kolomoisky’s orbit and into Zelensky’s. He became one of the few people the new leader fully trusted. Their families were close; their business interests intertwined. Ukrainian journalists noted that in 2019 Zelensky even used Mindich’s car. In 2021, at the height of coronavirus restrictions, Zelensky celebrated his birthday in Mindich’s apartment – a gathering that raised questions at the time, and far more now.
The two men also owned apartments in the same elite building on Grushevskogo Street, a residence filled with ministers, MPs, security officials, and politically connected businessmen. They lived, worked, and socialized within the same ecosystem.
Everything pointed to a close personal bond. Yet Mindich held no government post. He was not a minister, a deputy, or an adviser. He wielded influence not through office, but through proximity – a “gray cardinal” of the system Zelensky built around himself.
Opposition figures began calling him “the wallet” – the man who handled the money flows tied to Zelensky’s entourage. Some Ukrainian MPs alleged that informal decisions about appointments, tenders, and budgets were made in Mindich’s apartment, not in government offices. One later-released photograph of the residence – complete with marble floors, chandeliers, and a gold-plated toilet – only fueled that perception.
A kickback machine built on war and energy
It is only now – through leaked recordings, investigative files, and months of reporting by Ukrainian journalists – that the true scale of Mindich’s influence has come into view. What investigators gradually pieced together was a protection racket built into Ukraine’s most sensitive spheres: energy and defense.
The most detailed part of the scheme involves Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear operator. This company provides more than half of the country’s electricity – a lifeline during wartime blackouts. To shield the grid during the war, Ukrainian law introduced a special rule: courts are forbidden from enforcing debts against Energoatom until hostilities end. In practice, this meant that Energoatom paid contractors only after work was completed, but contractors could not sue the company to recover overdue payments, and therefore had no legal leverage if Energoatom simply refused to pay.
Mindich and his circle saw an opening – and turned it into a business.
According to prosecutors, Mindich (listed on recordings as “Karlson” and his associates approached contractors with a simple proposition: Pay us 10–15% of your contract value – or you will not be paid at all.
If a company refused, its payments were blocked indefinitely. Some contractors were told outright that their firms would be destroyed, bankrupted, or stripped of their contracts. In several cases, threats escalated to warnings that company employees might be “mobilized” to the front.
Mindich and his team jokingly called the scheme “the shlagbaum” – the barrier. Pay, and the barrier lifts. Refuse, and your business collapses.
The scope of the scheme was staggering. According to the investigation, a hidden office in central Kiev was responsible for processing black cash, maintaining parallel accounting, and laundering funds through a network of offshore companies.
Through this “laundry,” approximately $100 million passed in recent years – all during a full-scale war, when Ukraine was publicly pleading with Western governments for emergency energy support.
Energy was only one side of the operation. Mindich – again, without any state position – also lobbied suppliers and contracts inside the Ministry of Defense.
The most telling episode involves Ukraine’s minister of defense, Rustem Umerov. After meeting Mindich, Umerov signed a contract for a batch of bulletproof vests with a supplier promoted by Mindich. The armor turned out to be defective, and the contract was quietly terminated. Umerov later admitted the meeting with Mindich took place.
Some Ukrainian journalists have alleged that Mindich may have controlled or influenced companies producing drones for the Armed Forces, selling them to the state at inflated prices. These claims remain unproven, but prosecutors note that Mindich’s name appears repeatedly in connection with defense tenders, lobbying, and private suppliers.
Political fallout: Panic, damage control, and a fractured elite
The first political reaction came from inside the Ukrainian elite itself. According to MP Aleksey Goncharenko, the atmosphere on Bankova Street – the seat of Zelensky’s office – turned “miserable,” with officials aware that only a small part of the tapes had been released and fearing what might come next. Goncharenko also claimed that Zelensky’s team attempted to block Telegram channels reporting on the scandal – a sign, he argued, that the administration had “no plan” for crisis management.
The Ukrainian opposition immediately seized on the moment. Goncharenko publicly accused Zelensky and his entourage of stealing “billions of dollars during the war,” questioning whether Ukrainian soldiers had died “for the bags of Zelensky and his friends.”
Irina Gerashchenko, co-chair of the European Solidarity faction, warned that the scandal could undermine Western support, arguing that donors might “reconsider assistance” if allegations of high-level corruption were confirmed.
Ukrainian media also described a broader realignment within the political class.
According to Strana.ua, long-standing opponents of Zelensky – including former president Pyotr Poroshenko and Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko – intensified their criticism, seeing the scandal as an opportunity to reduce Zelensky’s influence over parliament and the cabinet.
