The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic has sentenced philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. Zyuzev, who holds both Russian and Canadian citizenship, is one of the best-known scholars of the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. He left Russia after the war began, but in the summer of 2025 he returned to his native village in Komi [a republic in northwestern Russia — T-invariant], where he was arrested. According to the FSB, the scholar was training leaders of national liberation movements among Russia’s small Indigenous peoples and receiving funding for his project from foreign organizations. T-invariant looks at what Zyuzev worked on, why he kept coming back to Russia, and what his friends and colleagues make of the treason charges.

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

A Classic Liberal

In the summer of 2025, philosophy professor Nikolay Zyuzev traveled from Europe to his native village of Podyelsk in Komi to visit relatives. And then he vanished.

“After the war started, he left Russia, just like I did. Sometimes he came to see me in Europe. I was expecting him again in the fall of 2025. But that summer he went to Russia, even though we begged him not to. There was no way he wasn’t going — his relatives were waiting for him. I guess he figured he’d get away with it, that they wouldn’t touch him. He left. And one day he just stopped responding,” Zyuzev’s friend and former student Alexander (his name has been changed at his request) told T-invariant.

For about a month, there was no word from him. His relatives refused to talk, and his acquaintances had no idea what had happened to him.
“I started sounding the alarm. Mutual friends said he was probably off fishing in his village again. Then one night I snapped, grabbed my laptop, and did a little investigating. On a Komi court website, I found a record showing that his pretrial detention had been extended. So it turned out they’d taken him even earlier, sometime around the middle of the summer,” Alexander says.

The court record didn’t say why Zyuzev had been detained. In September 2025, the website of the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic posted a notice that a criminal case had been opened against the scholar under Article 275.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, “Confidential cooperation with a foreign state or an international or foreign organization.” As Komi Daily reported, investigators searched Zyuzev’s house in the village of Podyelsk, in the Kortkerossky District, in the summer of 2025.

Zyuzev spent more than a year in pretrial detention. According to Alexander, his cell had a refrigerator, and he was taken out for an hour-long walk every day. In his free time, he read books from the prison library and solved chess problems. At the same time, Alexander says, the scholar went through bouts of depression brought on by loneliness and uncertainty. On June 10, 2026, Zyuzev marked his 70th birthday in his cell.

“We write to each other — I’ve gotten five letters so far. He’s in a fighting mood, though one letter was pretty sad. He jokingly calls his imprisonment a cultural-studies expedition to pretrial detention,” Alexander says.

His friends still can’t understand why the scholar decided to go back to Russia. His former colleague, journalist Nikolai Vokuev, has a guess: “I suspect he thought nobody was particularly interested in him and that he could spend the summer in his village. Besides, he’d frankly grown tired of other countries. He complained that he didn’t like the climate in Canada and that things there generally weren’t much to his liking. So he went to do some fishing and spend the summer in his village. And yet back in 2020, he was the one who strongly urged me to leave Russia — he said you can’t stay here. And then he went back himself. I don’t understand why he did it. After all his English-language publications, where he openly condemned the war and the regime’s policies in general, how could he take a risk like that? And whether he was even aware of the risk, I can’t say.”

Nikolay Zyuzev holds a Doctor of Sciences degree in philosophy [Russia’s higher doctorate, above the Candidate of Sciences — T-invariant]. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he taught at the Komi State Pedagogical Institute, Syktyvkar State University, and Ukhta State Technical University, where he chaired the philosophy department. Much of Zyuzev’s scholarship is devoted to the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. Like Zyuzev, Sorokin was ethnically Komi. After the 1917 revolution, he opposed Bolshevik policies, and in 1922 he was expelled from the country. Sorokin later moved to the United States and founded Harvard University’s sociology department. Zyuzev wrote both his Candidate and Doctor of Sciences dissertations on Sorokin’s legacy and published several books about him. Two of them, Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin and Pitirim Sorokin: Teachings and Life, came out in Syktyvkar in 2019.

In 2005–2006, Zyuzev was a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he gathered material for his book Pitirim Sorokin’s Roller Coaster. “In America, Sorokin started almost from scratch and fairly quickly ended up at Harvard — and that ‘roller coaster’ is exactly what Nikolay Zyuzev studied,” Alexei, a historian who specializes in the history of the Russian scholarly emigration, told T-invariant (his last name is withheld at his request).

In 2009, Zyuzev moved to Canada, where he taught at Massey College at the University of Toronto, and in 2015 he became a Canadian citizen. That same year, he returned to Komi and resumed teaching at Syktyvkar University.

“Nikolay was my professor when I was doing my master’s at Syktyvkar State University. An amazing teacher, one of those people who make you want to learn — he got me hooked on the humanities right away. His liberal views were close to mine — a classic liberal,” Alexander recalls.

