A prominent Israeli rabbi on Friday issued a religious ruling permitting Israeli occupiers to take olives from Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, claiming that harvesting the crop “demonstrates Jewish ownership of the land,” Anadolu reports.
The ruling was issued by Rabbi Dov Lior, one of the most prominent religious authorities among Israeli occupiers in the West Bank, and was published by Israeli Channel 13.
It comes amid escalating occupier violence against Palestinians and their property, particularly farmers during the olive harvest season.
Lior claimed that Palestinians do not own their land, arguing that they had not purchased it from the “people of Israel” or from any Jewish person and describing the land as “stolen property.”
Citing Jewish religious law, he claimed that ownership of land cannot be transferred through theft and that Palestinian land therefore remains the property of the “people of Israel.”
He also argued that Palestinians planting olive trees on their land does not give them ownership rights over either the land or its produce.
Lior claimed Palestinians had already received sufficient compensation for planting the trees by consuming their fruit over previous years, and said both the land and harvest should return to what he called their “rightful owners.”
His ruling was not limited to land near illegal settlements, however, and also permitted occupiers to take olive crops from Palestinian areas farther away.
The ruling comes as attacks on Palestinian farmers during the West Bank olive harvest season have intensified, including assaults, preventing farmers from reaching their land, damaging trees and stealing crops.
Such attacks recur during the olive harvest, which peaks in October each year, while this month has seen an increase in attacks by occupiers against Palestinians and their property.
Palestinian, Israeli and international rights organizations have accused Israeli authorities of failing to stop occupier violence or hold perpetrators accountable despite attacks targeting Palestinians, their homes, farmland, vehicles and other property.
Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land are considered illegal under international law, while Palestinians maintain their rights to their land and reject attempts to seize it.
Spanish arms manufacturer General Dynamics European Land Systems-Santa Barbara Sistemas (GDELS-SBS) is supplying Latvia with infantry fighting vehicles fitted with Israeli-made turrets, despite Madrid’s arms embargo on Israel, Globes reported on 15 October.
The deliveries cast doubt on the reach of Spain’s 2025 arms embargo on Israel, imposed in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which bans the import and export of military equipment, products, and technology to and from Israel.
Yet the ban has not stopped Israeli weapons systems from being mounted on Spanish-made combat vehicles for sale to third countries.
Latvia has ordered 84 Mednieks combat vehicles, each mounted with a UT30 MK2 unmanned turret built by lead Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, under a contract worth roughly $929 million, with deliveries set to continue until 2029.
Latvian Defense Minister Raivis Melnis hailed the first delivery as a step toward strengthening the country’s defense and its cooperation with NATO partners, as members scramble to meet the US’s demand for greater contribution to the alliance.
Elbit had already secured a deal worth around $100 million in April 2025 to supply GDELS-SBS with the unmanned turrets, months before Madrid declared its embargo, with the Israeli firm stating that the systems were bound for an unnamed European NATO member.
SBS was state-owned until the early 2000s, when it was privatized and sold to US arms giant General Dynamics.
According to Globes, General Dynamics’ presence in Europe greatly helps Israel push its weapons, military components, and technology into the continent, owing to the close ties between the US and Israel.
In early 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government came under fire for weighing the purchase of military systems from a company partly owned by Israeli arms giant Rafael, even as it pledged to achieve “zero technological dependence” on Israel.
The arrangement illustrates how Israeli arms firms continue to embed components in European weapons programs through multinational manufacturers, even where governments have restricted direct trade with Israel.
Elbit has benefited from surging demand linked to Israel’s war on Gaza and wider regional conflict, reporting a record $32 billion order backlog as of 30 June 2026.
Europe drove most of the backlog growth in the second quarter of 2026, the company said, with roughly 73 percent of its orders now coming from buyers outside Israel.
The Saudi kingdom is facing the danger of collapse from soaring war costs as Yemeni air strikes ramp up, hitting its northern neighbor’s capital and industrial centers with impunity.
Yemeni journalist Hussein al-Bukhaiti says the corruption and arrogance of the “House of Evil” is culminating in historic defeat. Its U.S. patron seems unable to avert the coming collapse.
Despite decades of the U.S. selling weapons worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the Saudi rulers, the regime seems shockingly exposed, with no viable defenses. Yemen’s missiles are striking Saudi Arabia at will. The panicky rulers are pleading with the United States and Europe for help.
Yemen’s armed forces are taking the war to Saudi Arabia, striking its airports, imposing a no-fly zone over the entire state and shutting down its vital oil industry.
“The Saudis cannot stop our drones and hypersonic missiles… we are taking the war to them,” says Sanaa-based Hussain al-Bukhaiti.
With no oil exports, Al-Bukhaiti reckons the Saudi rulers are facing an existential nemesis. Many observers have long predicted that the autocratic Saudi kingdom, created by the British Empire, is awaiting downfall from its ossified and family-run power structure.
Speaking from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, Hussain al-Bukhaiti described the Saudi monarchy as “a house of glass” that is now being shattered by air strikes that cannot be defended against.
“Yemen did not want this war, but we are bringing the fire back to Saudi Arabia.”
Western politicians and media are portraying the conflict between the two Arab Peninsula countries as being caused by recent aggression from the Ansar Allah-led Yemeni government.
Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid international airport was attacked on October 10 with ballistic missiles that killed several people. Other Saudi airports have also been hit. This has led international airlines to suspend flights.
The state-owned Aramco oil industry has also been blasted with missiles. Fires are raging at major facilities, including at the main base of operations in Dammam on the Persian Gulf coast.
Following the missile strike on Riyadh airport at the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump and all European leaders condemned an “act of terrorism” by Yemen.
Hussain al-Bukhaiti pointed out the gross hypocrisy of European governments not condemning the thousands of Saudi air strikes on Yemen that have occurred since 2015. These governments still remain silent about the ongoing Saudi atrocities against Yemeni civilians. The European Union even declares “solidarity” with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarchy, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, started the war with unprovoked attacks in March 2015. The aggression was enabled by the United States, Britain, and France supplying warplanes, bombs, and intelligence.
These Western powers continue to arm and direct the Saudi regime in its war against Yemen.
Since 2015, there have been thousands of Western-backed air strikes on Yemen, resulting in more than 20,000 mainly civilian deaths.
“They hit everything, schools, hospitals, water-treatment plants, farms, homes, wedding and funeral halls,” says Al-Bukhaiti.
In addition, over 400,000 Yemenis have died from starvation and diseases caused by a blockade on the country imposed by Saudi Arabia and its Western backers for over 10 years.
He says the war reignited in July 2026 after the Saudis broke a four-year truce signed in 2022 by bombing Sanaa international airport. There was no condemnation by Europe of the Saudi violation then.
What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia now is but a taste of what the House of Saud inflicted on Yemenis since 2015 with Western support.
The Yemenis this week rejected a reported Saudi proposal for a short-term truce because they see it as just a ploy by the Saudis for rearming and regrouping in a losing situation.
For the war to end, Saudi Arabia must respect Yemen’s sovereignty and stop interfering in its internal affairs.
However, Hussain al-Bukhaiti thinks that the United States will double down and escalate its military involvement in Yemen with a full-blown war. This is not primarily to support the Saudi monarchy, he believes, but rather to prop up the Israeli regime.
Yemen has inflicted huge damage on the Israeli state since it intensified the genocide against Palestinians in October 2023. Yemeni air strikes have repeatedly struck Tel Aviv despite American air defenses.
An expanded U.S. war in Yemen might seem surprising given that Trump has made such a mess of his reckless aggression against Iran and may not have the military forces at his disposal.
But Al-Bukhaiti believes the issue is beyond Trump’s choice. Washington is locked in with the Zionist regime and will do whatever it takes to salvage Israel from defeat. Yemen represents the biggest threat to Israel from the cutting off of its shipping in the Red Sea.
“We are ready for the war that is coming,” he warns.
Espionage novels portray the spy as a person in a trench coat carrying stolen documents and disappearing into a dark alley. Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, certainly fit that picture. A Navy analyst who stole American secrets including the complete ten-volume manual of the National Security Agency exposing how the US gathers its signal intelligence and the names of thousands of foreign individuals who worked for US spy agencies. Intelligence officials believe Israel shared stolen documents with the Soviet Union. According to several intelligence assessments, Pollard was one of the most damaging spies in US history.
Pollard received a life sentence in 1987 and was released in 2015. At first, Israel claimed he was a rogue, apologised and did not admit he had been its agent until 1998. In 2007, Israel named a square in Jerusalem after him, honouring him for his services.
Pollard was neither the first nor the last Israeli asset. Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon analyst, pleaded guilty in 2005 to passing classified information to an Israeli embassy official and two AIPAC staffers. Ben-Ami Kadish, a former Army engineer, pleaded guilty in 2008 to passing secret documents to an Israeli consulate official, and served no prison time. Stewart Nozette from NASA was charged with attempted espionage following an FBI sting operation. In 1970, Richard Perle was caught in an FBI wiretap discussing classified information with an Israeli embassy official.
In 2001, the same Perle chaired the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, while two other Israel-firsters, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz held senior posts in the same building. Franklin had worked in Feith’s policy office when he was indicted for espionage. In 1996, a study group led by Perle, and Feith, prepared a policy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled “A Clean Break.” It urged Israel to abandon the Oslo Accords and the peace process with the Palestinians, and it proposed removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as part of a broader Israeli strategy to reshape the region. Five years later, as leaders in the Pentagon, they delivered America’s first made-for-Israel war in Iraq.
The above is in no way intended to insinuate or allege that anyone, least of all these Zionist Americans, has dual loyalties. No. It is so profound, there is only one way to describe it: Israel-first loyalty.
Fast forward to 2026. David Milstein, stepson of Israeli propagandist Mark Levin and a senior aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee, effectively the ambassador’s chief of staff. An unabashed Israel-first American Zionist, Milstein oversees the embassy’s West Bank and Gaza portfolio, placing the fox in charge of the henhouse. According to The New York Times, citing a dozen people who have worked with him, Milstein has repeatedly quashed or rewritten embassy reports to the U.S. State Department to favour Netanyahu’s government.
When the Israeli government accelerated the approval of building more Jewish-only colonies in occupied West Bank, embassy staff drafted an urgent memo warning that the move might cross President Trump’s own red line against annexation. According to The Times, the memo never left Jerusalem.
