Security guarantees are not one-way instruments. They go in both directions. This is not a Russian argument, nor an American one; it is a foundational principle of European security, explicitly embedded in the Helsinki Final Act, the OSCE framework, and decades of postwar diplomacy.
Germany has a duty to approach this moment with historical seriousness and honesty. On that score, recent rhetoric and policy choices fall dangerously short.
Since 1990, Russia’s core security concerns have been repeatedly dismissed, diluted or directly violated — often with Germany’s active participation or acquiescence.
The building that houses Moldova’s oldest investigative newspaper, Ziarul de Gardă, founded in 2004, is in a small courtyard near one of the busy thoroughfares in central Chișinău, the capital. Alina Radu, the award-winning newspaper’s director, is busy checking the latest issue that just came out in print.
Ziarul de Gardă’s current burning topic has been the country’s recent parliamentary elections.
The September 28 elections — probably the most consequential in Moldova’s history — saw pro-European Union President Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) secure a clear majority. The stakes were high for this country of 2.4 million people, wedged between EU member Romania and war-torn Ukraine. Russia reportedly poured in millions of dollars to disseminate pro-Kremlin, anti-Western propaganda and support Russia-backed candidates.
“It was a nightmare,” Radu said, referencing Russian disinformation in the run-up to the 2025 elections. “Moldova was a real battlefield.”
Moldova’s pro-Kremlin strongholds — the Transnistria region, which has been under Russia’s de-facto control since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, where Russia has the strongest influence, were the main battlefields.
A different outcome would have sent a worrying signal to Western partners of the country, which has been a candidate for EU membership since 2022.
Given Russia’s unprecedented level of election interference through vote-buying schemes and disinformation, practices already observed in November 2024, when Sandu was reelected for a second term after a close runoff, this clear victory came as a surprise — and a relief — to journalists, human rights defenders, and government officials interviewed by CPJ’s Gulnoza Said, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, and Anna Brakha, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia senior researcher, during an October 6-9 mission to Moldova.
‘Money and fear’
A Ziarul de Gardăinvestigation revealed that there had been an active “digital army”— fake social media accounts created specifically to spread Russian propaganda and disinformation in the run-up to and during the elections.
People behind the accounts received payments from Moscow via networks in Europe using bitcoin and other sophisticated methods, the investigation found. “This was a huge army,” Radu said. “Russia provided the instruments and the budget.”
According to Liliana Vițu, chair of the Audiovisual Council, Moldova’s audiovisual media regulator, an autonomous public authority, Russia spent the equivalent of 2 percent of Moldova’s GDP to influence the elections, compared to 1 percent in 2024.
“They needed to instill fear about anything related to the EU,” Radu said, adding that the Russian disinformation networks used fear-mongering narratives about the prevalence of LGBTQ+ people and possible land theft by other EU countries if Moldova joins the union.
In the weeks leading up to the elections, Moldovan police conductedmajor investigations and made dozens of arrests aimed at uncovering these schemes. Information about planned destabilization operations kept coming in until election day. The staff at the independent news website Newsmaker.md worked from 7 a.m. until 2 a.m. that day, struggling to keep up with the news about it all, said Olga Gnatkova, a journalist and the outlet’s development director.
A ‘laboratory’ and a ‘training ground’
“Moldova is like a training ground where Russia tests its disinformation strategies,” Ion Manole, who works for the Moldovan human rights organization Promo-LEX, which specializes in legal defense and election monitoring, told CPJ.
“We feel like we are a laboratory, and after us will come other countries,” Manole’s colleague Mihaela Șerpi added, referring to similar methods being used in the region, particularly in Serbia and Romania.
Before Moldova, the testing ground was Ukraine, said Viorica Tătaru. Her colleague Andrei Captarenco agreed. They are independent journalists who work with a range of media outlets, including independent broadcaster TV8, and are the only Moldovan journalists who regularly travel to Ukraine to cover the war. After talking to Ukrainians, they realized that the same narratives and methods — including paidprotests — had been used in Ukraine by Russia in 2014, when Russia occupied Crimea and supported pro-Kremlin candidates, and anti-Western demonstrations.
‘Relatively safe’
Russia’s 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine is what prompted Moldova to apply for EU membership. Since then, the country has made encouraging steps forward, including in the field of press freedom.
“The Moldovan government needs to be congratulated for going through the EU screening process in record time,” Annalisa Giansanti, a spokeswoman for the EU delegation in Moldova, told CPJ, adding that the election results “will certainly impact the EU accession process, which is at full speed.”
Giansanti noted the progress in legislative alignment with the bloc, citing Moldova’s new regulatory law on a media subsidy fund, and the strengthening of the role and independence of its Audiovisual Council.
Other steps include seeking to incorporate the EU’s Audiovisual Media Service Directive into Moldovan law, making TV and radio ownership more transparent to align with one of the requirements of the European Media Freedom Act (a recent EU law to protect media independence and pluralism), and a recent amendment to a law on state advertising that defines its content and sets procedures for its allocation of public funds. “Now, all contracts must be reported,” Vițu said.
According to Anton Ialău, head of the media policy department at Moldova’s Ministry of Culture, the government has invested in fostering journalist safety. In July 2025, the country’s criminal code and code of administrative offenses were amended to detail the type of attacks perpetrated against the press and to increase penalties for obstructing its work.
Journalists Tătaru and Captarenco, who have both been physically attacked and threatened in connection with their coverage of protests organized by supporters of pro-Russian politicians, said they feel the police are on their side.
“Police try to help journalists,” Gnatkova said. “In general, in Moldova, we are relatively safe.”
The government’s pro-EU stance has made the environment more secure for journalists. “We don’t agree with everything [officials] do, but we feel free to criticize them,” said journalist Anghelina Chirciu.
But journalists fear the authorities’ ideological intolerance towards different views may lead to self-censorship as the ruling party claims the country’s only path is to the EU. “If you don’t support [the PAS], you are for Russia,” Gnatkova said. “If you criticize the ruling party, you’re criticizing EU integration. It’s unhealthy for any democracy to do that. To support a government without questioning its actions is not good for journalists.”
Over the last year, hostility toward journalists has grown as a result of internal divisions and a polarization in society deepened by Russian disinformation, which flourished in an underregulated online environment.
Reporters “are hit in the streets, and people who hit journalists are Moldovan citizens,” Ziarul de Gardă’s Radu said. “There is an environment of hate for nothing.”
Divides: Gagauzia and the Transnistria region
Moldova is deeply divided: geographically, with more than one million Moldovans living abroad; linguistically, with both Russian and Romanian languages being used by most of the population; and territorially, with the Transnistria region declaring independence in 1992, followed by Gagauzia in southern Moldova, which later returned to the country as an autonomous region.
In Gagauzia, pro-Russian narratives dominate the media, and journalists’ work is restricted. The region, which has a population of 130,000 mostly Russian and Gagauz-speaking ethnic Gagauz (Turkic) inhabitants, overwhelmingly voted for pro-Russians parties in the elections.
While journalists say they are free to report on any topic in Moldova, the Transnistria region remains inaccessible to them.
“The red line is the one that separates the left bank from the right bank [of the Dniestr River],” Captarenco said, referring to the approximately 250-mile administrative line between Transnistria and the rest of the country.
With a population of about 320,000, according to Ivan Turcan and Marian Soroceanu, representatives of Moldova’s State Chancellery’s Bureau for Reintegration Policies, a government body that oversees the negotiation process on the Transnistrian conflict, the region is a thin strip of territory between the eastern bank of the Dniester River and Moldova’s border with Ukraine where Russia has a key military base with around 1,500 troops.
Turcan said there are no independent journalists in the region: All media outlets are under the “strong control” of local authorities or in Russian hands. Independent Moldovan outlets are blocked, while Russian TV channels spread propaganda freely. “It’s a parallel reality,” he said.
Accreditation is required to work as a journalist in the area, but none of the independent Moldovan media outlets have been able to obtain it, despite requests.
Tătaru and Captarenco, who were detained in January 2024 while covering a protest in Tiraspol, the largest city in the Transnistria region, are among several journalists who have been obstructed or detained while reporting there in recent years.
In the last few years, the regime in Tiraspol has become “crueler,” said Anghelina Chirciu, a journalist with Zona de Securitate, the first independent media outlet to cover news in the Transnistria region. Her outlet was labeled an “undesirable organization” by the unrecognized regional authorities. “We know they don’t like our work,” she said.
“We don’t have effective control of the region, but we have an obligationto our own citizens,” Turcan said, mentioning Chișinău’s investments in education, health care, and improving labor policies. But in terms of press freedom and human rights, the bureau has hit a wall, with local authorities unwilling to cooperate with the government.
Underregulated online environment
Online threats are also on the rise, especially against women journalists. “Moldova is lacking a system that regulates the online environment,” the EU official said.
In the run-up to the elections, Radu faced harassment on Telegram and Facebook, with messages calling her a “prostitute” and threatening to cut off her head. She filed a complaint with the police, but said investigations take a lot of time and financial resources.
“We want to take the threats seriously,” the Ministry of Culture’s Ialău said. To do so, the police need to better enforce recent changes to the criminal and administrative offenses codes, he said.
As with threats and hate speech, authorities are struggling to tackle disinformation on social media, particularly TikTok — whose audience in Moldova has grown significantly in recent years — and Facebook, the country’s most popular platform for political debate, according to Gnatkova. Before the elections, AI-generated bots flooded the Facebook pages of independent media outlets, adding comments in support of pro-Russian candidates, she said.
As a candidate country to the EU, Moldova also needs to adopt the regulatory Digital Services Act, which should, among other things, help address disinformation and support the rights of journalists online.
“We hope we can get some protection via the EU,” Radu said. “Social media must be free but not a place for disinformation.”
The end of U.S. aid
The freeze of U.S. foreign aid in early 2025 has been a “hard blow” for media, Radu said, but the worst part is that Russian propaganda used it as an opportunity to stigmatizemedia as criminals, after Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development a “criminal organization” and former State Department official Mike Benz claimed that the organization had funded more than 100 media outlets in Moldova.
“We had no money,” Radu argued. “What we had is our reputation.”
As for Newsmaker.md, the outlet has been using up the U.S. foreign aid grant they received for 2025, seemingly the last for the foreseeable future.
For independent journalist Gnatkova, the future is bleak in terms of funding and, in broader terms, for the country’s press. “What’s going to happen in January?” she asked. “How will the media work in Moldova?”
In an escalation of the US empire’s ongoing illegal sanctions on Venezuela, US President Donald Trump has announced a “full blockade” of the sovereign nation and its oil tanker fleet. He claimed the measure would remain in place until Venezuela “returns all the oil, land, and other assets” he alleged were previously stolen from the US. The announcement ignited an immediate response from the Venezuelan government, followed by all state institutions and international allies.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump wrote on social media this Tuesday, December 16, adding that “it will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
It was a speech unhinged in millenarian zeal. It was unapologetically hysterical in urging war while claiming to protect peace. It was also delivered with a note of profound self-denial: the US administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy had belittled Europe’s efforts in terms of ensuring its own security, not least of all its claims to civilisational supremacy. President Donald Trump has tirelessly insisted that the continent bloat the military industrial complex and confront its demographic problems.
From the opening, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte reflects on a piece of the Berlin Wall kept in NATO headquarters. “It was a barrier to keep people in, and ideas out. Now it is a monument to the force of freedom, a reminder of the power of unity, and a lesson that we must stay strong, confident and steadfast.” He might have gone further to explain how the collapse of the Berlin Wall was also a chance to stabilise Europe and temper the tensions with the then ailing Soviet Union. Assurances by NATO members and respective US administrations that eastward expansion toward Russia would be eschewed, were never honoured. NATO became Washington’s spear of hubris, a post-Cold War entity of triumphalism. It would only grow, making Moscow ever more anxious.
The message is one of foaming agitation. Russia and “the dark forces of oppression” again coming to the fore. The mission of the alliance reinvigorated. Claiming that NATO was “to stop a war before it starts”, he proceeded to fan the flames. “We are Russia’s next target, and we are already in harm’s way.” Russia, a country bleeding in war, burdened by sanctions, with an economy hovering in size between Canada and Italy, would seemingly wish to plunge a continent into an infernal maelstrom.
Rutte is wilfully blind to this point, purposely elevating the threat posed by Russia despite its loss of over 1.1 million casualties since the war’s outbreak in February 2022, with a daily average loss of 1,200 troops a day in 2025. “Think about that, more than a million casualties so far, and 1,200 a day, killed or wounded, this year alone.” Think about that, and it makes remarks that Europe had to prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-parents endured” grotesque and misplaced.
In the Rutter strategy, it becomes axiomatic to link Ukraine’s decidedly gloomy fate to that of NATO, a false link one has come to expect in that dubious, often mendacious discipline called international relations. Russia’s ambitions on Ukrainian territory become synonymous with the Kremlin’s feverish designs on Western and Central European capitals. “Allied defence spending and production must rise rapidly, our armed forces must have what they need to keep us safe, and Ukraine must have what it needs to defend itself – now.” He proudly mentions NATO allies agreeing to push defence expenditure to levels of 5% of GDP by 2035, an insular, wasteful measure. “But this is not the time for self-congratulation, I fear that too many are quietly complacent, and too many don’t feel the urgency, too many believe that time is on our side.”
Whether by design or ignorance, Rutte’s smug civilisational rhetoric ignores the threatening shadow of Trump’s National Security Strategy, which takes aim at alleged anti-democratic practices of European states. (The phrasing here, as with much of the document, is conceptually confused and a travesty of language.) “The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” Peace was demanded by the European majority, “yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.”
The NSS comes close to dismissing Europe as an ailing patient on the verge of expiring, abominating the European Union and those “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
This can hardly sit well with Rutte and NATO’s European component, seeing as the Trump administration envisages an unrecognisable continent in the next two decades, doubting that “certain European countries will have economies strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Rarely has such an explicit statement on abandonment been made.
The howling subtext here is Ukraine’s increasing irrelevance to US foreign policy, evident in the parallel lines of European-Ukrainian negotiations on the war, and US-Russian discussions that sup from a different cup. Washington would support European allies in preserving “freedom and security” and restore “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” but would have its main eyes trained on asserting and enforcing “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” Latin America promises to suffer most, given this brash assertion of hemispheric domination.
Rutte, bless him, is putting on a brave face. In an interview with the BBC following his Berlin address, he remained industriously oblivious. Trump was “good news for collective defence, for NATO and for Ukraine”. Under the US President’s stewardship, NATO was “stronger than it ever was”. Time for a dose of that stiff medication called “reality”.
Green party leader Zack Polanski appeared on Jeremy Vine’s programme on Channel 5 alongside former Tory MP and current Reform party mayor Andrea Jenkyns, leading to a slightly heated response from Jenkyns to Polanski’s comments about Reform party figures’ links with Russia.
After the programme, Polanski posted on X that “Reform have a Russia problem”.