The FSB’s Show-and-Tell Video

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zyuzev left the country. Even so, he kept returning to his native village of Podyelsk from time to time. According to people who know him, Zyuzev missed home and the chance to teach in his native language.
“Nikolay speaks, teaches, and writes beautifully in English — he has no problems with it whatsoever. But I know from my own experience, having lived in Germany for more than 30 years: you can feel completely at ease in a foreign language, like a fish in water. And yet that cozy, at-home feeling you get when you speak your native language may simply not be there in another language,” Gasan Guseinov, a professor at the Free University [founded in 2020 by academics forced out of Russian universities — T-invariant] and a Doctor of Sciences in philology, told T-invariant. “Pitirim Sorokin reflected on his emigration, wrote a great deal about it, and was a bilingual Komi-Russian person. And although he was completely integrated into American life, he never became trilingual, even though he wrote in English. Nikolay sensed this. On the one hand, it’s a very personal topic, and on the other, a politically charged one these days.”

On September 16, 2026, news broke that the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic had sentenced Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony. By then, the charge had been reclassified as high treason. Media outlets cited the FSB’s Public Relations Center, which said the scholar had been “training leaders of movements for the liberation of Russia’s small peoples and developing a project directed against Russia’s sovereignty,” with funding from foreign foundations and organizations designated as undesirable in Russia. According to the FSB, the defendant pleaded guilty. In a video released by the FSB, Zyuzev says he originally planned to create an educational website for teaching the humanities, but European sponsors showed no interest in the project. What interested them far more, Zyuzev said in the FSB video, was “spreading false information about what is happening in Russia, inciting interethnic hatred, criticizing the policies of the Russian authorities, and destabilizing Russia as a whole by developing national movements.”

“In the video, he mentions that he wanted to do an educational project — we corresponded about that too, but it didn’t work out. What he says after that is obviously a script written by ‘Comrade Major’ [a sardonic nickname for a security-service officer — T-invariant]. Those aren’t his words, you can tell — all that stuff about him supposedly wanting to destabilize the country and so on. That’s just not how he puts things,” Vokuev says.

According to the FSB, Zyuzev received a total of €2 million from 12 foreign organizations. They reportedly included German, Czech, Swedish, French, and British foundations designated as undesirable in Russia.

“Anyone who knows what life is like for people like us abroad these days understands that the grant amounts attributed to him in the indictment are absolutely astronomical — seven figures, literally the budget of an entire research center. It’s a bit like those confessions from the 1930s about a tunnel that people from Central Asia were supposedly going to dig to India or Japan to hand over secret information about the Soviet state’s defenses. Utterly unbelievable nonsense. And there were lawyers, even defense attorneys, who added all this to the case file, sat through it, and raised no objections,” Alexei notes.

“It’s a show-and-tell video about what great guys we are, what a fine job we’re doing. Here’s this terrible professor, a Canadian citizen: look, he’s got euros, he’s got a Canadian passport, while you’re living here in poverty, and they’re over there in their Canada trying to destroy our great Russia. Somebody’s getting another star on his shoulder boards for this,” Alexander says. “They say he received two million euros. That’s laughable. I wouldn’t call him a poor man, but his finances are clearly not those of someone who’s received two million euros in grants. I don’t buy it.”

Small Peoples Tearing Russia Apart

According to Zyuzev’s colleagues, preserving the languages and cultures of Indigenous peoples has always been important to him.

“His project may have been aimed, roughly speaking, at developing regional identity, supporting the Komi language, supporting small peoples. But to the FSB, that doesn’t sound so impressive. Whereas training separatist squads… Sorry, but that makes it sound like they caught some foreign superspy engaged in subversion. I think that even if the project was about developing national identity and preserving these peoples’ languages and cultures, the FSB simply recut it into its own propaganda,” Alexander says.

According to Nikolai Vokuev, after the full-scale war in Ukraine began, the situation of Indigenous peoples started getting noticeably more attention in Komi.

“When the war started, this became a common theme. A kind of wave took off, a realization that this war is also a war against the Indigenous peoples who live in Russia. In that context, there was a lot of talk about the Buryats, who were being sent to the front en masse. I work for Komi Daily. Once, for an anniversary of the start of the war, we did a story trying to figure out how many people from different Komi municipalities had been killed. And we concluded that, proportionally, more people were sent from the villages where Komi is predominantly spoken. In other words, the war hits Komi speakers wildly out of proportion,” Vokuev notes.

Vokuev suspects that Zyuzev’s interest in the situation of Indigenous peoples may have been one of the reasons he came to the FSB’s attention:

“Here’s the thing — separatism. That’s what the FSB guys love. It’s what lets them build nice careers and show how hard they’re working. They didn’t want to pass up a chance like that. They don’t have to make anything up. Here you go, a case — attempts to break up the country. And their worries probably aren’t groundless. Starting in 2020, people began rethinking their relationship with Moscow. The Shies affair had a big influence on that [mass protests against the construction of a landfill at Shies station in Arkhangelsk Oblast that began in 2018 — T-invariant]. And you could easily hear people arguing that Moscow’s policy is a colonial policy. In the 2010s, that was an extremely marginal view, but after Shies, that’s exactly how people came to see their relationship with Moscow. So I think the FSB sank its tentacles into this for a reason.”

