Within hours of Donald Trump announcing an immediate halt to Russian and Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure, Moscow struck a major power plant in Kharkiv. Kyiv has agreed to a reciprocal ceasefire, but Russia has yet to confirm its participation, leaving serious doubts over what Washington has actually secured.

President Donald Trump’s announcement of an immediate ceasefire covering Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure was overtaken by events on Sunday evening when Russian forces struck a major thermal power station in Kharkiv. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Ukraine’s willingness to suspend attacks on Russian energy facilities, but said Moscow was continuing its bombardment even as Washington presented the arrangement as an accomplished diplomatic breakthrough.

The contradiction emerged within hours of Trump declaring that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop targeting each other’s energy infrastructure. Zelenskyy, responding in his evening address on 11 October, welcomed the proposal but reported that Russian attack drones remained active over Ukrainian territory and that Kharkiv’s CHP-5 thermal power station had just been struck.

The Ukrainian president made clear that Kyiv had not rejected the American initiative. Ukraine was prepared to refrain from attacking Russian energy installations and expected Moscow to accept the same restrictions. However, no corresponding commitment had been publicly confirmed by the Kremlin, and Washington had provided no explanation of how the supposed ceasefire would be implemented.

The timing was particularly significant because Ukraine had apparently not been informed that a binding agreement had been concluded. According to accounts of the announcement, Zelenskyy was unaware of Trump’s declaration before it became public, although he subsequently indicated his readiness to support the initiative.

His response therefore amounted to an acceptance of the proposed terms rather than confirmation that a negotiated ceasefire was already in force.

More than 200 attacks on Ukraine’s power network

The reported strike on Kharkiv came at the end of a particularly destructive week for Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Zelenskyy said Russian forces had carried out more than 200 attacks against electricity generation and transmission facilities over seven days, alongside 17 strikes targeting gas and oil installations.

He also reported that more than 150 Ukrainians had been killed and over 700 wounded during the week. These figures, supplied by the Ukrainian authorities, have not been independently verified.

The continuing bombardment places additional pressure on Ukraine’s power network as winter approaches. Thermal power stations and substations remain particularly vulnerable, while damage to generating capacity can disrupt electricity, heating and water supplies across entire urban districts.

Washington’s pressure on Kyiv

Trump’s ceasefire announcement follows an increasingly bitter dispute over Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have damaged Moscow’s fuel production and distribution infrastructure.

The American president has blamed Ukrainian strikes for worsening international diesel shortages and rising fuel prices. His administration has also threatened restrictions on military assistance and intelligence sharing if Kyiv refuses to suspend its campaign against Russian refineries.

Meanwhile, Washington has reached an arrangement with Moscow permitting substantial Russian diesel exports under a temporary easing of sanctions. Zelenskyy has criticised the decision, arguing that additional energy revenues could strengthen Russia’s capacity to continue its invasion.

For Ukraine, refinery attacks have become an important means of disrupting Russian military logistics and imposing economic costs on Moscow. Agreeing to suspend them without guarantees that Russian strikes will also cease would remove one of Kyiv’s principal instruments of pressure.

The diplomatic sequence has consequently raised questions about whether Trump’s initiative offers equivalent obligations to both countries, or primarily serves Washington’s immediate objective of stabilising fuel supplies.

Kremlin silence leaves ceasefire in doubt

By Sunday evening, Moscow had issued no public confirmation that Putin had accepted the arrangement. Washington had provided no details of its duration, the installations covered or any mechanism for verifying compliance.

An agreement confined to energy infrastructure would also leave both armies free to continue other military operations, including attacks on cities, industrial installations and military positions.

Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces had received the necessary orders, while Kyiv awaited clarification of Washington’s discussions with Moscow. He maintained that Ukraine supported credible measures to end the fighting but expected Russia to demonstrate a corresponding commitment.

The immediate question is whether Trump obtained an undertaking from Putin that Moscow is prepared to honour. Until Russia confirms the terms and its attacks cease, the announced energy truce remains a presidential declaration rather than an established cessation of hostilities.

Donald Trump has presented his agreement with Vladimir Putin as a means of reducing American fuel prices. Yet the Treasury authorisation extends far beyond the announced diesel shipments, opening opportunities for international trade in Russian petroleum products as American investors negotiate the acquisition of Lukoil’s overseas assets.

President Donald Trump’s decision to reopen trade in Russian diesel has implications extending well beyond American fuel prices. The agreement, announced ahead of November’s congressional elections, coincides with negotiations over Russian energy assets and mounting American pressure on Ukraine to suspend attacks against Moscow’s oil infrastructure.

