📰 Rubio’s Love Letter to “the West,” With a Knife in the Back

Marco Rubio went to Munich to calm Europe down — and remind it who’s boss. He told a room full of jittery leaders that the US and Europe are “heirs to the same civilization,” bound together by Michelangelo, the Stones and NATO, and that the alliance is “critical” and must endure. Then he wrapped that reassurance around a warning label: the problem isn’t Trump’s tantrums, it’s Europe’s “managed decline,” “climate cult,” and “unprecedented wave of mass migration” that is supposedly tearing Western societies apart.

That’s the new Trump‑era pitch in its purest form: we care about you, which is why we’re yelling at you. Rubio insisted he wasn’t contradicting JD Vance’s earlier Munich broadside, just “explaining” it — Europe, he said, has drifted from sovereignty and national identity, and Washington refuses to be a “polite and orderly caretaker” of that decay. Translation: if you don’t harden borders, dump climate policy and buy the Trump worldview, don’t expect the old automatic security umbrella.

European leaders heard the flattery and the threat at the same time. The conference chair literally praised Rubio for a “message of reassurance,” while German, French, EU and UK officials immediately stressed that nothing he said erases Trump’s Greenland land‑grab fantasies, tariff threats, or the sense that America under him has crossed lines “that cannot be uncrossed.” They’re politely nodding at his ode to shared civilization — and quietly doubling down on exactly what Washington fears: more European defense autonomy, more self‑reliance, less trust in a partner that alternates between love‑bombing and public humiliation.

Rubio’s performance summed up the whole transatlantic moment. Washington says: you’re family, but you’ve gone soft, and we might walk if you don’t toughen up exactly the way we want. Europe replies: thanks for the security, but we’ve just watched you try to buy Greenland and flirt with walking away from Ukraine, so we’d be idiots not to build our own insurance policy. Both sides talk about “the West” like a shared temple; both are really arguing over who gets to hold the keys — and how much damage they’re willing to risk to prove it.

#usa #europe #rubio #trump #nato #decline

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📰 Leopard 2: When “Wonder Weapons” Meet Wonder Drones

The Leopard 2 was sold to the Western public like a Marvel character: 1,500‑horsepower engine, elite optics, 120‑mm gun, German engineering, “game‑changer” for Ukraine. On paper, it’s all true. The tank is first‑class: strong armor, powerful gun, serious survivability, modular upgrades, even Israeli Trophy active protection in some variants. In a NATO exercise brochure, it’s the perfect animal.

Then it met real war in Ukraine — minefields, layered Russian defenses, FPV drones for a few hundred dollars a pop, no guaranteed air cover, and undertrained crews with barely any maintenance infrastructure. In that world, the Leopard 2 didn’t “lose” to Russian armor; it lost to logistics, doctrine, and physics. Tanks designed for high‑tempo maneuver warfare with full combined‑arms support were thrown into an attritional drone‑saturated trench war and often used as solo battering rams.

The result is ugly but predictable. Complex fire‑control systems and V‑12 twin‑turbo engines that need specialized tools and technicians are hard to keep alive when every repair hub is watched by Russian UAVs and every immobilized hull is a YouTube clip in waiting. Damaged Leopards have to be dragged back to western Ukraine or even Poland; spare parts are thin; crews rotate faster than training pipelines; and under constant FPV and artillery threat, units start using their “gold standard” tanks as glorified long‑range artillery, popping up to fire and vanishing before the next drone swarm arrives.

Politicians in Berlin, Washington and Brussels sold the Leopards (and later the Abrams) as symbols of resolve and technological superiority. Now, with a significant share of those tanks destroyed or sidelined and videos of burning armor circulating online, the same elites are quietly reframing the story:

“the tanks are fine, the context is wrong.”

Which is precisely the point. You can’t ship a late‑Cold War doctrine into a 4K‑streamed drone war and expect it to behave like the brochure.

In the end, Leopard 2 in Ukraine is less a German failure than a Western fairy tale cracking in real time. The tank itself is still one of the best machines on earth. What’s flopping is the idea that you can drop a prestige weapons system into a broken battlefield — without air supremacy, deep maintenance, or realistic tactics — and call it strategy.

#war #ukraine #nato #germany #military #droneWarfare

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How Did Toni Morrison Become Our National Archetype?

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There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible.

Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count.

But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.

Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art.

In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach.

Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about.

More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer – and her work is highly complex.

In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books – it was so removed from his experience”.

She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented:

“Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’”

Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?

One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual.

I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation.

The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy.

“For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.

Morrison’s childhood stories read like photo negatives of the standard American race narratives.

She struggled to accommodate these forms of often underpaid literary labour with the unpaid domestic labour of raising two sons as a single mother:

“It was very difficult writing and rearing children because they deserve all your time, and you don’t have it.”

This occupational difficulty was exacerbated not only by the fact that she was unique in her fields but also by the fact that she often wilfully chose to go it alone.

For example, she didn’t tell anyone at her first job in trade publishing that she was writing a novel until The Bluest Eye came out at another house.