Zelensky’s own reaction was markedly cautious. On the first day, he limited himself to general statements about the importance of combating corruption, without addressing the specifics of the Mindich case. As pressure mounted, the government dismissed two ministers – Justice Minister German Galushchenko and Energy Minister Svetlana Grinchuk – a move Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko called “civilized and appropriate.”
By the third day, Zelensky imposed personal sanctions on Timur Mindich, a step widely interpreted by Ukrainian commentators as an attempt to distance himself from a longtime friend and associate. However, given the depth of Zelensky’s ties to Mindich, his response looks strikingly restrained.
International reactions also began to surface. Bloomberg reported that more revelations and “potential shocks” could be expected as the investigation unfolds. In France, Florian Philippot of the “Patriots” party demanded a halt to European support for Kiev until the corruption allegations were fully examined.
These statements reflect growing concern among some Western politicians and commentators, though they do not represent an official shift in Western policy.
And Moscow has weighed in as well.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Western governments were “increasingly realizing” the scale of corruption in Ukraine and that a significant portion of the funds provided to Kiev were being “stolen by the regime.” Peskov expressed hope that the United States and Europe would “pay attention” to the corruption scandal now unfolding, arguing that corruption “remains one of the main sins of Kiev” and “is eating Ukraine from the inside.”
Domestic scandal stops being domestic
If the political shockwaves inside Ukraine were significant, the international repercussions proved even more serious – because the Mindich affair did not stay within Ukraine’s borders.
In fact, it quickly attracted attention from Washington.
According to Ukrainskaya Pravda, US law enforcement had taken an interest in Timur Mindich even before the November raids. On November 6, the outlet reported – citing a source in the United States – that the FBI was examining Mindich’s possible involvement in financial schemes tied to the Odessa Port Plant. One of the key figures in that earlier case, Aleksandr Gorbunenko, was detained in the US but later released under witness protection, allegedly after providing information to American investigators.
Another Ukrainian outlet, Zerkalo Nedeli, reported that on November 11, NABU detectives met with an FBI liaison officer. According to the publication, the Mindich case was part of those discussions.
These reports, taken together, suggest that the scandal may have implications far beyond Kiev’s internal politics.
And several analysts in Moscow believe this is precisely the point.
Russian political scientist Bogdan Bespalko believes that pressure on Mindich may be part of a broader effort by the United States to influence Zelensky and the structure around him, noting that NABU has long been viewed as a “pro-American” institution. According to Bespalko, Washington may be using the corruption scandal as leverage – not to remove Zelensky outright, but to constrain his room for maneuver and force political concessions.
What comes next
As the scandal widens, one question increasingly dominates political discussions in Kiev and abroad: what happens if Timur Mindich is ever forced to speak – and against whom?
Mindich has not been not detained. He left Ukraine shortly before the November raids and, according to open sources, remains outside the country.
But several figures familiar with Ukrainian politics argue that his potential testimony is the biggest threat hanging over the country’s leadership.
Former Verkhovna Rada deputy Vladimir Oleinik believes that if Mindich were ever confronted by investigators – especially those backed by the US – he could provide damaging information about Zelensky’s inner circle. “Mindich and others will be offered to give evidence on bigger fish – on Zelensky – in exchange for leniency,” he said. “They are not heroes. If pressed, they will give up everyone.”
Another former Rada deputy, Oleg Tsarev, expressed an even harsher view. According to him, the danger comes not from Mindich’s legal status, but from the sheer volume of information he allegedly possesses.
“Mindich was Zelensky’s closest confidant. He knows everything,” Tsarev said. “If interrogated seriously, he will talk – and he will talk fast.”
In Tsarev’s assessment, Mindich is aware of how the financial flows around Bankova worked, how influence was distributed, and how members of Zelensky’s entourage allegedly enriched themselves during the war.
Experts who share this view argue that Mindich could, in theory, map out the entire informal system of kickbacks and leverage that shaped Kiev’s wartime governance.
Oleinik adds that many of those implicated in the case initially believed Zelensky would shield them.
For now, however, Mindich remains abroad – and beyond the immediate reach of Ukrainian law enforcement. Whether he eventually cooperates with investigators in Kiev, with NABU, or with US authorities remains an open question.
But one conclusion is becoming hard to ignore: if Mindich ever decides to talk, the political consequences for Kiev could dwarf anything seen so far.
The Censored History of Able Archer 83
Archive Publishes “War Scare” Documents Deleted from State Department History
Newly Declassified Documents Focus on Soviet Military’s Fear of U.S. First Strike During Exercise
Washington, D.C., November 14, 2025 https://nsarchive.salsalabs.org/908?wvpId=753e3bf4-ad6a-4702-8e18-2f0d8d5326e6– The State Department quietly deleted important archival records from an official history detailing how a 1983 NATO war game could have led to a catastrophic nuclear exchange, according to new reporting from The Washington Post. This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, according to the report.