The US Treasury’s General Licence 135, issued on 9 October, authorises transactions involving Russian-origin diesel until 7 April 2027. Unlike Trump’s public announcement, which referred to specific quantities destined for the American market, the licence establishes no corresponding volume ceiling or restriction confining authorised trade to the United States.

Its provisions permit American businesses to participate in eligible international transactions involving Russian diesel, including associated financial and commercial services. Existing sanctions remain formally in force, but an important category of Russian petroleum trade has been reopened.

The arrangement potentially benefits not only Russian producers but also American commodity traders, financial institutions and intermediaries capable of purchasing Russian fuel and distributing it internationally.

Sanctions relief without removing sanctions

The legal mechanism offers Washington considerable flexibility. Rather than formally abandoning restrictions imposed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the administration can authorise selected transactions while maintaining the broader sanctions framework.

Congress’s Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 strengthened the legislative basis for economic pressure on Moscow but also provided presidential waiver powers.

General Licence 135 was issued under existing Treasury sanctions authorities, rather than necessarily through those waiver provisions. Nevertheless, the combined framework leaves the administration substantial discretion over the practical application of economic restrictions.

Washington can consequently maintain its declared sanctions policy while selectively restoring commercial relations with Russia. European governments, which have maintained extensive restrictions on Russian energy, have little influence over such unilateral American exemptions.

The Lukoil connection

The timing becomes more revealing when considered alongside negotiations over Lukoil’s international assets.

American investors have been exploring the acquisition of the Russian company’s overseas operations, including oilfields, refineries, storage facilities and retail distribution networks. The portfolio has been valued at approximately $20–22 billion.

Among the prospective investors is billionaire Todd Boehly, while discussions concerning Russian-American economic cooperation have involved Trump’s representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

An American-controlled acquisition of Lukoil’s international network could complement the commercial opportunities created by the diesel authorisation.

Russian petroleum products could potentially be purchased and marketed through American-controlled businesses, allowing Russian suppliers to retain export revenues while intermediaries earn profits from financing, distribution and resale.

No evidence establishes that General Licence 135 was specifically designed for the prospective Lukoil purchasers, or that Trump personally holds an interest in the proposed transactions. Nevertheless, the parallel negotiations suggest the possibility of an emerging commercial arrangement under which American intermediaries assume a greater role in Russian energy exports.

Ukraine and the conflict of interests

The consequences for Ukraine could be considerable.

Kyiv has expanded attacks against Russian refineries, fuel depots and petroleum infrastructure, seeking to reduce Moscow’s export earnings and disrupt supplies supporting its armed forces.

Trump has repeatedly criticised these strikes, linking them to higher international fuel prices. His administration now has an additional commercial reason to seek their suspension.

On 11 October, Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, although President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indicated that Kyiv had not agreed to such an arrangement.

Ukraine has maintained that any suspension of attacks against Russian energy facilities must be matched by an end to Moscow’s strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure.

An agreement protecting Russian refineries without equivalent Russian concessions would preserve an important source of Kremlin revenue while depriving Kyiv of military and economic leverage.

A separate accommodation with Moscow?

The immediate political advantage for Trump is apparent. Rising diesel prices have become a concern ahead of the 3 November midterm elections, particularly among farmers and transport businesses. Additional Russian supplies offer the administration an opportunity to demonstrate action on domestic fuel costs.

Yet the six-month Treasury authorisation extends considerably beyond the election, suggesting commercial objectives that cannot be explained exclusively by short-term electoral considerations.

The emerging pattern is one of bilateral economic engagement with Moscow proceeding independently of a settlement in Ukraine. Russian energy trade is being selectively reopened, American investors are pursuing Russian-owned assets, and Washington is seeking restrictions on Ukrainian operations against the infrastructure underpinning those commercial interests.

For European governments, this threatens the cohesion of the sanctions regime. Brussels may continue restricting Russian energy revenues while Washington authorises transactions that restore access to international markets.

The larger prospect is a system in which Russia retains export earnings, American intermediaries acquire profitable commercial positions, and sanctions become instruments of bilateral negotiation rather than coordinated Western pressure.

Trump’s diesel agreement may therefore represent the opening stage of a wider economic accommodation with Putin, negotiated while Russia continues its war against Ukraine and without any corresponding Russian commitment to withdraw from occupied territory.