“Komi is going through total Russification, of course. Under the republic’s constitution, we have two state languages — Russian and Komi. But there was a case where a young guy was detained at a rally in support of Navalny, back in what were, relatively speaking, less bloodthirsty times. And he tried to speak Komi in court. The judge answered him pretty rudely, something like: you went to a Russian school, what is this circus? But where else am I supposed to speak Komi, if not in Komi?” Alexander recalls.

Guseinov believes the Zyuzev case poses a threat to all scholars who work on the languages of small peoples.

“When the Soviet Union was being built, the Bolsheviks destroyed the independence of small nations, from Georgia to Tuva. But back then, the official ideology was one of bilingualism: the national language plus Russian. Russian scholars worked on the so-called young written languages. That is, languages were given writing systems, then they got their own writers, some publishing houses, films were made. These languages were built up and even brought back to life. And in nine cases out of ten, this was done artificially — in the sense that the language wouldn’t have survived on its own; it needed help, it needed education. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and that official doctrine fell apart too. And suddenly, overnight, in 2018, people are told that small languages are of no use to anyone [that year, Russia amended its education law to make the study of the national republics’ languages optional — T-invariant]. And when someone like Nikolay Zyuzev swims against the current and comes back home to educate people, to work on his own language, they throw him in prison for God knows what,” Guseinov notes.

Up-to-date videos on science during wartime, interviews, podcasts, and streams with prominent scientists — subscribe to the T-invariant YouTube channel!

What May Have Caught the FSB’s Attention

According to Alexei, regional security services began taking an interest in humanities scholars long before the full-scale war in Ukraine: “The first talk I remember about local security officials in the regions actively calling humanities scholars in for ‘chats’ and narrowing their eyes knowingly whenever international research collaboration came up goes back to around 2007–2008. You’d think these were just distant clouds on the horizon, but it had already started: who are you working for, guys, whose money is paying for your publications — come on, let’s just have a little talk. This had been rolling through the regions for a long time and clearly started earlier than in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And it was aimed specifically at humanities scholars — historians, ethnologists, and sociologists.”
Zyuzev had laid out his views on the situation of the Komi people and on relations between Russia’s regions and the federal center in public. In January 2023, the Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s published a first-person account by Zyuzev, “I fled Putin’s Russia for Canada. It opened my eyes,” as told to journalist Adnan Khan. The piece also features in the FSB video about the Zyuzev case. In it, the scholar explained why he had left Russia, criticized Vladimir Putin’s policies, and wrote about the war in Chechnya and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

“Politkovskaya’s murder was a warning to dissidents, and the crushing of the Chechen uprising was a warning to members of Russia’s Indigenous and ethnic minorities. I was both. I’m from the Komi minority, a Finno-Ugric people whose own republic, with a population of nearly one million, lies 1,000 kilometres northeast of Moscow. The Komi people have a distinct language and culture dating back at least two millennia, but under Putin’s rule, we face cultural and linguistic extinction. Like all of Russia’s nearly two dozen republics and four autonomous districts, the Komi Republic is supposed to have some degree of autonomy; in practice, it has none,” Zyuzev wrote.

In the same essay, Zyuzev recounted that in 2015 he was offered the chance to head a new research center at Syktyvkar State University. By then his daughter was already in her teens, his marriage had fallen apart, and he had failed to find an academic position in Canada — so the scholar decided to go back to Russia. According to him, the center’s mission was to build ties with scholars in Europe, North America, and other parts of the world. “So in the fall of 2021, I approached two friends—one a sociologist and retired politician, the other a linguist studying the Komi language — and brought to them a radical new idea: to establish an online Finno-Ugric University. It would offer high-quality social sciences education to Komi youth, help them think more critically and, importantly, raise awareness about the injustices suffered by the Komi people.” Zyuzev wrote.

According to Zyuzev, businessman Leonid Zilberg invited him to work with the outlet 7×7. After the war began, the project’s team left Russia and relocated to Lithuania. In May 2022, Zyuzev also moved to Vilnius and began looking for funding for the Indigenous Russia Information and Education Center.

“We sense an opportunity in the aftermath of Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine: Indigenous peoples have been disproportionately affected by the war, both on the battlefield and as conscripts to Russia’s army. Minority groups in the republics are waking anew to the threat the Kremlin poses. Our hope is that demands for decolonization will become stronger, and the Kremlin will lose its grip on the republics. There may be a rare window of opportunity now to change the conversation in Russia — one we can’t waste,” Zyuzev argued. In closing, he wrote: “The only way to course-correct now is to repudiate Putin’s vision, and to embrace the diversity and vitality of [Russia’s] many peoples.”