Today, the Archive is publishing copies of the records that were censored by the State Department, along with a selection of the most revealing war scare records. Among them are records revealing that the Soviet military leadership genuinely feared that they were vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear strike from the West during the war scare.
The State Department republished the FRUS volume without the records after the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2024 upheld a CIA decision to deny a 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the National Security Archive seeking the declassification of an important retrospective analysis of Able Archer 83 written by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, who warned that the exercise could have led to “a potentially disastrous situation.”
Asked why 15 pages on Able Archer had been removed from the history without explanation, the State Department told the Post that “[t]he Department was not required to provide public notice.”
National Security Archive director Tom Blanton said that the unprecedented deletion of declassified historical records from the State Department volume on the war scare echoed similar efforts in the Soviet Union where, as author David Remnick writes, the “censors went through the libraries with razor blades and slashed from the bound copies of Novy Mir.”
“Today, in America,” Blanton said, “the censors just have to press delete.”
| READ THE DOCUMENTS THAT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CENSORED |
| THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. |
AI Warlord”+: Eric Schmidt – Money, Media and Maim
rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.
In an era where technology is advancing at breakneck speed, the implications of AI on warfare are profound and troubling. Byrne’s latest article, “AI Warlord: Eric Schmidt,” part of the ongoing Military AI Watch series from Project Censored, sheds light on the intersection of power, profit, and peril in the realm of military AI. From the shadowy alliances of tech billionaires to the ethical dilemmas posed by autonomous weaponry, we’ll explore how the hype surrounding AI is not just about innovation but also about control, surveillance, and an unsettling future.
October 30, 2025, By Peter Byrne, https://www.projectcensored.org/ai-warlord-eric-schmidt-money-media-maim/
In August, Foreign Affairs published Alphabet-Google billionaire Eric Schmidt’s essay “The Dawn of Automated Warfare”—co-authored with Greg Grant of the Center for New American Security, a nonprofit funded by Schmidt and the military industry.
Best characterized as an advertorial, the AI weapons piece promotes Schmidt’s investments in military AI, including Ukrainian drone manufacturer White Stork, and Relativity Space, a military rocket contractor.
The authors frame Ukraine’s battlefields as laboratories for testing AI weapons in “the new reality of war.” From their profit-seeking perspective, mass death and suffering are collateral effects justified by “racing to create … an automated drone swarm—the holy grail of drone operations.”
The sane response to such callous marketing disguised as objective analysis by a stakeholding multibillionaire is revulsion and disbelief. But, such is the halo of entrepreneurial genius and progressive philanthropy crowning the 70-year-old Democrat Party sugar daddy, that Schmidt’s pronouncements are treated as oracular in corridors of government where he exercises undue influence alongside fellow billionaire AI militarists Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Thiel, Hoffman, Bloomberg, Andreessen, Altman, Huang, Son, the Trumps, and Kushners.
Since 2016, investigative reports in major media have documented serious conflicts of interest between Schmidt’s governmental positions and his $30 billion in private investments and the multibillion-dollar stock portfolios managed by his nonprofit foundations. But Schmidt and his similarly conflicted tech mogul demographic remain politically immunized against punishment—or paying taxes—by the violence-energized system that created and enriches them.
Schmidt’s conflicts of interest
In 2016, when Schmidt served as CEO of Alphabet-Google, The Intercept and the Tech Transparency Project published The Android Administration, illuminating the incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and 152 Google executives: “Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations.”
Obama’s doors were always open to executives from Schmidt’s investment firm, Tomorrow Ventures, and Civis Analytics, an AI data firm controlled by Schmidt that is a federal contractor.
In 2019, Politico published “How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon,” highlighting Schmidt’s activities as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, a quasi-governmental body composed of militaristic capitalists such as Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman, who is also a board member of the genocide-abetting Microsoft Corporation. The Defense Innovation Board develops military contracting policies that impact companies controlled by Schmidt and other board members.
In 2021, American Prospect exposed that Rebellion Defense, a military and security tech company that Schmidt owns, was vacuuming up military AI contracts while he chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
As Schmidt’s reputation was spoiling, New York Times tech reporters tried to refresh it, “updating” a previously published hagiography. Brushing past Schmidt’s well-documented conflicts, Kate Conger and Cade Metz explained that the philanthropic venture capitalist had simply “reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex.”