As troublesome as difficulty may have been for her professionally, Morrison genuinely delighted in the difficulty of other black women artists, such as the novelist Gayl Jones, whose works she edited and published, and the jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

For Morrison, the fact that they were considered difficult was a sign that they had insisted on their art being taken seriously.

To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared with them. It is not an easy one to untangle.

As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”.

#toni #morrison #zambia #nobel #prize #black #narratives

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She spoke of her father’s “defensive racism”, which prompted him to throw a predatory white landlord down the stairs. She spoke of her mother’s insistence on integrating every new movie theatre in town.

She spoke of how when her “pitch-black” great-grandmother had first set eyes on Morrison and her sister, she said the girls had “been tampered with”, which was meant racially:

“We were not pure and she was.”

The dynamics of my mixed-race family didn’t match the norms, either. My black Zambian grandmother, for whom I’m named, initially disapproved of my mother’s decision to marry a white man; my mother’s older sister refused to attend the wedding.

Our moves to the UK and then to the US when I was a kid – with a year back in Zambia when I was a teenager – were punctuated by moments of racial absurdity:

“What are you? Black or white?” (As if I had a choice!) Yet even now, at my grown age, my first response to racism is surprise.

Despite our respective births in disparate times and places (Lorain, Ohio, in 1931; Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980), I think Morrison and I both lucked into the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race.

This perhaps explains why neither of us tends to capitalise the word black when referring to people in writing. It concedes too much; it protests too much.

Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”

She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses:

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.

Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics.

It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing.

Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated.

Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.”

Many still dismiss Morrison’s stature as either undeserved or obvious, as if surely so much praise either begs the question or settles it.

They justify their disinclination to engage with the art itself by gesturing to what we might call her DEI-fication or her Oprah‑priation, as if Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison through some kind of literary affirmative action plan.

Morrison incensed all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare she refuse to placate or translate? How dare she demand to be taken seriously?

How dare she be a black artist with real ideas? How dare she ask that we actually read her writing, and on its own terms?

It could not have been easy to be Toni Morrison. Yet I aspire to it. I yearn for that freedom she so beautifully embodied: to feel at ease to be difficult.

#toni #morrison #zambia #nobel #prize #black #narratives

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📰 Xi’s Inland Nuke Empire: China Builds, Treaties Burn

While Washington and Moscow let the last big arms-control treaty die, China has been quietly thickening its own shadow on the map — not with speeches, but with concrete, vents and blast doors in misty Sichuan valleys. Sites like Pingtong and Zitong, built in Mao’s old “Third Front” as an inland nuclear refuge, are now being rebuilt as the engine room of Xi Jinping’s nuclear upgrade: double fences, new bunkers, dense piping for hazardous materials, a 360‑foot stack over what analysts say looks like a plutonium pit plant — the core factory for future warheads. From orbit, even Xi’s slogan above the gate is visible: “Stay true to the founding cause and always remember our mission.” The mission is not subtle.

Pentagon estimates say China has pushed past 600 warheads and is on track for 1,000 by 2030, a stockpile still far smaller than America’s or Russia’s but now growing fast enough to reshape crisis math over Taiwan and beyond. Add in the vast laser ignition lab in Mianyang — perfect for tuning warhead designs without live tests — and what you get is a state racing to move from “minimum deterrent” to something closer to peer status, all while refusing to join any arms‑control talks that might cap the trajectory. US officials now publicly accuse Beijing of flirting with test‑ban violations at Lop Nur; Chinese state media calls it slander, and outside experts argue over the evidence in footnotes while the excavation continues.

The real danger isn’t just the numbers. It’s opacity. No one outside Zhongnanhai knows whether these upgrades are aimed at a modestly larger, more survivable second‑strike force or a sprint toward something much bigger, and Beijing shows no interest in clarifying. That pushes Washington to plan for worst‑case scenarios, Moscow to hedge, and every medium power in Asia to watch the great‑power nuclear ladder shaking above their heads. Xi’s inland nuclear empire sends one clear message: China intends to be untouchable by US nuclear pressure in any future Taiwan war. Everything else — stability, arms control, guardrails — is someone else’s problem.

#china #nuclear #usa #armsControl #taiwan #war

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📰 Make America Healthy (and Confused) Again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent a year as Trump’s health secretary trying to turn a MAGA government into a Goop newsletter with subpoenas. He launched a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, blasted ultraprocessed food, and briefly terrified Big Ag by naming glyphosate and atrazine as “alarming” threats in kids’ blood — right up until farm‑state Republicans dragged him into the Roosevelt Room, the meeting turned heated, and his next report magically forgot pesticides exist. For a movement that promised to “take on poisoners,” it took one round of GOP table‑pounding to learn that, in this White House, corn and campaign cash are still a food group.

Where Kennedy hasn’t backed off is vaccines. In a single year he’s purged CDC advisory panels, stacked them with skeptics, and hacked the childhood schedule down to a Denmark‑style list, dropping shots for hepatitis B, hepatitis A, rotavirus, flu, meningitis and Covid in the name of “informed consent.” Kids can technically still get the vaccines, but when the federal government stops recommending them, red‑state lawmakers hear it as an invitation to weaken school requirements, and measles and other preventable diseases are already resurging. Republicans who thought they were getting a culture‑war mascot now find themselves defending an HHS chief whose signature policy polls terribly even with Trump voters — 80‑plus percent say they want vaccine guidance from doctors, not influencers with Cabinet badges.