Reform’s Russia problem
Polanski was referring to the conviction of former Welsh Reform leader Nathan Gill, who was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison last month for admitting taking bribes to say positive things about Russia. That in turn forced his Scottish counterpart and other linked figures to deny doing the same. Jenkyns was not prepared to accept that this might be evidence of a wider problem, even though Polanski pointed out that seven other figures in Reform are also implicated:
Farage has been urged to carry out inquiries and root out any remaining allegiances or relationships to Russia still within Reform. Whilst the party’s bigoted leader Farage recently called Vladimir Putin a “very bad dude,” and his sidekick Tice railed “against the monstrous tyranny of that most evil villain, Putin” it’s going to take a lot more than that to show Reform aren’t in Russia’s pocket.
YouGov polling this month on the issue suggests that a significant portion of people think Reform is pro-Russia. Among Farage’s base it doesn’t seem to be that much of an issue, as Reform supporters are more pro-Russia than those of any other political party. But, they clearly have a job on their hands.
Rise of the populist right In two previous articles I pointed out that the 18th century political spectrum makes no sense in the world today and it hasn’t made sense for at least the past 10 years. Today the leading forces against global monopoly and finance capital in the West are coming from the right wing of the political spectrum, not the left. Those who stand against the Anglo-American imperialism:
defend the sovereignty of the nation-state;
are not hostile to BRICS and the multipolar world and
defend national borders against immigration and refugees implying opposition to global capitalism market for cheap labor.
Alain de Benoist, one of the heads of the European new right, writes that the periphery against the center is a better distinction than left vs right.
Amazon’s censorship of Dugin’s books courtesy of the CIA
Two and a half years ago I read an article by Max Parry in the Greanville Post called Alexander Dugin and the Origins of the ‘Red-Brown Alliance’ Myth. In it, Parry defended Dugin, professor of sociology and geopolitics at Lermontov University in Moscow against charges of being a fascist. Parry says that Amazon, with a 600-million-dollar contract with the CIA, has refused to sell any of his works while giving free reign to his critics. Two months ago, I tried ordering Dugin’s books through Amazon and sure enough I could not find any of his books. Fortunately, I was able to find three of them on Alibris Books. When we published Parry’s article on our website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalismwe were met with responses which consisted of dire warning by leftists that Dugin was a fascist. The intention of this article is to describe how Dugin is far from being a fascist. There are important differences between a traditional conservative (Dugin) and fascism.
Motives and Qualifications.
My interest in Dugin lies in his desire for at some kind of left right alliance. As you will see in my article Dugin is an anti-capitalist conservative, nothing like the libertarian right in the United States. Also, it is important to develop theories of what a multipolar political world will look like. BRICS has an economicpractice but to my knowledge there is no self-conscious political counterpart. Dugin’s work with its cultural relativism, might be a contribution to a multipolar political theory from the Russian side. By way of qualification this article is only a review of The Fourth Political Theory. I have not read any of his other works.
The Triumph of Liberalism
Dugin claims that “traditions” including religion, hierarchy, family and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. What Dugin says we have left are:
the death of god (Nietzsche)—replaced by man;
disenchantment of the world (Weber) – philosophy and science replaced religion, and
end of the sacred and the place of revelation as it is overtaken by the liberal rationalization of religion.
Dugin begins by contending that by the end of the 20th century liberalism’s opponents – conservativism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism and communism – had all been defeated. Fascism emerged later than the other major political theories and vanished before them. Socialism and fascism positioned themselves as contenders for the soul of modernity and failed. Liberalism is the main enemy of the Fourth political theory. Dugan claims it is the forces of “freedom”, the forces of the market which have lead humanity along the path of degeneration. He wants to pull the roots of liberal evil out of the structure of the modern world.
Overview of the Fourth Political Theory and Multipolarity
In his book, the Fourth Political Theory Dugin defends traditional conservativism against three political theories he opposes liberalism (capitalism), communism, and fascism.
Ideology
What is Included
Major Unit of Analysis
Liberalism
Both left liberalism and neoliberalism
Individual
Communism
Marxism (Leninism) social democracy
Social class
Fascism
Nazis (Germany)
Race
Mussolini (Italy)
The state
Dugin is no ordinary conservative and makes significant distinction between liberal pro-capitalist conservatives of the West and his own. While critical of communism, his brand of conservatism is nothing like the liberal anti-communism of the West. Dugin says we need to unite the value center of the right and the labor-centered left to fortify the resistance against the Western Empire. In the process he wants to unite National Bolshevism and Eurasianism which came close to his 4th political theory. The National Bolshevik Party emerged in Russia in 1992 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dugin led it. He soon left the party to start his own, National Bolshevik Front. The original NBP has been banned by the Russian government. Does this sound like a fascist to you? What fascist author would use Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as a reference?
The Fourth Political Theory and Resistance to the Status Quo of Liberalism includes the following:
Against globalism
Against post modernity
Against end of history
Against neoclassical “laws” of economics
Against the universal morality of “human rights”
Against postindustrial society and its abandonment of industrial production
Dugin defends a Eurasian multipolar world against the Atlanticist West. He says the Russian population had almost entirely rejected the liberal ideology of the 1990s. How is Eurasian multipolar world to be achieved? By preserving the geopolitical sovereignty of the powers of the Eurasian continent Russia, China, Iran and India who he says safeguard the freedoms of other peoples on the planet. The inertia of liberal politics is such that a change of course is impossible to save the West. The Fourth Political Theory insists upon a multipolar world instead of universalism.
What is Liberalism? Freedom from
For liberals all forms of collective identity – ethnic, national, religious, caste or class impede the individual’s awareness of individuality. John Stuart Mill was interested in “freedom from”, not “freedom for”. “Freedom from” includes:
government and its control over the economy, politics and civil society;
churches and their dogma;
stratification systems;
responsibility for the economy;
any attempts to redistribute whether it be government or social institutions the results of material or non-material labor. For example, “social justice” is deeply immoral
ethnic attachments and
any collective identity whatsoever – even the family. The family is a contractual agreement
For liberals Freedom is synonymous with liberty. As for “freedom to”, here liberals have nothing to say. This is a question of private choice which is not discussed and has no political or ideological value. Locke is the most important philosopher of liberalism.
Ontological and epistemological foundations of liberalism
Besides freedom from, liberalism in the West is constituted by the following qualities:
the understanding of the individualism as the measure of all things;
belief in the sacred character of private property;
equality of opportunity as the moral law of society;
belief in the contractual basis of all sociopolitical institutions including government;
the abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who lay claim to a common truth;
the separation of powers and the making of social systems of control over any governmental institution whatsoever;
the creation of a civil society without races, peoples or religion in places of traditional governments;
the dominance of the market relations over other forms of economics;
certainty that the historical path as progress as a universal model of development
linear sense of time. the present better than the past; the future better than the present and
the nation-state, founded on the basis of an imaginary contractual agreement as the only recognized political unit (as opposed to kingdoms, providences, principalities or city-states) These European nations kicked religion, ethnic identity or classes to the curb believing them to be remnants of the dark ages.
The question of how to relate to socialists and leftists reached its more difficult moments for liberals in the 1920s and 1930s. Left liberals like FDR wanted more state intervention to keep the capitalist economy from crises. Unlike left-liberals, right-wing liberals like Von Hayek and von Mises said liberalism is not a transition from feudalism to socialism but rather an ideology that is complete in itself, holding an exclusive monopoly over the heritage of The Enlightenment. Right-wing liberals saw Marxism as a regressive return of the feudal epoch of eschatological uprisings.
Dugin points out that liberalism is hardly a visionary ideology. In fact, it never gets beyond Darwinism. Liberal ideology is a complete animal discourse. Instead of moving beyond survival of the fittest, it allows increasingly varieties of opportunities for the strong to assert their power so that capitalists are no more than king of beasts. Globalization is the new battlefield for the struggle for survival
Criticism of Liberal Progress as Irreversibility is a Monstrous Process
One of the greatest weaknesses of liberals is in what Dugin calls its “monotonic” processes. Monotonic processes are the ideal of constant growth, accumulation which proceed in one direction without cyclic fluctuations or oscillations. Gregory Bateson points this problem out in his book, Mind In Nature. Bateson says the characteristics of monotonic ideology of the West do not apply in biology, mechanical systems or in society. In biology such a process destroys species, produces deviants, giants or dwarfs and cannot produce offspring. In mechanical systems Bateson says it causes systems to explode. He points out:
The most important problem in developing the steam engine is the centrifugal governor. When the steam engine reaches cruising speed, it is necessary to regulate the intake of fuel. Otherwise, everything begins to resonate and the speed of the engine will cause it to explode. This was the major problem in the earliest stages of industrialization.
Within society Marcel Mauss in 1872 criticized the monotonic process as well.
In the book he co-authored, Sacrifice:Its Nature and Function and in The Gift, he described how traditional societies paid great attention to the ritual destruction or sacrifice of surplus goods. The surplus was seen as excessive usury and the essence of evil. Surplus crops were seen as disastrous. The community either organized a feast or gave it to the gods as a form of sacrifice or to the needy.
Russian historian Lev Gumilev had a cyclical theory of history which he explained with his famous theory of passionarity. He acknowledged there was development, but there is also decline. Gumilev saw passionarity as the level of vitality within a given ethnic group or civilization, a type of energy that would gradually increase, reaching a peak in which the group would reach its greatest achievements followed by a slow ebb. The Fourth Political Theory argues that history can be reversed. Socialism could turn into capitalism, into feudalism, into slave societies and back into primitive communism. Yet the Fourth Political Theory is not an invitation to a return of traditional society. It is not conservativism in a traditional sense.
Marxism’s criticism of liberals:
denied the identification of the individual from collective and class nature;
recognition of the unjust system of appropriation of surplus value by capitalists in the process of a market economy;
recognition that freedom from of bourgeois society is a veiled form of class supremacy, masking under new clothes the mechanisms of exploitation, alienation and oppression;
called for a proletarian revolution and the abolition of the market and private property
aimed at the social collectivization of property;
freedom to is creative labor as the social freedom of communist future and
criticized bourgeois nationalism as a form of collective violence over the poorest layers of society and an instrument of international aggression in the name of the egoistic interests of the national bourgeoise.
What is Fascism?
In fascism everything is based on the right-wing version of Hegel since Hegel himself considered the Prussian state to be peak of historical development. Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher and a proponent of Hegelianism applied this concept of “actual idealism” to fascist Italy. He developed what he called “actual idealism”. Here individual life only gains meaning in relation to the state. He was a staunch fascist from 1922 until his death at the hands of antifascists. He was regarded the official philosopher of Italian fascism. In German National Socialism, the historical subject is the Aryan race which according to racists and carries out the eternal struggle against the subhuman races.
The Field of the Contemporary Socialists
Dugin states that the break-up of the Soviet Union combined with the inability of European Marxism to produce any heads of state or even meaningful political parties were nails in the coffin for this communist ideology. However, there are aspects of communism that are worth preserving. Leftist political philosophy was a fundamental, general and systematic criticism of liberal capitalism. They provided critical observations concerning the capitalist system, its reification and exploitation. It has moral views and shows solidarity with the unfortunate along with deep criticism of liberalism, as we saw above. These views can arouse definite interest and sympathy. However, after Stalin, in the middle of the 20th century there arose a systematic critique of Leninism: from the Right the work of Von Hayek and the Austrian School of economics; from Cold War liberals Karl Popper in England and Raymond Aron in France. From the left Leninism was criticized by the social democratic Frankfort School which attempted to mix Marx and Freud.
Dugin names three varieties of socialist Ideology:
The Old Left (French)
Left nationalists (National Communists, National Bolsheviks)
New Left – appeared in the 1950s and 1960s
Postmodernists –1990s
The Old Left is now divided into at least four orientations:
Orthodox Marxists (Leninists)
Social Democrats (originating with Kautsky)
Third way of Anthony Giddens which combines liberalism and social democracy
European orthodox Marxists
They are often all embodied in the Communist Party which in some cases is capable of functioning as an umbrella organization.
European Social Democracy (Kautsky) is usually for a progressive income tax or flat tax, the nationalization of large monopolies, the broadening of government responsibilities in the social sector, free medicine, education, generous and guaranteed pension plans and the development and promotion of unions. The socialists of the third way are much closer to the Democratic Socialists of America. They seek to form alliances with liberal parties and they are sympathetic to Yankeedom and side with the Atlanticists internationally, passively or by actively supporting imperialism.
National Communists begin With What Marx Got Wrong:
Socialist movements did not begin in advanced capitalist societies. They were agrarian.
These socialist societies did not grow out of capitalist relations. They grew out of bureaucratic and tributary economic relations.
These societies had very few urban proletarians. The population was mostly composed of peasants.
These societies had little industrialization in the way of factories, railroads or mass communications systems.
Contrary to the Marxist expectation that premodern spiritual conditions would wither as part of the socialist revolution, magical beliefs, peasant folklore continued.
Racial and ethnic identities did not die out with improvement of class conditions.
With the exception of Peter the Great, Russia has never been at home with modernity. National communists wanted to preserve mythologies and use them to build socialism. They wanted history understood in the spirit of archaic eschatological expectations, deep national mythologies connected to the expectations of end times and a return to the golden age. Dugin claims it was national communism that has ruled in the USSR and in other parts of the world, not international socialism. It applies to communist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and many communist movements in the Third World – Mexican Chiapas, the Peruvian Golden Path; the Kurdish Workers Party and in Islamic socialism. National Communists are a broad formation – social, psychological and political. In Russia they are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the second largest party in Russia.
On the other hand, Soviet Marxist dissidents like Zinoviev, Shchedrovitsky and Medvedev are known but they were unable to start any sort of ideological school. There are liberals in Russia but no liberalism. The sole meaning of liberalism in contemporary Russia in the 1990s was freedom from Russian, Soviet political and economic traditions and an uncritical, ignorant and parodic imitation of the west. Liberalism as a political ideology interested no one. Its supporters engaged in politics. No one in Russia ever chose “freedom from”. Liberalism is the repudiation of God, tradition, community, ethnicity and empires.
The New Left
Dugin labels the philosophers of the New Left the “Philosophers of suspicion” who drew not only from Marx, but also Freud, Nietzsche and Sartre. The anarchists drew from the importance of economic reciprocity and referred to Mauss’ book The Gift for inspiration. Unlike the old leftists, the new leftists doubt what they felt was modernity’s glorification of reason and they denounced science as mystification and authoritarianism. They also supported relativist philosophers of science like Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn.
After reviewing all three political theories, Dugin identifies the bad tendencies that should be discarded from each theory and along with the good qualities that the Fourth Political Theory can learn from. He says nothing should stop us from rethinking the very fact of the failure of communism and fascism recasting their vices as virtues. By losing, Dugin says communism and fascism proved they did not belong to the spirit of modernity. He says each stood on the side of tradition in different ways. We must understand our new situation in a postmodern world no less profoundly than Marx understood the structure of industrial capitalism.
Ideology
Discarded
Kept
Fascism
All forms of racism
Biological racism and Hitler’s antisemitism vs Slavs
Ethnos as a cultural phenomenon
(a self is more than an isolated monad)
Cultural Racism such as high and low cultures
Those cultures that are “civilized “and those that aren’t
Marxism
Historical materialism
Unidirectional progress
Violates an appreciation of the ancestors
Destruction of religious heritage
Contempt for the culture’s past
Exclusive focus on economic factors
Class as the only historical subject
Sides with bourgeoise against ancient identities such as feudal, reactionary or nationalism
Marxism rejects conservativism in all its forms
How it describes liberalism as exploitative
Identifies the contradictions of capitalism
Description of primitive communism—original paradise
Labor as the great dream of the common good
Myth of eschatological consciousness
Identification of reification and mysticism
Good at describing the enemy, the bourgeoise
Liberalism
Attack individualism and abolish it
Freedom is microscopic
Modernization
All three accept the irreversibility of history.