In May 2022, the Tech Transparency Project published a blockbuster series detailing the scope of Schmidt’s influence over military AI contracting and his many conflicts of interest.
In December 2022, referencing CNBC reporting on Schmidt’s conflicts, Senator Elizabeth Warren formally requested that the Secretary of Defense investigate Schmidt; there is no available record of a reply.
In May 2023, Le Monde highlighted the synergies between Schmidt’s business interests and his calls to prepare for warring with China. Fox News reported on an investigation by the MAGA-friendly Bull Moose Project, which charted the intersections of Schmidt’s interlocking business and governmental networks. Jack Poulson’s All Source Intelligence published additional evidence of conflicts of interest between Google and Schmidt, including collaborating with US and Australian intelligence agencies.
These are but a few examples of the flood of exposés, amplified by hundreds of news outlets, that could have prompted federal agencies to bar Schmidt from military contracting for influence peddling. But Schmidt’s military businesses thrived during the Trump I and Biden years, and continue to do so under Trump II. In June 2025, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, a military AI venture capitalist associated with the Trump–Kushner family’s Thrive Capital, was tasked with delivering the keynote address at a June 2025 conference called AI+ Expo, sponsored by Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was dissolved in 2021 after concluding that the US must buy more military AI products to face off against China. Schmidt then transmuted the federal commission into the SCSP, a partially tax-exempt private foundation he funded and governs, which opposes AI regulation.
Most of SCSP’s fifty-member staff have worked for either the Commission, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or Wall Street firms. SCSP leadership includes the Center for a New American Security’s Robert O. Work and Michèle Flournoy. Both are Pentagon careerists turned lobbyists for military AI. To direct his military AI lobby, Schmidt hired the commission’s director, Ylli Bajraktari, the former chief of staff to Trump’s national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, also a prominent military AI promoter.
Tax-avoidant, Schmidt hires former national security officials to operate his interlocking network of businesses and tax-exempt organizations. He also places his employees and grantees in influential governmental positions, paying their salaries via his for-profit organization, Schmidt Futures.
Unholy AI alliances
Schmidt credits the late, and credibly accused war criminal, Henry Kissinger, with having inspired him to create SCSP. Schmidt modeled SCSP after Kissinger’s Special Studies Project (1956–1960), which oil and railroad billionaire John D. Rockefeller bankrolled through his Rockefeller Brothers Fund. History records that the Rockefeller study rationalized minimizing social spending to free up larger portions of the gross national product for the nuclear arms race.
Media amplification of the study influenced public opinion to support the Cold War by demonizing Russia and China as existential threats to American values, by which the Rockefellers meant plutocracy, not democracy.
Kissinger opposed arms control efforts. He advocated fighting “limited” nuclear wars with intercontinental ballistic missiles. He falsely claimed the US was militarily disadvantaged because Russia fielded more nuclear missiles, while the opposite was known to be the case. The Rockefeller study he crafted helped institutionalize what outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower called a danger to democracy when he left office in 1960. The former Army general presciently predicted “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” operating a perpetually war-seeking “military-industrial complex.”
In 2021, Kissinger, Schmidt, and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher published the bestselling book, The Age of AI. They advocated spending vast amounts of public wealth developing AI weapons of mass destruction for use against China.
Their arguments are framed in terms of seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy. They hail the solipsistic Cartesian worldview as the epitome of Reason, acting as if the wisdom of all previous ages culminated in the anti-democratic musings of Immanuel Kant, who avidly supported aristocratic rule. “The AI age needs its own Descartes, its own Kant, to explain what is being created and what it will mean for humanity. … Existing principles [of human reasoning] will not apply.” For Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher, artificial intelligence is the New Enlightenment.
The Age of AI echoes the factual dishonesty and omnicidal sociopathy of Herman Kahn’s 1960 treatise On Thermonuclear War. RAND Corporation theorist Kahn had argued that obedience to Reason requires accepting millions of deaths in a nuclear war waged to preserve American values.
According to Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, it is worth taking existential risks in order to achieve the supremacy of artificial intelligence:
Machines will enlighten humans, expanding our reality in ways we did not expect or necessarily intend to provoke. In daily life, AI is our partner, helping us make decisions about what to eat, what to wear, what to believe, where to go, and how to get there. … [AI] weapons are targetable with relative precision, [obeying] moral and legal imperatives.
Counseling going to war with China, Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher claim that failing to militarize artificial general intelligence (AGI) will wreck American society: “The dilemma posed by AI-related weapons technology is that keeping up research and development is essential for national survival.”
But, they caution, advanced AI must serve only certain corporations:
Developing AGI will require immense computing power … created by only a few well-funded organizations. … Its applications will need to be restricted. Limitations could be imposed by only allowing approved organizations to operate it.
