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UK plan for fighter jets carrying nuclear bombs is slammed.

 THE UK Government has been accused of “lurching towards war” after
reports suggested ministers were looking to purchase fighter jets capable
of carrying and firing tactical nuclear weapons.

If the Labour Government went through with the purchase, reportedly to counter the growing threat by Russia, it would be the biggest expansion of the UK’s so-called nuclear
deterrent since the Cold War. The Sunday Times reports that the Government
is taking part in “highly sensitive” talks and that US firm Lockheed
Martin’s F-35A Lightning stealth fighter jet and other aircrafts are
under consideration.

SNP MSP Bill Kidd said: “Many Scots will have concerns
about Labour spending billions of pounds of taxpayer money to expand the
UK’s nuclear arsenal at a time when many families continue to face the
impact of the cost of living crisis. “The UK’s nuclear capability is not
independent, has leaked in recent years putting workers and wildlife at
risk, frequently fails in safety tests and is highly unlikely to ever be
used.

We want an end to these dangerous weapons in Scotland, but Labour are
determined to write them another blank cheque. “Any further expansion of
the UK’s nuclear arsenal must therefore come before parliament for
democratic scrutiny.”

 The National 1st June 2025, https://www.thenational.scot/news/25206192.uk-plans-fighter-jets-carrying-nuclear-bombs-slammed/

June 3, 2025 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

How many nuclear submarines does the UK have – and are they ready for war?

Britain currently has a fleet of nine submarines, including four Vanguard vessels armed with the Trident nuclear system

Alex Croft, Monday 02 June 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2jr1m49no

Britain will build up to 12 new nuclear-powered submarines, Sir Keir Starmer will announce as he unveils his much-anticipated defence review.

In a bid to “ensure the UK rises to the challenge” of growing global security threats, the prime minister will say that the 130-page review is a “radical blueprint” signalling a “wave of investments” into military infrastructure and weaponry.

An extra £15bn will be spent on new nuclear warheads for the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

The plans will significantly increase the UK’s conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine fleet, with the new vessels built under a joint deal with the US and Australia, known as the Aukus partnership.

Here’s all you need to know about the UK’s fleet of nuclear-deterrent submarines, and the proposed plans for its future:

How many submarines does the Royal Navy currently have?

The Royal Navy currently operates nine submarines, including five Astute-class conventionally armed nuclear-powered attack vessels. The Astute class is Britain’s largest and most advanced fleet of submarines.

The remaining four are Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBN), which carry the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system.

A new group, the Dreadnought class, will be introduced in the early 2030s. These will be both nuclear-powered and ballistic missile-armed.

How many submarines will the UK have in the future?

Two further Astute-class submarines, HMS Agamemnon and HMS Agincourt, are set to enter service in late 2025 and late 2026 respectively.

Agamemnon is currently going through trials with the Royal Navy as part of a test and commissioning programme, while Agincourt remains under construction.

As part of the joint defence deal between the US, Australia and the UK – known as Aukus – the UK is set to significantly boost its fleet of submarines following the defence review.

An added 12 submarines would bring the UK’s fleet up to more than 20 in total. This remains far smaller than the US’s fleet of 71, and China and Russia’s fleets of 66 each.

June 3, 2025 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine drone strikes hit nuclear bombers deep inside Russia

Japan Times, Jun 2, 2025

Ukraine staged a dramatic series of strikes across Russia, deploying drones hidden in trucks deep inside the country to hit strategic airfields as far away as eastern Siberia.

Around the same time, Moscow launched one of its longest drone and missile attacks against Kyiv, escalating tensions ahead of crucial peace talks this week.

More than 40 Russian aircraft, including the Tu-95 and Tu-22 M3 long-range bombers capable of deploying conventional and nuclear weapons as well as the A-50, are reported to have been damaged in the operation on Sunday, an official in Ukraine’s Security Service said on condition of anonymity as the details are not public. Ukraine’s Security Service chief Vasyl Malyuk led the operation and losses are assessed to be at least $2 billion, the person said…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/06/02/world/ukraine-drone-nuclear-bombers-russia/

June 3, 2025 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Donald Trump’s Fool’s Gold

“Golden Dome for America is a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength,” asserts its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, our first clue that the Golden Dome has nothing whatever to do with peace.

there’s not much use in a Golden Dome unless it’s one hundred percent effective, which it has a one hundred percent probability of not being………….. If just one missile gets through, the level of destruction would be devastating, and the US would then likely retaliate after which all bets are off.

the Golden Dome is merely a deterrent meant to frighten off aggressors. That means we are about to spend $175 billion on something the US would never actually use.

Linda Pentz Gunter, May 30, 2025, https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/30/donald-trumps-fools-gold/

Alright, as it turns out, the golden toilet was just a myth. Donald Trump doesn’t have one. But not to fret. President Trump’s private Boeing 757 jet (not the even more lavish one he may shortly be gifted by Qatar) reportedly has gold-plated seat belts. His Trump Tower apartment features a 24-carat gold front door. Inside, there are gold ceilings, golden plant pots and even a gold elevator!

Fancy a visit to Mar-a-Lago? Its imitation Versailles aesthetic has been described as that of an upscale bordello.

Trump’s favorite restaurant is, of course, the Golden Arches, (also known as McDonald’s). And then there’s his lustrous golden tan with the reverse raccoon eyes. We could suggest that Trump’s three trophy wives were all gold diggers, but that wouldn’t be very golden hearted. Remember the golden showers kompromat rumor? Ick, let’s not go there, either.

The wannabe king boasted during his January 20 inaugural address that “The Golden Age of America begins right now.” Six weeks later, during his March 4 Joint Address to Congress, Trump reassured the audience that his Golden Age truly was coming. “Get ready for an incredible future,” he said. “The Golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”

That last part was certainly true.Next came Trump’s embarrassingly titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would cause almost 14 million Americans to lose health care, 11 million to be deprived of food stamps, and slashes $700 billion from Medicaid and $500 billion from Medicare. This was necessary, insists the Trump junta, because there’s just so much wasteful spending in Washington — except of course the $45 million US taxpayers will spend on Trump’s June 14 he-man vanity project, that will parade tanks on the streets of the capital and fighter jets overhead.

The Big Beautiful Bill was followed a day later with much fanfare — but surprisingly without any actual golden trumpeters — by the signing of Trump’s five executive orders on nuclear power. “President Trump Signs Executive Orders to Usher in a Nuclear Renaissance, Restore Gold Standard Science,” announced the press release that presaged these disastrous directives.

The orders dramatically weaken nuclear regulatory and safety oversight, put new reactor development on an entirely unrealistic timetable, knit the civil and military nuclear sectors firmly back together again and make a major nuclear accident more likely.

They also endeavor to drastically weaken existing and inadequate radiation protection standards that already don’t account for the heightened vulnerability to harm of pregnant women, infants and children.

However, since we are now entering the age of enlightenment, the press release went on to explain: “Gold Standard Science is just that—science that meets the Gold Standard.” Thank you for clearing that up.