In response to the surge in attacks by Israeli Jewish mobs on Palestinian homes and farms, embassy staff prepared a report documenting Israel’s failure to rein in violence by Zionist youth. Milstein rewrote it and sent an embassy cable to Washington titled “Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence.” When US diplomats pointed out that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution sites were chaotic and deadly, Milstein concluded the operation was a success.
Thirty members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, asked what had become of the investigations into the killings of nine Palestinian Americans by Israeli Jewish mobs and soldiers. Embassy staff compiled a report showing little progress and no charges. According to The Times, the report was set aside in favor of a letter saying Israel was handling the cases properly.
Cable traffic from the section covering Palestinian affairs fell from several a week to a few a month, because American embassy staff feared their work would be blocked, rewritten or impact their diplomatic career. Milstein would question embassy staff if they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” not if they were loyal Americans. A diplomatic mission that polices loyalty with questions like that ceases to function as an American embassy.
I once shared a lunch table with an American ambassador serving abroad. He recounted how, during George Shultz’s tenure as Secretary of State, Shultz would meet newly appointed ambassadors, point to a world map in his office, and ask the appointee to identify their country. Most would point to the country where they had been assigned. Shultz would correct them: “No, your country is the United States. Your duty is to serve your own country’s interests, not those of the country to which you are assigned.”
Ambassador Huckabee and Milstein either never heard that lesson, or serving Israel was their priority.
Rather than representing American interests in Jerusalem, the embassy operates as Israel’s envoy within the US government. Turning the US embassy into a Zionist mission run by the evangelical church, and an indoctrinated Zionist whose stepfather is referred to as “Tel Aviv Levin.”
Here again, no one is accusing Huckabee or Milstein of being foreign agents. Frankly, Israel does not need them to be. It need not recruit them or pay them like Pollard. Officials ideologically devoted to Israel can do the same work from within the U.S. government, under legitimate titles and without risking arrest.
No country receives more American financial and military aid than Israel. Yet US counterintelligence assessments have identified Israel as one of the most aggressive intelligence-gathering threats to the American homeland. Jonathan Pollard and others may have been the quintessential trench-coat spies. But the more dangerous risk is not someone stealing classified files; it is Americans whose loyalty to Israel overrides their duty to the U.S., operating in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon with one focus: serve Israel.
Consider David Frum, who coined President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” phrase, helping lay the rhetorical roadmap for America’s longest foreign war.
Frum also wrote speeches for Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, making Israel’s case before the international body. The same writer, serving an Israel-first agenda from two different platforms: first helping sell America a war in the Middle East, then making Israel’s case before the world.
In the 21st century, with Zionist control of mainstream corporate media, and these implants inside America’s halls of power, Israel does not require trench coats, or stolen documents. It operates through officials who occupy positions of power deciding what American policymakers read by shaping diplomatic reporting, suppressing information and steering American decisions in ways that advances Israel’s strategic interests over America’s own. And whenever Israel’s interests and Washington’s information needs diverge, the information bends, delivered in plain sight, through official channels, under official titles, and on the American taxpayer’s payroll.
I’ve had this article sitting in storage waiting for the right moment to publish it. Tonight, Mario Nawfal hosted a debate on Iran that featured Robert Barnes and Matt Tardio. Matt put out so much disinformation and falsities that I believe now is the time to set the record straight about what happened to the JCPOA. I was tempted to attach the prefix, “RE” to Matt’s last name but decided not to go down the ad hominem path. Instead, let’s just deal with the facts.
On May 8, 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement that Iran had signed with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China three years earlier. He reimposed every sanction the deal had lifted and then piled on more under a policy he called “maximum pressure.” Iran had not violated the agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which had inspectors at every Iranian nuclear site, had certified again and again that Iran was keeping its side of the bargain.
Most people in Washington expected Tehran to respond in kind: throw out the inspectors, restart the centrifuges and race for the bomb. Some in the administration hoped it would, because that would have justified the next step. Iran did the opposite. For a full year it continued to abide by every limit in the agreement, keeping its enrichment at 3.67%, its stockpile under 300 kilograms and its doors open to the IAEA. Understanding why tells you a great deal about how Iran’s leaders actually think, and it undercuts the caricature of a reckless regime that dominates American commentary.
It put the United States in the wrong
The first reason was legitimacy. By staying in the deal, Iran turned the dispute from “Iran versus the world” into “the United States versus everyone else.” Washington, not Tehran, was the party that had broken an agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. Europe, Russia and China all said so. For the first time in decades Iran held the diplomatic high ground, and its leaders understood that giving it up would reunite the coalition that had sanctioned them before 2015.
That calculation paid off in a way few predicted. In August 2020 the Trump administration tried to invoke the deal’s “snapback” clause to restore all UN sanctions on Iran. Thirteen of the fifteen members of the Security Council rejected the move, on the grounds that the United States had left the agreement and could not use its provisions. Had Iran walked out in 2018, the snapback would have been automatic and unanimous. Patience bought Iran protection at the United Nations.
It gave Europe a chance to deliver
The second reason was economic hope. The deal’s value to Iran was sanctions relief, and the Europeans promised to preserve some of it. They created a special trade channel, INSTEX, designed to let European companies do business with Iran without exposure to American sanctions. Tehran gave Europe time to make it work. It never did. INSTEX completed its first transaction, a shipment of medical supplies, only in March 2020, and European companies fled Iran rather than risk being cut off from the American market and the dollar. Iran’s oil exports collapsed from about 2.5 million barrels a day to a few hundred thousand. But Iran’s leaders had to test the European promise before they could declare it worthless, and they did.