Kissinger joined his ancestors in 2023, and in 2025, after Trump retook office, Schmidt teamed up with Alexandr Wang (founder of the military AI company Scale AI, now charged with developing “superintelligence” for Meta) and Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit largely funded by Open Philanthropy.
In March, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang co-published a Strangelovian policy paper on national security, “Superintelligence Strategy.” The authors compare their version of deterring attacks from unfriendly AI-armed nations—which they call “Mutual Assured AI Malfunction” or MAIM—to the classical Cold War deterrence theory of “mutual assured destruction” or MAD.
But, rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.
Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang compare MAIM favorably to Kahn’s “thinking the unthinkable” about the positive aspects of launching a preventative nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, while preplanning to robustly rebuild American capitalism from the radioactive ashes after the hypothetically enfeebled Soviet retaliation.
Echoing extreme “AI doomer” worldviews, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang encourage the US military to undertake preemptive cyber and “kinetic” sabotage campaigns to ruin the AI infrastructure of US competitors, including bombing data centers to prevent the emergence of non-US-aligned superintelligences.
Afraid of US market competitors launching expensive Manhattan Project-style superintelligence efforts, they advocate for “nonproliferation.” By which they mean using military means to ensure that only the US, its allies, and certain corporate behemoths can create and use advanced AI technologies.
In a major obfuscation, the trio’s pro-AI acceleration paper does not acknowledge ongoing attempts to create international agencies capable of monitoring, regulating, and sanctioning the development and use of military AI, such as the Netherlands’ Responsible AI in the Military Domain, or international resolutions by governments to regulate or ban lethal AI weapons.
Schmidt’s SCSP vehemently opposes significant governmental regulation of AI products and weapons. Schmidt prefers that the AI industry self-regulate, and his policy aligns with the vaguely stated regulatory aims of Hendrycks’s Center for AI Safety.
In late October, leading computer scientists, world celebrities, and thousands of concerned professionals signed the Future of Life Institute’s call for prohibiting the further development of superintelligence until there is “strong public buy-in” and “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.” Hendrycks signed the call; Wang and Schmidt did not.
An April 2025 analysis by AI Now concludes that, given the propensity of large language models to hallucinate and the impossibility of humans monitoring neural network decision-making processes, it is a national security error to allow commercial interests to dictate the reliability and safety of military AI. The failure to establish strong laws regulating artificial intelligence violates long-established legal and social norms governing the safety of nuclear power, nuclear arsenals, and chemical weapons. Loosely regulated AI systems are obviously more susceptible to hacking, sabotage, and operational disaster than regulated systems, AI Now emphasizes.
In 2025, SCSP released a series of Defense Papers and Memos to the President, urging, “The United States should organize ‘moonshot’ programs, modeled on past successful efforts like the Manhattan Project, to drive AGI [artificial general intelligence] innovation.” Schmidt’s clarion call is for the US to harm China.
Schmidt’s stance on military AI aligns closely with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the policy blueprint followed by the Trump administration. Heritage paints a similarly paranoid view of China, while urging that government research and development of AI weaponry ought to be “transferred swiftly to American interests in the private sector,” which includes, of course, Schmidt’s ventures.
Last year, the Tech Transparency Project uncovered Schmidt’s stakes in Chinese AI firms, “Eric Schmidt Cozies up to China’s AI Industry While Warning U.S. of its Dangers.” It appears that Schmidt lacks a coherent international relations strategy beyond enriching his globalized enterprises.
Media conflicts of interest
In June 2025, SCSP’s AI+ Expo conference in Washington, DC, was sponsored by military firms and “media partners” focused on ramping up military AI spending by the “Department of War.” Talks by Schmidt and panels featuring a Who’s Who in governmental and corporate AI war planning were obsequiously “moderated” by national security beat reporters from the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Washington Post, and C4ISRNET.
Code Pink energetically disrupted Schmidt’s presentation, which was hosted by former New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, who is now employed by RAND Corporation. The activists unfurled Palestinian flags, demanding that Google cease providing technology enabling genocide in Gaza. They were forcibly removed.
David E. Sanger of the New York Times supervised a panel discussion featuring former Rep. Mac Thornberry, a board member of military AI corporations, including CAE and Booz Allen, where he sits alongside Michèle Flournoy, his colleague at Beltway lobby firm West Exec Advisors and SCSP. Sanger also ran a panel featuring a Google vice president, Royal Hansen, and SCSP’s Anne Neuberger, who had served on Biden’s National Security Council, before joining SCSP and anti-AI regulation leader, Andreessen Horowitz.