All of these dangerous developments have arrived wrapped — or should I say gilded — in a nausea-inducing level of overblown rhetoric that showcases Trump’s obsession with all things gold, both literal and metaphorical.

And now, as if all this golden fleecing of American taxpayers wasn’t enough, we have the Golden Dome for America!

“Golden Dome for America is a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength,” asserts its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, our first clue that the Golden Dome has nothing whatever to do with peace. Lockheed Martin is integrally involved in the US nuclear weapons complex, and is a key partner in the development and production of US submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles, specifically the Trident II D5, the most lethal destructive force on earth.

The idea of having an invincible missile defense system that could intercept and destroy all missiles targeting the United States, has been around since the 1950s and was developed in various iterations, garnering headlines under the Ronald Reagan administration with the announcement of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), quickly nicknamed “Star Wars” by its detractors.

SDI was highly ambitious, complex, expensive and controversial, and arguably led to the failure of what promised to be a bilateral elimination of nuclear weapons agreed by Reagan and then Russian premier, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 when Reagan refused to place limitations on SDI.

“Unexpectedly, the two leaders agreed that they could eliminate ‘all [U.S. and Soviet] nuclear weapons,’ but Gorbachev added the contingency that SDI be confined to the laboratory,” wrote Aaron Bateman for the Arms Control Association in a 2023 article on SDI. “After Reagan refused to accept any limits on SDI, the two leaders departed Reykjavik without a deal in hand.”

By the end of the 20th century, the SDI program had been renamed National Missile Defense (NMD), eventually shifting to a focus on a Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, whose primary task is to defend against incoming long-range ballistic missiles aimed at the US.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists states in the headline to its history of US missile defense, “Since the system’s deployment in 2002, six out of ten test intercepts have failed.”

The Golden Dome is fundamentally another ambitious reboot of SDI. Trump claims he has already settled on what he calls the “architecture”, which makes you wonder if he sees this as some sort of floating palace, a Mar-a-Lago in the sky? When the plan was unveiled in the White House, Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, stood by the glittery poster looking for all the world like some sort of game show host.

The Golden Dome price tag is a whopping $175 billion (there’s austerity for you!) and apparently it will all be up and running before Trump’s term is out in January 2029, (assuming Trump willingly leaves office and we still have a democratic election process by then.)

It’s a goal longtime national security and nuclear policy expert, Joe Cirincione, called “insane” in an interview with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “You probably won’t even get the architecture of the system settled by the end of his administration,” Cirincione said.

Even more insane is that, far from enhancing the safety of the US, the Golden Dome is entirely provocative and, as a nervous China has already warned, will only increase the risks of militarizing space and could even relaunch a global arms race (arguably something that is already underway).

In any case, there’s not much use in a Golden Dome unless it’s one hundred percent effective, which it has a one hundred percent probability of not being. Its predecessor certainly didn’t achieve that and was what Cirincione described as “the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense.”

If just one missile gets through, the level of destruction would be devastating, and the US would then likely retaliate after which all bets are off.

Our current missile defense system, whose earliest iteration was deployed in 1962, has cost at least $531 billion so far according to Stephen Schwartz, a longtime analyst on nuclear weapons costs.

On BlueSky, Schwartz called the Golden Dome project “delusional and reckless. There’s no way to design, test, construct, and deploy a comprehensive system to reliably stop any missiles launched from land, sea, or space, and do it in ‘two-and-a-half to three years’ for $175 billion.”

So far, US missile defense interception attempts (fortunately all tests), have had a success rate that spans a range of 41% to 88% depending on whether you accept an independent analysis, which generates the lower number, or “official” tallies, which produce the higher one. Either way, it’s not 100%.

The Golden Dome, it turns out, is no golden ticket to survival.

But no matter, since, its proponents argue, the Golden Dome is merely a deterrent meant to frighten off aggressors. That means we are about to spend $175 billion on something the US would never actually use.

Trump would do well to take a lesson from Shakespeare’s Prince of Morocco who, in The Merchant of Venice, discovers that “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed, when he chooses the golden box (of course) over the other less sparkly ones, he learns that what tends to lurk inside such “gilded tombs” are merely “worms.”

Or maybe Trump should just stop talking and heed the most important lesson of all? Silence is golden.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. 

June 2, 2025 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Revealed: Nato rearmament could increase emissions by 200m tonnes a year

Exclusive: researchers say defence spending boosts across world will worsen climate crisis which in turn will cause more conflict

Damien Gayle 29 May 25, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/29/nato-military-spending-could-increase-emissions-study-finds

A global military buildup poses an existential threat to climate goals, according to researchers who say the rearmament planned by Nato alone could increase greenhouse gas emissions by almost 200m tonnes a year.

With the world embroiled in the highest number of armed conflicts since the second world war, countries have embarked on military spending sprees, collectively totalling a record $2.46tn in 2023.

For every dollar invested in new hardware, there is not only a corresponding carbon cost but also an opportunity cost to potential climate action, critics say. This is on top of the huge death toll resulting from armed conflicts.

“There is a real concern around the way that we are prioritising short-term security and sacrificing long-term security,” said Ellie Kinney, a researcher with the Conflict and Environment Observatory and a co-author of the study, shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“Because of this kind of lack-of-informed approach that we’re taking, you’re investing in hard military security now, increasing global emissions for that reason, and worsening the climate crisis further down the line.”

That in turn is only likely to lead to further violence, with climate change itself now increasingly seen as a driver of conflict, albeit indirectly. In Sudan’s Darfur region, conflict was linked to competition over scarce resources after prolonged droughts and desertification. In the Arctic, receding sea ice is leading to tensions over who should control newly accessible oil, gas and critical mineral resources.

Few militaries are transparent about the scale of their fossil fuel use, but researchers have estimated that collectively they are already responsible for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

That figure is expected to rise as tensions escalate in a number of regions and as the US, for decades the world’s biggest military spender, indicates that it expects its Nato allies to devote significantly more resources to their armed forces.

According to the Global Peace Index, militarisation increased in 108 countries in 2023. With 92 countries involved in armed conflict, in places ranging from Ukraine and Gaza to South Sudan and DRC, with tensions seething between China and the US over Taiwan, and with the frozen conflict between India and Pakistan flaring, governments fearful of war are investing heavily in their militaries.

In Europe, the increase has been particularly dramatic: between 2021 and 2024, EU states’ weapons spending rose by more than 30%, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In March, the EU, disconcerted by Donald Trump’s cutting of military aid and diplomatic support for Ukraine, indicated this would go further, with proposals for a further €800bn spend across the bloc outlined in a plan called “ReArm Europe”.

In analysis for the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, Kinney and colleagues looked at the potential impact of increased militarisation on meeting climate goals. What they found was sobering: the likely increase in emissions from Nato’s remilitarisation alone would be the equivalent of adding the cost of a country as large and populous as Pakistan to the world’s remaining carbon budget.

“Our analysis specifically looks at the impact on sustainable development goal 13, which is climate action – to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts,” Kinney said. “And what our analysis finds, looking at the various sub-targets of that … [is] that there is a real threat to global climate action caused by global increase in military spending.”