“And the real tragedy is precisely that he, in the grip of a deep love for his homeland, came back to his part of the world to educate and enlighten. And now these brutes are pinning God knows what on him. Because the way they see it: we’ve got our own life here, everything’s under control, we don’t give a damn about this Komi language. And you’re just spoiled rotten. You went off to the West, picked up some ideas there, came back, and now you’re trying to lecture us — well, we’ll put you in your place, you lousy intellectual. It’s a kind of revenge for their own indifference, for their own wretchedness. Nikolay came back to a country that had already turned thoroughly fascist, where it was clear they would do something to him, some vile thing. Living under the rule of law had spoiled him. He couldn’t imagine they could do something like this to him. That’s the kind of naivety it was,” Guseinov emphasizes.

[[socialnetworks]]

Zyuzev’s arrest came shortly before searches at Syktyvkar’s Revolt Center, an independent cultural space whose founders included Leonid Zilberg. In the summer of 2025, the center was designated a “foreign agent” and shut down, and one of its founders, Pavel Andreev, was later charged with treason. However, according to Andreev, Zyuzev had no connection to the Revolt Center team and had only spoken at its venue a few times.

Zyuzev’s friends are now trying to draw the international academic community’s attention to his case. “Right now we’re looking for prominent Canadian sociologists and philosophers who could bring the Zyuzev case to the attention of politicians. Maybe, with Canada moving closer to Europe, they’ll take an interest,” Alexander says.

Zyuzev is not the only Russian humanities scholar to receive a long sentence in a criminal case in recent years. Among others, sociologist and political scientistBoris Kagarlitsky, convicted under the law against justifying terrorism, is serving time in a penal colony.

“Quite a few people I know are in prison right now. Boris Kagarlitsky, whom I’ve known since childhood — we lived in the same building. It’s absurd. These are people who are in prison for being smart. That’s the tragedy. It’s the same kind of persecution we saw in the ’30s, the ’40s, and the ’50s: oh, you think you’re too smart — well, here’s what you get. Sociology is a science that makes it possible to improve society. Or to destroy it, if it gets snuffed out. And we’re watching the second process. These cretins don’t even understand what Nikolay Zyuzev’s work is about. They simply don’t understand what intellectual work is for. Because their brains just don’t work. What works are their jaws, which chew people up. And what’s especially painful with Nikolay is that no voice coming from the West, or that could come from there, from Canada, say, will ever reach his jailers’ ears. Maybe there will be some kind of prisoner swaps. There’s no other way he’ll be freed,” Guseinov says.

Alexei also sees the Zyuzev case as a warning to other scholars working on politically sensitive topics:

“Right now, any Tatar, Karelian, or Bashkir historian or ethnologist, say, who back in the 2010s traveled freely to Turkey or Finland, studied figures from the Civil War era and the emigration, and, God forbid, worked with some Germans on sensitive topics like wartime collaborationism, I think, feels like they’re in the crosshairs. For them, the Zyuzev case is an unmistakable signal that anything and everything can be held against them, now and in the future. It seems to me the goal right now is clearly to intimidate scholars. I hope there were no informers involved in the Zyuzev case. But in other fields, unfortunately, they may turn up: self-appointed guardians and pseudo-patriots from within the scholarly community itself.”

“The only thing we can count on is that scholars with an instinct for self-preservation, and people who would like their children to become scholars, will simply leave. Mobility today is completely different from what it was in the 20th century. People are highly mobile and can cross borders relatively easily. And if we prepare for this kind of movement, then young people, at least, can and should be taken out of the Russian Federation — so they can get a normal education and integrate into a more or less humane society,” Guseinov concludes.

Support T-invariant’s work by subscribing to our Patreon and choosing a donation amount that suits you.

The post An Expedition to Prison: Why Philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev Was Sentenced to Seven Years appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Every day Israel creates a new humanitarian crisis in Gaza, a new provocation in the West Bank, a political dilemma in the US. Keep track of the news here.

We, the members of the Russian-American Science Association (RASA), strongly condemn the drone attack on the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine which caused serious damage and, according to reports, resulted in casualties.

Even against the background of the years-long and devastating war, an attack on a national academy of sciences is particularly horrifying. We express our solidarity with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and with our Ukrainian colleagues, and we extend our deepest condolences to the families and colleagues of those who were killed.

[[socialnetworks]]

Scientific institutions are part of the shared heritage of humanity. They are places where knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted across generations and across national borders. 

The international scientific community has a responsibility to uphold the principles of protecting human life, scientific freedom, international cooperation, and respect for institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.

We reaffirm our commitment to the protection of science as a sphere of international cooperation and human progress, even in times of war.

The post Statement of the Russian-American Science Association in Support of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

TOKYO — Anyone betting that inflation risks are fading should look at the US Treasury market. The sharp selloff in Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) suggests the world’s biggest bond market is growing less convinced that price pressures are contained. Investors are rethinking the inflation outlook, with implications for Federal Reserve policy, real rates and stock […]

The post Bond markets aren’t buying the inflation-is-tamed fairy tale appeared first on Asia Times.

For years, relations between Washington and Beijing seemed stuck on an escalation treadmill. Every quarter brought new semiconductor restrictions, naval jockeying in the South China Sea or retaliatory tariffs, locking the world’s two preeminent powers in an apparently irreversible downward spiral. Observers came to view every exchange as a prelude to confrontation, with diplomacy treated […]

The post Trump-Xi summit’s real test will come in the months ahead appeared first on Asia Times.