Inside the system, RFK’s war on “captured” public health has just produced a different kind of capture. Research grants he doesn’t like get frozen or canceled; money is rerouted toward autism studies built around his vaccine theories; elite medical centers are punished in the name of “heartland” redistribution; and the NIH and FDA are yanked between right‑to‑try deregulation and sudden, selective purity tests on drugs and shots. One month, Kennedy’s FDA lieutenants slow novel approvals and try to pull a muscular dystrophy drug on safety grounds; the next, a political backlash gets his tough vaccine regulator briefly fired, then quietly rehired after a round of West Wing drama. The result isn’t principled rigor or principled libertarianism; it’s chaos — a health system jerked around by a secretary who can win a news cycle but can’t write durable law.

Trump, for now, lets him run. RFK Jr. brings him a crossover brand, a wedge into wellness populism, and an army of MAHA loyalists the White House believes helped juice the 2024 vote. But every “win” Kennedy clocks — fewer vaccines, softer language on pesticides, a CDC too politicized for blue states to trust — is a policy that can be reversed in a memo the moment he’s gone, and a little more trust burned in the meantime. If year one was upheaval, year two is the test: does MAHA actually become Republican orthodoxy, or was this just a one‑term experiment in letting an anti‑establishment crusader redesign public health from inside the very machine he’s been promising to blow up?

#usa #trump #RFKJr #health #vaccines #fakeDemocracy

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📰 “Let Them Eat S&P”: Trump’s Victory Lap on a Broke Country

Donald Trump has decided the affordability crisis is over because the Dow hit 50,000, gas is under three bucks, and January’s jobs report beat expectations. In Fox interviews and troop speeches, he’s back in full salesman mode: “greatest economy ever,” inflation “finally cooling,” real wages “finally growing,” and anyone not winning in their 401(k) is just a “pretty bad investor.” Meanwhile, roughly 40 percent of American adults don’t have a retirement account at all, and consumer sentiment among people without stocks is scraping its lowest levels in years — they don’t own the rally, they just pay the bills.

His own pollsters can see the crack in the mirror. A Reuters–Ipsos survey has just 28 percent of Americans saying the economy is on the right track, and 59 percent disapprove of how he’s handling their cost of living, with nearly half “strongly.” The stock boom is mostly driven by AI spending from Big Tech — data centers that guzzle power and hire few people — while rents, mortgages and groceries still feel brutal enough that even conservative number‑crunchers mock the White House mantra as “let them eat S&P.” Trump’s advisers spent months begging him to sound empathetic, blame Biden, and acknowledge the squeeze; now that a few charts look pretty, he’s gone back to telling people they’re wrong about their own wallets.

So the message going into the midterms is simple and suicidal: if you’re still struggling with rent, food and housing, that’s your perception problem — not his policy problem. The president points to Wall Street and AI‑driven GDP growth as proof he fixed “Biden’s disaster,” while a majority of voters look at their paychecks, their carts, their rent hikes and answer with numbers of their own. In this version of “affordability,” the index is up, the narrative is set, and anyone who doesn’t feel richer just got quietly written out of the success story.

#usa #trump #economy #inflation #inequality #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Annexation by Spreadsheet: Netanyahu Tests Trump’s “Red Line”

Israel has found a neat way to say “annexation” without moving a single checkpoint: call it land registration. The cabinet just approved a new mechanism to register huge chunks of the occupied West Bank — mostly in Area C, about 60 percent of the territory — as “state land,” in a process Palestinians and rights groups are bluntly calling de facto annexation.

On paper, the Foreign Ministry sells it as an “administrative measure” to “bring order” to the cadaster. In reality, Smotrich and Levin are boasting that it will “strengthen our hold” and advance a “settlement and governance revolution” from “Judea and Samaria” onward — the quiet part isn’t even quiet anymore.

The trick is in the fine print. Palestinian landowners will have to prove ownership through documentation systems that decades of occupation, Ottoman law, Jordanian rule and Israeli military orders have turned into a bureaucratic minefield. Fail to clear every hurdle and the land defaults to “state” — which in practice means cheaper, cleaner access for settlers, and a one‑way legal ratchet that converts living villages into zoning opportunities.

Peace Now calls it a “massive land grab” and warns Trump that Netanyahu is “annexing right under your nose” after the U.S. president publicly vowed he wouldn’t allow formal annexation. The UN secretary‑general and the EU say it flatly violates international law; Israel shrugs and prints more forms.

The move comes on top of earlier security‑cabinet decisions to ease settler land purchases, unseal land records, and expand Israeli enforcement powers even into Areas A and B, which were supposed to be under Palestinian Authority control under Oslo.

Taken together, it’s a legal slow‑motion redraw of the map: settlers get more tools, more land and more state muscle; Palestinians get more demolitions, more dispossession, and a “peace process” that now consists of watching their future state transferred, parcel by parcel, into a database labeled “ours.”