By Jan Wolfe Oct 11 (Reuters) – Republican US Senator Thom Tillis on Sunday said President Donald Trump’s diesel supply deal with Russia may be illegal and will put American lives at risk, adding to bipartisan...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he supports an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia announced by U.S. President Donald Trump Sunday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he supports an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia announced by U.S. President Donald Trump Sunday.

par Jules  SEYES

Si l’Allemagne désirait interrompre les aéroports français, elle pourrait équiper ses Typhoon de missiles et créer une bulle de supériorité aérienne au-dessus du sol français. L’affirmation sonne-t-elle ridicule ? C’est exact, elle est pourtant l’exact miroir de l’alerte qu’El Mundo prête à la CIA selon laquelle les Russes pourraient équiper un navire de drones pour désactiver des aéroports occidentaux¹. Comprendre pourquoi l’une sonne comme folle alors que l’autre paraît terrifiante suppose de saisir les méthodes d’analyse sur lesquelles elles reposent, avant d’analyser justement les présupposés des intentions.

Celles-ci étant un peu complexes, commençons par la doctrine, qui aura le mérite de clarifier le brouillard mental actuel. Un peu comme le brouillard de guerre auquel les militaires sont confrontés. Deux méthodes offrent un moyen de le briser : la méthode des moyens et celle des intentions.

La première repose sur un inventaire des ressources connues de l’adversaire pour évaluer l’ensemble des points qu’il peut toucher. C’est aujourd’hui l’exercice de la CIA : les Russes disposent de drones, ceux-ci peuvent être basés sur un navire, donc les Russes peuvent équiper un navire. L’exercice en début d’article relève de la même logique : prendre le nombre de chasseurs de la Bundeswehr, le nombre de Taurus en stock, puisque contrairement à nos SCALP ces armes n’ont pas été envoyées en Ukraine, et établir que cette combinaison a la capacité de mener une attaque surprise au-dessus de la France.

Le problème de cette méthode est de livrer un arc de menace souvent inutilisable, car il existe trop d’axes de vulnérabilité pouvant être exploités. L’automne 1944 en offre l’illustration². Les Allemands retirent alors plusieurs divisions du front. La reconnaissance aérienne alliée photographie, à partir de la mi-novembre, un trafic ferroviaire intense autour de Cologne, de Coblence et dans l’Eifel : gares de triage saturées, locomotives sous pression, une vingtaine de wagons plats chargés de chars Tigre sur la ligne d’Euskirchen. Début décembre, cent soixante-dix wagons plats chargés de blindés et de véhicules roulent entre Cologne et Limbourg. La nuit, les chasseurs de nuit repèrent des convois aux phares masqués. Des dépôts de ravitaillement apparaissent à Rheinbach et à Schleiden, des piles de bois propres à jeter des ponts près d’Echternach, des trains sanitaires à l’ouest du Rhin. Les écoutes radio identifient une armée blindée nouvelle, la 6e Panzerarmee. À la mi-décembre, face aux Ardennes, le VIIIe corps américain signale une activité d’artillerie inhabituelle, aucun mouvement visible et presque plus de prisonniers. Cette force, dont la valeur combative était connue, pouvait être engagée de bien des manières.

Une seconde méthode doit alors entrer en jeu : celle des intentions. En fonction des moyens connus, on établit ce que l’ennemi voudra toucher. Plus précise, celle-ci possède l’inconvénient de reposer sur des déterminants bien moins solides, puisque liés à la compréhension de la psychologie de l’adversaire.

Ces indices remontent à tous les états-majors alliés, et chacun les interprète selon le tempérament de son chef. Au quartier général d’Eisenhower, commandant suprême des forces alliées, homme de coalition et de logistique, domine une conviction : les Allemands sont trop fatigués pour attaquer. Les divisions retirées sont donc évaluées comme des rotations de repos et une reconstitution de réserve. Le 15 décembre encore, son bureau des opérations n’a rien à signaler dans les Ardennes. Patton, chef de la Troisième Armée, passe pour le plus offensif des généraux américains : il ne conçoit la guerre qu’en mouvement et à l’attaque. Son état-major projette cette volonté offensive sur l’ennemi allemand. Elle reflète en réalité la psychologie des analystes, elle-même dérivée de la psychologie des chefs. Son chef du renseignement, le colonel Oscar Koch, lit les mêmes indices comme la préparation d’un coup et présente à Patton, le 9 décembre, sa conclusion : une contre-offensive allemande est possible dans les Ardennes. Patton fait aussitôt préparer les plans qui permettront à la Troisième Armée de pivoter vers le nord. Le lendemain du rapport rassurant d’Eisenhower, l’offensive allemande éclate. Autrement dit, la méthode des intentions en dit souvent plus sur la manière de penser des analystes que sur leur compréhension fine de l’adversaire. Bien conscients de ces défauts, les militaires appliquent les méthodes classiques d’analyse stratégique pour filtrer l’ensemble. La première d’entre elles est le rapport coût-avantage : qu’est-ce que l’adversaire a à gagner ? Pour quel coût ?