Liberalism and Postmodern Times
In the heyday of modernity, liberalism always co-existed with non-liberalism which means it was an object of choice. The choices included conservativism and the various forms of socialism. After defeating its rivals, liberalism brought back a monopoly on ideological thinking the way the Catholic Church once ruled Europe. Liberalism went from being one of many political theories to become the sole ideology. In postmodern times liberalism became a way of life. It became unconscious, and automatic.
Postmodernism
Triumphant liberalism mutated into a lifestyle consumerism, solipsistic individualism and a postmodern manifestation. Post modernists of the 1990s contained the following values:
rejection of reason and call for the conscious adoption of schizophrenia – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari;
the renunciation of man as the measure of all things ;
the death of man (Levi) death of the author (Barthes);
the overcoming of sexual taboos;
legalization of all kinds of narcotics;
new forms of spontaneous and sporadic being;
the measure of the individual is not the individual but the post individual, accidently placed ironic parts of people—clones, cyborgs and mutants;
private property is idolized and transformed from what a man owns to what owns the man;
belief in the contractual relations of all political and social institutions grows into the equalization of the real and the virtual;
all forms of non-individual authorities disappear. Anyone is free to think about the world in any way they wish;
the principle of the separation of powers transforms into a constant electronic referendum in which each internet user votes by giving an opinion of many forums -examples include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Telegraph and
civil society completely displaces government and converts into a global cosmopolitan melting pot.
Dugin says that so much of the political vision of postmodernism is contained in the book Empire by Negri and Hardt. This book, according to Dugin can be read as a political manifesto of the tendencies above. While postmodernists fancy themselves as radicals, their ontology and epistemology is that of relativistic liberals.
Conservativism as a Model Traditional conservativism
In traditionalism we have a full-blown and mostly complete complex of the conservative relationship to history, society and the world. The traditionalists – Rene Guenon and Jules Evola – rejected the Enlightenment and defended tradition while foretelling the end of the world through the victory of the fourth caste. Dugin says traditional conservatives want to return to the past, but they don’t go far back enough. They go back to ancient times, patriarchal times where monotheism began. They want to return to a condition when man exhibited the first symptoms of the illness. Rather, a better starting point to a time in tribal societies which, Dugin claims, were matriarchal.
Traditional Conservativism With the Following Characteristics:
one who opposes time and irreversible history;
sees progress as an illusion;
technological development is not a saving grace;
Descartes division of subject and object is crippling;
Newton’s mechanical watchmaker (mechanism vs organicism) deadens the world;
science reduces quality to quantity and
education that is built on science rather than the arts and humanities.
Guenon and Evola acidically gave an exhaustive description of the most fundamental conservative position. They describe traditional society as super-temporal ideal and modernity is a product of a fall, a degeneration, degradation, a blending of castes, the decomposition of hierarchy and the shift away from the spiritual to material, from heaven to earth and from the eternal to the ephemeral.
Liberal conservativism (neoconservatives)
Dugin does not support the liberal conservatives of the United States because they do not condemn liberalism across the board. Rather, they say yes and no to liberal proposals. Liberal because when it says yes it merely attempts to step on the brakes; “let’s go slower”, “ let’s not do that now” it says. They agree with the general trends in modernity especially around capitalism and individualism. Edmund Burke is a good example. He first sympathized with the Enlightenment but pushed it away after the French Revolution. He defended:
bourgeois freedom;
independence of man;
equality;
rights;
progress and
evolution rather than revolution
William Kristol was one of the founders of neo-conservativism. The Project for New American Century includes projects of the Greater Middle East, Greater Central Asia where the goal is to uproot inertia, national, political, social, religious and cultural models and their replacement by the operating principles of American economic liberalism. For neocons liberalism must penetrate the depths of all societies. Contemporary neoconservatives call for a global liberal revolution rejecting all isolationism. They do not like leftists and continue to fear communism. Neither do they like right-wingers like Evola and Guenon who we will discuss next.
The conservative revolution in Europe
Left-wing historians like Karl Mannheim dismissed conservativism as an ideology of politics that was out of date. This may have seemed the case in Mannheim’s time, but it is not true today. There have been many conservatives in European history. Among the theorists was Arthur Moeller, van den Bruck, Ernst and Friedrich Junger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Othmar Spann, Fredrich Hielscher many other German authors. Dugin says we must look for alternatives to liberalism in non-liberal versions of conservativism. Liberalism’s linear sense of time (present better than the past, future better than present) Dugin says it is an insult to the honor and dignity of our ancestors because in many cultures the dead play an important sociological role. They are considered alive in a certain sense. After all, Chinese civilization is built itself on reverence of the ancestors.
The Conservative Revolution is a term first coined by Hugo von Hofmannsthal which has come to designate a loose confederation of anti-liberal German thinkers who wrote during the Weimer Republic. They are opposed to capitalism and communism in favor of a synthesis of aristocratic traditions and spiritual values with socialism. Benoist is one of the pioneers of the European New Right and is an organist and a holist like any real conservative. There is a new gallery of thinkers who begin to defend the conservative position. Dugin writes that they do so with uncompromising consistency and persistence and not with the thoughts of the 18th and 19th centuries. They include Titus Burckhardt Leopold Ziegler.
Ethnos has no home in liberalism, communism or fascism Ethnicity was not a focal point in either national socialism or fascism. For them race or the state was its center. Marxist ideology did not pay much attention to the ethnos either, believing that the ethnos would be overcome by the classless society where no trace of it will remain. Liberal globalization is equating the concrete ethnic, sociopolitical or religious pattern by a universal standard, the very important process of transcending ethnos itself, transforming its natural, organic and most often unconsciously imparted tradition into the rank of a man-made conscious, rational system. The common logic of social evolution from savagery to civilization was the distinctive feature of 19th century anthropology. The term “civilization” that we are using is saturated with the spirit of the Enlightenment, progressivism and historicism.
German and Russian Ethnosociology Ethnos has found deep resonance in the conservative revolution. The German school of ethnic sociology included Wilhelm Muhlmann, Richard Thurnwald and Lev Gumilev. Thurnwald was an Austrian ethnologist who is credited with founding the school of ethnosociology. Lev Gumilev was a Soviet anthropologist who attempted to explain ethnic differences through geological factors. His book was Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere. Spengler, in his Decline of the West contrasted civilization and culture, considering culture the organic vital spirit of man. Civilization was a product of a cooling off of that spirit in mechanical and purely technical boundaries. The conservative ethnos is roughly equivalent to culture.
Dugin Ethnos: Cultural Primordialism Enemies of Russia, whether they are liberals or many socialists of the West never tire of accusing Dugin of being a fascist, a racist and biological determinist. Dugin shows none these characteristics in his book The Fourth Political Theory. In that book, he argues that fascism is one of the first three political theories he rejects. He explicitly argues against the fascism of Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini in their champion of the state. He also spends pages rejecting the racism of the Nazis and the superiority of the white race. It is true that in terms of ethnos he does not share the liberal notion of the human individual as being a blank slate. He advocates what he calls a “cultural primordialism” ethnicity, but this ethnicity has nothing to do with any biological determinism or racial determinism. From his book Ethnosociology, the structure of the basic ethnosociological terms and concepts include:
Ethnos
Narod –German folk
Nation
Civil society
Global society
Each has its own defined meaning and sense which does not overlap with any of the others. The general movement goes from simple societies to complex societies. At the same time, Dugin says we can describe these levels as a vector directed from the organic and integral to the mechanical, combined and complex
The inner structures of the ethnos: family, lineage, clan
A family can only be formed on the basis of two unrelated lineages. The structure of the family in all societies without exception is based on an exogamous principle to protect against incest. In order to get one family, it is necessary to have two lineages and exogamous rules of marriages. It is for this reason that the family is not considered the primary cell of society. In addition, it is customary in ethnosociology and anthropology to call a union of lineages a clan. For Dugin ethnicity contains the following 5 characteristics:
speak the same language;
belief in a common origin;
possess a complex of customs, beliefs, rituals, myths and art forms;
have a specific geographical location and
are different from other ethnos.
The narod The narod is different from ethnos. The narod is the social organization of society, qualitatively more complex than an ethnos. In the formation of a narod there are necessarily a few ethnos. Narods usually are in form in chiefdoms or agricultural states. Here there is a hierarchy between chiefs or kings at the top and commoners and peasants at the bottom. Other extreme archetypes are heroes and servants and masters and slaves. The state and polytheistic religions are other characteristics of narod. The table below adds some other differences.
Ethnos
Category of Comparison
Narod
Less complex
Level of complexity
More complex
Static
Dynamics
More mobile
Natural
Artificial, goal oriented
Survival and reproduction
Purpose
Oriented to a historical or military goal
Egalitarian
Political form
Stratified professional
Eternal return, cycle supported by myth
Place of history
Historical—linear time
Myths
Myths vs epics
Epics
There is none
individuality
Individuality is exclusive to heroes and chiefs
Two lineages
Social structure
The state, religion, civilization
The nation For most of human history societies consisted of ethnos and narods. In Europe beginning in either the High Middle Ages (England) or in early modern Europe a new political formation emerged, a new kind of political identity based on citizenship with the individual as its foundation. The political concept of the nation did everything possible to suppress the older allegiances of region, city, kingdom provinces, ethnos and narod but never quite successfully. Merchants were the new power and they were located in cities and towns .
Civil society and global society
In the 20th century thanks to the spread of capitalism around the globe, the nation-state became relativized and capitalist relations mostly ignored the political boundaries of nations unless nationalism could be used to seize resources of other countries.
The World Bank and the IMF helped grease the wheels of global economic relations. In a global society individual citizenship took a back seat to global human rights and rules of civil society. Again, all configurations aim to suppress the earlier ethnos and narod.
Dugin argues against seeing these levels as indicating any progress or irreversibly. Civil society can return to the nation level as is happening in some of the BRICS countries today. Another example is the fact that the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban does not support the regional European Union. Furthermore, some nations can disintegrate back into narods or ethnos. Dugin stands for an archaic and holistic sociology with ethnicity as its core.
Eurasian Multipolarism
Some countries that are more or less successful as nation-states do not want to lose their independence to a supernational external authority like the United States but they try not to directly oppose it. These countries include China, Russia, Iran and India. Other states try to oppose Mordor directly, rejecting Western values, unipolarity and US Western hegemony. They include Iran (Islamism), China, Venezuela and North Korea embodying socialism. But before BRICS all these groups lacked an alternative global strategy that could be symmetrically comparable to the West.
There is also the Eurasian approach: the Multipolarity, Great Spaces or Great Powers movement. Twelve years after this book was written no doubt BRICS would be part of this. The one tendency in conservatism that is not acceptable to Eurasians is the liberal conservatism of the West. For Eurasianists, modernity is a phenomenon peculiar only to the West. Other cultures must divest the pretentions to the universality of Western civilization and build their societies on the internal values they already possess. For Eurasianists there is an epistemology for Russian civilization an epistemology for the Chinese Islamic epistemology and one for India. It is not accidental that among Russian authors the first to refer to Guenon’s book East and West was the Eurasianist, N.N. Alekseev.
Towards a 4
Dugin claims to share the part of the vision of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola who considered modernity – individualism, liberal democracy, capitalism, consumerism – to be the cause of the future catastrophe of humanity. He wants there to be political alliances between Muslims and Christians, Russians and Chinese, between leftists and rightists, Hindus and Jews. There was a positive side of communism, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan and anti-individualist. Communism’s social solidarity, social justice, socialism and general holistic attitude are good. Dugin wants to get rid of the materialist and modernist aspects of communism. He arrives at national Bolshevism which presents socialism without materialism, atheism, progressivism and modernism. He supports Eurasianism. The differences in the ethnicities should be accepted and affirmed without any biological, racist or evolutionary sentiments. Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu – premodern sources are a very important development in the national Bolshevik synthesis. He wants to put aside anti-communist prejudices. He says we should strongly oppose any kind of confrontation between the various religious beliefs:
Muslim vs Christian
Jews vs Muslims
Muslims vs Hindus
Conclusion In terms of opposition to Western global capitalism, the resistance has come from BRICS internationally but also from conservative populism at a national level. Given the bankruptcy of the 18th century political spectrum I explored the work of Alexander Dugin’s book, The Fourth Political Theory. In it he claims to be for a unity between a value centered right-wing of the political spectrum and a labor-centered left. Most of the book is taken up with his criticism of liberalism which seems inseparable from capitalism. He spends little time on fascism other than to condemn both between the state centered fascism of Italy and the race-centered Nazis in Germany. His criticism of the left has much complexity and he claims to be allied with National Bolshevism which supports most of Marx’s ideas minus the atheism, materialism and internationalism.
In the last third of my article I explore what Dugin calls the fourth political theory, his brand of conservativism. Dugin quickly points out that his conservativism is not that of the old monarchist or aristocratic tendencies in Europe. But neither does the fourth political theory have anything to do with the liberal conservativism of the United States with its pro-capitalism, pro-imperialist. anti-communism beliefs. Dugin aligns his brand of conservativism of the New Right Alain de Benoist who advocates that the major division on the political spectrum should be core vs periphery, not right vs left. Dugin considers himself a cultural primordialist with ethnos as its deepest level. This ethnos has nothing to do with racism or biology or social Darwinism. Dugin considers himself a multipolarist but does not spend much time developing it in this book.
Criticism of Dugin’s book The Fourth Political Theory:
What kind of sacred is he advocating?
Dugin says The Fourth Political Theory is free to ignore those theological and dogmatic elements in monotheistic societies that were influenced by rationalism. But does this advocate theology without rationalism? He says he wants to take aboard those irrational aspects of cults, rites and legends that have perplexed theologians in the earliest ages. He says the more ancient the better. Does this mean animism, polytheism or some kind of primitive monotheism?
What kind of economic system is he advocating?
Liberalism is inseparable from capitalism, but it is not clear what kind of economic system Dugin is advocating. After all, in the history of economic relations, in pre-state societies Marshall Sahlins writes that there are three kinds of systems-generalized reciprocity – balanced reciprocity and negative reciprocity. With the rise of the state, Karl Polyani has identified the relationship between the state and its population as “redistribution systems”. Lastly there is state socialism systems. If Dugin is against capitalism as it exists under liberalism, what kind of economic system is he advocating?
Politics: no mention of anarchism
Surprisingly, in his description the various kinds of leftist groups he ignores anarchism. This is hard to understand because some of the great anarchists of the 19th century were Russian, namely Bakunin and Kropotkin. He says nothing about the revolutionaries in Russia prior to the Bolsheviks and all the men and women who built the radical opposition to the Czar. Anarchism was not just an intellectual movement. It was followed and fought for between 1905 and 1917. Further, many working class people in factories and in the countryside, led by Nestor Makhno fought for an anti-capitalist world during the Russian Civil War between 1917-1921.