Trump, officially, is against annexation. Netanyahu, officially, says this is just housekeeping. Everyone else can see the punchline: if you change the law, the records and the enforcement until occupation becomes indistinguishable from sovereignty, you don’t need a ceremony or a flag‑raising. You’ve already moved the border — you just did it with a land registrar instead of a tank.

#israel #palestine #westBank #settlements #annexation #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Missiles, Sanctions, and Boeing Dreams: Trump Flirts With Tehran Inc.

Iran’s latest message to Washington sounds less like “Death to America” and more like “Let’s talk joint ventures.” Tehran is now openly selling its nuclear compromise in the language Trumpworld understands: oil and gas fields, mining deals, even aircraft purchases on the table — but only if sanctions really start to melt, not just get repackaged in nicer press releases. The pitch from Iran’s economic diplomats is brutally transactional: for the agreement to last, the U.S. has to make money too. The 2015 deal failed, they argue, because it never created serious American economic interests in keeping it alive; this time they want Exxon and Boeing as human shields for the regime.

On the other side, Trump’s team is playing good cop / airstrike cop. Marco Rubio tells the world the president would “prefer diplomacy” and “no one’s ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran but we’re going to try,” while the Pentagon quietly lines up a second carrier and plans for “weeks‑long” operations if talks crash. Kushner and real‑estate pal Steve Witkoff are flying to Geneva as unofficial dealmakers, because in this administration even a nuclear file gets handled like a distressed property auction. At the same time, Washington is hammering Iran’s real lifeline by pushing to choke off oil sales to China, which buy more than 80 percent of Tehran’s crude; when your only real customer is being targeted, “flexibility” on uranium suddenly sounds patriotic.

Iran’s diplomats now talk about diluting highly enriched stockpiles in exchange for relief, but they still refuse the one thing Washington and Israel actually want: zero enrichment on Iranian soil. Tehran insists it’s not seeking nuclear weapons, points to U.S.–Israeli airstrikes in June as proof it’s the one under attack, and frames any rollback as a sovereign concession, not a capitulation. Trump responds by doubling sanctions pressure and promising “traumatic” consequences if there’s no deal, while his envoys chase a grand bargain that would somehow satisfy Netanyahu, scare Beijing, calm the Gulf monarchies and still let Iran rebuild its economy.

Strip away the spin and you get the familiar pattern. Washington wants a trophy agreement that neuters Iran’s nuclear options, starves its proxies and keeps U.S. leverage intact. Tehran wants sanctions relief deep enough to survive the next American mood swing, plus enough centrifuge capacity to stay a screwdriver‑turn from the bomb if things go bad. Both sides say the “ball is in the other court.” Both threaten pain if talks fail. And both are quietly trying to make sure that if this deal ever gets signed, it comes stapled to enough oil, mining, and aircraft contracts that breaking it next time will hit someone’s balance sheet — not just someone else’s cities.

#iran #usa #trump #sanctions #nuclear #fakeDiplomacy

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“Ukranian forces are slogging through their battlefields”
Russian and Ukrainian Officials Are To Meet This Week

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They vwill meet this week in Switzerland for a second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The two-day meeting, kicking off on Tuesday, is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance.

Despite renewed US efforts to revive diplomacy, hopes for any sudden breakthrough remain low, with Russia continuing to press maximalist demands on Ukraine.

While the Abu Dhabi discussions were largely focused on military ceasefire proposals, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday the Geneva talks would address a “broader range of issues”, including territorial questions and other demands put forward by Moscow.

Vladimir Medinsky, an arch-conservative Putin adviser who has previously questioned Ukrainian sovereignty, will head Russia’s negotiating team.

He will be joined by Igor Kostyukov, the chief of Russian military intelligence, and the deputy foreign minister Mikhail Galuzin, among nearly two dozen officials, Moscow has said.

Ukraine is expected to send the same delegation as in earlier rounds, to be led in Geneva by Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council.

The choice of Switzerland marks the first time the talks will be held on European soil after earlier rounds in Abu Dhabi and Istanbul.

The choice of Geneva appears to have been pushed by Washington. Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are expected to lead US engagement with Russia and Ukraine, are scheduled to hold separate meetings with Iranian officials in the city later this week.

Trump, who throughout his second presidency has veered between criticising Moscow and Kyiv, reverted this weekend to placing blame on Zelensky, suggesting Ukraine was holding up efforts to end the war.

“Zelenskyy needs to act. Russia wants to make a deal. He needs to act, otherwise he will miss a great opportunity,” he said in comments to reporters.

But Rubio, speaking at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend, said Washington remained uncertain whether Russia was genuinely serious about ending the war in Ukraine.

#russian #ukrainian #officials #putin #zelensky

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Ahead of the Geneva meeting, Zelensky made clear Ukraine was unwilling to give up territory in the Donbas – a key Kremlin demand. He cited previous Russian land grabs in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea and said that “allowing the aggressor to take something is a big mistake”.