In summer 2023 Dr Colin M. Barron published a book, I Will Never Buy an Electric Car, in which he set out all the shortcomings of EVs. Now, three years later, he says the case has only got worse.

The post Why I Will Still Never Buy an Electric Car appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

When Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan agreed to a mutual defense pact in August, it was principally seen as a political commitment. The “Mecca alliance,” as it was dubbed, stipulated that an armed attack on one would be treated as an attack on all three, accompanied by deeper military cooperation. That pact is no longer […]

The post Baptism of Houthi fire for Mecca mutual defense pact appeared first on Asia Times.

Is Ukraine becoming an “Eastern European Israel” for the EU? Sociologist and author Volodymyr Ishchenko joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to discuss Ukraine’s eroding sovereignty, who profits from keeping the fighting going, and whether an off-ramp still exists to a war with Russia now costing Ukraine 27,000 casualties per month, according to Poland’s prime minister.

Europe is pushing record defense budgets and warning that Russia could test NATO within months. But this month Ukraine launched its largest drone attack yet on Moscow, Washington approved a $2.68 billion air defense sale, and the EU unblocked €6.6 billion in military aid. Is Europe readying to defend itself from a Russia with imperialist ambitions? Or preparing for a forever war, where profiteers abound and working-class Ukrainians do the fighting and dying at the direction of a state they’ve come to hate?

Ishchenko describes an emerging vision for Ukraine amongst Kyiv’s power brokers: a militarized, ethnonationalist frontier state serving as outsourced security for the European Union against Russia. Sound familiar? 

“Maybe NATO at this point is not an alliance for security, but actually a source of insecurity in Europe.” 

Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!

When governments talk about reducing dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, the discussion usually turns to pipelines in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For Asian importers, that is only part of the story. The physical bottleneck is in the Persian Gulf, but much of the economic exposure sits thousands of kilometers to the […]

The post Asia can’t just pipeline its way around Hormuz appeared first on Asia Times.

Press For Truth – September 14, 2026

The Allison Inquiry has concluded.

Four days of sworn testimony in Ottawa.

50 Canadians out of 1,400 who came forward finally had their stories heard.

This final report features firsthand accounts of life-altering injuries and deaths following COVID-19 vaccination, paralysis, neurological damage, cardiac events, and families left without answers.

In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth covered the hearings after mainstream outlets stayed away.

MP Dean Allison explains why he launched the inquiry: too many people were suffering in silence.

The injured describe being dismissed by the medical system, denied support through Canada’s vaccine injury program, and treated as if their experiences didn’t count.

Watch the testimonies and share them!

These stories were never supposed to stay hidden so please:

SHARE THIS VIDEO FAR AND WIDE!!

Support my efforts to Cover the ALLISON INQUIRY: https://gogetfunding.com/help-me-cove…

DONATE via Paypal ➜ https://www.paypal.me/PressforTruth

Or you can send an e-transfer to dan@pressfortruth.ca

If you’re old fashioned like we are and prefer to keep it old school, we also accept cash, cheques (made out to Dan Dicks), equipment and words of encouragement! You can send us those things here: Dan Dicks P.O. Box 1521 Squamish BC V8B 0B1

The last of the US-led coalition forces are leaving Iraq. It’s a significant bonus for Iran. The withdrawal date, September 30, was also the date by which Baghdad had pledged to bring numerous powerful Iran-backed militias under state control. But this deadline looks certain to be missed. This effectively means that, at a moment when […]

The post Final US military withdrawal from Iraq is a major bonus for Iran appeared first on Asia Times.

Egypt’s intelligence chief warned that Hamas appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack; Israel should grant Hamas economic concessions to avert conflict. 'If Israel doesn't change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your face – the window to prevent a disaster is closing.' Netanyahu's response was confident—even cocky—that they had the situation under control

Satellite images show utter devastation in Gaza ■ Jerusalem heats up ■ Israeli citizenship only for "good Jews" now? ■ Under Trump, US sold weapons to Israel at a rate of over $1B/month ■ More

Was in Ungarn derzeit passiert, ist nur schwer zu verstehen. Dort tobt ein Skandal wegen eines banalen Vorfalls aus dem Jahr 2024, bei dem der heutige ungarische Regierungschef Magyar in einem Nachtclub einem Gast, der ihn filmte, das Mobiltelefon entrissen und in die Donau geworfen hat. Das entsprechende Strafverfahren war bereits eingestellt, wurde nun aber […]

In a recent phone call, Donald Trump urged Volodymyr Zelensky to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. Whether a request or a demand, this appears, certainly at first glance, fundamentally different from the Biden administration’s policy of restricting the use of US long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia. The US president has justified […]

The post Trump’s bid to stop Ukraine’s Russia strikes a strategic disconnect appeared first on Asia Times.