Of all functions of states, militaries are almost uniquely carbon-intensive. “First of all, with the equipment that they purchase, which is mainly a lot of steel and aluminium, which is very carbon-intensive to produce,” said Lennard de Klerk, of the Initiative on the GHG Accounting of War, another co-author of the study.

“Secondly is during operations, armies are very mobile. And in order to move around they use fossil fuels – that’s diesel for ground operations and kerosene for air operations. Or for maritime operations it’s mainly diesel as well, if they’re not nuclear-driven.”

Given the secrecy that usually surrounds militaries and their operations, it is difficult to know just how much greenhouse gases they are emitting. Only Nato countries report enough of their emissions for scientists to attempt an estimate.

“We took Nato because they are the most transparent in terms of spending. So it’s not that we particularly want to focus on Nato, but simply because they have more data available,” De Klerk said.

The researchers calculated by how much greenhouse gas emissions would increase if Nato countries excluding the US – since it already spends far more than the others – made a two percentage point increase in the share of GDP they devoted to their militaries.

Such an increase is already under way, with many countries in Europe significantly increasing military spending in response to the crisis in Ukraine. Although Nato countries have publicly committed to increasing spending to 2% of GDP, the researchers say the ReArm Europe plan could lead to an eventual rise to 3.5%, from about 1.5% in 2020. The researchers assumed a similar eventual increase in Nato members that are not members of the EU, such as the UK.

Borrowing methodology from a recent paper that argued each percentage point increase in the share of GDP devoted to military spending would lead to an increase in national emissions of between 0.9% and 2%, they estimated that a two percentage point spending shock would lead to an increase across the bloc of between 87 and 194 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) a year.

The researchers say that not only would such a huge increase in emissions supercharge climate breakdown but the increase in global temperatures would hurt the economy. Recent estimates of the social cost of carbon – a monetary indicator of the damage of CO2 emitted – put it at $1,347/tCO2e, suggesting the annual cost of Nato’s military buildup could be as much as $264bn a year.

And that is only a fraction of the true carbon cost of militarisation, Kinney points out. “The calculation in the paper, it’s 31 countries – that only represents 9% of total world emissions. If you consider … the impact of that, there’s a lot of the world that we haven’t taken into consideration of this specific calculation.”

The analysis notes that spending more money on militaries also reduces resources available for policies aimed at mitigating climate change. This already seems to be the case, with the UK, for example, funding its increase in spending by reducing its overseas aid budget – a move mirrored in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

“This increase in military spending is impacting the kind of core trust that is necessary for multilateralism,” Kinney said. “At Cop29, global south countries like Cuba in particular pointed out the hypocrisy in the room of states being willing to spend increasing amounts on their military spending, but offering … completely, unacceptably low climate finance commitments.”

The Guardian has contacted Nato for comment.

June 2, 2025 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Britain to buy fighter jets to carry nuclear weapons.

 Britain wants to purchase fighter jets capable of firing tactical nuclear
weapons, in a major expansion of the deterrent intended to counter the
growing threat posed by Russia. Sir Keir Starmer’s government is in
highly sensitive talks over the move, which would represent the biggest
development in the UK’s deterrent since the Cold War and a recognition
that the world has entered a more dangerous nuclear era.

 Times 31st May 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/review-fighter-jets-nuclear-weapons-x9vldt0sv

June 2, 2025 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Desperation Time in Ukraine End-Game

Despite propaganda pieces touting a mythical Ukrainian superiority in drone production and warfighting, the truth is that it is Russia that enjoys these superiorities.

The financing of the army has now reached a deficit of 400-900 billion Ukrainian hryvnia ($20 billion), meaning the Ukrainian army is highly dependent not just on Western supplies but also Western financing (https://t.me/rezident_ua/26250).

by Gordonhahn, May 29, 2025, https://gordonhahn.com/2025/05/29/desperation-time-in-ukraine-end-game/

Europe in the form of the power triangle of Germany, France, and the UK have abandoned all caution and appeared to have decided to take a step they already twice had balked at because of a lack of U.S. support: allowing Kiev to hit targets deep inside Russia with longer-range missile systems that can hit Moscow.

New German Chancellor Freiderick Merz recently claimed then backed off the claim that the US and the three leading European governments had agreed to lift the restriction against such attacks.

Merz’s claim may have prompted US President Donald Trump to include in one of his recent ‘Truth Social’ tirades that he ‘has protected Russia from some very bad things.’ Merz also rolled backed his claim that Berlin is sending the requisite German ‘Taurus’ missile systems to Kiev and instead proposed after a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy in Berlin that Germany would finance the production of Ukrainian rockets with a capability to hit targets as far away as 2,500 kilometers—that is, deep inside Russia. Then today, Merz reiterated that sending Tauruses to Kiev is an option.

Even the former Joseph Biden administration had the sense to veto Europe’s and American neocons’ ‘hit Russia deep’ policy, which Washington is able to do, because Europe’s missiles with the needed range cannot be launched without the use of US software and technical support.

What has prompted Merz’s demarche and flailing about? There are at least four reasons, and they are the same ones that explain similar failed demarches and flailing about by French President Immanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer.

First, Merz, a war hawk, sought to raise again the issue and mount pressure on the new U.S. administration of Ukraine dove, Donald Trump, to acquiesce in lifting the restriction should Russo-Ukrainian negotiations break down.

Second is the accelerating collapse of Ukraine’s defense lines across a broad swathe of the battle front and Russia’s mammoth superiority in missiles, artillery, conventional air power, and now drones.

Third is the US President Trump’s peace mission, which, though failing, has rendered Ukraine in a weaker position militarily and politically. The latter two reasons can combine forcing Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s or a moderate successor to essentially capitulate to Moscow’s topught demands, marking a major defeat for the NATO and the EU.

Fourth, any peace agreement achieved in a process initiated by Trump additionally likely would bolster national Trumpism’s hand in Europe, threatening its remaining woke, neo-liberal, globalist governments, most importantly those ruling over the leading EU troika of Germany, the UK, and France. In sum, for the woke, globalist Western elite, this is desperation time. Let’s look at these in some detail.

The accelerating collapse of Ukraine’s defense lines is approaching a critical mass at which point there will be a cascading collapse and mass, uncontrolled retreat of Ukrainian forces to the Dneiper River and Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv (Kharkov). There they, respectively, will fight with their backs against the water and can be surrounded and forced to retreat further to the Dneiper as well. Russian forces have been accelerating their advance into Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv Oblasts and recently entered the south-central region of Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk) Oblast’. These are regions that Russia has not declared to be its sovereign territory.

In the annexed but not fully seized oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhia, and Kherson gains are also mounting. Luhansk is some 98 percent under Russian control. In Donetsk, Russian forces have made a major breakthrough between the key cities of Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka splitting Ukraine’s Donetsk defense lines, making the full occupation of Donetsk almost a certainty by autumn……………………………………….