SCSP videos record Sanger making statements disguised as questions about the threat of China to US global hegemony, and, therefore, the necessity for the US to quicken AI weapons contracting. Sanger did not ask the panelists about the validity of accepting those core elements of SCSP’s lobbying agenda as factual or desirable.
Hansen, however, made a newsworthy statement:
We have been using AI to defend Gmail long before people were using chatbots, and … it’s only gotten better [with large language models]. … We use little agents, little classifiers, to look at all the content and metadata about a message to look for bad actors.
To reiterate: Hansen stated that Google uses Gemini to parse all the content of Gmail looking for (undefined) “bad actors,” and the “reporter” ignored it. (Google’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The New York Times’s Ethical Handbook cautions reporters that
those assigned to beats, must be sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. … [S]ources are eager to win our good will for reasons of their own. … Staff members may not collaborate in ventures involving individuals or organizations that figure or are likely to figure in coverage they provide … While many professional and trade groups are organized as nonprofits, most of them do lobbying or advocacy work on policy issues [so] avoid situations that create an appearance of coziness or favoritism.
Sanger is professionally affiliated with military-industry-focused organizations, including the Center for New American Security, Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Aspen Institute. In an email exchange with Military AI Watch, Sanger said his only recompense for hosting the SCSP panels was “a somewhat soggy sandwich.” He did not respond to our query about his possible conflicts of interest, including writing a Times story last year praising Google’s much-criticized Project Maven, while pumping Schmidt’s White Stork drone business in Ukraine.
Mick Sussman, a New York Times editor charged with investigating staff conflicts of interest, did not respond to Military AI Watch’s email query on Sanger’s conflicts. Reached then on his cellphone, Sussman demanded to know how we got his phone number and abruptly hung up. Doggedly, we called back, and he picked up. Sussman said he had received the email and would get back to us. He didn’t.
Influence peddling and tax dodging
Banking a net worth of $30 billion—more than doubled since 2020—Schmidt uses a network of private nonprofits to reduce taxes and to social engineer his popular image. Advertising himself as “working to restore a balanced relationship between people and the planet,” Schmidt has disbursed billions of his tax-deductible dollars to hundreds of socially and environmentally progressive nonprofits, including media organizations.
To be clear: Schmidt’s foundations earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year investing in environmentally and socially disastrous multinational corporations, venture capital partnerships, and private equity firms, some operating out of secretive tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Schmidt’s nonprofits pay multimillion-dollar fees to Schmidt’s personal investment firm, Hillspire LLC, to manage portfolios of decidedly non-progressive investments.
According to IRS filings in 2023, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation held $1.4 billion in assets and logged (largely untaxed) capital gains of $302 million. It distributed $301 million, mostly to scientific and university projects, including $15 million to SCSP. Its largest tax-free grant, $41 million, went to an AI software accelerator, Convergent Research, which works on barcoding brains.
The Schmidt Family Foundation held $1.8 billion in stocks and real estate, netting $198 million in profits. Its charitable contributions were $137 million, targeting Indigenous and alternative energy organizations—causes antithetical to the sources of the money. The foundation holds $814 million in shares of climate- and information-destroying Alphabet (Google), and extensive holdings of Chinese AI companies.
The family foundation invests heavily in environmentally destructive corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Oracle, Dow, Barrick Gold, and Rio Tinto. It profits from companies that fuel wars and genocides, such as Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, and Rheinmetall. It owns stock in Las Vegas casinos, greenhouse gas-generating chemical manufacturers, and oil-guzzling automakers. The nonprofit owns a piece of Murdoch’s anti-environmentalist News Corp. And its 2018–2023 tax returns reveal cash donations of $9.75 million to Grist, an “independent” environmental magazine that regularly climate-washes Google and Schmidt. Grist’s media department did not respond to a request for comment.
The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the west.
Nate Bear, Nov 01, 2025, https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-ai-drones-used-in-gaza-now-surveilling
AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.
The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.
The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.
Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.
According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.
In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.
The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.
The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.
This extensive level of coverage is enabled by Skydio’s docking platform hardware. These launch pads are placed in locations around a city enabling drones to be remote charged, launched and landed many miles away from police HQs. After launch, all the information gathered by these flights is both saved to an internal SD card and automatically uploaded to special software configured for law enforcement. This software is made by Axon, a major financial backer of Skydio and the controversial maker of Tasers and ‘less-lethal weapons’ used by police departments in the US and across the west. The software, Axon Evidence, enables, in the words of an Axon press release, ‘the automatic uploads of photos and video footage from drones into a digital evidence management system.’