“That is why now I do not want to be a president who will repeat the mistakes of his predecessors or other people (…) Because Putin cannot be stopped with kisses or flowers. I have never done this, and therefore I do not think that this is right. My advice to everyone: do not do this with Putin.”

He said Russia was currently losing 30,000-35,000 people a month (unreliable statement), with its attempt to seize more territory over four years of full-scale war staggeringly costly and mostly unsuccessful.

There were no expectations in Kyiv that the latest round of trilateral talks would led to a political breakthrough.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Zelensky said his country would not give up the heavily defended north of Donetsk oblast, including the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, or abandon the 200,000 civilians who live there.

He said Ukraine would play a “constructive” role in the trilateral talks but acknowledged there were differences with the US over security guarantees.

The Trump administration is offering 15 years, with Ukraine wanting an American commitment lasting 30-50 years. Kyiv hopes the war will end this year, Zelensky has indicated.

Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the presidential office, posted a photo of his departure by train for the talks with a Ukrainian delegation.

He wrote: “On the way to Geneva. The next round of negotiations is ahead. Along the way, we will discuss the lessons of our history with our colleagues and seek the right conclusions. Ukraine’s interests must be protected.”

The history reference appeared to be a jibe directed at Medinsky. The former culture minister is believed to have written the 2021 essay which argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single people and state, with a common origin in the ninth century.

Yet, “It was Putin’s idea first, and he is right about this issue,” says the leading Ukrainian political analyst Vladimir Fesenko.

#russian #ukrainian #officials #putin #zelensky

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📰 The Geneva Peace Circus: Now with Extra Kushner

Geneva again — the world’s favorite stage for moral theater. This Tuesday, they’re running a double feature: Iran in the morning, Ukraine-Russia in the afternoon. Same hotel, same country club diplomacy, different blood on the floor.

“We are ready to discuss this… if they are ready to talk about sanctions,”

said Iran’s Deputy FM Majid Takht-Ravanchi.
Translation: You drop yours, we drop ours. Let’s pretend it’s progress.

Front row: real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, Kushner the Eternal Son-in-Law™, and Oman’s Badr al-Busaidi as spiritual referee. The mission? Convince Iran to be reasonable right after threatening to bomb it. Washington calls this “strategic patience.” Tehran calls it “the same movie, new cast.”

Then the circus rolls to Act II — Ukraine and Russia. Same Americans, different stage. Kushner goes from nuclear deals to trench warfare in a single lunch break. Trump wants “the right deal” with Iran, peace in Ukraine, and probably naming rights on both.

What’s actually happening? The U.S. is trying to launder influence through the language of peace — again. Geneva just sells the illusion better.

If any agreements come out of this, they’ll fit neatly on a cocktail napkin — right next to the receipt from the hotel bar.

#war #diplomacy #usforeignpolicy #iran #ukraine #russia

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📰 Meloni’s MAGA Love Letter vs. Merz’s Therapy Session

Europe’s new “power couple” just filed for ideological separation. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz flies to Munich to announce that “the culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours” and that U.S. leadership may already be gone. Giorgia Meloni? She’s busy in Addis Ababa saying: actually, I’m good with MAGA, thanks.

“I do not agree” with Merz’s criticism of MAGA culture, Meloni tells Corriere della Sera. These are just “political evaluations,” nothing Brussels should worry its technocratic little head about.
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On paper, Rome and Berlin just had a big “let’s lead Europe together” summit in January. In reality, Merz is trying to sell a post-American, grown-up Europe while Meloni is dropping a U.S. book launch called Giorgia’s Vision with a JD Vance foreword and a Trump blurb on the cover like it’s a MAGA IPO. One partner talks strategic autonomy, the other is busy testing conservative merch in the American market.

Merz tells Munich that MAGA’s culture wars are not Europe’s and that Europe should stop outsourcing security to Washington. Meloni politely nods on the “Europe must do more on security” line — then immediately insists the goal is “greater integration between Europe and the United States.” Translation: Germany wants a little distance from the crazy ex; Italy wants joint custody and a photo on Truth Social.

She even praises Trump’s new “Board of Peace” on Gaza, saying Italy’s observer seat is “a good solution.” Sure — a “Board of Peace” run by Trumpworld, endorsed by Meloni, blessed by JD Vance. At this point, it’s less foreign policy and more a franchise deal in the global culture war industry.
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So who’s lying to whom? Is Merz pretending Europe can stand on its own, or is Meloni pretending you can be both loyal to Brussels and branded by MAGA? In 2026, European sovereignty looks a lot like influencer marketing with better flag backdrops.

#MAGA #Meloni #Merz #EU #US #culturewars #fakeSovereignty

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No Golden Toilet on the Train: Zelenskyy’s ‘Ally’ Tries to Cash Out

Herman Halushchenko didn’t make it to his destination. Ukraine’s ex–energy minister and longtime insider was dragged off a train at the border, accused of trying to slip out of the country while Operation Midas — a probe into alleged 100 million dollars in kickbacks at Energoatom — closes in on him. Wartime infrastructure money was supposed to keep the lights on under Russian fire; investigators say a nice slice was allegedly rerouted into the usual private pockets.