It denied Washington and Israel a pretext
The third reason was security. Iran’s leaders knew that any visible move toward a bomb would be used to justify military strikes. Hawks in Washington and Jerusalem had argued for years that the deal only delayed the inevitable; an Iranian walkout would have proved their case. By staying inside the agreement, with inspectors on the ground, Iran made it far harder to sell a war. The IAEA’s reports were Iran’s best defense.
This was consistent with the position Iran’s leadership has held publicly for two decades. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a religious ruling forbidding nuclear weapons, and Iran remained a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty throughout. Whatever one thinks of the sincerity of that position, Iran’s conduct after May 2018 matched it.
It bet on outlasting Trump
The fourth reason was time. Iran’s leaders had watched American politics closely, and they knew presidents come and go. The deal had been negotiated by one administration and abandoned by the next; it could be restored by a third. Staying in the agreement kept that door open. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had staked their political careers on the deal, and they argued that Iran should wait out Trump rather than burn the bridge. Khamenei, who had always been skeptical of American promises, allowed them to make that case. It was a wager that the United States would return to its word.
Why the patience ran out
Iran’s patience was not unlimited, and it was never unconditional. On May 8, 2019, exactly one year after Trump’s announcement, Rouhani said Iran would begin to scale back its commitments in stages. Iran invoked paragraph 36 of the deal itself, which allows a party to stop performing its obligations if another party is in significant non-compliance. Each step was announced in advance, carried out under IAEA observation and described as reversible the moment the United States returned and lifted sanctions. In July 2019 Iran exceeded the stockpile limit and enriched to 4.5%. In November it resumed enrichment at Fordow.
Then came the events that hardened Tehran. The United States killed General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in November 2020. The Natanz enrichment plant was sabotaged in April 2021. Each attack was answered with another step: 20% enrichment, the end of expanded inspections, and finally 60%. The Biden administration had a chance to restore the deal in Vienna in 2021 and 2022, and those talks collapsed too.
Sixty percent as leverage
The most alarming of Iran’s steps, the decision in April 2021 to enrich uranium to 60%, is usually cited as proof that Tehran was racing for a bomb. Look at the timing and the terms and it reads very differently. Talks to restore the deal opened in Vienna on April 6, 2021. Five days later the enrichment hall at Natanz was sabotaged in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran announced 60% enrichment two days after that.
The move was a message aimed at the negotiating table. Iran was telling the remaining parties, and the United States, that every month they failed to honor their commitments would cost them, and that the cost would rise. Iran’s government spokesman, Ali Rabiei, said publicly on April 20 that the step “can quickly be reversed” if the other parties returned to their obligations, and that enrichment would then go back to the level set in the 2015 accord. The parliament’s law of December 2020, which ordered higher enrichment and fewer inspections, was written the same way: it tied every escalation to the absence of sanctions relief.
That is leverage, not a breakout. Iran had watched Europe fail to deliver for three years and the United States refuse to return without new concessions. Staying at 3.67% had won it praise and nothing else. Raising the stakes was the only tool it had left to make the other signatories take their own commitments seriously. Iran enriched to 60% so that it would have something to give back.
What the critics will say
Critics make three arguments that challenge my thesis. The first is that Iran was provoking the United States all along through its missile program and its support for allies across the region. But neither was covered by the JCPOA. The deal was deliberately limited to the nuclear program because that was the only issue on which agreement was possible. Holding Iran responsible for breaking terms that were never in the agreement is not a fair test.
The second is that 60% enrichment has no civilian purpose. That is largely true, and it is the point. A bargaining chip has to be valuable to the other side, and 60% was valuable precisely because it worried Washington, Europe and Israel. Iran never enriched to 90%, never left the Non-Proliferation Treaty and never expelled inspectors during this period.
The third is that in early 2023 the IAEA found uranium particles enriched to 83.7% at Fordow. Iran said they were the result of unintended fluctuations in the enrichment process, and the agency did not report any stockpile at that level. Particles are not a stockpile, and a stockpile is not a weapon. Iran’s accumulated 60% material did grow, to about 87.5 kilograms by that report and far more later, and that growth was dangerous. But it was the predictable price of a policy of pressure that gave Iran no reason to stop.
The lesson
The record shows a government that responded to the breach of an international agreement with restraint, then with measured and reversible pressure, and only escalated after its economy had been strangled and its officers and scientists killed. That is not the behavior of a regime determined to build a bomb at the first opportunity. It is the behavior of a government that wanted the deal to survive and concluded, slowly, that the United States would not let it.
There is a lesson here for Washington. When the United States walked away from an agreement that was working, it did not get a better deal. It got an Iran with near-weapons-grade uranium, fewer inspectors and every reason to doubt American promises. Iran kept the JCPOA alive for a year after Trump abandoned it. The question we should be asking is not why Iran eventually stepped back, but why the United States walked away from a deal that was keeping Iran a year away from a bomb.
Weapons supplied to Ukraine from US military stocks have been found in the possession of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a senior Russian diplomat has said, citing markings linking them to deliveries to Kiev.
Yulia Zhdanova, head of Russia’s delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control, made the statement on Wednesday at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Forum for Security Co-operation.