Ici, vous constatez par exemple la différence de pensée entre Eisenhower et Patton. Pour le premier, le coût est en carburant ; le second pense en termes d’avantage moral de l’offensive. D’où la divergence d’analyse. Si nous prenons notre exemple d’avions allemands équipés de Taurus, le coût est une guerre franco-allemande, voire OTAN-Allemagne si l’article 5 venait à jouer. Aucune attaque, même couronnée de succès, ne pourrait provoquer des dégâts suffisants pour compenser les coûts d’un conflit avec une puissance nucléaire. En pratique, l’Allemagne aurait beaucoup à perdre et peu à gagner, puisque son influence dans l’appareil d’État et l’UE lui permet d’obtenir satisfaction dans des domaines cruciaux, telle la fermeture de Fessenheim.

Alors, la Russie ?

La CIA vient de nous gratifier d’un de ces mémos qui relèvent à la fois de la plus pure vérité et du plus pur mépris du public destiné à recevoir la fuite. Voici la menace : «Le point faible de l’Europe» : la menace d’une attaque russe contre la France et l’Espagne est réelle, selon la CIA.

Le scénario de l’attaque impliquerait des drones Gerbera³, de petits appareils à la charge explosive réduite dont l’intérêt est perturbateur et non de faire des victimes : fermer un aéroport, par exemple. Ils seraient lancés depuis des navires marchands déguisés en trafic commercial ordinaire et postés en Méditerranée.

Je vous avouerai qu’en ouvrant ce mémo, je m’étais attendu à un scénario sérieux, pas à cela. À la découverte du propos, son outrance m’a fait passer à la limite de l’insulte. Voilà une proposition d’attaque étatique dont le but serait de «perturber» ? Se rend-on compte du terme ? Une attaque pour perturber ? Schlieffen se retourne dans sa tombe, Napoléon s’étrangle avec sa bataille décisive, Manstein est fort heureusement mort. Car, hélas, un État ne gaspille pas la surprise en lançant un tapotage gentil. S’il faut recourir à la violence, alors il faut d’emblée prendre un avantage définitif pour maintenir au plus court la durée de la campagne. Sun Tzu le notait déjà : aucun pays n’a jamais tiré profit d’une guerre prolongée.

Le projet proposé contredit tous ces principes et, dès lors, il ne pose qu’une seule question : le code militaire russe a-t-il supprimé la peine de mort pour les traîtres ? Eh oui, désolé de décevoir ces intervenants de plateaux qui se prétendent experts malgré leurs abus propagandistes, mais ce que la CIA nous propose est de lancer une attaque inefficace pour ruiner la réputation que les Russes ont acquise auprès du reste du monde. Nous parlons bien sûr des pays sérieux, hors de l’Occident malade où les journalistes reprennent ce scénario comme un sujet sérieux.

En clair, une balance coût-bénéfice où il n’y aurait que des coûts pour la Russie et aucun bénéfice. Eh oui, car fermer un aéroport fait peut-être perdre quelques millions à des entreprises, mais cela n’a AUCUN impact stratégique. Pire, il est inutile de mobiliser un drone Gerbera, un navire ou tout autre moyen militaire : un coup de fil d’un gamin pour annoncer une bombe suffit. Ou bien une voiture piégée.

Bref, l’aventure proposée n’apporte aucun bénéfice stratégique et se fait avec des moyens disproportionnés qui coûteraient énormément à la Russie. Seul un traître à la Russie peut avoir cette idée. Je sais, en Occident, nous sommes habitués avec les relais US, mais plus en Russie : les réseaux qui ont soutenu V. Poutine après son arrivée au pouvoir s’en sont assurés. Ou en tout cas, ils ont fait monter le prix de la passe. Un officier russe réclamerait une méga-malle de billets pour seulement proposer cela à ses chefs, vu qu’il sait que ce serait (si ses chefs sont gentils) la fin de sa carrière. Quant à le mettre en œuvre sans validation politique, il aurait intérêt à avoir le bon billet d’avion pour s’éclipser au plus vite.