Sanctions and asset seizures are not neutral tools. They are weapons of empire. Venezuela and Russia stand at the center of this economic warfare, but they are not alone. From Iraq to Libya, nations have been stripped of their wealth, their citizens punished, and their sovereignty undermined. What emerges is a global system where confiscation and coercion replace dialogue and democracy.
Venezuela’s Stolen Gold
At the Bank of England, more than 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold — worth over $1.5–2 billion — remain frozen in a legal battle between President Nicolás Maduro’s government and opposition figure Juan Guaidó. Maduro sought to use this gold to fund health services during the COVID‑19 crisis, but access was denied.1 Similar disputes extend to European banks, where Venezuelan reserves are locked away, preventing the government from addressing humanitarian needs.2
This is not law; it is strangulation. Sovereign wealth has been transformed into hostage property.
Russia and Venezuela: Assets Denied, Infrastructure Crippled
Both nations face frozen reserves abroad, resources that could sustain hospitals, schools, and public works. Instead, billions sit idle in foreign vaults, while ordinary citizens endure shortages and collapsing infrastructure. Sovereign wealth is held hostage, denied to the very populations it was meant to serve.
Turning Citizens Against Their Own Governments
In Venezuela, sanctions and propaganda campaigns redirect public anger toward domestic leadership rather than external interference. Scarcity is weaponized, creating the illusion that the government alone is responsible for hardship. This is democracy eroded under the guise of humanitarian concern.
Exile and Regime Change Narratives
Exiled Venezuelans, backed by foreign powers, lobby for intervention and overthrow. Their rhetoric of “liberation” masks the reality of destabilization and bloodshed. The pattern echoes Iraq and Libya, where external actors used exile communities to justify intervention.
Historical Parallels: Iraq and Libya
Iraq (1990–2003): UN sanctions barred trade, froze assets, and devastated civilian life. Surveys estimated between 227,000 and 500,000 excess child deaths under the age of five during the sanctions era.34
Libya (2011–present): Sanctions froze the assets of the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), Africa’s largest sovereign wealth fund. More than $68 billion remains frozen globally, unable to be reinvested for the Libyan people.5 Other reports suggest the total frozen assets may exceed $200 billion.6
These precedents show how sanctions and asset seizures are preludes to deeper destabilization, often justified by humanitarian rhetoric but resulting in humanitarian catastrophe.
Sanctions as Collective Punishment
Sanctions imposed by multiple countries extend beyond governments to entire populations. Livelihoods are restricted, futures constrained, and sovereignty undermined. The supposed moral high ground of sanctions collapses under the weight of their human toll.
Stirring the Flames of Global Conflict
Asset seizures and sanctions ripple outward, stoking tensions across continents. Economic warfare bleeds into military confrontation, pushing the world toward perpetual conflagration. What emerges is not stability, but a planet perpetually on fire.
Conclusion: The Human Cost of Hostage Property
When sovereign assets are seized, they become hostage property. Locked away in foreign vaults, they are denied to the very people who need them most. It is not presidents or elites who suffer from these sanctions — it is the poor, the marginalized, the mothers who cannot find medicine for their children, the workers whose wages collapse, the elders whose pensions vanish into thin air.
Sanctions do not kill presidents. They do not wound the wealthy, nor silence the powerful. Instead, they starve the powerless, punish the innocent, and deepen inequality.
This is the cruel paradox: sanctions are justified as tools of justice, yet they inflict injustice on those least able to bear it. They are proclaimed as instruments of democracy, yet they erode the very foundations of democratic life.
If humanity is to reclaim conscience, it must reject this system of collective punishment. Sovereign wealth must serve the people, not be held hostage. And the world must remember sanctions burn the poor, not the powerful.
Anthony Hughes was in such a hurry to open and shut the British Government’s case against President Vladimir Putin for the Novichok chemical warfare attack in England in 2018, he failed to tie the top button of his shirt.
This was also a precaution against choking on what Hughes recited as his conclusions to more than seven years of investigations, five months of autopsy, toxicology, and post-mortem pathology, then just 24 days of public hearings, which he read from a prepared script on his desk. At the 21-minute mark, to the doctors, lawyers, policemen, intelligence agents, and “to the many people who made the vital administrative arrangements for the Inquiry to function at all,” Hughes looked down to read out “thank you very much”; shuffled the pages into a notebook, and left the room. No public or press questions were allowed.
It had taken a special kind of expertise for Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — to exclude the four crucial pieces of evidence which surfaced in the inquiry he has conducted since 2022 into the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death. This is the evidence (1) that the alleged Russian Novichok weapon, a bottle of perfume, was planted by British government agents in Sturgess’s kitchen twelve days after police drug squad searches had failed to find it; (2) that the colour of the liquid in this bottle was yellow, according to an expert witness, when Novichok is colourless; (3) that the only witness to finding the perfume bottle and giving it to Sturgess, her boyfriend Charles Rowley, was so incapable of telling the truth he was excluded from testifying in public; and (4) that the expert pathologists who had conducted the post-mortem investigations between July and November 2018 had recorded enough fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream to have been the cause of her heart and then brain death before Novichok was detected by the British chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.
Instead, Hughes has reported only the evidence to fit the British government’s version of a Russian attack with Novichok.
The judge did more. He reported that what he had been told of the Russian recovery of Crimea in March 2014 and the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 four months later was “the most likely analysis” of President Putin’s motivation for ordering the Novichok operation of 2018.
Hughes went further still.
“There are two more pieces of evidence,” he declared in last week’s report, “which may be relevant to the question of Russian state responsibility for the events into which I had to inquire. One concerns an incident near to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Netherlands. The other concerns Alexei Navalny. Both are examples of second-hand evidence, or hearsay, which can of course be reliable, but which I did not have the opportunity to explore in any detail… Neither of the two additional areas of evidence now summarised would be enough by themselves to justify the conclusions which I have reached here. But both may provide some limited additional support for those conclusions, at which I arrived without needing to call upon them, and I ought to refer to them both” [page 90].
This was Hughes sticking his neck well beyond his shirt collar: the official terms of reference limited him to investigating “how; when and where [Dawn Sturgess] came by her death; and the particulars (if any) required by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to be registered concerning the death; Identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.”
The evidence of Russian military operations he accepted had come from “closed Inquiry hearings in January 2025,” Hughes said. “The hearings lasted several days. Attendance at the hearings was limited to myself, members of the Inquiry Team, and appropriate members of the teams for His Majesty’s Government (HMG) and Operation Verbasco. The hearings took place in a government building in London. During the closed hearings, as in the open hearings, I heard oral evidence from witnesses and also received submissions from Counsel regarding documentary evidence. A number of witnesses were called and questioned during the closed hearings. The witnesses included Commander Dominic Murphy (Commander of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15)), MK26 (Chemical and Biological Scientific Adviser, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Porton Down) and also witnesses represented by HMG. The HMG witnesses included individuals who had been personally involved in making decisions regarding Sergei Skripal’s security prior to March 2018” [page 121].
The last sentence identifies the MI6 or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Together with the other UK government agencies, police, and officials engaged in the manufacture and testing of chemical warfare weapons, this was a conference to compose evidence made up to look like a cross-examination and interrogation, but kept secret to shut out doubt.
Hughes is a retired appeals court judge who was paid by the Home Office to take over the Sturgess investigation after two inquest coroners had been removed and the inquest itself replaced by a public inquiry. The government’s first reason for that was to allow untested evidence from the security and intelligence services to be given in secret that would be inadmissible in a regular coronial court inquest. The second reason was to frustrate a multi-million pound compensation claim which lawyers for the Sturgess family and boyfriend Rowley were making against the Home Office for negligence in protecting her from the Russian threat.
Hughes blocked this money shot on the second last page of his report. “I have considered whether there were steps that the British state ought to have taken to avoid the Salisbury and/or the Amesbury events. First… I do not think that the assessment that Sergei Skripal was not at significant risk of assassination by Russian personnel can be said to have been unreasonable, although, of course, events unhappily demonstrated that it was wrong… Nor, for the same reasons, do I consider that the attack on Sergei Skripal ought to have been avoided by the kind of additional security measures which I was asked to consider. The only such measures which could have avoided the attack would have been such as to hide him completely with an entirely new identity, and to prevent him and his family from having any continued contact. As at 2018, the risk was not so severe as to demand such far-reaching precautions” [page 125].
Here is how Hughes disposed of the evidence casting the greatest doubt on his conclusions.
The bottle of perfume was planted twelve days after Sturgess’ collapse and death, and after thorough police searches for evidence of illegal drugs – Hughes ignores the evidence.
In his report Hughes fails to explain why it took twelve days for the Wiltshire drug squad to find the bottle which was visible on the kitchen shelf, according to this police photograph:
“The source of their exposure must lie,” Hughes concluded, “with the bottle later found – when it was possible to make a safe search – in the Muggleton Road flat…The search process was painstaking and therefore protracted, given that it was plain from the condition of both Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley that there was a great risk of Novichok contamination and the nerve agent might be anywhere in the flat. Special arrangements had to be devised for handling items recovered without risk of contamination – this included the need for ‘Russian doll’ metal boxes for transport to Dstl [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down] for testing. The searchers found – in some rubbish in a plastic bag on the kitchen floor – what appeared to be an opened and empty small box for ‘Nina Ricci’ perfume. Later, as the search progressed, they found a small bottle sitting on the kitchen worktop to one side of the sink, and in amongst a clutter of glasses and other unconnected items. The bottle had a kind of push-down applicator attached to its top. The liquid inside was fairly viscous” [page 78].
Implied by Hughes here is that the delay in finding the bottle was caused by the time required for safety reasons. He omits the evidence presented in the open court hearings that there had been extensive and painstaking searches, first by the ambulance crews on the scene on June 30, then by the police who published their accounts at the time that they were looking for illegal drugs and injection paraphernalia, had found them, and warned the public of dealers attempting to sell more. No witness has been recorded in evidence from the South Western Ambulance Service or the Wiltshire county police to tell Hughes their searches were delayed at the house for hazardous material security reasons. Hughes invented this fiction.
The alternative explanation is that the delay in finding the alleged Novichok weapon was caused by the time required by the British government’s Porton Down laboratory to fabricate the bottle with its liquid contents and plant it at the scene. Hughes covered up by failing to investigate.
What colour was the liquid in the perfume bottle which Hughes accepted to have been the cause of Sturgess’ death?
A direct request to researchers publishing on A-234, the standard chemical designation for the Novichok class of nerve agents, has revealed that the Iranians who reported synthesizing the chemical agent in 2016, reply that Novichok is colourless. The British, Americans, Czechs, and Koreans who have done the same laboratory work and who held stocks of the nerve agent before 2018, refuse to say what colour their Novichok is.
And yet, despite all the preliminary vetting by British intelligence agents, years of double-checking by government officials, and months of closed-door sessions and redactions ordered by Hughes, the truth has managed to slip out. A man named Josep Vivas, a Spaniard living in Barcelona, was the unintended, unguarded source.
His evidence appears in the record of the Hughes proceedings for November 28. [page 1]. Hughes doesn’t mention the name or the evidence in his report.
Left: the Iranian proof of Novichok manufacture in 2016 Researchgate.net. Right: this, the only comprehensive study of the Novichok case, revealed the clue of the colour of Novichok at publication of January 2025.
Vivas was a vice president of Puig, the company which manufactures and sells the bottled perfume branded Nina Ricci which in the British Novichok story has been turned into the Russian murder weapon.
“I am making this statement,” Vivas signed for the Hughes Inquiry on February 12, 2024, “in addition to a letter I provided on 27 July 2018. Prior to me writing and signing that letter, I was shown a number of images of a small perfume bottle branded ‘Nina Ricci Premier Jour Perfume’. The images I viewed were under police exhibit reference [redactiontagged VN551/10]. I was shown further images of a perfume box labelled as ‘Premier Jour Nina Ricci’. This was under police exhibit reference [redaction tagged VN521/3]. On Friday 2nd February 2024, I was again shown the images of [redaction tagged VN551/10] and [redaction tagged VN521/3] before signing this statement and I set out my observations on them below.”
The photographs of the poison bottle shown in public on November 28, 2024, were censored – a large black mark was pasted across the bottle contents. But British agents had shown Vivas the photographs just days after July 11, 2018, when the bottle was purportedly discovered at the Sturgess crime scene. Vivas was shown the photographs again more than five years later, before he testified before Hughes. He saw the bottle without the black mark.
The key observation he confirmed he had seen on both occasions was this: “The liquid inside the bottle. Premier Jour perfume is pale pink, and from the photos I observe that the liquid contained in the bottle is yellow.”
If the perfume is pink; if Novichok is colourless; and if the liquid in the murder weapon was yellow, then the liquid in the perfume bottle allegedly used by Sturgess cannot have been Novichok.
QED – Quod erat demonstrandum, as the ancient lawyers used to conclude their proofs.
The colour yellow was a British fabrication; the black mark was British camouflage. And yet the secret slipped out into the open by Hughes’s mistake. The bottle which Sturgess allegedly sprayed herself with did not contain Novichok.
Left, Josep Vivas; right, Charles Rowley.
The only witness to the existence of the perfume bottle before Sturgess allegedly used it was Charles Rowley, but Hughes ruled he was unable to give consistent and credible evidence and was excluded from public testimony and cross-examination.
“It is impossible,” Hughes reported, “to avoid the conclusion that by now Charlie Rowley was – no doubt with good intentions – simply creating false memories (confabulating) or reconstructing events, and was, moreover, astute to pick up hints from the interviewing officers which he may have misinterpreted as endorsing the theory that the discovery had been (a) in a bin near the charity shops and (b) during the week before Saturday 30 June 2018. Neither of those propositions was in any way supported by any independent evidence, save that such bins were often his targets… The same applies to a much later interview in February 2019, when Charlie Rowley said that he did not think that he had had the bottle for more than four days… Nothing is added by a valiant attempt by the police on 15 July 2019 to compose a witness statement of his recollections for the Inquest… Here, Charlie Rowley returned to the assertion that the bottle had been picked up in the street on his way to the pharmacy, either in Salisbury or Amesbury, whilst adding that he might have picked it up from the charity bins “the day before” (Friday 29 June 2018). It follows that I derive no assistance from Charlie Rowley’s understandably fallible memory on the subject of when and where he came into possession of the bottle. I do, however, find that it is more probable than not that he did find it somewhere, and that for this to happen it must have been left somewhere in a public or semi-public place by those who had used Novichok on Sunday 4 March 2018 on the front-door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house” [page 84].
“More probable than not that he did find it somewhere” is less probable than that Rowley did not find the perfume bottle anywhere; did not give it to Sturgess; did not know how it showed up in his kitchen days after the police searches of the house had uncovered drug paraphernalia and illegal drugs but not the bottle of the yellow liquid.
Hughes was right to find that Rowley was “creating false memories”. That’s because he could not remember what had been fabricated after he and Sturgess had been taken to hospital. Rowley could not remember what he hadn’t done. He couldn’t testify that he had found the perfume bottle because he hadn’t found it. Rowley’s memory failure — “no doubt with good intentions” in Hughes’s endorsement – was evidence there had been no perfume bottle in the house when Sturgess had the heart attack which killed her.