Accelerating progress in the less-controlled southern regions of Zaporozhia and Kherson has also begun, with Russian forces moving on Gulyai Pole and Malaya Tokmachka, respectively. ……………………………………..

Russia’s mammoth superiority in missiles, artillery, conventional air power (rarely used), and now drones…………………………….

A similarly grave Werstern/Ukrainian deficit is evident with air defense missiles……………………..in 2024 Ukraine was able to intercept up to 90% of Shahed drones, now this figure has fallen sharply, to 30% in some areas of Ukrane (https://t.me/rezident_ua/26250).

The withdrawal of US support for the war and Europe’s lack of industrial capacity has crippled Ukraine in this regard. NATO rejected Ukraine’s recent request for additional missiles for such Ukraine’s Western-supplied air defense systems, since the West has spent some 40% of NATO’s strategic reserve in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War (https://t.me/rezident_ua/26246). Russian artillery production outstrips Western production by a factor of five or so as the use of artillery on the front by Russia outstrips that of Ukraine by a factor of six to one.

Despite propaganda pieces touting a mythical Ukrainian superiority in drone production and warfighting, the truth is that it is Russia that enjoys these superiorities. Thus, Ukrainian intelligence concludes that Russian drone production will soon reach 500 per day within the next few months (https://t.me/rezident_ua/26250). Even the pro-Ukrainian, pro-NATO outlet, The Economist, notes that it is Russia not Ukraine that soon will be attacking with 1,000 Shahed drones alone nightly (https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukraine-russia-may-produce-500-shaheds-daily-launch-1-000-drones-per-strike-the-economist-50516881.html).

The financing of the army has now reached a deficit of 400-900 billion Ukrainian hryvnia ($20 billion), meaning the Ukrainian army is highly dependent not just on Western supplies but also Western financing (https://t.me/rezident_ua/26250).

All this compounds Ukraine’s manpower shortage, which is deepening, with the failure of the 18-24 Program that provided increased remuneration for service but which only attracted some 500 volunteers in a period of two months (March-April 2025)…………………………………………

Russian recruits are younger, better trained, better armed, and Russian soldiers are rotated away from the front for 30-day leaves, while Ukraine has been unable to adopt a law that would make rotation obligatory, and few ever receive leave outside of going AWOL. This leaves Ukraine’s middle-aged, little trained, and poorly armed army in combat on a permanent basis, destroying morale.

This dark picture or something very similar to it is certainly known to those working in the bowels of the state apparati in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and Kiev.

In politics, desperation is masked by extreme denial, especially in Kiev, where Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s penchant for simulacra over reality is evident and legend even among his own team. Nevertheless, there is some awareness, indeed panic over the fact that Trump’s withdrawal of full US support has weakened the positions of Kiev and Europe politically. US pressure on Kiev, forcing it to negotiate is undermining not just the army’s morale but also the public’s morale – already dangerously low – weakening Zelenskiy’s administration at home and abroad. At home, Zelenskiy’s refusal to negotiate with Moscow seriously is consternating the many Ukrainians predisposed to ending the war through a peace agreement with Moscow, even one that includes giving up Ukrainian territory. In addition, Ukraine’s powerful neofascists, now with many weapons in hand, are increasingly voicing their opposition to talks and threatening Zelenskiy.

Abroad, those few European and numerous non-European states that have been opposed to Europe’s rejection of Trump’s peace efforts and endeavors to undermine them are emboldened in this policy, further isolating Kiev and stressing its lone supporter, Europe and its pro-war governments. Pro-Ukrainian European governments and states have become less viable politically, economically, and financially. This, in turn, is marching such European governments inexorably towards an even less rational Ukraine policy—one that risks a broader, more overt European or Russo-Western war by, among other things, allowing Kiev to hit deep inside Russia with European-controlled weapons, which Freidrick Merz and the leaders of the other leading European states are pressuring Washington to back.

For Europe, it must be clear that soon the disparity between European/Ukrainian and Russian power will such that it will either force Kiev’s army, regime and perhaps state to collapse or dictate to Zelenskiy or a replacement that Kiev must sit at the negotiating table and accept unfavorable terms.  Lacking the courage or social political, economic, financial, industrial, and technological whertewithall to enter the war directly with boots on the ground. Europe seeks parity and sekf-respect on the cheap. Bombing Russia from afar and having Ukraine pay the price has been a ‘good deal’ for many in the West.

The problem is that if Europeans do help Ukraine attack Russia in depth and succeed in striking Moscow or achieve some other blow, Europe will become a target in Putin’s ‘special military operation’ (SMO), as Putin implicitly warned last fall when the West wisely balked at taking such a dangerous step.

 Indeed, in such an event, Putin is likely to upgrade the SMO to war status, with the State Duma adopting a declaration of war at his behest. The SMO will be no more, and actual ‘full-scale invasion’ of, and all-out war against Ukraine will ensue.

Ukraine will pay an even more steep price for Europe’s hubris, but also Europe will be hit. Will Trump enter the U.S. into the frey more directly, and in what form? Desperation’s frequent handmaiden is dangerous, fateful decision-making.

June 1, 2025 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Time to give up the pretense about Ukraine winning the war.

31 May 25, https://theaimn.net/time-to-give-up-the-pretense-about-ukraine-winning-the-war/

The war in Ukraine has reached a new, and very dangerous phase. Not that it wasn’t dangerous before. But the toll of militarism was being paid by the deaths and the sufferings only of soldiers and their communities of Ukraine and Russia.

That’s OK by the shareholders in U.S. and other weapons companies, and by warhawks and the virtuous Russian-haters of Western culture. But it’s another thing when the deaths and sufferings might now extend to European people, to the British – and heck, – to World War 3 and all of us.

The change is that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged on 28th May to help Ukraine develop its own long-range missile systems that would be free of any Western-imposed limitations on their use and targets. So Ukraine could hit Moscow. Now Merz did back off in this, a bit, but later suggested that Taurus missiles might be delivered to UKraine. Germany would put up the money.

This would be a revolutionary change in the Western policy on the war in Ukraine.War-monger though he was, President Joe Biden saw the danger in escalating the war in this way, and for over 2 years refused Ukraine’s demand for long-range missiles. He changed his mind on this only at the last minute in December 2024. Then Trump, on taking office, paused weapons shipments to Ukraine. Now, characteristically, Trump has a confusing attitude on this – probably means “It’s OK as long as Ukraine pays up for them“.

Now, there are lots of impediments to Ukraine actually getting long-range missiles that could strike deep inside Russia. One big impediment is that the USA would have to be involved in missiles from Germany being used – this would necessitate U.S. software and technical support.

Lavrov on Germany’s Taurus Missiles: Approval for Ukraine’s Long-Range Strikes? | Times Now World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L8ARMiQmdE

So, should we really worry about this bold initiative by the German Chancellor?

I think, yes. It’s a wake-up call. If we all think that it’s now OK for long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russia, well, I guess we don’t mind if Russia sends the same into Ukraine and beyond ?