Car là est le point qui permet aux individus tarés que l’Occident nomme journalistes de procéder à cette propagande goebbelsienne (enfin, je m’excuse auprès du docteur Goebbels pour cet amalgame insultant) : les moyens existent. Exact, la Russie possède les drones, les navires. Elle aligne même un porte-avions et surtout un arsenal de missiles de toute première qualité. Depuis les années cinquante, l’URSS dispose de bombardiers stratégiques et de missiles capables de frapper le territoire français. La menace n’a donc rien de nouveau, puisque la Russie peut transformer la France en parking si elle le désire.

L’alerte de la CIA ajoute-t-elle de nouvelles capacités ? La réponse est non, une fois, deux fois, mille fois NON !

Héritière, État successeur de l’URSS, la Russie dispose depuis sa naissance des moyens de nous mettre à terre si elle accepte les millions de morts qu’exigera l’absorption de la salve nucléaire française. Une poignée de drones n’y ajoute rien, n’y retranche rien. D’autant plus que la Russie dispose de missiles hypersoniques Orechnik en mesure d’infliger de douloureux dégâts à notre territoire. Par exemple, mais je ne voudrais pas exciter LCI, par une frappe d’Orechnik contre des centrales nucléaires ou, en non nucléaire, contre nos barrages. Nous n’aurions aucun moyen de riposte non nucléaire.

Dès lors, oui, les Russes peuvent monter des drones sur un navire, ils peuvent monter des Grad aussi, ou toute autre arme à plus ou moins grande portée. Dans un tel scénario, l’élément coûteux est le navire sacrifié, pas les munitions embarquées. L’alerte donnée, qui n’est que l’une des alertes autour desquelles on nous a fait résonner tambours et trompettes, n’apporte rien de structurellement nouveau. Un bricolage de drones pour frapper notre territoire n’a rien de complexe. Après tout, le gouvernement de Kiev a bien réussi à introduire des drones sur le territoire russe pour frapper des bombardiers stratégiques.

Seulement, à ce jeu, tout le monde peut jouer ou presque. Il faut le restreindre : l’équipe Le Maire, Breton ne peut pas jouer, mais c’est lié à l’incompétence des joueurs. La France, par exemple, possède encore quelques officiers de valeur capables d’organiser l’affaire. (Non, pas le colonel monté hors de propos en lui accrochant des étoiles comme des guirlandes de Noël, et qui fait aujourd’hui comme s’il dirigeait l’armée française.)

Le problème est que ces gens refuseraient de monter une telle opération. Frapper la Russie, comme frapper la France pour la Russie, exige que la première balle soit mortelle. On tire au cœur ou on ne tire pas, et dans ce cas, entre puissances nucléaires, la question n’est pas celle des moyens, mais celle de la volonté. Même si nous avons TOUT fait, par une politique irresponsable, pour irriter les Russes, ils n’ont nullement annoncé leur intention de répondre à la hauteur de notre bêtise.

Reste l’intention : les Russes peuvent nous frapper, c’est acquis, ils peuvent le faire depuis des décennies pour un coût fixé. Resterait le gain d’une frappe : faire cesser l’appui français à l’Ukraine. Dans ce domaine, hélas, hormis l’agacement entre les oreilles d’entendre les rodomontades et pseudo-discours d’Emmanuel Macron, qui justifient toute envie de retourner une paire de claques justement méritée, la vérité commande de constater l’épuisement de nos moyens : la macronie a déjà envoyé à peu près tout ce qu’elle pouvait racler dans les fonds de tiroirs ; quant à l’argent, l’Allemagne ou la Grande-Bretagne peuvent le fournir. Les véritables acteurs sont les Anglais, par l’usage des moyens de leurs services secrets très actifs dans la guerre des drones, et les Allemands pour la livraison de munitions. Pour peser sur les opérations en Ukraine, une frappe russe devrait cibler en priorité ces deux pays.

Sauf à vouloir faire de l’éducation prioritaire, mais dans ce cas, l’ambassade de Russie peut se contenter d’engager un professeur de SEGPA pour l’envoyer à l’Élysée. Pour la fessée, il serait même inutile d’engager : Montjoie Saint-Denis a fait des petits.

Prise sous un angle militaire, l’information n’apportait rien, et si les journalistes en avaient fait une lecture correcte, ils l’auraient classée verticalement.