Axon’s equipment is also central to Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, with the company providing body cameras and Tasers to Israeli police forces and prison guards who routinely torture Palestinians. Axon, which participated in a $220 million Series E round of funding in Skydio, is just one of the many entities backing Skydio who serve a Zionist agenda.
Skydio’s first investor in 2015 was Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which provided $3 million of seed capital to the three-man team behind the drone maker. They have since invested tens of millions across numerous funding rounds. The founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are both notorious Zionists. The firm was the most active venture capital investor in Israel in 2024 and this summer Andreessen and Horowitz visited Israel to meet with tech companies founded by ex-IDF and Unit 8200 war criminals.
Other Skydio investors include Next 47, which has an office in Israel headed by Moshe Zilberstein who worked in the IDF’s computer spy centre Mamram, and Hercules Capital whose managing director Ella-Tamar Adnahan is an Israeli-American described by Israeli media as “Israel’s go-to tech banker in the US.”
The saturation of US police departments with drone technology so closely connected to Israel, technology used to carry out war crimes is a frightening, if not unsurprising, development. Skydio drones will be central to the rapidly advancing proto-fascism in the US and the crack down on Antifa and other so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration. In this context, the bigger surprise is that the rapid expansion of Israel-linked surveillance drone technology across America has so far gone largely under the radar.
Skydio should also make it on to the agenda of Zohran Mamdani. Recently criticised for saying “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Skydio is just another example that shows he’s right. If he has the courage of his convictions, he could do worse than use his powers as mayor to shut down the NYPD’s Skydio deal.
Skydio is also a large supplier to the Department of Defence, recently signing a contract to provide the US Army with reconnaissance drones. As a significant supplier to both military and civilian security forces, it raises questions about what information is or will be shared between the US military and domestic security agencies via the Skydio-Axon digital evidence management system.
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the west. And next year Skydio is rolling out new indoor drones. We can only speculate as to what extent these new drones were informed by the ‘learnings’ accrued via genocide.
The story of Skydio shows that what happens in Gaza doesn’t stay in Gaza.
The logic of capitalist imperialism means these technologies will always find their way home.
It’s Just Wall-To-Wall News Stories About The US And Its Allies Abusing The World.
Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 29, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-just-wall-to-wall-news-stories?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=177462655&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It’s just news story after news story about the US and its allies terrorizing the world today.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been filming themselves committing horrific massacres in Sudan over the last couple of days, reportedly murdering some two thousand civilians. You can see the bloodstains on the ground in satellite images. As we discussed the other day, the RSF and its atrocities are backed by the UAE, a close partner of the United States.
Meanwhile Israel has committed another wave of massacres of its own throughout the Gaza Strip, reportedly killing 104 people in a single day, including 46 children. This is as many Palestinians as would typically be killed on any given day in Gaza prior to the so-called “ceasefire”.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes has released a cartoonishly blatant war propaganda piece on “Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator” about how poor and unhappy the people of Venezuela are under their current government. The piece featured an interview with Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said that “If I was Maduro I’d head to Russia or China right now; his days are numbered.”
The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don’t truly know they’re serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press.
In the same interview, Scott also said that if Maduro is successfully ousted, “it’ll be the end of Cuba.”
“America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy,” he added.
The senator’s statements suggest that the US is preparing a push in Latin America similar to what it has been executing with Israel in the middle east, eliminating any powers which refuse to bend the knee. South of the US border the top two disobedient governments are the socialist states of Venezuela and Cuba. In the middle east the US and Israel have spent the last two years bombing Iran and Yemen, securing a regime change in Syria, and doing everything they can to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah in order to rule the region uncontested.
And of course we’ve still got the horrifying US proxy war in Ukraine, where men continue to be dragged off against their will to fight in a nightmarish conflict that most Ukrainians now oppose, but which Zelensky is saying he intends to keep fighting for years against the will of the public. This whole miserable ordeal could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but the western power alliance avoided off-ramp after off-ramp in order to ensure that Russia would get sucked into another costly military quagmire.
All over the world the US and its allies are murdering and abusing people in order to dominate the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system with which its power is intertwined. It is a giant murder machine feeding on human blood and the life force of our biosphere while providing nothing but obstacles to a healthy world.
The US-centralized empire is a disease that affects our entire species. We had better find a cure, and fast.
Hi-Tech Holocaust: How Microsoft Aids The Gaza Genocide
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities.
Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”
Alan Macleod, Mintpress News, 28 Oct 25
Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft. From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sariel travelled to Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
The largest and most controversial organization within the Israeli military, Unit 8200 has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech spying operation. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare, and online manipulation operations. Last year, it carried out the Lebanese Pager Attack, an act that wounded thousands of civilians. Unit 8200 agents were also behind many of the most infamous international spyware and hacking cases, including the Pegasus software, that was used to surveil tens of thousands of the world’s most prominent political leaders, journalists, and human rights campaigners.