Is anyone in the West paying attention to the facts on the actual progress of this war? Global Conflict Tracker now says:

“Russia still occupies roughly 20 percent of the country after gaining over four thousand square kilometers of territory in 2024. Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities…. Since January 2022, Ukraine has received about $407 billion in aid, including over $118 billion from the United States. Fighting and air strikes have inflicted over 40,000 civilian casualties, while 3.7 million people are internally displaced, and 6.9 million have fled Ukraine. 12.7 million people need humanitarian assistance.“

But never mind. The corporate media is still telling us that Ukraine can, and must, beat Russia. And they’re also telling us that Russia doesn’t want a negotiated settlement.

And why is it that Russia does not seem to want a negotiated settlement?

Well, that’s because the new “Coalition of the Willing”, led by Britain and France, supports Volodymyr Zelensky’s underlying demands for ending the war:

​​Zelensky’s underlying demands:

  1. ​Ukraine membership of NATO​ 
  2. return of all Russian-occupied territories, including the Donbass and​ Crimea​ 
  3. Western troops in Ukraine for security​ 
  4. payment of reparations, war crimes trials for the Russian leadership

All of these are unacceptable to Russia – especially NATO membership – a definite “Red Line”

There have been previous negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. In the Istanbul talks of March-April 2022, the two parties were on the verge of an agreement, in which Russia made concessions, and Zelensky did not insist on NATO membership. The US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul talks by refusing to provide Ukraine with security guarantees and encouraging Zelensky to keep fighting instead. 

Now Russia is in a militarily winning position, and has no inclination to submit to those underlying demands, nor to agree to a temporary ceasefire which would allow Ukraine to develop weaponry and troops.

But there is no suggestion from our bold, confident, Western leaders – Sir Keir Starmer,  Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, that it might be best to pay more attention to the actual military situation, and less to the theatrical posturing of Volodymyr Zelensky. An unlikely source of common sense is America’s President Donald Trump – who actually does want peace, with his focus on making himself and his cronies richer, rather than on fighting Russia.

And the general public? Weary of it all, stunned into a sort of mental paralysis as we observe the barbarities going on in Gaza, the West en masse seems to be just sleep-walking into the military and economic disaster of a continuing war in Ukraine.

As with all wars, the media plays a huge role – glorifying that consummate media performer Zelensky, and regaling us with the civilian horrors suffered by Ukrainian civilians. (And they ARE really suffering). Of course, not a word about suffering Russians. Russian atrocities are publicised – both real ones, and fabricated. But if you see any news item about atrocities done by Ukrainians – you assume automatically that it must be a lie.

In fact, I’ve noticed that there is a powerful argument for the untruth of anything that shows any positive activity by Russians. If you mention it to any Westerner, it will be refuted because “After all, this news is just Russian propaganda“. You see, it doesn’t matter if the news is factual – it must be false, coming from Russia. In reality, of course the Russians are using factual news as propaganda. As well, they do have a sophisticated programme of misinformation as well. And so do we in the West, in all likelihood, when we consider America’s Central Intelligence Agency and its long history of disinformation.

So, it is a media mess. It’s tragic that Zelensky, elected on a pledge to honour agreements ensuring the autonomy of the largely Russian-speaking Donbass provinces, quickly went along with Europe and USA’s historic fear and hatred of Russia.

Never mind that Russia was on “our side” in the last big war, and largely won that war in Europe, at the price of some 27 million Russian lives. The Soviet Union did defeat the Nazis in Ukraine. But all that is forgotten, as Western leaders look solemn and statesman-like, pronouncing on coalition-of-the -willing plans for a big war in the air, with ever more powerful missiles, ending of course, in a glorious victory over Russia (and sorta bad luck that Ukraine is completely demolished along the way).

I don’t know what it might take for the public to wake up to the suicidal path on which these macho “statesmen” are leading the West, and “helping” Ukraine. A previous Coalition of the Willing” “helped Iraq”, and that hasn’t turned out so well.

It would be a good start if some in the corporate media could get away with telling the facts on the dismal situation of Ukraine in this war. Expanding the war sounds so noble and easy to decide on. Much more difficult would be a measured progress in negotiation, recognising the legitimate needs of each side.

May 31, 2025 Posted by | Christina's notes, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Gaza’s Hospitals ARE The Target

Caitlin Johnstone, May 30, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gazas-hospitals-are-the-target?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=164774998&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

It’s a relatively well-known fact that Israeli forces have attacked the overwhelming majority of hospitals in Gaza and have launched hundreds upon hundreds of strikes on medical services in the enclave.

Whenever anyone mentions this fact publicly they’ll get Israel apologists babbling about “human shields” and absurdly trying to claim that there are Hamas bases in all the hospitals. But these talking points are invalidated by the fact that we’ve seen multiple reports from doctors documenting Israeli forces actually entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying all the individual pieces of medical equipment in those facilities, one by one.

The latest of such reports appears in the Greek outlet Efimerida ton Syntakton from a specialist surgeon named Christos Georgalas, who was at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza from April to May of this year.

According to machine translation, Georgalas calls Israel’s onslaught “a war mainly against children,” and describes horrific injuries that Israeli munitions have been inflicting upon young Palestinians.

Georgalas also describes repeated Israeli attacks on the hospital where he was working, which include the following:

“A Spanish colleague told me that when the Israelis came to the hospital where the MRI machine was, they tried to destroy everything. But the MRI machine is a huge machine. It’s like a car. Even if you shoot it, it can be repaired. So they brought in a specialist engineer to permanently destroy it. Because even if a bomb went off next to it, it could still be repaired. They had to bring in a specialist who knew the heart of the machine to make it non-functional. And that’s exactly what he did last February.

In our hospital, the Israelis went through the wards that were the incubators and systematically broke them one by one. The incubators with the crowbar! This has been recorded by my colleagues. The hospital where I worked was occupied by the Israelis for two months, in February and March 2024. The doctors who had remained in the hospital were tortured. They were lined up one by one and beaten. A total of around 80 of them were kidnapped. Of these, we do not know where 40 are or if they are alive. They killed many on the spot.”

Because Israel has been blocking journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, doctors have largely become the de facto reporters on the ground there.

We saw another report documenting Israel’s pattern of systematically destroying individual pieces of medical equipment back in February of this year, this time at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza. Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reported the following:

“There is no health system anymore in the northern part of Gaza. Kamal Adwan hospital has been razed, while Al Shifa, Al Awda and Indonesian hospitals are seriously damaged and only partially functioning. We were utterly shocked to observe that in Indonesian hospital every medical machine seemed to have been deliberately destroyed; they were smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore. You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children. It’s devastating to see the state of these hospitals.”

In April of this year Seguin’s report on the Indonesian Hospital was corroborated by an emergency physician named Clayton Dalton, who wrote the following for The New Yorker:

Sultan led me upstairs, to the I.C.U., where wind blew through broken windows. He wanted to show me something that he had discovered after Israeli forces left the hospital. He pointed to a cardiac monitor near a wall. It appeared to have a bullet hole in its screen. Next to it was an EKG machine whose screen had been smashed.