Ce n’était bien évidemment pas le but, mais au contraire d’avoir un thème pour parler de menace russe afin de poursuivre la propagande par martèlement, qui vise à abrutir les téléspectateurs de menaces pour leur faire admettre le concept sans esprit critique. Ça marche avec les résidents de maison de retraite au stade pré-Rivotril.

Tel est le problème de nos gouvernants. Faute d’agression russe, il faut créer le sentiment d’une agression, ce qui est le but de ces annonces : entretenir l’hystérie et donner un prétexte pour prononcer les mots agression, guerre, menaces, puissants générateurs d’un sentiment d’insécurité dans la population soumise à ce discours anxiogène.

Ça n’a qu’un défaut : messieurs les journalistes, vous avez repris en connaissance de cause une publication des services américains pour engager notre pays sur une trajectoire fausse et dangereuse pour sa sécurité.

Soit vous êtes des idiots congénitaux, ce que la CIA n’exclut peut-être pas, et je vais m’offrir de partager le soupçon. Soit vous le faites délibérément. Même en tenant compte de votre bêtise, tous les journalistes français ne peuvent pas être aussi désavantagés par la nature ; il aurait donc dû en rester assez pour faire échouer la manipulation.

Cela fait de vous, en tant que catégorie, des traîtres à votre nation, susceptibles de subir les foudres judiciaires au moment où le pouvoir changera de main et cessera de couvrir vos abus. Il ne s’agit pas de menaces, mais d’une évaluation juridique. VOUS mettez objectivement notre nation en danger !

La méthode marcherait si, justement, conscients de la menace sur leur esprit, beaucoup de citoyens ne s’étaient pas dirigés vers internet.

___

1. L’alerte a été rendue publique par le quotidien espagnol El Mundo le 24 septembre 2026 (article de Xavier Colás), reprise notamment par Euronews : «La CIA alerte sur des drones russes visant l’Espagne, la France ou l’Italie», https://fr.euronews.com/2026/09/24/la-cia-alerte-sur-des-drones-russes-visant-lespagne-la-france-ou-litalie ;
   i24news : «Les États-Unis alertent l’Europe sur une possible attaque de drones russes depuis la Méditerranée», https://www.i24news.tv/fr/actu/international/artc-les-etats-unis-alertent-l-europe-sur-une-possible-attaque-de-drones-russes-depuis-la-mediterranee ;
   Meduza, sur le démenti italien : https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/24/no-one-needs-more-fuel-on-the-fire-italy-pushes-back-on-report-that-cia-warned-of-possible-russian-sea-launched-drone-attacks
2. Sur le renseignement allié avant l’offensive des Ardennes : U.S. Army, «Third Army G2 predicts Battle of the Bulge, 9 December 1944», https://www.army.mil/article/116038/third_army_g2_predicts_battle_of_the_bulge_9_december_1944 ;
   Carlo D’Este, «December 16, 1944 : Ardennes Offensive Begins, An “Abysmal Failure of Allied Intelligence”», https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/december-16-1944-ardennes-offensive-begins-abysmal-failure-allied-intelligence/
   DVIDS, «First Army in the Battle of the Bulge», https://www.dvidshub.net/news/printable/385060 ;
   David T. Zabecki, «Patton at Bastogne», The Intelligencer (AFIO), vol. 29, n° 2, 2024, https://afio.com/publications/eprints_2024/ZABECKI_Patton_at_Bastogne_AFIO_INTELLIGENCER_Vol29_No2_SummerFall_2024.pdf ;
   Oscar W. Koch, G-2 : Intelligence for Patton, 1971.
   The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. III, chap. 19, Third Army G2 Predicts Battle of the Bulge, First Army in the Battle of the Bulge, D’Este, The History Reader.
3. «Gerbera (drone)», Wikipédia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerbera_(drone)

Publiéà l’origine par  Reseau International

Netanyahu on the hook for at least 24 hostage deaths, possible "treason" ■ Netanyahu administration have strong words about Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay ■ More

Europe’s “strategic autonomy” is a project through which Europe is rebuilding its own imperial and militarist capabilities.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

We remember Nokia as the company behind some of the most popular mobile phones of the past, as well as its famous slogan, “Connecting people.”

Founded in Finland in 1865 and now operating as a multinational company in telecommunications and information technology, Nokia continues to work in the field of communications – that is, to “connect people.” But with its latest project, it appears that the company is now preparing to connect people in uniform.