The British Police say that the five men arrested in connection with a suspected bomb plot targeting RAF Fairford are all British nationals. Nothing has yet been said officially about who was behind the plot. The risk to US assets and personnel in the UK remains extremely high. United Kingdom police are releasing the five […]

The post RAF Fairford big-scale attack try represents serious threat to US appeared first on Asia Times.

The future of the planet depends on uprooting Jewish supremacy

By Nahida Exiled Palestinian | September 28, 2026 

There is no running away from the fact that there are extremely troubling ideas throughout the Torah, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Tanya.

Ideas like “choseness”, “promised land”, “return to Zion”, “building the temple”, “tikkun olam”… etc come from no other than Torah itself, soaked in supremacy, dominance aspiration, deception and mass-killing.

We can no longer hide our heads in the sand, pretending not to know, pretending not to see.

Jewish anti-Zionists should move on now, and use all their activism outside the Palestine solidarity movement, direct their work towards their people where serious discussions happen, plans are drawn, funds are raised, weapons are shipped and is genocide plotted and enacted. They should work with their own Jewish communities to try to get them out of the mess of supremacy and genocide they got themselves into.

Instead of wasting their time denying any links between Judaism and Zionism, instead of throwing their energy on controlling the Palestinian discourse, and instead of relentlessly monitoring us, Semite Palestinians lest we slip and “conflate Zionism with Judaism”or say something “antisemitic”, that may offend a Jew, Anti-Zionist Jews should change course and adopt a different role to play.

They should shift their activism within, try to effect change within their own Jewish communities who by vast majority are still supporting the Genocide with all their wealth, their leverage, all their influence and all their might.

They should leave us Palestinians to lead our Liberation Movement, and to narrate our authentic, untamed, unfiltered, unkosherised story without censoring, blacklisting, slandering or intimidation.

The future of the planet depends on the uprooting of Jewish supremacy, deception, hatred and violence from their ideology, and joining the human race as equals not as “chosen”.

Failing to confront the elephant in the room would end up in a World Nakba, like nothing we have ever seen before.

This is a WARNING, a mere WARNING of a brewing global disaster, I see in the horizon, and I am praying that together we would be able to prevent before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Maya Kareen | Press TV | September 28, 2026

Nearly 466 days ago, just seven days into the unprovoked and illegal US-backed Israeli military aggression against Iran, The Economist provocatively placed a torn Iranian flag on its cover and asked: “How will this end?”

The image was widely interpreted as a metaphor for the possible collapse or fragmentation of the Islamic Republic in the face of overwhelming military force.

At the time, the narrative surrounding Iran was dominated by predictions of its imminent defeat, the weakening of its leadership, and even the possible collapse of the Islamic Republic under the weight of an aggression that came amid Iran-US indirect nuclear talks.

The article went on to ask whether what it described as Israel’s first war against Iran “will also be the last,” or whether it would “lead to a series of Iran-Israel wars that mire” West Asia in years, if not decades, of further violence.

Written before the United States directly joined the war of aggression by illegally bombing Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities on June 22, the article also suggested that Washington should move beyond “merely defending Israel and deterring Iran” and join the occupying regime in attacking Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

Yet even then, The Economist warned that such a war could spiral into a broader regional war, sending energy prices soaring by targeting Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure or blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for global energy supplies.

Iran, however, did not turn the war into a regional war at that stage, nor did it close the Strait of Hormuz. It retaliated decisively and inflicted massive damage on the Zionist regime.

Following a powerful wave of retaliatory strikes against Israeli-occupied territories, the Islamic Republic demonstrated that it retained the ability to impose high costs on its adversaries.

After 12 days of war, Israel and the United States ultimately agreed to a ceasefire. The confrontation and US hostility, however, were far from over.

On February 1, the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, warned that any new war initiated by the United States against Iran would inevitably become a regional war, engulfing all countries across the region.

Less than a month later, on February 28, Washington and Tel Aviv launched a second round of military aggression against Iran, again in the middle of nuclear diplomacy.

On the very first day, the United States and Israel assassinated Iran’s Leader and several senior commanders, apparently calculating that “decapitating” the country’s leadership would pave the way for the rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic and the so-called “regime change.”

That calculation, however, once again proved wrong.

Iranian armed forces mounted a sustained and forceful response, launching wave after wave of retaliatory strikes against Israeli-occupied territories and US military bases across the region.

Far from collapsing under the pressure, Iran demonstrated its capacity to absorb the initial shock, reorganize its command structure, and continue fighting on multiple fronts.

The war eventually reached the Strait of Hormuz, as Iran asserted its control over the strategic waterway, leading to severe disruption in global energy markets and exposing the vulnerability of one of the world’s most strategically important chokepoints.

After 40 days of war, the United States and Israel were once again compelled to accept a ceasefire. This time, the Trump administration even agreed to an Iranian proposal to end the imposed war.

The outcome was a striking departure from the expectations that had accompanied the opening hours of the aggression: instead of so-called “regime change,” Washington and Tel Aviv found themselves confronting an Iran that had endured the assassination of its senior leadership, absorbed unprecedented attacks and continued to resist and inflict blows on the enemy.