Sudanese troops recovered MK19 automatic grenade launchers, M72 anti-tank weapons, and Swedish-made AT4 launchers during an operation near Bara, she said, according to TASS. “A preliminary examination of the markings revealed that these weapons were donated to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in December 2024 from US military stock,” Zhdanova said.
Sudan’s army and the RSF have been at war since April 2023, forcing millions from their homes and exposing civilians to bombardment, hunger, and widespread abuses. In June last year, Sudanese Foreign Ministry official Muhammad Al-Sirr told RT that Ukraine was supplying drones to the paramilitary forces at very low prices and helping its fighters use the technology to strike Sudanese infrastructure.
Sudan descended into chaos in April 2023 when fighting erupted between the national army, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The conflict followed months of tension between their commanders, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, over a planned transition to civilian rule. What began in the capital, Khartoum, as a power struggle has devastated the country, killing tens of thousands, displacing millions, and pushing parts of Sudan into famine.
Regional and international peace efforts, including African Union mediation and Saudi-US talks in Jeddah, have repeatedly stalled. In September 2025, the Quad group – the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates – proposed a three-month humanitarian truce leading to a permanent ceasefire and a civilian-led political transition. Burhan rejected a subsequent US-led proposal that November, arguing it would dismantle state security institutions while leaving the RSF in place. The paramilitaries said they accepted the truce.
The UAE’s involvement has deepened mistrust of mediation. Sudan’s army-backed government severed diplomatic ties with Abu Dhabi in May 2025, accusing it of supporting the RSF. The UAE denies supplying weapons to the paramilitaries. Relations with Washington deteriorated further in September 2026 after the US questioned both factions’ legitimacy. Sudan rejected the remarks and called for peace efforts free from foreign dictates.
Meanwhile, rival administrations have entrenched Sudan’s divisions. Burhan’s government returned to Khartoum in January 2026 after the army recaptured the capital, having operated from Port Sudan during the fighting. In July 2025, the RSF-aligned TASIS coalition announced a rival government based in Nyala, Darfur, with Dagalo heading its governing council. The UN Security Council and African Union rejected the move.
Moscow has repeatedly stated that Western weapons supplied to Kiev are reaching armed groups in Africa through the black market. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised the alarm as early as 2022, warning that Stinger missiles, Javelin anti-tank systems, and grenade launchers could enter illicit trading networks worldwide.
In February, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia addressed the issue at a Security Council meeting, where he also accused Kiev of directly supplying weapons, including drones, and training militants in the Sahel. Zhdanova previously blamed corruption in Ukraine and failures to track Western-supplied military equipment for weapons reaching terrorists and criminal groups in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso jointly appealed to the UN Security Council in August 2024, accusing Ukraine of supporting international terrorism following a deadly ambush on Malian forces near Tinzaouaten. Mali severed diplomatic ties with Kiev after Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andrey Yusov said rebels received information enabling the ambush.
Addressing the UN General Assembly last month, Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop renewed the accusations, saying Ukraine was backing armed groups undermining his country’s territorial integrity. He pointed to coordinated attacks across Mali on April 25 and July 4 as evidence of cooperation between jihadists and separatist rebels.
Last week, AFP reported that sources within the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg-led separatist rebel coalition fighting Mali’s government, acknowledged receiving Ukrainian training, including instruction in operating drones.
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed.
Honest about argyria. Honest about what silver cannot do. Honest about the dependency trap.
That is why the book has ten appendices. 295 pages, thirteen chapters, ten appendices. The practical use chapters are grounded in a reference apparatus — a Pre-1938 Condition Index with two hundred and forty entries, an Argyria File, resources, commercial products, modern case accounts, cleansing responses, children and vulnerable populations. The whole picture, in one place.
The seed idea, and the person who planted it
The frame that lets this book say what silver is actually doing came from Robert Becker. Becker was the orthopaedic surgeon at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse and the Syracuse VA whose electrical regeneration research in the 1960s and 70s named something no one else was willing to name at the time: silver is not just an antimicrobial. It is a bioelectric agent. His silver-electrode experiments regrew tissue in animals that mainstream medicine said was non-regenerable. His book The Body Electric (1985) is the full account.
Becker is the frame that lets Colloidal Silver explain what silver is actually doing — not just “killing bacteria,” but acting on the bioelectric field the pharmaceutical model has no vocabulary for. His regeneration research was systematically defunded through the 1980s because an element on the periodic table has no business plan. Chapter 6 of this book rebuilds the Becker framework from the primary research he published before the funding stopped.
The debt is foundational, and belongs at the top of the post.
What the book shows
Part One: The Disappearance. What silver did in Western medicine for a century before 1938, and how it vanished. The surgical wound-care tradition and the pre-antibiotic clinical record. The Lancet and BMJ as the primary archive. The Flexner Report of 1910, funded by Carnegie and Rockefeller, which restructured American medical education around the pharmaceutical model and killed silver’s institutional base inside a generation. The Streetlight Effect — why the questions silver could answer stopped being asked once the funding model changed. The first section is the recovered history, put together in one place for the first time.
Part Two: What Silver Is and What It Isn’t. Why the germ theory story fails as a complete account of infection. The terrain paradigm as the actual working frame of pre-1938 medicine, before Pasteur-only orthodoxy was institutionalised. What silver actually does at the cellular level — Becker’s bioelectric framework in full — and what the pharmaceutical model has to keep denying for the current therapeutic approach to continue to work.