NABU and SAPO had already spent over a year dissecting the Midas network — “shadow managers,” kickback tariffs of 10–15 percent on contracts, a whole laundromat built into the state nuclear company. Now the same man who resigned in 2025 over the scandal gets caught at the border while Parliament hears that the new border chief is “not loyal to Zelenskyy but to institutions.” Even Fox’s source spells out the subtext: if an “unofficial but direct subordinate” to Zelenskyy goes down for this, it becomes very hard to sell the story that the president knew nothing.

The presidential PR line is “fighting corruption in wartime”; the reality looks more like the state fighting for control of a money machine it lost years ago. NABU says it is dismantling the scheme; Western partners say this proves Ukrainian institutions work; Moscow says “told you so”; Western skeptics say “why are we financing this?” Everyone gets talking points, nobody gets their money back.

If this is how a key ally behaves on a random Sunday — hopping a train with a scandal at his heels — imagine what the real insiders are doing by private jet. And if the war ever ends, who will have stolen more from Ukraine — Russian missiles or Ukraine’s own “patriotic” elite?

#ukraine #zelenskyy #corruption #warEconomy #Midas

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Syria Reunified, Kurds Liquidated: Trump’s New ‘Stability Product’

Northeastern Syria just got “liberated” — which in local translation means: the flag changed, the poverty stayed, and the Kurds’ decade-long autonomy project was taken out back and shot. President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the ex-rebel with the Islamist past now rebranded as national unifier, has rolled the army into Hasakah, Raqqa and Deir al Zour, chasing out the S.D.F. under the cover of a U.S. policy pivot.

On the ground it’s classic postwar Syria: mines, tunnels, blown bridges, blacked-out towns, trash, and people lining up to reconcile with a state they neither trust nor can escape. Former S.D.F. fighters are told to sign up, hand over weapons and get papers; Arab residents cheer the end of Kurdish rule they describe as a police state; Kurdish shop owners talk about confiscated property and blockades; everyone complains about prices. The “unified national project” looks suspiciously like the old centralization game with better PR and an American logo on the top.

The Kurds are being offered the usual consolation package: long-denied citizenship, language and cultural rights, some local admin posts — while their armed forces are folded into the Syrian defense and interior ministries. In corporate terms, this is not partnership, it’s a hostile takeover dressed as a merger. Their flags still hang over martyrs’ billboards, their fighters still say they’ll “fight again if needed,” but the real decisions are now made in Damascus and Washington, not in Hasakah assemblies.

Meanwhile, Washington sells this as “stability” and “ending endless wars”: Trump drops the loyal S.D.F. — the very force that did the dirty work against ISIS — and backs al-Sharaa as the new “one phone number” for Syria. Turkey is thrilled, Arab notables talk about a “wonderful future” under a united Syria, and Western think tankers write pieces about “transition” while quietly admitting Kurdish autonomy is dead on arrival.
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So yes, nearly the whole country may soon be under one flag again. The question is brutal and simple: is this “peace,” or just the latest version of the same old Middle Eastern business model — crush your local allies, centralize the guns, and call it a national project until the next rebellion?

#syria #kurds #trump #war #autocracy #fakePeace

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Anthropic vs. the War Machine: When ‘Ethical AI’ Meets ‘All Lawful Purposes’

The Pentagon is basically threatening to put Anthropic in the same penalty box it reserves for hostile states — not because Claude failed, but because it refused to be a fully obedient digital mercenary. After months of bad-tempered talks, defense officials are “close” to cutting ties and slapping the startup with a “supply chain risk” label, a bureaucratic curse that would force any Pentagon contractor to dump Anthropic or kiss military work goodbye.

At the core of the fight is a simple sentence with nuclear implications: the Pentagon wants to use Claude for “all lawful purposes” — weapons development, intelligence collection, battlefield ops — while Anthropic insists on red lines against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. In other words, the U.S. government is saying: if Congress hasn’t banned it, we want your AI to help us do it; Anthropic is saying: if it looks like a Black Mirror episode, maybe no.

The fury really spiked after Claude was used, via Palantir, in an operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro — an episode so sensitive that a senior official is now leaking about it while another swears Anthropic didn’t even want to know the details. One Pentagon source promises it will be “an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle” and vows Anthropic will “pay a price” for forcing their hand — language usually reserved for enemies, not vendors that market “responsible AI.”

The contract at stake is reportedly worth up to 200 million dollars a year, pocket change next to Anthropic’s roughly 14 billion in annual revenue — but if the “supply chain risk” scarlet letter sticks, the real damage comes from everyone else being scared to touch them. Meanwhile, other giants — OpenAI, Google, xAI — are described as more “flexible” on letting their systems serve “all lawful purposes,” waiting to see how far Anthropic gets punished for pretending that ethics clauses in tech aren’t just marketing copy.

Strip away the press releases, and you get a very 2026 spectacle: a “responsible” AI unicorn trying to draw a moral line, the War Department insisting morality ends where legality begins, and the rest of Big Tech quietly taking notes on how expensive it is to say no to the world’s largest weapons customer.