Since the April 8 ceasefire, exchanges of fire have continued intermittently, while the Strait of Hormuz has remained largely closed to hostile vessels.

Having failed to achieve its objectives through military means, Washington has increasingly turned to economic pressure, imposing new sanctions and pursuing a naval and aerial blockade against Iran. Yet the Islamic Republic has continued to withstand the pressure.

Also, despite sanctions, threats, political pressure and military aggression, Tehran has maintained that the Strait of Hormuz will only be reopened once the United States ends the imposed war on all fronts.

And now, more than 15 months after that torn Iranian flag appeared on its cover, The Economist has returned with an image that could hardly be more different.

Gone is the question of how Iran will end. Instead, the magazine has placed a new question at the center of its latest cover: “WHEN AMERICA WALKS AWAY.”

The change in imagery reflects a striking shift in the narrative. In June 2025, the focus was on Iran’s survival. Today, the question being raised is about the future of American power in West Asia.

But the transformation in the narrative is not limited to the language used on The Economist’s covers.

Over the past 15 months, the war has also produced a growing record of military, financial and strategic costs for the United States and its military-industrial complex.

Washington launched the war on Iran with many ambitious objectives, including crippling Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities in order to undermine and weaken the Islamic Republic.

Yet months of war have instead left the United States facing tens of billions of dollars in expenses, damaged military facilities across the region, depleted stocks of some of its most sophisticated interceptors and other munitions, and casualties among its service members.

The following figures and assessments, many of them coming from US government agencies, American media outlets and Western think tanks, offer a picture of the price Washington has paid for the war — and of the widening gap between the objectives announced at its outset and the situation that has emerged months later.

$43.6 billion — and the bill is still rising

On September 18, The Washington Post reported that the US Central Command (CENTCOM) had estimated the cost of the war at $43.6 billion as of early September.

The figure included $28 billion to replace munitions expended during the war on Iran and more than $4.3 billion for equipment lost or damaged. The breakdown also put Air Force operating costs at more than $6.6 billion, Navy costs at about $2.2 billion, and Army costs at roughly $1.6 billion.

Crucially, the $43.6 billion estimate does not include the future cost of rebuilding or repairing damaged US military facilities across West Asia, according to the report.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also published its own assessment on September 15, estimating that the war on Iran had already cost the Department of War approximately $38 billion as of August 1.

CBO said the figure included the replacement of expended munitions and equipment lost in battle, increased flying hours, other operational costs, and additional fuel costs.

But the most important part of the CBO assessment was its warning about the continuing cost.

It said if the war remained at the relatively low intensity seen in May and June, another month of fighting would cost approximately $2 billion. If fighting returned to the intensity seen in July, the monthly cost could rise to approximately $3 billion.

CBO also stressed that its $38 billion estimate did not include all costs borne by other parts of the federal government and did not include certain costs already incorporated into the regular military budget.

At least 228 US military assets damaged

The financial bill was accompanied by substantial physical damage to US military infrastructure.

On May 6, The Washington Post published a satellite-image investigation finding that Iranian attacks had destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at 15 US military sites across West Asia.

The Post’s analysis identified 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that had been damaged or destroyed. The targets included hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, radar systems, communications equipment and air-defense systems.

The newspaper examined more than 100 high-resolution satellite images released by Iranian media and independently verified 109 of those images against imagery from the European Union’s Copernicus satellite system and commercial satellite imagery where available.

It found no evidence that the Iranian imagery had been manipulated. The Post also reported that the destruction was “far larger” than what had been publicly acknowledged by the US government.

The extent of the damage was subsequently reinforced by the US government’s own watchdog. In a report released on September 14, the Pentagon Inspector General provided what the Associated Press ​​​​​​said was the most comprehensive official accounting to date of the war’s impact on US military facilities.

The report said Iranian attacks had damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan.

The significance of this finding is that the damage was no longer based solely on satellite analysis or Iranian reports. It was acknowledged in an official US government assessment.

Dozens of MQ-9 Reapers and other aircraft lost or damaged

The Pentagon Inspector General’s findings also provided a clearer picture of damage to American aircraft.

According to Stars and Stripes on September 15, the war had resulted in damage to or destruction of as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones, along with four F-15 fighter aircraft and more than six KC-135 tanker aircraft.

The report also noted that the cost of repairing or replacing some of these assets had not yet been incorporated into the Pentagon’s overall war-cost estimate.

In other words, even the $43.6 billion figure should not necessarily be regarded as the final bill.

The actual figure, however, is much higher. More than 50 MQ-9 Reapers have disappeared over Iranian skies, according to independent estimates.

The war has depleted America’s missile-defense stockpiles

Perhaps more consequential than the dollar value of the weapons fired is the depletion of America’s stockpile of advanced interceptors.

In its May 6 report, The Washington Post, citing an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), reported that between February 28 and April 8 the US military had used at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors.