Part Three: Practical Use. Three parallel chapters: silver and water, silver on the body, silver inside the body. Preparation. Dosing. What distinguishes clinically useful colloidal silver from the commercial product that gets sold as a tonic. What forms work for what conditions. The practical heart of the book.
Part Four: The Honest Account. Argyria and the historical silver compounds — the condition that gets used to end every conversation about silver, correctly identified so it stops ending the conversation. When antibiotics have failed and silver is the one tool still working. What silver cannot do. The place of silver in a terrain approach — not as a replacement for anything, not as a cure-all, as one tool returned to the shelf, with its evidence intact.
What is at the back
Ten appendices. Home Production of Colloidal Silver — equipment, concentration, safety. Dosing and Administration. The Pre-1938 Condition Index, two hundred and forty entries from the primary literature, condition by condition, source by source. The Argyria File — every documented case the research could identify and the circumstances that produced it. Resources and Further Reading. Commercial Products. Modern Case Accounts. Silver in the Broader Landscape of Recovered Remedies. Understanding Cleansing Responses. Children, Pregnancy, and Vulnerable Populations.
Full back-of-book index. Everything cross-referenced.
Who this book is for
If you have been reading me on Substack for a while and you have been waiting for the one book on silver that holds the pre-1938 record, the Becker framework, and the practical use together, this is that book.
If you are new, start here. You do not need to have read anything else to follow it.
If someone you love is still working through chronic infection, long-course antibiotic damage, or the dependency trap of pharmaceutical-only medicine, this is the one volume I would send.
If Colloidal Silver traces how one of the pre-1938 tools was dropped, No Autoimmunity takes apart the diagnostic category that was invented to explain what medicine has done to the body in the years since.
The current chronic-illness landscape — type 1 diabetes, juvenile arthritis, pediatric multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, atopic dermatitis, food anaphylaxis — is routinely labelled “autoimmune.” The word places the fault inside the patient. The body is said to have malfunctioned, failed to tell self from non-self, started attacking itself.
The body did not do any of that. The body responded to what has been injected past every barrier it has to filter foreign material. The mechanism was named more than a hundred years ago, confirmed experimentally through the twentieth century, and relabelled only when the original vocabulary stopped suiting the business model. No Autoimmunity is the full account.
Readers who want the pre-1938 pharmacopoeia restored, tool by tool, should read Colloidal Silver. Readers who want the “autoimmune” label dismantled should read No Autoimmunity. The two sit together on the shelf, and the pair reinforces.
I am back in NYC at the invitation of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Unlike my previous appearance before the full UN Security Council, this was an Arria session. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal meeting called by one or more Security Council members to hear from people who normally can’t address the Council. These include NGOs, civil-society figures, experts, victims and witnesses, and non-state actors. It isn’t a formal Council meeting and has no basis in the Council’s rules of procedure.
All fifteen members of the Security Council were represented. Their response was quite revealing (I will reveal that below). Here was my statement:
Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, thank you for the opportunity to address you.
My name is Larry Johnson. I served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency and later in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. I spent more than two decades working with United States Military Special Operations Forces. I come to this Council not as a spokesman for any government, but as someone who has spent a career studying how wars are fought and how civilians suffer in them and how hostilities are accompanied by disinformation campaigns.
For more than four years this Council has heard that Russia is waging a war against Ukraine and is targeting civilians. You do not need to come to the Security Council to hear this narrative, it is all over media and internet. I ask you to test that claim against the evidence.
Today we heard horrific stories of civilians targeted, of prisoners of war being tortured, and civilians held against their will by Ukrainian armed forces.
Ask yourselves a couple of questions: why are the civilians dying in Russia from drone attacks discounted and why are the civilians that were killed in Ukraine before February 2022 ignored? Based on my experience, the crisis in Ukraine has been accompanied by a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to place all blame on Russia while exonerating Ukraine.
Begin with the scale of the fighting. By the Ukrainian government’s own figures, Russia has fired well over approximately two and a half million tons of munitions. This includes one hundred thousand glide bombs, attack drones, missiles and millions of artillery rounds since February 2022.
Now consider the human toll. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has verified 16,431 civilian deaths through the middle of this year. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, and I do not minimize any of them. However, the ratio of civilian deaths to munitions expended is extraordinarily low for a war of this intensity.
Compare those numbers with what the United States did in the Second World War, a war my country rightly regarded as just. Allied bombers dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe and killed between half a million and three-quarters of a million civilians in Europe.
In the Pacific, the United States dropped about 160,000 tons of bombs on the Japanese home islands. In all, American air attacks on Japan killed somewhere between 330,000 and half a million civilians.
Put the figures side by side. In total, the United States killed somewhere between half a million and more than a million civilians in the Second World War. The verified toll in Ukraine, after more than four years, is a small fraction of that.
These numbers do not happen by accident. The record of Russia in Ukraine is consistent with a policy of not targeting civilians. These facts contradict the claim that Russia is waging a campaign of extermination against Ukraine’s civilian population.
The same standard must apply to Ukraine.