The toxicological evidence of Sturgess’s blood samples establishes that the combination of drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream, including fentanyl and cocaine, was the probable cause of her death – Hughes ignores the evidence.
In the evidence presented at the Hughes hearings, Guy Rutty testified as the pathologist engaged by the Home Office; he was appointed together with Dr Philip Lumb by the Wiltshire County coroner, David Ridley, to conduct the autopsy on Sturgess’s body and gather the post-mortem evidence. Note that from Rutty’s partially redacted documents, the location of the “designated mortuary” was kept secret. Evidence unreported by Hughes has ruled out the location as Salisbury hospital where Sturgess had died, or the local undertaker, Chris White Funeral Directors, which took the body from the mortuary the day before the funeral on July 30. The location, in fact, was DSTL Porton Down; its representatives were recorded as attending the autopsy.
The procedure started at 1320 on July 17 and continued until just after midnight. The date on the report is November 29, 2018. That means more than five months had elapsed between the post-mortem and the signing of Rutty’s report. The dates given for the consultations which Rutty records with others ran from mid-July to September 16. The date for the DSTL Porton Down report he attached to his own has been classified, but meetings and exchanges of notes between Rutty and Porton Down agents are dated by Rutty on July 26 and August 2. Hughes omits to investigate the reason for the delay until end-November for completing the report; Rutty doesn’t reveal it.
“A toxicology result,” according to Rutty’s report, was also entered which showed the presence of clopidogrel, rocuronium, atropine, cocaine and its metabolite, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, fentanyl, midazolam, ethyl sulphate, mirtazapine and its metabolite, zopiclone and its metabolite as well as nicotine and its metabolite. An EEG (a test to look at brain activity) was performed which showed very low amplitude with little, if any cerebral activity which was considered to represent diffuse cerebral dysfunction which could be due to severe hypoxic brain injury (brain injury due to a lack of oxygen).”
The text of Rutty’s report indicates that the toxicological evidence obtained from testing of Sturgess in hospital and by an associated laboratory failed to detect Novichok — page 23, lines 567-68. This means that the initial cause of death listed on the documents required for release of Sturgess’s body for cremation and burial did not mention Novichok. These documents – the coroner’s release, the funeral director’s cremation form – have all been kept secret.
The discovery of Novichok is reported in Rutty’s autopsy report to have occurred in November 2018 when “the second examination used an immunohistochemical approach” and “the third examination used a histochemical approach”. Follow what Rutty told Hughes in the hearing of November 5 here.
In his official reporting Rutty used circumlocutions to conclude he couldn’t tell what drugs may have been the cause of her death. The toxicology, he said, “identified a number of therapeutic and non-therapeutic drugs to be present. Although I have not been provided [sic] with the levels of the drugs identified, I am not aware [sic] that there is any indication [sic] to suggest that the deceased’s collapse was a direct [sic] result of the action of either a therapeutic or illicit drug.” – line 273. Sic marks Rutty’s evasions.
In the Anglo-American law and court practice for suspicious death cases, this is the point at which evidence is either inadmissible for the prosecution’s case or short of the required standard of beyond reasonable doubt for the judge and jury. Rutty also qualified his conclusion on the cause of Sturgess’s death by saying: “I am of the opinion that these observations, although reported organophosphate toxicity, are not necessarily specific in their own right to organophosphate toxicity.” This isn’t gobbledygook. It is Rutty’s qualification of what he was told by Porton Down and MOD to sign for cause of death. “Not necessarily specific” means no proof of Russian Novichok beyond reasonable doubt, nor even on the balance of probabilities.
In his testimony to Hughes, Rutty referred to what he had been told by Porton Down, claiming it was “independent”. Independent of Hughes’s proceeding, Porton Down was. Independent of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), it was not. Whom did Rutty think he was fooling?
“I understand,” testified Rutty, “that there is independent [sic] laboratory evidence that the deceased was exposed to Novichok and that it is considered [sic] that this was through a dermal route. Thus, I am of the opinion that the clinical presentation in terms of the signs and symptoms, as well as the in-lift laboratory tests and the tests and reports received following the autopsy examination all support that Dawn Sturgess did not collapse or die from a natural medical event, an assault or the result of a therapeutic or illicit drug overdose but rather due to the complications resulting from a cardiac arrest caused by Novichok toxicity. Having been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok…appears from the information I have been provided [sic] to have occurred through a dermal exposure…”
Missing from this, the sole source of Hughes’s pathological evidence, is the original pathologist engaged by Coroner Ridley; that was Dr Philip Lumb. In July 2018 Rutty was accompanied by an academic colleague, also a Home Office-registered pathologist for suspicious death cases, Lumb. According to Rutty’s summary report, he “was instructed by HM Senior Coroner to be present throughout the autopsy examination and to provide a second independent report concerning the autopsy findings and death of Dawn Sturgess. I can confirm that Dr Lumb and I undertook the examination together, and that 1 have not had sight of his independent report” [page 8].
Lumb and his report have been excluded by Hughes, from the Inquiry investigations. Lumb’s “independent report”, along with what Rutty has identified as Lumb’s “autopsy contemporaneous notes” and emails the two of them have exchanged, have been kept secret. Since Lumb was not present in the second and third examinations conducted by Rutty in November, it is highly likely that he cannot have testified to Hughes that he detected any evidence of Novichok poisoning as a cause of Sturgess’s death. This is the reason Hughes excluded Lumb – without explanation.
Lumb, the independent medical expert who knows what killed Sturgess before Novichok was added to the death certificate by Rutty, refuses to answer press questions.
Inside NATO’s cathedral of fear, weapons become sacraments and projection becomes liturgy. From the stained-glass altar, thunderous light strikes Russia and China — not as analysis, but as ritual. This is not about Putin. It is about the West’s collapse into psycho-political theatre.
Mark Rutte’s Berlin speech in December 2025 has been hailed as a wake‑up call for NATO. But the deeper truth is this: Rutte’s speech is not about Russia and China at all. It is about NATO itself, and about the fundamental transformation of politics into psycho‑political theatre where rational policy has become impossible. The “red threat” he invoked is less an empirical reality than a stage device in a liturgical performance.
From Policy to Performance
Compared with a good month ago, Rutte’s purpose is alarm/urgency instead of agreement/consensus. His tone is existential/dramatic instead of pragmatic/institutional. His focus was on the survival of Europe instead of the credibility of NATO, and hinting that more than 5% of GNP may be needed. His threat perception is now that “Russia is already at our doorstep,” and that China is behind it, where it was a more general enemy image and Ukraine focus in November 2025. Significantly and amateurishly, he condescendingly calls Putin “this guy.” These are very significant escalatory changes.
Watch the full speech here, delivered about 13 minutes after that of the German foreign minister, Wadephul, which is an intellectual bottom feeder in poor English. And here is NATO’s transcript of Rutte’s speech, should you prefer to study it more closely.
Politics once meant rational calculation: weighing interests, negotiating compromises, balancing costs and probabilities. That paradigm has collapsed. In its place stands a new order: politics as performance. Leaders no longer persuade with evidence; they dramatise with sermons. Rutte’s Berlin speech exemplifies this shift. His words were not analytical but eschatological: “Russia is already at our door. NATO and Europe could be Putin’s next target.” This is not policy analysis; it is liturgy. (See postscript below, too).
NATO as Church
The speech revealed NATO’s metamorphosis into a church‑like institution.
Doctrine: NATO embodies goodness; Russia embodies evil.
Congregation: The Military‑Industrial‑Media‑Academic Complex, MIMAC, creates and repeats the creed.
Rituals: Summits, communiqués, budget votes, press conferences, and speeches function as sacred ceremonies.
Eschatology: The apocalypse — Russia’s attack — is always imminent, never arriving, sustaining endless vigilance and ever-increasing military expenditures, never peace. It is not the purpose.
In this church, Rutte plays the priest. His sermon is not about Russia’s actual capabilities or intentions; it is about reaffirming NATO’s faith in its own innocence and moral superiority. The congregation responds with offerings: pledges of 5% GDP for defence, tithes to the military‑industrial altar. More about NATO as church in my 2022 abolish NATO analysis.
Psycho‑Pathological Rhetoric
Rutte’s rhetoric falls squarely into a tradition that includes Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, and Adolf Hitler. Each claimed to be surrounded by enemies, each insisted on the necessity of defence, and each justified aggression by projecting evil onto the other side. The formula is always the same: we are threatened all the way around, and we must defend ourselves — no matter the reality.
Hitler invoked Versailles and “Jewish Bolshevism” to justify expansion. Saddam invoked imperialism and Zionism to justify repression and war. Bush invoked weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion. Rutte invokes Putin to justify NATO’s expansion and militarisation. The psycho‑pathological script is identical: paranoia, projection, eschatology, and self‑sanctification.
And here lies the danger: there is an increasing risk that the Rutte‑type of performance, whether intended or not, will have the same consequence for Europe as Hitler’s did. Once politics becomes theatre of paranoia, escalation is not a possibility but a destiny.
The Absurd Stage
The absurdity of this transformation is striking. It resembles Ionesco’s The Chairs, where the stage fills with empty chairs until there is no room left for the characters themselves. In NATO’s theatre, the “chairs” are weapons, budgets, and warnings — multiplying endlessly until politics itself disappears. The room is filled with arsenals, slogans, and rituals, leaving no space for rational analysis or genuine diplomacy.
Groupthink thrives in this closed theatre. Leaders, media, and academics repeat the same refrains, trapped inside the box of paranoia. The more they echo each other, the less reality intrudes. The absurdity is not comic but tragic: a self‑reinforcing ritual that consumes substance and replaces it with performance.
The Red Threat as Stage Device
The “red threat” is not a description of Russia’s actual power. NATO remains technologically superior, vastly richer, and more expansive than Russia. Yet Rutte insists NATO is fragile, vulnerable, at risk of annihilation. This inversion of reality is the hallmark of absurd theatre: the stronger actor plays the victim, the weaker is cast as omnipotent aggressor. The red threat is a stage device, a prop that sustains the liturgy of fear.
Why Politics Has Changed
Readers will ask: Why has politics changed so dramatically? The answer lies in the decline of the West itself. The United States, NATO, and the European Union are facing the long arc of imperial exhaustion. Economic stagnation, social fragmentation, and geopolitical overreach have eroded confidence. As substance weakens, performance intensifies. The sermon replaces the policy because the empire no longer has coherent strategies to offer.
Rutte’s speech is therefore not only a symptom of NATO’s paranoia but of the West’s decline. The liturgical theatre of threat and innocence is the last refuge of a system that senses its own fragility. The louder the sermons, the weaker the empire beneath them.
The Existential Change
The tragic fact is that Rutte’s speech demonstrates the end of rational politics. There is no longer space for cohesive, analytical policy. What remains is performance: sermons of paranoia, rituals of spending, choruses of media repetition. Politics has mutated into psycho‑religious theatre, where leaders preach, congregations respond, and the apocalypse is always imminent.
Thus, the speech is not about Russia and China at all. It is about NATO’s transformation into a church of paranoia and projection in which the sermon itself is the policy. The red threat is not a geopolitical reality but a liturgical necessity. And in this theatre — absurd, pathological, and imperial in decline — substance has vanished; only performance remains.
Post‑script
The tragic transformation of politics described above makes it rather meaningless for an organisation like TFF to continue publishing rational analyses, as if today’s world were still guided by reason, concepts from peace research, international relations, or political science. With few exceptions, the omnipresent geo‑politico‑military day-to-day commentators do not seem to have noticed this change and speak now into a vacuum — into something that once existed but no longer does.
As TFF turns 40 on January 1, 2026, we therefore move in new directions – or do the same with new means and perspectives: toward idea‑producing visions and conceptual innovations that humanity will need in the multi‑nodal, networking world that will emerge after the fall of the US/Western empire and its institutions.
Our basic mission remains the same: Promoting the UN norm of making peace by peaceful means. But either you adapt the methods and perspectives to the ways of the world or you perish – or stop. TFF does not stop. We believe in the fundamental – superior – values of nonviolence, educated conflict-management and peacemaking over primitive and kakistocratic urges of militarism and pathological war-mongering in the name of fake peace.
As all cricket and football followers know, the British are bad losers. They blame the other side or the umpire; they stampede inside the stadium, then they riot outside.
They believe their cleverness is in getting the media to portray their defeats on the battlefield as feats of heroism. That’s been the British story against Russia from the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Novichok operation of 2018. The success of both these stories as wartime propaganda has depended on public belief in little fools sitting on tall horses — noblemen whose ambition has braced them against their deceit and camouflaged their mental incapacity.
In March 2022 Anthony Hughes was the small nobleman whom His Majesty’s Government (HMG) in Whitehall put in charge of turning a failed MI6 operation into a John Le Carré thriller in which British morality stumps Kremlin evil. Le Carré – whose real name and job were exposed by Kim Philby for the KGB — earned £100 million for his efforts; Hughes has been paid £192,110, plus £5,529 in train fares and overnight bedrooms.
Hughes’s publication, released on December 4, runs to 126 pages, plus 47 pages of references, name lists and other appendixes. In the direct quotes to follow from the Hughes report, the page numbers are given for each reference.
Hughes reports how his brain has worked in the second of his conclusions at page 123: “if I state a fact, or say that it is ‘likely’, I have found it proved at least on the balance of probabilities, that is, to the ordinary civil standard adopted in UK courts. Where I say that I am ‘sure’, I have been satisfied of that fact to the level generally applied in criminal courts, that is, beyond reasonable doubt. Other expressions, such as that something is ‘possible’, do not represent findings of fact but are indications of my state of mind.”
For forensic analysis of Hughes’s “state of mind”, the bar has been set low enough in this two-part series for the reader to judge whether what the judge adduces to be evidence is all there is; or all that is provably true independent of what Hughes has to say; or no more than the British Government has been confident Hughes would be too loyal or too incompetent to doubt.
That Dawn Sturgess — the only person in the world to have died from a dose of the alleged Russian poison known as Novichok — was clinically dead at her apartment on June 30, 2018, by the time the paramedics arrived is one of Hughes’s certainties. “It is absolutely clear that her condition was in fact unsurvivable from a very early stage – indeed, from before the time the ambulance crew arrived to treat her. This was a result of the very serious brain injury that was itself the consequence of her heart stopping for an extended period of 30 minutes or so immediately after she was poisoned. Looking back, I am sure that no medical treatment could in fact have saved her life” [page 123].
Hughes concludes also that he is “sure that [Alexander] Petrov and [Ruslan] Boshirov brought with them to Salisbury the ‘Nina Ricci’ bottle containing Novichok made in Russia that was subsequently responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death.” Hughes also claims he is sure that three Russians who were tracked by the UK security agencies had “the intention of working together to kill Sergei Skripal”; that “I am sure that Petrov and Boshirov brought with them to Salisbury the ‘Nina Ricci’ bottle containing Novichok made in Russia that was subsequently responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death. It was probably this bottle that they used to apply poison to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house”.
This slip from certainty to probability doesn’t deter Hughes’s conclusion that “there is a clear causative link between the use and discarding of the Novichok by Petrov and Boshirov, and the death of Dawn Sturgess… I am sure that, in conducting their attack on Sergei Skripal, they were acting on instructions. I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin. I therefore conclude that all those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov, but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible” [page 124-125].