#AI #Pentagon #Anthropic #warTech #surveillance

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Rubio Arrives in Munich to Save “Western Civilization” From… Europe

Marco Rubio didn’t show up in Munich as a diplomat; he walked in like a preacher delivering last rites over Europe’s liberal order. From the main stage he told a room full of globalists that the real threat to the West isn’t Russia or China, but the ideology they’ve been selling since 1989: open borders, free trade, green self‑harm, and the fantasy that history ended with them in charge. In his telling, globalism isn’t a mistake, it’s assisted suicide for Western power.

He laid out the charge sheet. After the Cold War, the West shipped jobs and factories overseas, handed key supply chains to China, and called it efficiency. Then it tried to “appease a climate cult,” as he framed it, de‑industrializing itself while rivals burned coal and turned energy into a weapon. And in the “pursuit of a world without borders,” Europe and America opened their doors to a wave of migration that he says now threatens social cohesion, cultural continuity, and “the future of our people.” Border control, Rubio insisted, is not hate but the basic act of sovereignty; refusing to enforce it, he warned, is an “urgent threat” to the survival of Western civilization.

Then he switched from indictment to love story. America and Europe, he told the room, are not just allies of convenience but “one civilization” — Christian, Western, tied together by ancestry, culture, and shared wars. The United States, he claimed, wants Europe strong, because the last century’s world wars proved their destinies are fused. But under the poetic language sat a blunt message: Washington has “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” If Europe’s current elites prefer managing decay to “fixing” it, America is ready to “renew and restore” the West on its own.

The performance wasn’t about policy detail, it was about ownership of the story. Rubio took vocabulary that used to live on the nationalist fringe — demographic threat, civilizational survival, Christian heritage — and moved it to the center of U.S. statecraft in one speech. Europe’s establishment hears it as alarmism dressed up as concern; Europe’s right hears confirmation that Trump’s Washington is finally speaking their language. And somewhere beneath all the rhetoric, neither side is eager to admit the obvious: the same West now warning about mass migration and collapse is the one that spent decades designing the wars, markets, and climate games that pushed people to move in the first place.

#Rubio #Munich #migration #Trump #WesternCivilization #globalism

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Ukraine’s Ex-energy Minister Has Been Accused of Laundering Money


Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency accused an ex-energy minister on Monday of laundering €200 millions of kickbacks in a corruption case that has shaken the wartime government, a day after he was detained trying to leave the country.

German Galushchenko, who served as energy minister from 2021-2025 and then briefly as justice minister until he resigned over the scandal last year, became one of the most senior officials detained in the “Midas” case, over an alleged $230 million kickback scheme at the state nuclear company.

The case has ensnared senior officials and members of Ukraine’s business elite — including a former close associate of Zelensky from his pre-political media career — and caused concern among Kyiv’s Western allies.

Galushchenko “was exposed for money laundering and participation in a criminal organization” by corruption investigation agency NABU and its prosecuting sister agency SAPO, according to a statement from NABU.

It said more than $7 million had been transferred to foreign accounts naming Galushchenko’s wife and four children as beneficiaries.

Some was spent on educating the children at elite schools in Switzerland and some placed in “a deposit, from which the family of the high-ranking official received additional income and spent it on their own needs.”

Galushchenko has denied wrongdoing. There was no reply to a message sent to him seeking comment and Reuters was unable to locate a lawyer representing him.

NABU had said on Sunday that he was detained “while crossing the state border,” without specifying where the arrest took place.

Prosecutors say participants in the Midas scheme squeezed nuclear company Energoatom’s contractors for bribes to complete projects, including structures to protect energy facilities from Russian airstrikes.

They had previously said the plot was organized by former Zelenskyy associate Timur Mindich, who fled to Israel before he could be arrested in November.

Mindich, who founded the TV studio behind the hit sitcom that brought Zelenskyy fame as an actor before he entered politics, has denied wrongdoing.

A former deputy prime minister was arrested in November and NABU has said other former senior officials are under investigation.

The case sparked a political scandal last year that led to the ouster of Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and fueled new public anger at lingering corruption as Ukraine fights Russia in its four-year war.

Zelensky had tried to limit the independence of the anti-corruption agencies last year before reversing in the face of public protests and pressure from Western allies.

Energoatom CEO Pavlo Kovtonenko told Reuters last week that the company had taken a number of steps to prevent the recurrence of corruption schemes in the future.

Battling corruption is a key priority in Ukraine’s reform effort as it eyes membership of the European Union, which requires the country shake off the decades-old scourge of graft.

#ukraine #energy #minister #aundering #money

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Orbán’s New Script: Brussels Is the USSR, Trump Is the Model

“The real threat facing Hungary is not Russia but the European Union,” Viktor Orbán told his supporters, eight weeks before the April 12 election that could finally break his grip on power. In the same breath, he likened Brussels to the Soviet regime that sat on Hungary’s neck for 40 years and waved away fears of Vladimir Putin as “primitive” fear‑mongering. Those who “love freedom,” he said, should fear the EU, not the Kremlin.