Those numbers represented approximately 53 percent of the US prewar THAAD inventory and 43 percent of its Patriot inventory. By September, the assessment had become even more concerning.

The Stimson Center, in a report published on September 22, said that by August the United States had used approximately 80 percent of its THAAD inventory and around half of its Patriot interceptors.

The same report said the Army had used “virtually all” of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) — long-range weapons that would also be important in a potential conflict involving China.

According to Stimson’s assessment, replenishing some of these stocks could take years. CSIS estimated that Tomahawk inventories might not return to prewar levels until late 2030 or early 2031, while Patriot and THAAD inventories could take at least three years to recover.

The costs extend beyond the battlefield

The financial impact has also spread beyond the Pentagon. The CBO said on September 15 that the disruption of oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz had increased global energy prices, contributing to higher prices for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel in the United States.

CBO estimated that the war would leave US inflation in the first quarter of 2027 0.5 percentage points higher than it had projected in February 2026, while core PCE inflation was projected to be 0.3 percentage points higher.

The agency also estimated that three-month Treasury bill rates would be nearly 0.2 percentage points higher in 2026 than previously projected.

The Stimson Center went further, estimating the direct and indirect cost of the war at approximately $220 billion and putting the average household’s share at roughly $1,650. It attributed much of that wider economic burden to higher energy prices.

Stimson said that by September 15, average US gasoline prices had reached $4.32 per gallon, a 45 percent increase since the war began, while diesel prices had risen by approximately 70 percent.

Damage to US military facilities

Beyond the billions spent on weapons, operations and damaged military equipment, Washington also incurred substantial military, diplomatic and emergency expenses.

On September 14, the Pentagon Inspector General, as reported by The Washington Post, said Iranian attacks had caused approximately $184 million in damage to US military and diplomatic facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Separately, the US State Department reported around $113 million in war-related and emergency expenses, nearly $80 million of which was associated with the evacuation of diplomats, their families and other US citizens and eligible individuals.

Around 9,000 US citizens were evacuated from the region during the war against Iran.

Iran’s missile program has begun rebuilding

The depletion of American interceptor stocks becomes particularly significant when considered alongside the continued resilience of Iran’s missile program.

On September 10, The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had resumed production of ballistic missiles, despite the extensive US and Israeli attacks on its missile infrastructure during the opening phase of the war.

According to the report, US and regional officials said Iran was assembling both liquid- and solid-fuel missiles using stockpiled components at underground facilities.

Intelligence pointed to activity at several underground sites, including the Khojir missile facility, while Iran was also working on new underground assembly locations.

The report concluded that the renewed production underscored the difficulty of fully dismantling Iran’s missile program — one of the stated objectives of the war.

Six months on, the original objectives remain out of reach

This brings the military expenditure back to the central question: what did all of this cost actually achieve? Washington continues to describe the war on Iran as having severely degraded the country’s military capabilities.

But independent Western assessments point to a substantial gap between the original objectives and the situation that has emerged.

The Stimson Center, in its September 22 assessment, said the administration initially went to war with objectives that included ending Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its missile industry, annihilating its navy, and ending its support for the Axis of Resistance.

It concluded that the United States had failed to achieve those objectives. Instead, Stimson said, the mission subsequently narrowed to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — a goal that became necessary precisely because the war itself had disrupted shipping through the waterway.

“Six months later, little progress toward those goals has been made, while the mission has largely narrowed to the single task of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway the war itself closed.”

The figures tell the story of that widening gap: $43.6 billion in US military costs; $28 billion needed merely to replace expended munitions; more than 4.3 billion dollars in damaged or lost equipment; hundreds of damaged military structures; depleted THAAD and Patriot stocks; and a weapons-production system facing years of replenishment.

And yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, Iran is already rebuilding parts of its ballistic-missile production capability.

That contrast — between the scale of resources committed by Washington and the difficulty of translating military force into its original political and strategic objectives — is perhaps the most important evidence behind the dramatic change in the narrative surrounding the war.

And now, back to The Economist

This is where the latest Economist cover becomes particularly relevant.

More than 15 months after the magazine placed a torn Iranian flag on its cover alongside the question “How will this end?” the question on its new cover is no longer centered on Iran.

It asks: “WHEN AMERICA WALKS AWAY.”

“America seems to be stuck in the Middle East. It has no easy way out of its war with Iran. Yet the conflict, however it ends, will in fact mark something quite different: the moment when America pulls back from the region—in the sense that it finally relinquishes its hegemony there,” the article reads.

In a September 25 editorial, The Economist’s Deputy Editor Robert Guest makes a similar assessment, writing that the United States has enjoyed decades of dominance in the region, but that this era is now coming to an end.

“Now, as Mr Trump seeks a way out of his ill-planned war, something momentous is occurring. As we describe in our cover package, American hegemony in the Middle East is ending,” Guest writes.

Netanyahu asked UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed during a secret meeting Sunday to deny Haaretz's report that the Emirati leader had warned Netanyahu of an impending Hamas attack shortly before October 7, 2023