“Must have been” and “morally responsible” are not the courtroom standards Hughes defined for himself. They represent the standard of beyond unreasonable doubt – British moral certainty of Russian evil leading to the judgement of moral responsibility for that evil.
In between reasonable doubt and unreasonable conviction – between the tested evidence and the propaganda – Hughes reveals his certainty that in 2018 Novichok was a Russian weapon, not a British, American, Iranian, Korean or other state weapon, and that his evidence for this comes from UK officials, intelligence and propaganda agencies. “There is no reason to doubt the information made widely public by Drs Mirzayanov, Uglev and Fyodorov many years before the events which concern this Inquiry. In his letter of 13 April 2018 to the Secretary-General of NATO, Sir Mark Sedwill (then National Security Adviser, HM Government) confirmed that this open-source reporting was not only ‘credible’, but consistent with intelligence which showed that Russia continued to produce and stockpile small quantities of Novichoks in the 2000s.44 This is an issue which I considered specifically in closed session; the closed material adds further support to my conclusions” [page 13].
This is a description of hearsay. Hughes ignores all the public evidence which contradicts it.
For the evidence reconstructing the Skripal attack and the subsequent Sturgess death as an MI6 operation to foil Russian agents on mission to exfiltrate Sergei Skripal and return him to Russia, and the British government’s effort to mobilise public opinion for war against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield, read the only two books available here; and Tim Norman’s three-part series discrediting the Hughes hearings at Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Instead, Hughes reports that “Petrov and Boshirov had the opportunity to apply the Novichok to the door handle between those times. There was a plain opportunity to do so during Trip 3…during the 16 minutes between being on camera at the Shell petrol station and re-appearing on Devizes Road. There might have been another opportunity during Trip 4… but this would have been much more restricted for time. The question of whether Counter Terrorism Policing obtained DNA and fingerprints from No. 47 was explored in the open hearings… At the request of the family of Dawn Sturgess, I enquired in closed hearings whether further detail was available. From that, I am able to conclude that there has been nothing further relating to DNA and fingerprint testing of value to the investigation to date” [page 52].
In sum, there is no evidence of any kind that the alleged assassins put Russian Novichok on the Skripals’ door handle.
The evidence from Yulia Skripal in hospital, in reply to questions from her treating doctor, Stephen Cockroft, was that she believed she had been sprayed with a poison by an assailant at lunch in a restaurant much later. Hughes has dismissed Skripal’s testimony. “A note in Yulia Skripal’s medical records suggests she appeared to assent to the suggestion that she had been sprayed. This is also suggested by the statement of a nurse who entered the room as the question was being asked. However, Dr Cockroft’s evidence was simply that she nodded or shook her head from time to time before the re-sedation took hold, but not that she positively agreed or disagreed with the questions asked” [page 48].
This is false. Cockroft’s evidence was that when he asked his questions, Yulia Skripal blinked her eyes in a signal form of communication which Cockroft suggested after his patient revived from sedation, and before orders were given to put her into a coma again.
Hughes has dismissed this crucial evidence. “The questioning was clearly inappropriate,” he has concluded. “Materially for the Inquiry, the exchange under sedation provides no reliable evidence at all about how Yulia Skripal was exposed to the Novichok. When, in due course, she was able properly to be interviewed, she made it clear that she did not know how she came to be exposed to the Novichok” [page 49]. Hughes was lying – Skripal was not under sedation when she answered the doctor at her bedside. Hughes was fabricating when he claimed the subsequent police and security service interrogations of Skripal were the “proper” interviews.
Hughes acknowledges there is no evidence at all that the Russian assassins came within several hundred metres of the Skripal house in order to attack the Skripals or their door handle. Instead, Hughes has fitted into the gap in evidence of the alleged crime a judicial speculation. “There was clearly [sic] an opportunity [sic] to pass, or visit, or view Sergei Skripal’s house in that intervening 17 minutes” [page 40]; and then, minutes after the alleged murder attempt at the door handle, CCTV records of the Russians and the Skripals lead to the inference by Hughes: “the camera in Devizes Road that Petrov and Boshirov walked past at 13:40 had been passed just five minutes earlier by the Skripals, who were travelling in Sergei’s car and heading into Salisbury city centre for lunch…It follows [sic] that the two men might [sic] have been in a position to see the departure of the Skripals from their home” [page 40].
“Might” is an untested, unverified possibility, but in Hughes’s judgement, it does more than “follow” inferentially — this is known by the technical term in jurisprudence as guesswork. Sic is legal Latin for a Hughes hunch.
In summary, Hughes presents no evidence of the weapon in the possession of the accused murderers, no evidence of the murderers at the crime scene; no evidence that the victims, the Skripals, were directly poisoned through their hands; no evidence of the murderers’ intention to kill Sergei Skripal; and no evidence from the victims’ themselves, neither the Skripals, nor Sturgess, nor her boyfriend. Also, the chain of custody in finding and testing Novichok in a bottle on a kitchen bench, in other locations, and in blood drawn for testing hours, days, and weeks after the alleged crime is so faulty as to allow tampering, fabrication, and falsification which should have made the evidence inadmissible in Hughes’s judgement.
As for the allegations of criminal intention on the part of the accused Russians, Hughes provides nothing. Instead, he has detailed the intelligence service and police evidence of the paperwork preceding their flights to London; then the CCTV and telephone tracking evidence of their movements in London and Salisbury. There is no evidence of what was inside their bags; no evidence that they were carrying Novichok in one or more perfume bottles. “I do not think that it is legitimate to draw any firm conclusion from the transfer of the rucksack” [page 39], Hughes acknowledges from the available CCTV records that he neither knows what was in the bags the Russians were carrying or why.
After they have publicly denied the charges against them, Hughes dismisses the evidence, just as he had of Yulia Skripal’s unforced testimony to her doctor. “It has not been possible for me to investigate the reliability of these statements nor of their authors, and I do not therefore rely on them” [page 25].
Instead, Hughes concludes he is certain that after the assassins had lethally dosed the Skripals’ door handle, at least fifteen minutes later “Sergei Skripal’s hands were contaminated with Novichok at this point” [page 18]; he then used these hands to pass bread to two boys to feed ducks in a park pond. That neither the boys nor the ducks showed any poisoning symptoms, Hughes has concluded: “given the evidence I heard regarding the toxicity of even tiny amounts of Novichok and its transmission through skin contact, as well as other routes…it may well be a matter of luck that the boy who took the bread from Sergei Skripal was not more gravely affected” [page 19]. Conviction based on the possibility of luck is generally known as superstition. As a courtroom standard in England, it ended with the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
No direct testimony from the Skripals appears in the report. Hughes didn’t allow any cross-examination or public testimony by the Skripals on the ground that “it proved unsafe for me to require Sergei or Yulia Skripal to attend the open hearings to give oral evidence” [page 15]. Hughes fails to explain why he himself did not interview the Skripals in closed proceeding at a secret location. If the security of several dozen closed sessions had been tested to the satisfaction of the Government, of the police, and of the judge, why had he failed to test the Skripals directly? There is no answer – and from the British media has come no doubt, scepticism, or suspicion that there is an alternative explanation.
In the very last line of the report it is revealed that Sergei and Yulia Skripal weren’t represented by Adam Chapman at the London law firm of Kingsley Napley – motto, “when it matters most”. However, Chapman had appeared in court many times, confirming to the judge that he was in communication with the Skripals and receiving instructions from them on what to say. Instead of Chapman, a person named Natalie Cohen has now been listed by Hughes as doing that job.
According to her law firm resumé, until 2024 Cohen had spent her career as a state employee litigating for government ministries and official agencies in court cases. In Cohen’s career advertisements and in the Hughes report, Cohen claims no credit for representing the Skripals in the proceedings. If she had, she would have been lying.
Instead, buried in the very small print of a notice issued by Hughes in April 2024, he recorded that Chapman had told him he was retiring and that in his place Chapman was nominating Cohen to represent the Skripals. Note – Chapman nominated Cohen; the Skripals did not; Hughes didn’t care.
“I know how Government and policy making works from the inside will hopefully be a valuable perspective for clients,” Cohen announced in a selfie for Kingsley Napley. Her record reveals cases for the regional police. In the Grok summary, “her expertise focused on defending government decisions against claims of unlawfulness, procedural unfairness, or breaches of human rights under the Human Rights Act 1998.”
There is no evidence that the Skripals knew Cohen or agreed to have such a state lawyer represent them. “Accordingly”, Hughes recorded, “I am satisfied that Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal have appointed Natalie Cohen as their qualified lawyer.”
“The lie told often enough becomes the truth” – Vladimir Lenin recognised the method of state propaganda long before Adolph Hitler and then Joseph Goebbels adopted it, claiming they were following the method of Winston Churchill. Lord Hughes of Ombersley is small fry by comparison; his report is nothing new. Lenin’s heirs turn out to have the antidote.
On Thursday, the White House released the new National Security Strategy for the United States. Others may well give it a different read, but here is my quick take:
The document is ghoulish, abhorrent, repetitious, and sometimes incoherent, but I found its honesty refreshing. The mask is torn off sanctimonious bullshit, tall tales about spreading democracy and caring about human rights. The US is “not grounded in traditional political idealism,” but by “America First.” (P.8) A bit of the usual boilerplate is here, but for the most part, the ideological cover is gone.
Dan Caldwell, onetime advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, applauded the new American military restraint, saying, “For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy, delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests, and delusion about what we can achieve through military force. This is a reality-based document in that regard.” (NY Times,12/7/2025)
In place of pretense, the document spells out what US policy has always been about: undisguised economic nationalism — whatever benefits American grifter capitalism. All this unexpected candor required the New York Times to lamentably and hypocritically describe the new doctrine as “Security Strategy Focused on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.” Going further, General Wesley Clark, former NATO Commander, joined in by saying that “The United States has sacrificed the magic of America. For 250 years, America lived the dream that we gave to all mankind. And we acted to protect that. The rules-based international order has served us so well.” Yes, he actually said that…
Here are a few specifics from a document that, without explicitly saying so, recognizes that the US is a declining power and must accommodate that reality
Ukraine: The US must press for an “expeditious cessation of hostilities.” This is as clear a public admission that we’re going to see from Trump that the US proxy war is lost. Ukraine will not be joining NATO; the organization must cease being a “perpetually expanding alliance.” The US should also “re-establish strategic stability with Russia.” This section states that “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” One detects Vance’s input here.
The Middle East: The US will recede from the Middle East. There will be “No more” decades of nation-building wars, even as the area remains an area of “partnership, friendship, and investment.” The document also states that “We seek good and peaceful relations with other countries without imposing on them democratic or other changes that differ widely from their traditions and histories.” This falls under a section called “Flexible Realism.”
Europe: The US evidences contempt for Europe. As recently as last Wednesday, Trump said, “The European Union was founded to screw the United States.” The document asserts that Europe faces “civilization erasure” in 20 years, in large measure because immigration will make it “non-European.” Further, Europe must learn to “stand on its own feet” and “We expect our allies to spend far more on their Gross National Product (GDP) on their own defense to start making up for the enormous imbalances over decades of much greater spending by the United States.” This refers to Washington’s demand that European allies spend 5% of their GDP on defense.
Latin America: The United States will reassert its preeminence in the region, a development referred to as “The Trump Corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Hemispheric competitors will be prevented from owning and controlling energy facilities, ports, and telecommunication networks. The goal is to make the Western Hemisphere an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment. In accordance with this objective, US diplomats in the region are to seek out “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.” And they should be “sole-source contracts for our companies.” I sense that profits from the Western Hemisphere are expected to offset a shortfall elsewhere. There is an unmistakable message here that Latin American countries will no longer retain their sovereignty.
China: As nearly as I can tell, the document cautions that war over Taiwan should be avoided because it would have “major implications for the US economy.” Further, “Our allies must step up and spend — and more importantly do — much more for collective defense.” The document refers to establishing a “mutually advantageous relationship with China.”
Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America.
The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.
The eight wars Trump claims he has ended include non-existent wars between Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo, and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended in 2023, after Azerbaijan invaded and ethnically cleansed the ancient Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh. Trump stole credit for peace between Thailand and Cambodia, which was actually mediated by Malaysia, while India insists that it ended its war with Pakistan without help from Trump.
Trump recently invited the presidents of Rwanda and the DRC to Washington to sign a peace deal, but it’s only the latest of many agreements that have failed to end decades of war and proxy war that rage on in the eastern Congo.
Trump even claims to have brought peace to Iran, which was not at war until he and Netanyahu plotted to attack it. Now diplomacy with Iran is dead—torpedoed by Trump’s treacherous use of negotiations as cover for the U.S.-Israeli surprise attack in June, an illegal war right out of Rubio’s neocon playbook.
Rubio has undermined diplomacy with Iran for years. As a senator, he worked to kill the JCPOA nuclear agreement, framed negotiations as appeasement, and repeatedly demanded harsher sanctions or military action. He defended the U.S. and Israeli attacks in June, which confirmed the claims of Iranian hardliners that the United States cannot be trusted. He makes meaningful talks with Iran impossible by insisting that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and long-range missile development. By aligning U.S. policy with Israel’s, Rubio closed off the only path that has ever reduced tensions with Iran: sustained, good-faith diplomacy.
Trump’s eighth claimed peace agreement was his Gaza “peace plan,” under which Israel still kills and maims Palestinians every day and allows only 200 truckloads per day of food, water, medicine, and relief supplies into Gaza. With Israeli forces still occupying most of Gaza, no country is sending troops to join Trump’s “stabilization force,” nor will Hamas disarm and leave its people defenseless. Israel still calls the shots, and will only allow rebuilding in Israeli-occupied areas.
As secretary of state, it was Marco Rubio’s job to negotiate peace and an end to the occupation of Palestine. But Rubio’s entire political career has been defined by unwavering support for Israel and corrupted by over a million dollars from pro-Israel donor groups like AIPAC. He refuses to speak to Hamas, insisting on its total isolation and destruction.
Rubio even refuses to negotiate with the weakest, most compromised, but still internationally recognized, Palestinian Authority. In the Senate, he worked to defund and delegitimize the PA, and now he insists it should play no role in Gaza’s future, but he offers no alternative. Contrast this with China, which recently convened fourteen Palestinian factions for dialogue. With a U.S. secretary of state who won’t talk to any Palestinian actors, the United States is only supporting endless war and occupation.
Ukraine is not on Trump’s list of “eight wars,” but it is the conflict he most loudly promised to end on day one. Trump took his first steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine with phone calls with Putin and Zelenskyy on February 12, 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of America’s NATO allies in Brussels that the U.S. was taking Ukraine’s long-promised NATO membership off the table, and that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
Zelenskyy and his European backers are still trying to persuade Trump that, with his support, they can win back at the negotiating table what Ukraine and its western allies lost by their tragic decision to reject a negotiated peace in April 2022. Russia was ready to withdraw from all the land it had just occupied, but the U.S. and U.K. persuaded NATO and Ukraine to instead embark on this long war of attrition, in which their negotiating position only grows weaker as Ukraine’s losses mount.