This isn’t strategy, it’s franchising. Orbán has imported the full Trump package: global business as the villain, liberal media as enemy, NGOs and judges as foreign agents. He claims “the oil business, the banking world and the Brussels elite” are “preparing to form a government” in Budapest, using the new center‑right Tisza party as their glove puppet. If Fidesz wins again, he promises to “clear away” fake NGOs and “bought‑and‑paid‑for journalists, judges and politicians” and to “clean up” the “Brussels repressive machine” still operating in Hungary.

Trump’s endorsement is written into the script as holy writ. Orbán praises the U.S. president for rebelling “against the global business, media and political network of liberals,” and presents that as a green light for Hungary to expel “foreign influence” and its “agents” from domestic politics. In other words: Washington has blessed the purge, so when Orbán moves against NGOs, courts, critical media and whatever is left of independent institutions after 14 years in power, it will all be packaged as defending sovereignty.

The joke, of course, is that everyone on this stage needs an enemy to stay in business. Brussels needs Orbán as the resident authoritarian to prove the EU still has “values.” Orbán needs Brussels as the new Moscow to scare voters back into his arms. Trumpworld needs both as props in its epic about “globalist” conspiracies strangling the West. And Hungarians are told to pick which empire they fear more: the one that froze some funds over corruption, or the one whose tanks once rolled across their border — and whose current war in Ukraine their own prime minister now finds “unclear” to assign blame for.

#hungary #orban #eu #trump #elections #fakeSovereignty

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Geneva Is Not About Peace. It’s About Real Estate.

In Geneva today they’re not really talking about “peace,” they’re haggling over square kilometers. The third round of U.S.-mediated talks between Ukraine and Russia opens with one central question: how much of Ukraine’s land can be carved off and still be sold as an agreement. Moscow is demanding formal control over the remaining parts of Donetsk it hasn’t managed to seize by force; Kyiv is still saying no, even with Washington breathing down its neck.

The cast is already a punchline. On the Ukrainian side: Rustem Umerov, the national security chief, flanked by presidential power broker Kyrylo Budanov and other officials who spent four years promising “no concessions” and now sit in a Swiss conference room arguing over slices of their own map. Across from them: Vladimir Medinsky, the Kremlin aide famous for explaining why Ukraine supposedly isn’t a real state, now helping decide which parts of that “not real” country Russia gets to keep.

Over all of this hangs Donald Trump’s timetable. His administration has set a soft deadline of June for a deal and is pushing “end of war” packages built around security guarantees. Washington is talking about a 15‑year guarantee plan. Zelenskyy is asking for 30 to 50 years and warning of “unprecedented external pressure” on Kyiv to give up territory first and patch up security later.

Officially, the agenda has “expanded”: energy ceasefire, prisoner exchanges, and the status of occupied territories that now make up around a fifth of Ukraine when you count Crimea and everything already grabbed. Unofficially, everyone understands the trade being tested is brutal and simple: land for signatures, electricity for recognition, time‑limited guarantees in exchange for permanent losses. All this while Russian strikes still hit Ukraine’s power grid and civilians sit in the dark.

Geneva is the perfect stage for this version of geopolitics: a TV‑friendly hotel, a war rebranded as “too expensive to continue,” a U.S. president impatient for a deal, a Kremlin that senses fatigue, and a Ukrainian leadership told to be “realistic” about borders that every Western speech since 2014 swore were untouchable.

#ukraine #russia #geneva #trump #war #landForPeace

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Golden Midas, Rotten System: Ukraine’s Ex-Minister Caught at the Exit

German Galushchenko almost made it out. The former energy minister — later briefly justice minister — was grabbed at the border on Sunday, accused a day later of laundering millions in kickbacks from the “Midas” scheme that has haunted Zelenskyy’s wartime government for a year. Investigators say the network skimmed around 100 million dollars from contracts at Energoatom, the state nuclear company, including projects meant to harden plants against Russian strikes.

According to NABU and SAPO, over 7 million dollars went to foreign accounts listing Galushchenko’s wife and four children, paying for elite Swiss schooling and sitting on deposits that quietly generated extra income for the family. Galushchenko denies everything, but he is now one of the highest‑ranking names formally pulled into a case that already features a former deputy prime minister, other senior officials, and businessman Timur Mindich — Zelenskyy’s old media partner from the TV studio that made him famous, now in Israel and also insisting he’s innocent.

The scandal has already taken scalps at the very top. It helped push out Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak last year and triggered public fury over wartime corruption at the exact moment Ukraine is begging for weapons, cash and EU membership. In parallel, Zelenskyy briefly tried to bring NABU and SAPO to heel through legislation that would have gutted their independence, then beat a retreat under pressure from street protests and Western partners who made clear that anti‑corruption bodies are now part of the terms of support.

So on paper this is a success story: institutions catching crooks, ministers being detained, money trails exposed, corporate CEOs promising new safeguards. In reality it’s a more uncomfortable picture: a “reform” state at war, whose president ran on cleaning up oligarchic rot, now watching his own pre‑politics circle and senior officials dragged into a laundromat built on nuclear safety contracts — and only really slamming on the brakes when the streets and the donors start to growl.

#ukraine #corruption #Midas #Zelenskyy #Energoatom

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