“We entered a large storage room in the corner of the I.C.U. which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound machines, I.V. pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had apparently been destroyed by a bullet — not in a pattern one would expect from random shooting but, rather, methodically. I was stunned. I couldn’t think of any possible military justification for destroying lifesaving equipment.”

Indeed, there is no possible military justification for destroying lifesaving medical equipment. They were destroyed so that they could not be used to save lives. Israel has been systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure with the goal of making it uninhabitable, so that the territory can be seized by Israel.

That’s three separate accounts describing Israeli forces systematically destroying medical equipment in Gaza, from doctors who’d stand nothing to gain from lying about such a thing. The evidence is too overwhelming to deny.

There were no Hamas fighters hiding in the MRI machine. There were no tunnels in the incubators. No arms stockpiles in the EKG machine. Israel has been lying about Hamas hiding in hospitals this entire time. Hamas was never the target. Hospitals are the target. Healthcare is the target. That’s established far beyond any reasonable doubt by now.

May 31, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

New Israeli Law Allows Palestinians as Young as 12 to Be Imprisoned for Life.

Israel often accuses children of terrorism for actions like throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or at cars, with Israeli forces killing many children for stone throwing over the decades and Israeli lawmakers passing a minimum sentence of three years for the act.

 May 29, 2025 , By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/new-israeli-law-allows-palestinians-as-young-as-12-to-be-imprisoned-for-life/

A group of UN human rights experts is raising alarm over a recently-passed Israeli law that allows children as young as 12 years old to be sentenced to life in prison, saying that the legislation is likely a violation of international human rights law.

The experts say that the law, passed late last year, is crafted specifically to target Palestinian children, as Israeli authorities often accuse Palestinian children of terrorism while not charging Israeli children the same way — one fixture of Israel’s apartheid system.

“[A]uthorizing up to life imprisonment for children as young as 12 years old is not consistent with international law,” the experts wrote in a statement this month. “Under [the Convention on the Rights of the Child], the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child must be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”

The statement was signed by UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestine territory, Francesca Albanese, as well as Ben Saul, special rapporteur on the promotion of human rights in counterterrorism; Farida Shaheed, special rapporteur on the right to education; and K.P. Ashwini, special rapporteur on racism and intolerance.

Israel often accuses children of terrorism for actions like throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or at cars, with Israeli forces killing many children for stone throwing over the decades and Israeli lawmakers passing a minimum sentence of three years for the act.

Israeli officials have also long framed all Palestinians, including children, as terrorists.

This has led to the detention and killing of huge numbers of Palestinian children under Israeli occupation. According to a recent report by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), the proportion of children in administrative detention — meaning that they are being held without charges — has reached a record high amid Israel’s genocide.

Citing numbers from the Israeli Prison Service, DCIP reports that nearly 40 percent of Palestinian children detained in Israeli prisons are being held without charges. This amounts to 119 of the 323 imprisoned by Israeli authorities, which represents “both the highest number and the highest proportion” in DCIP’s records on administrative detention.

“These figures highlight Israel’s continued criminalization of Palestinian childhood and its deepening disregard for fundamental legal protections,” the group wrote, adding that children and their families are frequently forbidden from contacting their lawyers by Israeli authorities.

The Israeli Knesset has sought to further punish these families in another recent law condemned in the UN experts’ statement.

That law, passed last year, allows child welfare benefits to be taken away if children are convicted of terrorist offenses. Experts say that the legislation is “overbroad” and not backed by evidence that such a punishment would deter supposed terrorist acts.

“We note that Israeli law does not withdraw benefits from children convicted of other serious offences, suggesting that the Amendment does not legitimately aim to suspend benefits that may be unnecessary while the child is in detention, but serves an ulterior punitive purpose,” the experts wrote.

This legislation, too, is aimed at punishing Palestinian children and their families, experts say, and is likely a violation of international law.

Israel was put on the UN’s list of international violators of children’s rights last year due to thousands of “grave violations” against children throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, Israel has continued to act with impunity, and UNICEF reported on Tuesday that Israel has killed or injured at least 50,000 children since October 2023 — with other estimates of casualties being far higher.

May 31, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel, Legal | Leave a comment

Legacy of US nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands created global radiation exposure: new study

27 May 25
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/74957/legacy-of-us-nuclear-weapons-tests-in-the-marshall-islands-created-global-radiation-exposure-new-study/

Hamburg, Germany – Nearly seven decades since the US government ended nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, a new study has revealed the impacts were far greater than what the US government has so far publicly acknowledged. According to a new study, all atolls, including the southern atolls, received radioactive fallout, but only three of the 24 atolls, all northern and inhabited at the time of fallout, received medical cancer screening.[1]

“The Legacy of U.S. Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands” by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and commissioned by Greenpeace Germany, has comprehensively analyzed official documents from US government military and energy archives, scientific analyses, and medical sources from 1945 to the present day. 

“Among the many troubling aspects of the Marshall Islands’ nuclear legacy is that the United States had concluded, in 1948, after just three tests that the Marshall Islands was not ‘a suitable site for atomic experiments’ because it did not meet the required meteorological criteria. Yet testing went on,” said Arjun Makhijani, report author and President of IEER. 

Among the key findings of the study:

  • U.S. government radioactivity measurements and dose estimates show that the entire country was impacted by fallout.
    In the immediate aftermath of Castle Bravo – the US government’s largest ever nuclear weapons test – its capital, Majuro, was officially considered a “very low exposure” atoll. However, radiation levels were tens of times, and up to 300 times more, relative to background gamma radiation levels
  • Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands created radiation exposures globally, with “hotspots” detected as far west of the Marshall Islands as Colombo, Sri Lanka and as far east as Mexico City.
    The total explosive force detonated on the Marshall Islands was 108 megatons – the equivalent of dropping a Hiroshima bomb every single day for twenty years. On a proportional basis, the nuclear fall out is estimated to result in roughly 100,000 excess cancer deaths worldwide (rounded).[2]
  • Remediation of contaminated areas is complex and costly. The Marshall Islands lacks technical capacity in a number of fields crucial to health, environmental protection, and possible resettlement. The history of damage by, and distrust of the United States is compounded by Marshallese dependence on the United States for funds and for scientific and medical expertise. As an example, the Runit Dome, which houses decades of nuclear waste, has been deemed “safe” by the US Department of Energy despite cracks and the impact of climate change and sea level rise.

“The tests on the Marshall Islands are exemplary of an inhumane, imperial policy that deliberately sacrificed human lives and ignored Pacific cultures. As a result of this nuclear legacy, the Marshallese have been robbed of their land, traditions, and culture, with the people of Bikini and Rongelap forever displaced,” said Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific. “The US still fails to acknowledge the full extent of the deep impact. However, these atomic bomb tests are not a closed chapter and they are still having an impact today. Reparations that fit the extent of the harms caused by testing are long overdue.”

In March and April, Greenpeace and its flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, completed a six-week mission with radiation specialists and independent scientists to conduct research across the atolls to support the Marshall Island’s government in its ongoing fight for nuclear justice and compensation.[3] It also marked 40 years (May 1985) when Greenpeace helped answer a call and evacuated the people of Rongelap Island to Mejatto due to nuclear fallout from Castle Bravo, which rendered their home uninhabitable.