On November 21st, Trump unveiled a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that was built around the policy Trump and Hegseth had announced in February: no NATO membership, and no return to pre-2014 borders. But once Rubio arrived to lead the U.S. negotiating team in talks in Geneva, he let Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the Europeans put NATO membership and Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders back on the table.
This was a poison pill to deliberately undermine the basic concept of Ukrainian neutrality that Russia insists is the only way to resolve the security dilemma facing both NATO and Russia and ensure a stable and lasting peace. As a European official crowed to Politico, “Things went in the right direction in Geneva. Still a work in progress, but looking much better now… Rubio is a pro who knows his stuff.”
Andriy Yermak, who led Ukraine’s negotiating team in Geneva, has now been fired in a corruption scandal, reportedly at Trump’s behest, as has Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, Keith Kellogg, who apparently leaked Trump’s plan to the press.
Trump is facing a schism in his foreign policy team that echoes his first term, when he appointed a revolving door of neocons, retired generals and arms industry insiders to top jobs. This time, he has already fired his first National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, several NSC staff, and now General Kellogg,
Trump’s team on Ukraine now includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Andy Baker and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who all seem to be on board with the basic policy that Trump and Hegseth announced in February.
But Rubio is keeping alive European hopes of a ceasefire that postpones negotiations over NATO membership and Ukraine’s borders for a later date, to allow NATO to once again build, arm and train Ukrainian forces to retake its lost territories by force, as it did from 2015 to 2022 under cover of the MInsk Accords.
This raises the questions: Does Rubio, like the Europeans and the neocons in Congress, still back the Biden-era strategy of fighting a long proxy war to the last Ukrainian? And if so, is he now in fact working to undermine Trump’s peace efforts?
Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, thinks so, writing “…we are at the threshold on Ukraine, at the beginning of a consequential battle between the neocons and Europeans on one side, and Donald Trump and the realists on the other. Will Trump show the fortitude to see this through and overcome his secretary of state?”
But it’s perhaps in Latin America where Rubio is playing the most aggressive role. Rubio has always promoted regime-change policies, economic strangulation, and U.S. interference targeting left-leaning governments in Latin America. Coming from a conservative Cuban familiy, he has long been one of the most hard-line voices in Washington on Cuba, championing sanctions, opposing any easing of the embargo, and working to reverse Obama-era diplomatic openings.
His position on Venezuela is similar. He was a leading architect of the Trump administration’s failed “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, promoting crippling sanctions that devastated civilians, while openly endorsing failed coups and military threats.
Now Rubio is pushing Trump into a catastrophic, criminal war with Venezuela. In early 2025, Trump’s administration briefly pursued a diplomatic track with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spearheaded by envoy Richard Grenell. But Marco Rubio’s hard-line, pressure-first approach gradually overtook the negotiation channel: Trump suspended talks in October 2025, and U.S. policy shifted toward intensified sanctions and military posturing.
Rubio’s hostility extends across the region: he has attacked progressive leaders in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil, while supporting authoritarians aligned with U.S. and Israeli interests. While Trump has warmed to Brazil’s president Lula and craves access to its reserves of rare earth elements, the second largest after China’s, Lula has no illusions about Rubio’s hostility and has refused to even meet with him.
Rubio’s approach is the opposite of diplomacy. He refuses engagement with governments he dislikes, undermines regional institutions, and encourages Washington to isolate and punish rather than negotiate. Instead of supporting peace agreements—such as Colombia’s fragile accords or regional efforts to stabilize Haiti—he treats Latin America as a battleground for ideological crusades.
Rubio’s influence has helped block humanitarian relief, deepen polarization, and shatter openings for regional dialogue. A Secretary of State committed to peace would work with Latin American partners to resolve conflicts, strengthen democracy, and reduce U.S. militarization in the hemisphere. Rubio does the reverse: he inflames tensions, sabotages diplomacy, and pushes U.S. policy back toward the dark era of coups, blockades, proxy wars and death squads.
So why is Trump betraying his most loyal MAGA supporters, who take his promises to “end the era of endless wars” at face value? Why is his administration supporting the same out-of-control American war machine that has run rampant around the world since the rise of neocons like Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s?
Is Trump simply unable to resist the lure of destructive military power that seduces every American president? Trump’s MAGA true believers would like to think that he and they represent a rejection of American imperialism and a new “America First” policy that prioritizes national sovereignty and shared domestic prosperity. But MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Green can see that is not what Trump is delivering.
U.S. secretaries of state wield considerable power, and Trump is not the first president to be led astray by his secretary of state. President Eisenhower is remembered as a champion of peace, for quickly ending the Korean War – then slashing the military budget – and for two defining speeches at the beginning and end of his presidency: his “Chance for Peace” speech after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin in 1953; and his Farewell Address in 1960, in which he warned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”
For most of his presidency though, Eisenhower gave his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, free rein to manage U.S. foreign policy. By the time Eisenhower fully grasped the dangers of Dulles’ brinksmanship with the U.S.S.R. and China, the Cold War arms race was running wild. Then Eisenhower’s belated outreach to the Soviets was interrupted by his own ill-health and the U-2 crisis. Hillary Clinton had a similarly destructive and destabilizing impact on Obama’s first-term foreign policy, in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and Honduras.
These should be cautionary tales for Trump. If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, he had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late. War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the U.S. pretexts for war are fabricated and false. Rubio has stoked the underlying tensions and led this escalating campaign of lies, threats and murders, so Trump would be wise to replace him before his march to war crosses the point of no return.
This would allow Trump and Rubio’s successor to start rebuilding relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to finally change longstanding U.S. policies that keep the Middle East, and now Ukraine, trapped in endless war.
A peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict is not in the cards. It is a logical impossibility given the following truths
1. America’s leaders could not tolerate terms minimally acceptable to Russia. For such terms would represent a) an unmistakable loss of status and self-regard; b) a reversion from the strategic foundations of the country’s foreign policy put firmly in place over the past 35 years; and c) a domestic political embarrassment carrying heavy costs for Trump and his movement. Furthermore, Trump’s narcissistic, warped personality is too vulnerable to endure a rebuke and a failure of that magnitude. He is terrified at the prospect of looking like a loser.
2. Currently, there is not a single official at the policy level who has direct knowledge of Russia or has dealt with it on a sustained basis. Similarly, there is not a single official at the policy level who has the experience of having conducted serious diplomacy with foreign powers. Ignorant amateurs wedded to a rigid conception of American national interest are at the helm. A crew made up of a New York real estate operator who draws heavy financing from the Qatari government, a FOX news loudmouth, a Castro-obsessed Miami pol and an opportunistic novice Veep is in so far over their heads that the bubbles don’t reach the surface – and their skipper is an erratic, mentally impaired narcissist whose hold on reality is tenuous.
The fixed goal of everything that the United States does in the world is the securing of American dominance as institutionalized since 1991 – in every sphere of international life that counts and in every region where either the stakes are high or the prospect of a putative rival arising exists. To that end, they are prepared to use all the formidable means available to them. There is no group or intellectual current of weight whose worldview deviates markedly from this line in either political party, in Congress or among prominent members of the foreign policy community.
3. Therefore, the United States in Ukraine has stranded itself in a cul de sac that is strategic, political, intellectual and psychological. Trump’s so-called 28 Point peace proposal – a pastiche of the not-so-good, the very bad, and the very ugly – is an absurd non-starter. Dead on arrival in Moscow whoever the delivery man. When he finally realizes that he is cornered, Trump’s first instinct will be to bluster his way out; that failing, to forcibly fight his way out. Only the pervasive, unlimited capacity for self-delusion hides that unyielding fact. Self-delusion is the cardinal feature of the faux diplomatic initiatives that the White House is desperately trying to make real – over the strenuous objections of Kiev and the European allies who have succeeded in stiffening its provisions so they are yet more unpalatable to Moscow.
4. Vladimir Putin, and his associates, tacitly feed this delusion by taking a calculatingly temperate tack in reaction to this non-starter of a “peace” plan despite Washington’s quixotic and bumbling machinations. Whether they do so to satisfy partners (China, India, Turkey, Brazil) who for their own national reasons want to see an end to the war and whose cooperation is valued OR due to Putin’s long-standing and enduring hopes of engaging constructively with the United States, their non-confrontational approach carries the risk of entrenching the Americans’ fantastical view of the world. So that when crunch time comes, and humiliating defeat is at the door, they might revert to type and impulse by resorting to the violent, escalatory option.
Far-fetched? For some time, the Kremlin may well have been emboldening Washington to consider escalation by passively accepting that hundreds of American military personnel are firing American HIMARS and ACATM missiles into Russia proper, that American AWACS and satellites guide Ukrainian attacks against strategic radar sites, that analogous technical assistance allows for assault on Russia’s “shadow” oil fleet, that the Pentagon draws up the battle plans for the Ukrainian army and orchestrated the ill-starred 2023 offensive, that the CIA implanted itself along the country’s border to provide Kiev Intelligence and to facilitate para-military operations. This passive behavior has led many within Washington policy circles to believe that Putin is lacking in ruthlessness – whatever his other strengths. That impression has been reinforced by Russian restraint on Syria, Iran, Palestine and Venezuela when the Kremlin was confronted by audacious, in-your-face American actions. The conclusion that Putin is not a ruthless leader is probably correct – although incorrect in the corollary assumption that he would allow himself to be bullied into major concessions when push comes to shove over Ukraine. Putin’s reading of the Trump presidency is that the man’s mercurial nature and unpredictability potentially opens the possibility for some kind of meeting of the minds which was foreclosed by more conventional American leaders like Biden. A stable Russo-American modus vivendi, in turn, is the sine qua non for a longer-term reconciliation of Russia within the wider European system.
Another consideration. In all likelihood, there lurks in the back of Putin’s mind the dread fear that an unhinged Trump, roiling in the coils of his twisted psyche, could do something truly insane that endangers all. Keeping company with him – however tenuous – is seen as mitigating that risk by ensuring that Trump didn’t disconnect from reality totally.
What he fails to perceive is that behind the showmanship and disconnects, Trump’s outlook on the world – especially the fixed belief in the country’s superiority and privileged exceptionalism – at its core closely resembles that of the Washington consensus. Scratch beneath the surface and we experience deja vu all over again – decked out in novel costume.
Looking beyond Ukraine, bear in mind that this government, in less than a year, has established a stunning record for bellicosity: launching a massive air assault against Iran with no legal or security justification (an aggression concealed by a deceptive veil of fictitious peace talks); lending its military might and diplomatic muscle to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria followed by partial territorial seizures; participating in the Palestinian genocide; declaring war on Venezuela behind a smokescreen of transparent lies to hide the actual objective of taking control of the country’s petroleum resources; encouraging the newly minted Japanese government of ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to make the reckless declaration that Japan had a strategic national interest in Taiwan’s independence and, if necessary, defense; imposing or threatening coercive economic sanctions on an array of countries suspected of disobedience to Washington.
5. Domestic criticism of Trump’s mishandling of the United States’ foreign relations is feeble. The Democratic Party leaders share the same worldview (re. the Biden administration – and are inhibited about crossing swords with Trunp on any issue. The MSM have been intimidated into subservience to the point where even the most egregious lies and illegal actions are not labelled as such. Examples: the global tariff wars that are in direct violation of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) that grants Congress the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” which includes the authority to set tariffs on imported goods – with statutory exemptions limited to national security emergencies; the promiscuous use of the armed forces without even prior notification of the Congress; the ridiculous tale about Venezuela’s fishing skiffs delivering drugs only 800 miles off the U.S. coast, , the condition of Russia’s economy, the Afghan who shot the two National Guardsman – a CIA commando trained to fight a dirty war against the Taliban – as reason to suspend all asylum petitions, the destruction of the Nordstrom II gas pipeline, the denunciation as ‘traitor’ anyone who reminds serving military officers that they are bound by the Department of Defense’s manual stipulating codes of conduct as well as international law to refuse a manifestly illegal order. Hence, the public is instilled with the notion that there is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the Trump dangerous escapades and inanities.
A conscientious follower of the MSM remains largely oblivious to the meaning and consequence of these matters. Superficial and fleeting mention of tactical differences or disagreements over the grammar of policy elbows out any serious critical commentary. Therefore, tolerance is high, electoral costs abnormally low and the President’s ability to act with feckless impunity unimpeded.
The United States is being defeated in Ukraine – comprehensively. One could say that it is facing defeat – or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. We prefer to look at the world through the distorted lenses of our delusions. We plunge forward on whatever path we’ve chosen while averting our eyes from the topography that we are trying to traverse.
It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. We are very well acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Mali – in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Georgia and Niger. Moreover, Washington’s failures are now crowned by its embarrassment at being forced to run up the white flag when China stared it down in the Trump initiated tariff war. That rich experience in frustrated ambition has failed to liberate us from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, we have acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.
Vietnam being the prime example. A society that so thoroughly can erase from the collective mind a Vietnam where 59,000 Americans died, surely can suppress Ukraine where no deaths are recorded.
The new U.S. National Security Strategy says with regard to Ukraine:
It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.
The U.S. is pressing forward with that mission. With the help of the Ukrainian anti-corruption vertical (the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor Office (SAPO) and the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) – all created by the U.S. after the 2014 Maidan coup) it has removed Andreij Yermak from his position as the head of the president’s office.
The next step is to press the acting President Vladimir Zelensky to agree to a peace agreement with Moscow. This will require him to give up land that the Ukrainian army is still holding.
In an effort to formalise the hostility which has been growing under Donald Trump, America has announced a plan to combat the “current trajectory” of Europe:
European priorities for Trump’s new National Security Strategy:
People are taking the above to be a pretty direct attack on the existence of the European Union:
Meiselas: The official Trump U.S. National Security Strategy document has been released. The document says a top priority of the U.S. is "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory." In other words, to destroy the European Union. pic.twitter.com/Dz2KvhTRfg
Donald Trump is deep in bed with the tech oligarchs, who all attended his inauguration as guests of honour:
The 3 billionaires who got a front row seat to Trump’s inauguration (Musk, Zuckerberg & Bezos) worth $950 billion are laying off 74,000 U.S workers, hiring 27,000 H-1B guest workers & building an army of robots to displace millions of jobs. Trump cares more about them than you. https://t.co/ypb4uGrdmapic.twitter.com/ixVwmC31EH
At this point, the US has got about as much as they can out of Europe while still maintaining a veneer of democracy and liberalism. To bleed us dry, they’ll need to perform the shock doctrine on us; i.e. they want far-right authoritarians to take charge so they can syphon off the last of of our public wealth to American conglomerates.
Hi @Nigel_Farage, when will you make a statement on the Epstein Files?
People are asking what links Reform have with Russia, but really the links we need to worry about are their links to the Americans.
The United States says in its National Security Strategy that it is now official US policy to weaken and destroy the European Union and prop up right-wing political parties in Europe that are aligned with Putin and phase out NATO as a permanent organization. pic.twitter.com/1Y0GkqQfMD
The National Security Strategy also contains the following, suggesting that Reform are taking their direction from the states (reported by the BBC):
In the document, the EU is blamed for blocking US efforts to end the conflict and says that the US must “re-establish strategic stability to Russia” which would “stabilise European economies”.