Nokia has teamed up with ICEYE, another Finnish company specializing in the production of microsatellites that provide high-resolution Earth observation data day and night and in all weather conditions.

The two companies have partnered to develop secure and sovereign satellite communications systems for governments and defense customers, with the first communications satellites planned for launch in 2028.

Defense, border security, emergency response…

Announced on October 1, the project envisages satellite systems operating in low Earth orbit (LEO) for use in areas including defense, border security, emergency services and disaster response.

Under the project, governments will be able to own and control not only the satellites themselves, but also the ground infrastructure and user terminals.

Rafal Modrzewski, co-founder and CEO of ICEYE, said countries should not leave control over their communications infrastructure in the hands of foreign commercial satellite operators, emphasizing that the project is ultimately aimed at reducing external dependence.

As part of the partnership, Nokia will contribute its expertise in secure networking technologies and network management, while ICEYE will provide its experience in satellite platforms, satellite constellation operations and ground infrastructure.

The cooperation between Nokia and ICEYE is not entirely new. Nokia was among the companies that participated in an investment round announced by ICEYE in June 2026, through which the company secured more than €1 billion in financing.

First satellites planned for 2028

The first satellites are scheduled to be launched in 2028. If the project is implemented, ICEYE will expand its activities in government-controlled satellite intelligence into the communications sector, while Nokia will strengthen its presence in Europe’s rapidly growing defense and space communications market.

Europe’s “strategic autonomy”: the militarization of civilian technology

The new partnership between Nokia and ICEYE is a striking example of where the concepts of “strategic autonomy” and “technological sovereignty,” which Europe has increasingly embraced in recent years, are actually heading.

The satellite communications systems being developed by the two Finnish companies may initially appear to be nothing more than a technological investment. Yet the companies themselves explicitly list defense, border security and government operations among the project’s intended areas of use. With the first satellites planned for launch in 2028, the system is also designed to remain under government control, including its satellites, ground stations and terminals.

What is significant here is not simply that two companies are entering the defense sector. The boundary between civilian and military technology is increasingly disappearing in Europe.

Companies operating in telecommunications, artificial intelligence, satellite technology, data analysis and digital infrastructure are being turned into direct components of European states’ rearmament and security policies.

This transformation is being marketed under the rhetoric of “European independence.” Yet what is emerging is not a Europe moving away from militarism. On the contrary, Europe is building its own militarized infrastructure.

Reducing dependence on the U.S. does not eliminate militarism

Europe’s basic argument is that it should not remain dependent on U.S.-based companies for its security and communications infrastructure. That is why European states are seeking to develop their own satellite systems, defense technologies and secure communications networks.

But there is a serious contradiction here.

The infrastructure being developed to reduce dependence on U.S. companies is being used to expand the military capabilities of European states. In other words, the question of “militarism or peace?” is being reduced to a choice between “American militarism or European militarism.”

The EU’s IRIS² program is a larger-scale example of this transformation. Although the system was initially presented as a secure communications and digital infrastructure project, the program was expanded in August 2026 to include 66 additional LEO satellites for defense, security and emergency services, bringing the total planned core constellation to 348 satellites. The European Commission has also explicitly identified defense and security applications as among the main drivers behind the changes.

What we are therefore witnessing is not simply a European space program designed to “improve internet access.” Space infrastructure is being transformed into a component of Europe’s security and defense architecture.

Companies are becoming part of the war economy

More importantly, this transformation is not taking place solely through state institutions.

The European model places private companies at the center of this process. As in the case of Nokia and ICEYE, private technology companies are developing infrastructure designed to meet the defense and security needs of governments. Public-private partnerships are also at the heart of the IRIS² model.

The program’s total cost over 12 years has been set at €10.6 billion, with €6 billion expected to be provided by the EU and more than €4 billion by the private sector.

Thus, the expansion of Europe’s “defense capacity” does not simply mean larger state budgets. Private capital is becoming a direct partner in Europe’s emerging security economy.

This transformation is also changing the fields in which technology companies operate. Technologies once associated primarily with consumer communications, the internet, software or civilian infrastructure are now becoming integrated into border surveillance, military communications, intelligence and crisis-management systems.

This is not the neutralization of Europe’s technology sector. It is its militarization.

The technological infrastructure of “Fortress Europe”

All of these developments cannot be considered separately from the increasingly powerful concept of “Fortress Europe.”