The killing of civilians in this conflict did not begin in February 2022. From 2014 through 2021, the OHCHR recorded at least 3,404 civilian deaths in the Donbass. From 2018 through 2021, the OHCHR found that 81 percent of civilian casualties from Ukrainian shelling, small-arms fire and drone attacks occurred in areas held by the Donetsk and Luhansk authorities. Those victims are forgotten by the world media and by the United Nations. Few call for any investigation or accountability.
Since February 2022, according to figures the Russian Foreign Ministry presented to the Human Rights Council last month, Ukrainian strikes have killed more than 9,000 civilians in the territories under Russian control and wounded more than 25,500. This Council has rarely discussed those victims. They deserve the same attention and the same investigation as every civilian killed on the other side of the line.
Today we heard some of the circumstances of their deaths. I hope that the United Nations will include those numbers in their reports in order to give an unbiased record of events…. At least 12,404 civilians have been killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014.
Thus, we come to the simple fact that the number of civilians killed on both sides of the front line are not that different even if we take numbers offered by OHCHR at their face value –12,404 compared to 16,431. And I know that the Government of Russia strongly challenges them, citing in particular the questionable OHCHR claim that Russia was responsible for Bucha.
Why is the focus exclusively on Russia while we hear nothing about Ukrainian Armed Forces committing crimes against civilians?
I am not asking this Council to excuse any unlawful act. Where a strike violates the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution, it should be investigated, whoever carries it out. I am asking the Council to apply a single standard. The nations that sit in judgment of Russia should measure Russia’s conduct against the evidence and against their own history, not against a narrative.
False accusations and biased reports are not the most effective way to protect civilians in Ukraine. The key to protecting civilians is a negotiated end to this war. I urge the members of this Council to put their full weight behind that goal.
Thank you.
The biggest shock came from the US representative. Unlike my previous appearance before the Security Council when the US representative was aggressive and dismissive of my remarks, the guy sitting in the US chair today spoke as if the US had no role whatsoever in the war raging between Russia and Ukraine. He was quite subdued. A complete change in tone and attitude. This told me there is a definite change in the US policy towards Russia.
The Europeans on the other hand were out of their fucking minds. The representatives of Denmark, Latvia, France and Greece were aggressive and rude. They are boiling for a fight. The purpose of the meeting was to present evidence of Ukrainian attacks on civilians in territory now occupied by Russia. Instead of dealing with the facts, the European Lilliputians howled at the Russians.
Even the British representative took a low key approach. That also was surprising. The remaining eight members of the Security Council made measured, neutral remarks. My commentary was in support of Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Ambassador tasked with investigating attacks on civilians. Rodion is a good man and an honest investigator. All in all, a fascinating day.
President Trump has, over the past days, lashed out against President Zelensky, calling for elections in Ukraine and arguing that Zelensky should have accepted a deal two years ago, when the terms were more favourable. The media has also reported that the US may cut its intelligence-sharing arrangements, which is significant, as this is a proxy war and Ukraine could not fight Russia without US support. How can we analyse this shift in rhetoric from the American president? The immediate significance cannot yet be determined, given Trump’s history of shifting positions. However, if we take a step back, this scolding of Zelensky represents a wider trend: a manufactured democratic icon falling apart.
What Does Trump Aim to Achieve?
The significance and consequences of this new tirade against Zelensky cannot yet be determined, as Trump did something similar during the renowned Trump–Zelensky confrontation in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025.
The first hypothesis is that Trump’s comments could reflect a wider strategic shift away from Zelensky in an effort to further outsource the war to the Europeans. Washington seemed to believe that escalation could bring an end to the war by putting pressure on Moscow, and Marco Rubio previously expressed optimism about this outcome in relation to the 40-day campaign of deep strikes against civilian infrastructure in Russia, intended to make civil society feel the war. The opposite happened, as the Russian public now sees the existential threat posed by what is accurately considered a NATO proxy war. As Russia has responded with a powerful escalation, including a naval blockade and powerful attacks against Ukrainian logistics and energy infrastructure, Trump may simply recognise that the strategy has failed and that the Ukraine war is entering its endgame. This may be why it is time for the US to extricate itself from the war, either by ending it or handing it over to the Europeans.
The second hypothesis is that Trump’s comments merely represent a knee-jerk reaction to Zelensky’s tactless comments about the US–Russia deal on diesel. The failed Iran war has put immense pressure on Trump to stabilise energy prices and appear to be in control ahead of the midterm elections in the US. Trump’s entire presidency is based on the premise that weak American leadership over the years has led to the relative decline of the US and that, as a strong leader, he is the solution to making America great again. What much of the world interprets as crude and unilateral behaviour in breach of existing norms and agreements is, for Trump, a sign of strength: the ability to act independently in the service of national interests. A proxy like Zelensky can only stay in power and fight Russia with US support, and having him lash out against Trump thus required a powerful response, which also serves as a warning shot to anyone else who thinks they can challenge Trump’s authority.
The third hypothesis is that this is merely a swing strategy designed to keep all sides uncertain, thereby strengthening the US in negotiations. Zelensky and European leaders are told that US military and financial support can disappear at any time, while Russia also has an incentive to make concessions before the US changes course again. Making all sides fear the alternative is not possible if they believe that the US is locked into a position, rather than having the ability to manoeuvre between the different sides. The willingness of the US to pressure all sides also strengthens its role as a mediator, which is an awkward position, given that the US has been the main actor in instigating and prolonging this war since 2014.