It appears to endorse efforts to influence policy on the continent, noting that US policy should prioritise “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
The new report also calls for the restoration of “Western identity”, and claims that Europe will be “unrecognisable in 20 years or less” and its economic issues are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure”.
“It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies,” the document states.
In stark contrast, the document celebrates the influence of “patriotic European parties” and says “America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit”.
Remember when Farage used to talk about sovereignty?
Remember when he said we need to take back control from unelected foreign elites?
We remember, but somehow we doubt Farage will stand up to the Yanks.
The new US “National Security Strategy” document puts it in black & white – Trump intends to “cultivate resistance” within European countries to force Europe to change course to what he wants to see.
It’s an open declaration of intent to interfere in Europe’s internal politics. pic.twitter.com/yR8ZWT0bOr
In the following tweet, you’ll notice Elon Musk repeats the idea of ‘sovereign nations’ from the National Security Strategy. Musk is being a bit more blatant, giving the game away as to what his friends in the White House are scheming:
What this really means: The EU should be abolished so that great powers run by unaccountable oligarchs can better bully smaller countries. https://t.co/42HounA7BJ
Oh, and the guy agreeing with Musk is on the Security Council of Russia, by the way, so it’s a real who’s who of ‘who the fuck asked you?‘
Russia has welcomed the National Security Strategy, saying:
The adjustments we’re seeing… are largely consistent with our vision,
They added:
We consider this a positive step
There’s been a debate between leftists and centrists as to which is worse: American imperialism or Russian imperialism. That debate may be over now, because they’re officially the same thing according to the US government.
Despite widespread rejection and ridicule in Western media of Donald Trump’s peace proposal on Ukraine being “dead on arrival” in Moscow, there was Trump’s envoy and his son-in-law discussing the “dead” document for five hours until midnight on Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
Yury Ushakov, Putin’s chief aide on Ukraine, in the official readout, said the two sides discussed several options, including territorial issues, and agreed to continue contacts.
“We did not discuss specific formulations, specific American proposals, but discussed the very essence of what is embedded in these American documents.
Despite widespread rejection and ridicule in Western media of Donald Trump’s peace proposal on Ukraine being “dead on arrival” in Moscow, there was Trump’s envoy and his son-in-law discussing the “dead” document for five hours until midnight on Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
Yury Ushakov, Putin’s chief aide on Ukraine, in the official readout, said the two sides discussed several options, including territorial issues, and agreed to continue contacts.
“We did not discuss specific formulations, specific American proposals, but discussed the very essence of what is embedded in these American documents.
Moscow condemned on 1 December comments made by NATO’s most senior military officer, threatening that Brussels might conduct a possible “pre-emptive strike” against Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the remarks “an extremely irresponsible step, indicating the alliance’s readiness to continue moving towards escalation.”
“We see in it a deliberate attempt to undermine efforts to overcome the Ukrainian crisis,” Zakharova said.
“The people making such statements should be aware of the risks and possible consequences, including for the alliance members themselves.”
European leaders are in panic mode. They are scrambling to ensure that Trump’s 28-point peace plan that they believe favours Russia can be revised to give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an equal say alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This is delusional thinking. Whether or not Zelensky and his U.S./NATO allies, who have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into this conflict care to accept it, Russia is the indisputable victor in this terrible 14-year war, beginning with the 2014 Ukrainian civil war, which Russia entered in 2022.
Moscow will call the shots when it finally ends. As in Potsdam at the end of WWII, the only path forward now is working out the terms of defeat.
Donald Trump made some revealing remarks to the media as he flew to Florida for Thanksgiving on Wednesday. Asked if he thought Ukraine is being asked to give too much land to Russia in his proposal to end the war, Trump responded:
“It’s clearly up to the Russians. It’s moving in one direction. … That’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway. So, do you want to fight and loose another 50,000 or 60,000 people? Or do something now? They are negotiating; they are trying to get it done.”
That’s the same realistic approach Trump’s new special envoy to Ukraine, U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, took with the Ukrainians and Europe’s so-called “coalition of the willing” during a visit to Kiev earlier this week.
On 13 November, at the Global South Academic Forum in Shanghai, China, we released our latest study, The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War – Understanding Who Saved Humanity: A Restorationist History. An edited version of my keynote speech ‘Two Lies and an Enormous Truth’, delivered to introduce the study, is reproduced here.
In early August 1942, the Soviets set up loudspeakers across Leningrad. The city had been under siege for over 300 days. People were starving. The conductor, Karl Eliasberg, kept the Leningrad Radio Orchestra going by holding rehearsals and personally taking his musicians to feeding stations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on 27 November that the Kremlin generally agrees that the 28-point US peace plan for Ukraine could form a basis for an agreement, while at the same time calling Ukraine’s leadership illegitimate.
“In general, we agree that this could be the basis for future agreements,” he said while speaking to reporters at the conclusion of a visit to Kyrgyzstan.
“It would be impolite of me to talk about any final options now, as there aren’t any. But some things are fundamental,” Putin said.
In the unforgiving battlefields of the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, the Kiev regime is yet to learn that any perceived superiority complex is nothing but that – a set of dangerous delusions that may seem “real” (or even “crystal clear”, “natural”, etc). Probably the most dangerous of such delusions is the near-total disregard of Moscow’s military might due to the Neo-Nazi junta’s stubborn refusal to accept battlefield realities, one of which has a name – the Su-30SM2. Russia’s latest upgrade to the legendary Su-30SM, the “Flanker-H” (its NATO reporting name) is part of a long line of Su-30 series, by far the most successful commercial Su-27 derivative.
For Moscow, in addition to the legendary Su-35S and MiG-31BM, the Su-30SM is instrumental in maintaining not only air superiority, but also conducting SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) missions, drone hunting, etc. However, one of the most pressing issues faced by the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) is the diversity of the “Flanker” fleet. Although the expected advantage of determining which is best suited for a certain role and then perfecting the said role, this significantly complicates maintenance, logistics, training, etc. This is why the VKS made a decision to start upgrading the Su-30SM to the SM2 standard, bringing the jet much closer to the capabilities of the Su-35S.
The two core components of this upgrade are the AL-41F1S jet engine (the AL-41F1 variant is used by the Su-57 before the wider introduction of the next-generation AL-51F1) and the N035 “Irbis”, a hybrid PESA/AESA (passive/active electronically scanned array) radar. As previously mentioned, this not only improves the Su-30SM/SM2’s capabilities, but it also makes the jet much easier to maintain. In addition, the extended service life of the engines makes them cheaper and safer in the long term, while the updated avionics contribute to not only superior capabilities, but also much better interoperability (especially with the Su-35S).
The introduction of the Su-30SM2 marked a pivotal moment, which was bad news for the political West that decided to respond by sending additional SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, specifically the extremely overhyped and exorbitantly overpriced US-made “Patriot”.
Germany officially donated the latest batch, praising it as “instrumental in defending Ukrainian democracy”. However, barely a day or so after the delivery, the Su-30SM2’s combat debut over NATO-occupied Ukraine turned out to be a total disaster for the “Patriot”. Military sources report that a daring SEAD mission was launched, destroying the latest batch of US/NATO’s air defense “crown jewels”.
The operation, executed with unspecified precision-guided munitions (most likely the ramjet-powered Kh-31P supersonic anti-radiation missile) launched from standoff ranges, reportedly neutralized critical components of the system, including its multifunctional radar and launchers. The operation highlights the Su-30SM2’s enhanced capabilities, particularly its integration of advanced avionics and weapon systems that allow it to evade and overwhelm sophisticated air defenses. The more advanced engines provide at least 15% more thrust, giving it additional energy and contributing to the increase in range and payload capacity, also improving its loitering capabilities.
The latest success against the “Patriot” comes at a time when the Kiev regime is begmanding more air defense systems, to which several NATO member states responded by buying more US-made SAM systems. In a move reportedly coordinated with Denmark and Norway, Berlin transferred at least six “Patriot” systems to the Neo-Nazi junta, costing billions. Obviously, European taxpayers will foot the bill for what President Donald Trump said was “good business for America”. Given the fact that the Russian military already destroyed dozens of “Patriot” systems in NATO-occupied Ukraine, all Washington DC needs to worry about is making money (its reputation is ruined anyway).
Namely, a single interceptor missile of the latest PAC-3 variant costs $7 million. Just one launcher can hold up to 12, which means a full load of missiles costs $84 million. There are up to eight launchers per battery, bringing the total value of interceptors to $672 million. This is without even considering the cost of all components of the battery (upward of $2.5 billion). The Russian military has wiped out dozens of such batteries, so do the math on how much money the troubled EU is spending so it could keep arming the Neo-Nazi junta with these US-made air defense systems. Although it had some initial success, the “Patriot” is now a relatively easy prey for the Kremlin.
The Russian military drastically improved its tactics by using decoys and high-precision attacks, forcing the “Patriot” operators (many of whom are undoubtedly NATO personnel) into reactive modes, which makes it easier for strike aircraft (such as the Su-34) to conduct their missions. The Su-30SM2’s precision strike serves as a stark reminder that no defense is impenetrable, forcing the Kiev regime to disperse its air defense assets, which dilutes coverage, further eroding their capabilities and impact. On the other hand, by upgrading its Su-30SM fleet to the SM2 standard, Moscow significantly expanded its already impressive strike capabilities.
Unlike the Su-35S, which was designed primarily as an air superiority fighter with secondary strike capabilities, the Su-30 is a true multirole platform. In addition, the Su-35S is more expensive, as it was designed to counter the American F-22 “Raptor” and other Western air superiority fighter jets. With the latest upgrade to the SM2 standard, the VKS effectively got a jet that’s around 75-80% as capable as the Su-35S while being at least 35-40% cheaper. This indicates that Russia retains a massive advantage in the effectiveness of its “economy of war” concept, which requires weapon systems to be affordable without a significant loss in capabilities.
Donald Trump has once again shown us exactly why he is not fit to lead one of the most powerful countries in the world.
An unknown source leaked the recordings of two telephone conversations. One appears to show Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, advising Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s most senior foreign policy aide, on how to appeal to the president.
And of course, Trump has defended him. He said it was the “standard thing”.
According to the BBC, Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he hadn’t heard the audio, but he was “doing what a dealmaker does” to sell his peace plan to both Russia and Ukraine.
The leak emerged after the US presented its 28-point draft peace plan.
The other leaked recording is a phone call between Mr Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, Mr Putin’s economic adviser. It seems to suggest that the Kremlin created the 28-point plan, which Trump then presented as his own.
Trump’s big 28 point surrender plan for Ukraine was drafted and written by Russia.
Treason pedo Trump was assigned with delivering it in another failed attempt to backstab Ukraine and Europe and prevent the release of the blackmail Russia has on the US “president”. pic.twitter.com/9nwVzKe9DV
As the Telegraph reported, Mr Dmitriev allegedly said during the call:
I think we’ll just make this paper from our position, and I’ll informally pass it along, making it clear that it’s all informal
And let them do like their own. But, I don’t think they’ll take exactly our version, but at least it’ll be as close to it as possible.
The Telegraph then added that he suggested “talking to Steve about this paper” — which is an apparent reference to Witkoff.
Mr Dmitriev claimed the transcript was fake.
Trump—Quick to defend
Republicans called for Trump to remove Witkoff from the Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations. However, Trump was quick to defend him.
Russia has, of course, denied leaking the recording.
Russia has denied leaking a phone call between Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin’s senior adviser.
The leak, first reported by Bloomberg News, revealed details of a conversation that took place on Oct 14 in which Mr Witkoff advised Yuri Ushakov on how…
An unknown source leaked the US-backed peace plan last week. It included giving Russia some Ukrainian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine. It has been widely criticised for being too Russian-focused and has now been heavily edited. However, Zelensky still wants to negotiate with Trump on the territorial concessions. He has asked the president for a meeting “as soon as possible”
The US is arguing that the current trajectory of the war means that, eventually, Russia will take that land anyway.
From Trump’s refusal to criticise Putin during his 2016 election campaign, to surrounding himself with people known to be friends and business associates of Russia — it is clear that Trump’s relationship with Russia has always been a little too special. And now, it seems that Ukraine is going to pay the price of that friendship.
New York, November 26, 2025—Russian authorities should immediately release Crimean Tatar journalist Vilen Temeryanov and end their crackdown on independent voices in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.
The court ruled that Temeryanov will serve the first three years of his sentence in a prison, and the remainder in a strict-security prison colony. Temeryanov denied the charges and plans to appeal his sentence, a source close to his case told CPJ under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Russia cracked down on independent media following its 2014 occupation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many Ukrainian journalists, including Crimean Tatars, the predominantly Muslim indigenous ethnic group of the Crimean peninsula, have been persecuted in connection with their reporting. Russia currently holds at least 12 Ukrainian journalists behind bars; seven of them are Crimean Tatars.
“After holding Crimean journalist Vilen Temeryanov captive for over three years, Russian occupation authorities sentenced him to 14 years behind bars in retaliation for his work,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “This signals how scared Russia is of any independent reporting from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Russian authorities must immediately release Temeryanov and all other imprisoned members of the press.”
Russian authorities have detainedTemeryanov, a correspondent for the human rights group Crimean Solidarity and the independent news website Grani, since August 11, 2022, after searching his home in the village of Vilne, in Crimea. Authorities also arrested five Crimean Tatar activists that day. Four of them were sentenced along with Temeryanov to prison terms ranging from 13 to 19 years.
Authorities accuse Temeryanov of being a member of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which Russian authorities have banned and consider a terrorist organization. The group is allowed to operate legally in Ukraine.
“I am a Muslim and a journalist, and after studying reality all these years, I have come to the conclusion that where there is an intention to commit terror in the form of persecution, intimidation, and destruction of families and peace among the people, there is no place for justice,” Temeryanov said in a final statement on November 25.
CPJ emailed the press service of Rostov Region’s prosecutor’s office but did immediately receive a reply.
Britain is preparing a smear campaign aimed at damaging US President Donald Trump’s reputation in order to derail his efforts to end the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed on Tuesday.
According to the agency, London views the continuation of hostilities as vital to securing multi-billion-dollar weapons contracts that could help revive the struggling British economy. Undermining Trump, who is pushing to end the conflict, would dissuade Washington and protect the UK’s “blood money” profits, the SVR alleged.
“Plans have been concocted to revive former British intelligence officer [Christopher] Steele’s fake ‘dossier’, accusing the head of the White House and his family of having links to Soviet and Russian intelligence services,” the statement claimed.
That document, penned by Steele, a former MI6 officer, in 2016 and reportedly paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, relied on unverified rumors alleging that Trump and members of his family had compromising ties with Moscow.
Although widely used to fuel the ‘Russiagate’ narrative early in Trump’s first presidency, the dossier has since been debunked. The SVR suggested that British operatives may craft a new iteration inspired by the original template rather than attempt to reuse it directly.
Trump’s administration has drafted a proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict. However, Kiev and several European governments strongly oppose it due to its reportedly demanding major concessions from Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed this week that US diplomats had already removed some of the 28 provisions at his government’s request.
Moscow has kept its distance from the American initiative. President Vladimir Putin reiterated that Russia’s military position continues to strengthen and that Moscow intends to achieve its security objectives regardless of whether Kiev accepts Washington’s mediation.
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