Sariel’s policy of mass surveillance changed the internal attitude at Unit 8200. “Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,” said one officer. The gargantuan trove of information compiled in Microsoft Azure amounted to a vast repository on the entire Palestinian population – a giant database of kompromat that is used to extort and blackmail the region’s indigenous people. If a person was secretly gay, or cheating on their spouse, for example, that information was readily available to Unit 8200 agents, who would then use it to turn their targets into informants. One former Unit 8200 member revealed that, as part of their training, they were made to memorize different Arabic slang words for “gay”, so that they could identify them in conversations.
The cloud database is also used to provide after-the-fact justification for arrests of innocent peoples. Off-hand, out-of-context comments made years ago can be used to portray anyone as a member of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or another armed resistance force.
“These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing,” an Israeli intelligence official who served in the West Bank said.
When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, [the Azure surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We’re now in a situation where almost no one in the [Occupied] Territories is ‘clean,’ in terms of what intelligence has on them.
Unit 8200 has also used big data to compile A.I.-generated kill lists featuring tens of thousands of people. One program gave every Gazan, even women and children, a score of between 1 and 100, based on a number of factors. If they live in the same building or are in group chats with known or suspected Hamas members, for instance, their score is increased. Once their score reached a certain threshold, all Gazans were automatically placed on a kill list that was minimally overseen by humans.
According to multiple Unit 8200 agents, Microsoft Azure’s cloud-based storage platform allowed Israel to overcome targeting bottlenecks, using all manner of data to research and identify individuals for assassination, which led to the killing of tens of thousands of people during the first weeks of its post-October 7 onslaught.
Of course, the vast majority of the deaths have been civilians – around 70% were women and children. But Israeli officials can also go back after the fact and scour their digital dragnet to justify any killing, finding connections or any other incriminating evidence. A senior Israeli military officer described the cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word.” Other officials, however, have gone so far as to raise concerns that Israel’s overreliance on Microsoft as a service is a strategic vulnerability that should be corrected.
Microsoft Sees No Evil, Only Profits
Throughout all this, Microsoft has protested its innocence – and ignorance – of Israeli crimes. “At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cell phone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned,” a spokesperson for the company stated, adding, “Any allegations about Microsoft leadership involvement and support of this project … are false.”
But leaked documents suggest Microsoft engineers understood exactly what sort of data was being stored in Azure, and what their clients hoped to achieve. “Technically, they’re not supposed to be told exactly what it is, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one engineer said. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
Others felt that the idea that Microsoft did not know that one of the world’s most notorious spying organizations might be using big data to spy on people was not credible, especially given how closely the two entities had been working together for years. “Microsoft says that it can’t figure out if their customers are committing crimes against humanity or mass surveillance, while at the same time Microsoft employees are working alongside uniformed IDF. Absurd!” Paul Biggar, the founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress.
The corporation’s claim of innocence seems even more tenuous, given the fact that Microsoft employs hundreds of former Unit 8200 agents, and recruits directly from the organization. A 2022 MintPress investigation found at least 166 former Unit 8200 operatives who went on to work for Microsoft, including many who helped design Azure itself.
Microsoft’s role in Gaza goes far beyond locking out the ICC. From cloud warfare to surveillance, it’s helping power Israel’s war machine………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Zionism: Roots in Israel’s War Economy
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities. Microsoft established its first branch in Israel in 1989, and two years later, opened a research and development center in the city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The first of its kind outside the United States, the center has continued to expand, and now directly employs an estimated 2,700 workers…………………………………………………………………
Every CEO in Microsoft’s history has flown to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including Bill Gates, who, in 2016, stated that hi-tech Israeli security was “improving the world.
In short, Microsoft is a cornerstone of Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector, which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP and more than half of its total exports. Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”…………………..
Cracking Down on Internal Resistance
A greater threat than Iran to Microsoft, however, is its own employees, hundreds of whom have organized to oppose its role in the genocide. Under the banner of No Azure for Apartheid, workers demand that: Microsoft terminates all Azure contracts with Israel; disclose all ties to the Israeli national security state; publicly call for a ceasefire, and stop persecuting employees who speak out about the genocide……………………………………………………………………..
Targeting Enemies
Company employees are far from the only target of Microsoft’s wrath, however. In May, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced that Microsoft had locked him out of his official ICC email account, just as he was formalizing charges against Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders. For many, the timing was not a coincidence, but rather a message……………………………………………………………..https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
1 This Month
of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
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