In July, Greenpeace and the Rainbow Warrior will mark another 40 year anniversary – the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior I by the French secret service, who were attempting to halt Greenpeace’s campaign against nuclear testing in French Polynesia (Maohi Nui).  

May 30, 2025 Posted by | environment, OCEANIA, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Roads to War: The EU’s Security Action for Europe Fund

May 29, 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/roads-to-war-the-eus-security-action-for-europe-fund/

As the world was readying for the Second World War, the insightful humane Austrian author Stefan Zweig made the following glum observation: “Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will to expand and make preparations for war. The politics of rearmament is pursued in broad daylight and at breakneck speed; every day you read in the papers arguments in favour of armaments expansion, the idea that it reduces unemployment and provides a boost to the stock exchange.”

This is not so different from the approval by European Union countries on May 27 of a €150 billion loan program known as the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) borrowing scheme. A press release from the European Council stated that the scheme “will finance urgent and large-scale investments in the European defence technological and industrial base (EDTIB)” with the intention of boosting “production capacity, making sure defence equipment is available when needed, and to address existing capability gaps – ultimately strengthening the EU’s overall defence readiness.”

The statement also makes a central rationale clear: that SAFE will enable continued European support for Ukraine, linking its defence industry to the program. Despite not being an EU member, Kyiv will be able to participate in the scheme. Interestingly enough, the United Kingdom, despite leaving the EU, will also be able to participate via a separate agreement.

Disbursements to interested member states upon demand, considered along national plans “will take the form of competitively priced long-maturity loans, to be repaid by the beneficiary member states.”

The scheme further anticipates the types of weaponry, euphemistically titled “defence products”, that will feature. As outlined by the European Council on March 6, these will comprise two categories: the first covering, amongst others, such products as ammunition and missiles, artillery systems, ground combat capabilities with support systems; the second, air and missile defence systems, maritime surface and underwater capabilities, drones and anti-drone systems and “strategic enablers” including air-to-air refuelling, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare.

The broader militarisation agenda is confirmed by linking SAFE with broader transatlantic engagement and “complementarity with NATO.” It will “strive to enhance interoperability, continue industrial cooperation, and ensure reciprocal access to state-of-the-art technologies with trusted partners.”Significantly, the emphasis is on collaboration: a minimum of three countries must combine when requesting funding for SAFE defence projects.

There seems to be something for everyone: the militarist, the war monger and the merchants of death. Global Finance, a publication dedicated to informing “corporate financial professionals”, was already praising the SAFE proposal in April. “The initiative has the potential to transform the business models of many top European defense groups – like Saab, which has traditionally relied on contracts from the Swedish state to grow its sales.” What a delight it will be for such defence companies to move beyond the constraints on sales imposed by their limiting governments. A veritable European market of death machinery is in the offing.

The fund is intended for one, unambiguous purpose: war. The weasel word “defence” is merely the code, the cipher. Break it, and it spells out aggression and conflict, a hankering for the next great military confrontation. The reason is traditional, historic and irrational: the Oriental despotic eminence arising from the Asian steppes, people supposedly untutored in the niceties of European good manners and democracy. Not that European manners and democracy is in splendid health. A mere glance at some of the candidates suggests decline in institutional credibility and scepticism. But we can always blame the Russians for that, deviously sowing doubt with their disinformation schemes.

The initiative, and its tightening of ties with arming Ukraine, has made such critics as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sound modestly sensible. “We need to invest in our own armies, but they expect us to fund Ukraine’s – with billions, for years to come,” he declared in a post on X. “We’ve made it clear: Hungary will not pay. Our duty is to protect our own people.”

The approval of the fund by the European Commission has also angered some members of the European Parliament, an institution which has been treated with near contempt by the European Commission. European Parliament Presidente Roberta Metsola warned Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier in May to reconsider the use of Article 122 of the EU Treaty, which should be used sparingly in emergencies in speeding up approvals with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. Bypassing Europe’s invigilating lawmakers risked “undermining democratic legitimacy by weakening Parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions.” The Council’s resort to Article 122 potentially enlivened a process that could see a legal case taken to the European Court of Justice.

The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) has also supported a legal opinion repudiating the Commission’s cavalier approach in approving the fund. According to that tartly reasoned view, Article 122 was an inappropriate justification, as the threshold for evoking emergency powers had simply not been met.

Ironically, the rearmament surge is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, at both the behest of the Trump administration, ever aggrieved by Europe not pulling its military weight,and Moscow, characterised and caricatured as a potential invader, the catalyst for decorating a continent with bristling weaponry. The former continues to play hide and seek with Brussels while still being very much in Europe, be it in terms of permanent garrisons and military assets; the latter remains a convenient excuse to cross the palms of the military industrial establishment with silver. How Zweig would have hated it.

May 29, 2025 Posted by | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US protects Israel as Netanyahu vows to ‘take over’ Gaza, using hunger as as weapon


Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed to colonize Gaza, saying, “We will take control of all the territory of the Strip”. He is using starvation as a weapon, as Donald Trump tries to expel Palestinians to Libya or other countries. The US imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to protect Israeli war criminals.

GeoPoliticalEconomy, By Ben Norton, 22 May 25

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that Israel’s goal is to colonize Gaza.

“We will take control of all the territory of the [Gaza] Strip”, Netanyahu pledged on 19 May.

Israel had agreed to a ceasefire in January, but unilaterally violated the agreement in March and restarted its brutal war on Gaza.

Donald Trump personally gave Israel the green light to break the truce, according to Israeli officials.

Israeli minister boasts: “We’re destroying everything… We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza”

Israel’s extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the Israeli security cabinet and Netanyahu ally, boasted that the IDF is “destroying everything left in the Gaza Strip”, and that “the army is leaving no stone unturned”, reported the top Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Smotrich admitted that Israel is intentionally killing civilian members of the government of Gaza, including those who are not part of Hamas. “We’re eliminating ministers, bureaucrats, money handlers”, he said with pride.
“We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed”, bragged Smotrich.

In January 2023, before the latest Gaza war, Smotrich described himself as a “fascist homophobe”, telling Israel’s LGBT community, “I won’t stone gays, [as long as] you won’t feed me shrimp”.

In November 2023, just a few weeks after the war started, Smotrich publicly called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, through so-called “voluntary migration”.

Then, in April 2024, Smotrich demanded the “total annihilation” of Gaza. He invoked a Biblical passage in which God ordered the complete destruction of the nation of Amalek, including the killing of all women and children: “You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven”. This was an explicit call for genocide.

After Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November 2024, Smotrich tweeted that 2025 would be the year when Israel fully colonized and officially annexed “Judea and Samaria”, the term Israeli settlers use for the West Bank — which according to international law is Palestinian territory that has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.

In Gaza, Israel uses starvation as a “bargaining chip”, UN humanitarian chief says

As Israel unilaterally restarted its brutal war in March, it also imposed a suffocating blockade on Gaza, preventing food and medicine from entering the densely populated strip.

The UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, stated on 13 May that all 2.1 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza faced famine conditions.

Fletcher called on the UN Security Council (UNSC) “to stop the 21st-century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza”.

The UNSC has been unable to take action, however, because it has been paralyzed by the United States, which has repeatedly used its veto power to protect Israel. This was true under the Joe Biden administration, and it has continued since Trump returned to the White House in January.

Fletcher serves as the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.

“I can tell you from having visited what’s left of Gaza’s medical system that death on this scale has a sound and a smell that does not leave you”, Fletcher recalled. “As one hospital worker described it, ‘children scream as we peel burnt fabric from their skin’”.

The UN humanitarian chief stated that “Israel denies us access, placing the objective of depopulating Gaza before the lives of civilians”.

Instead of allowing in UN aid, the US and Israel created an alternative mechanism that Fletcher described as a “cynical sideshow” and “deliberate distraction”, which is merely a “fig leaf for further violence and displacement”.

The US-Israeli plan for Gaza “makes starvation a bargaining chip”, the UN humanitarian chief said.

A week later, on 19 May, Fletcher warned, “There are 14,000 [Palestinian] babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them”.

“We run all sorts of risks trying to get that baby food through to those mothers who cannot feed their children right now because they’re malnourished”, the UN humanitarian chief explained.

Israel’s mass starvation strategy

Israel is using mass starvation as a tactic to try to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, or kill those who refuse to leave.

The independent website Drop Site News reported on speeches given by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which frankly outline their sadistic strategy.

Netanyahu revealed that he only allowed a few aid trucks to enter Gaza in order to minimize international condemnation and ensure continued US support………………………………………………………….

Trump plans to expel Palestinians and ethnically cleanse Gaza

Trump has floated various plans to try to ethnically cleanse Gaza and expel Palestinians to another country………………………………………………………………………

Trump’s ICC sanctions paralyze the Hague, protecting Israel from legal consequences

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant in November 2024 for Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.

In February 2025, just two weeks after he returned to the White House, Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC, accusing it of “engag[ing] in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”.

“The ICC’s recent actions against Israel and the United States set a dangerous precedent, directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest”, the White House warned.

The Trump administration invoked the 2002 American Servicemembers’ Protection Act. This law, which was passed under the George W. Bush administration, is commonly known as the “Hague Invasion Act”, and threatens military intervention in the Netherlands to stop the prosecution of US officials and their allies.

The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights denounced Trump’s sanctions on the ICC as a “direct attack on the rule of law” that is “intended to embolden perpetrators across the world and to inhibit the pursuit of international justice against the most powerful”.

The Associated Press reported in May that Trump’s sanctions on the ICC have paralyzed the Hague and prevented it from investigating the crimes committed by top Israeli officials.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who is a British citizen, had his bank accounts in the UK frozen.

Microsoft even cancelled Khan’s email account.

Microsoft has provided the Israeli military with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing services during its genocidal war on Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

A non-governmental organization that helps the ICC compile evidence had to move its money out of US bank accounts, due to Trump’s sanctions, according to the AP.

“The Hague-based court’s American staffers have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest”, the AP added. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/23/us-israel-netanyahu-take-over-gaza-hunger/

May 29, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, USA | Leave a comment

US Has 500 Troops in Taiwan in Major Challenge to China

The number of US troops in Taiwan was disclosed by a retired US Navy rear admiral in a recent congressional hearing

by Dave DeCamp May 26, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/05/26/us-has-500-troops-in-taiwan-in-major-challenge-to-china/

A retired US Navy admiral recently revealed that the US has 500 troops in Taiwan, a major challenge to Beijing’s red lines related to the island.

Ret. Adm. Mark Montgomery made the disclosure at a House hearing on May 15, where he was arguing that the US should send more military personnel to Taiwan.

“We absolutely have to grow the joint training team in Taiwan. That’s a US team there that’s about 500 people now, it needs to be 1,000,” said Montgomery, who now works for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), an extremely hawkish think tank.

“If we’re going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, sell them tens of billions of dollars worth of US gear, it makes sense that we’d be over there training and working,” he added.

So far, the Pentagon has not confirmed the number, but due to the sensitivity of the matter, the US military typically offers few details about its operations in Taiwan.

After Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979, the US would still deploy a handful of military trainers to Taiwan. The small US presence was always an open secret but wasn’t officially confirmed until 2021, when then-President Tsai Ing-wen became the first Taiwanese leader to acknowledge US troops were on the island since 1979.

At the time of Tsai’s acknowledgment, only a few dozen US troops were believed to be on the island for training purposes. In 2023, media reports said the US was increasing its military presence to about 200 soldiers.

Last year, Taiwan confirmed that some of the US military trainers were deployed to Kinmen, a group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of mainland China.

The US has significantly increased military support for Taiwan in recent years despite constant warnings from China that the island is the “first red line” in US-China relations that must not be crossed.

May 29, 2025 Posted by | Taiwan, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine ‘can’t afford’ it if US quits conflict – top Zelensky aide

Once Kiev’s top donor, Washington has shifted under Donald Trump from arming Ukraine to focusing on mediating peace with Moscow.

25 May, 2025 https://www.rt.com/russia/618112-ukraine-us-quit-podoliak/

Ukraine can’t afford to lose US military aid in its conflict with Russia, Mikhail Podoliak, adviser to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, told the French newspaper Le Point on Friday. According to the official, US support is “essential” for Kiev’s war effort.

Under the previous US administration, Washington was Kiev’s largest donor. Since returning to office earlier this year, however, US President Donald Trump has not approved any new military aid for Ukraine, while the last remaining assistance package authorized under former President Joe Biden is expected to run out by mid-summer.

Despite pledging on the campaign trail to end the Ukraine conflict within 24 hours, Trump has recently warned he may “back away” from peace mediation unless Kiev and Moscow reach a deal. He has also questioned US commitments to NATO allies unless they boost defense spending, repeatedly insisting the EU should handle its own security and regional conflicts without depending on Washington.

Podoliak praised Europe for taking a firm pro-Ukrainian stance in the current conflict, but said it is currently too busy with its own rearmament to sufficiently support Kiev.

“Europe is rearming and changing its foreign and military policy… however, this transformation takes time. Unfortunately for Ukraine, that time is measured in lives lost,” he stated.

“We cannot afford to let the United States disengage from this war, because its military support is essential for both Europe and Ukraine,” he said, reiterating Kiev’s warnings that Russia “is a threat to Europe” and “wants to dominate” it – claims that Moscow has repeatedly dismissed as nonsense.

Russia has repeatedly condemned Western military aid to Ukraine, stating that it merely prolongs the conflict and hinders peace efforts. Last week, Russia and Ukraine held their first direct peace talks in three years in Istanbul. Both delegations agreed to stay in contact and to carry out a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner-of-war swap, which transpired on Sunday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow and Kiev are expected to exchange draft ceasefire proposals once the swap is finished.

May 29, 2025 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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