The Manufacture of a Democratic Icon
If we take a step back and assess this development in a wider context, we see a trend in which President Zelensky’s image as a PR project is gradually collapsing. Zelensky began his political career on a peace platform. He advocated respecting language rights in eastern Ukraine and pursuing peace with Russia. In 2019, he won the presidential election with 73% of the vote on such a peace platform, promising to implement the Minsk Agreement, open dialogue with Donbas, and make peace with Russia. Western NGOs outlined red lines against most of Zelensky’s election platform, and far-right militias funded by the US very openly threatened Zelensky’s life if he were to deliver on his election promises. Eventually, Zelensky fell in line and betrayed his own democratic mandate.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, media coverage of Ukraine and Zelensky was transformed overnight. Through language and imagery, Vogue magazine and other publications presented Zelensky as the besieged underdog standing up for democracy and freedom. Zelensky went from governing a hub of corruption to becoming a leader of the free world and a beacon of democracy. The far-right groups that wear fascist insignia and follow the ideas of fascist movements from the Second World War were whitewashed as reformed freedom fighters. The suppression of language rights, political opposition, the media, and the Orthodox Church was defended as necessary to protect Ukraine’s democracy from a Russian hybrid war. Narratives about Ukraine winning the war and suffering low casualty rates were defended in the West to maintain public support for the war. The brutal conscription practices and ‘busification’ of Ukrainians were ignored and even dismissed as an effort to delegitimise Zelensky at the behest of the Russians. Zelensky was the new Churchill fighting Putin as the new Hitler, and in this struggle between good and evil, any critical coverage of Zelensky was quickly smeared as propaganda.
The Incremental Fall of Zelensky
Gradually, the image of Zelensky has begun to fall apart. Authoritarianism, corruption, fascist groups, ‘busification’, high casualty rates, and other issues began to tear away at the manufactured image of the beloved democratic leader. When domestic opposition emerged from former Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Federov, the Italians could protect Zelensky’s position by hiring Federov as an adviser in Italy. Zelensky is also needed by the West to sell the narrative that they “stand with Ukraine”. While polling demonstrates that most Ukrainians want a negotiated settlement, how can the Europeans justify their boycott of diplomacy and instead push for deporting Ukrainian refugees, lowering the conscription age, conscripting women, or other measures to keep the war going? With Zelensky repeating the talking points of his Western handlers, the proxy war to the last Ukrainian can be sold to the Western public as “supporting Ukraine”.
Trump himself bears some responsibility. When he initially criticised NATO expansion as the source of the war and criticised Zelensky, it may have been a negotiation tactic. However, he broke with the NATO narrative of an “unprovoked” Russian invasion and the Churchillian worship of Zelensky. While the success of his negotiation tactics remains uncertain, we can see that by breaking the consensus around the narrative, he opened a door through which many were able to walk through and criticize Zelensky. In a war between good and evil, peace is achieved through military force, while diplomacy is appeasement. As the manufactured icon of Zelensky falls apart, the entire narrative of the proxy war collapses. Soon, we may even see the decriminalisation of diplomacy.
The post-mortem of the Zelensky presidency and the manufacturing of his image is a tragedy. Zelensky ran on a peace platform and was captured by those who sought to use Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia. On March 27, 2022, before the UK and US sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement, Zelensky stated the following in an interview with The Economist: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.” As Zelensky falls, there may be another chance for peace.
This article was initially published by Prof. Glenn Diesen in Die Weltwoche: “Zerfall einer fabrizierten Ikone”
The Russian Embassy in Paris has accused France of “piracy” after its naval forces seized an oil tanker in international waters near Madagascar, rejecting claims that the operation complied with international maritime law.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced the detention of the DF Peak on Monday, saying the vessel was suspected of sailing under a false flag and involvement in illegal fuel transportation.
The tanker was intercepted 450 nautical miles south of Reunion, a French island territory east of Madagascar, Macron said.
According to MarineTraffic, the DF Peak sails under Benin’s flag. Macron did not identify the owner but described the seizure as part of France’s campaign to “fight the ghost fleet wherever it may be in the world.”
The Russian Embassy called the operation a “flagrant violation of international law,” dismissing France’s references to maritime regulations and “international sanctions” as a “fig leaf” concealing “outright piracy and robbery.”
The embassy denounced the sanctions as illegitimate unilateral measures and said the French authorities failed to notify Russian diplomats of the seizure. It added that officials are checking whether any Russian nationals were aboard.
Western governments have used the term ‘shadow fleet’ to describe vessels that allegedly help Russia circumvent sanctions on oil exports. Moscow rejects the designation, arguing that it has no basis in international maritime law.
France previously detained the Tagor tanker in the Atlantic in June, and British forces seized the Smyrtos in the English Channel later that month. Moscow condemned both operations as piracy.
In July, the EU adopted a mechanism allowing member states to sell oil and other cargo confiscated from sanctioned vessels. President Vladimir Putin subsequently warned that Russia could retaliate against ships carrying Western cargo.
The latest seizure comes days after Putin and US President Donald Trump agreed to expand Russian diesel supplies to American and global markets in an effort to ease soaring fuel prices.
Washington subsequently issued a temporary sanctions waiver covering Russian diesel trade until April 7, 2027. Trump announced initial deliveries of more than 300,000 tons, followed by another 500,000 tons in November, and 1 million tons thereafter.
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