Tighter border controls, the treatment of migration as a security issue, increased military spending and the expansion of Europe’s own defense industry are different components of the same political direction.

Satellite technology is no exception. Indeed, border surveillance is explicitly listed among the intended uses of IRIS² in EU documents.

In this way, seemingly positive concepts such as “digital sovereignty,” “technological independence” and “strategic autonomy” are, in practice, becoming technological instruments for building a stronger European security apparatus.

The fundamental issue here is not that Europe is reducing its dependence on the United States. There is nothing inherently wrong with any country developing its own technological capabilities. The question is what those capabilities are being developed for.

If the result of technological independence is more military satellites, more sophisticated border surveillance systems, stronger military communications networks and larger defense budgets, then what is being created is not simply independence. It is the expansion of the militarist capacity of European states and European capital.

From this perspective, the Nokia-ICEYE agreement represents more than a technological partnership.

As Europe seeks to create an alternative to the United States’ military and technological dominance, it is simultaneously building its own military-technological complex.

And perhaps the most important feature of this process is that the war economy is no longer built solely in arms factories.

Telecommunications companies, satellite companies, artificial intelligence firms and other high-tech corporations are becoming increasingly important actors in this economy.

Europe’s “strategic autonomy” therefore cannot be understood merely as a project to become independent from Washington. It is also a project through which Europe is rebuilding its own imperial and militarist capabilities.

Pistorius eilt nach Washington, unterschreibt Rüstungsdeals und hört nur Lob. Die SPD, einst Partei von Brandts Ostpolitik, schreibt Deutschland in die US-Konzeption einer NATO 3.0 ein und schiebt uns in die Feuerlinie gegen eine Atommacht.

„Wer Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius nach dem Treffen mit seinem Amtskollegen Pete Hegseth zuhörte, konnte fast den Eindruck gewinnen, die beiden Minister seien beste Freunde geworden“, berichtet die Tagesschau aus Washington. Dabei geht es um Deutschlands Beitrag dazu, die Dinge in Europa zu eskalieren.

Es scheint eine ferne Zeit zu sein, in der die SPD einst für Dialog und Versöhnung mit unseren europäischen Nachbarn stand. „Frieden ist nicht alles, aber ohne Frieden ist alles nichts“ – das war das Credo von Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt mit einer Ostpolitik, die auf Interessenausgleich und Diplomatie setzte. Eine eigenständige Politik der Annäherung gen Osten war zugleich auch ein Stück Souveränitätsgewinn gegenüber den USA.

In diesen Tagen erleben wir eine völlige Abkehr von diesen Erkenntnissen. Die SPD positioniert sich als Teil der Merz-Regierung gegen den erklärten Feind Russland im Osten. Während selbst die USA teilweise den Dialog mit Moskau wagen, ist aus Berlin lediglich die Ansage zu hören, in wenigen Jahren die größte Armee Europas aufstellen zu wollen. Die SPD ist dabei in der Koalition die Partei, die scheinbar am willfährigsten Deutschland in die US-Konzeption einer NATO 3.0 einschreiben will. Die jüngste Reise von SPD-Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius kann hier als Beleg dienen.

Lizenz zum Zuschlagen tief in Russland

Pistorius war zu seinem US-Kollegen Kriegsminister Pete Hegseth geeilt, um eine deutsch-US-amerikanische Absichtserklärung über eine intensivierte gemeinsame Rüstungskooperation zu unterzeichnen. Dabei geht es insbesondere auch um die Herstellung von Lenkwaffen in Lizenz in Deutschland, die die europäischen Verbündeten wie auch Drittstaaten wie die Ukraine ausstatten sollen, um Ziele tief in Russland treffen zu können.

Was auffällt, ist die besondere Unterwürfigkeit des SPD-Ministers gegenüber den USA, einem Land, das aktuell einen völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskrieg gegen den Iran führt und unter US-Präsident Donald Trump Nachbarländern mit der Annexion droht. Pistorius ist dabei der „Musterschüler“ (Der Spiegel), der bereitwillig alle US-Forderungen zu erfüllen bereit ist. Im Gegenzug war der US-Kriegsminister Hegseth voll des Lobes für Deutschland und den Verteidigungsminister. Und Pistorius jubilierte:

„Ich habe kein kritisches Wort zu Deutschland gehört, überhaupt keins. Im Gegenteil: viel Anerkennung in den verschiedenen Bereichen und auch Dankbarkeit für die Rolle, die wir in Europa übernehmen.“

Im Rahmen der NATO-3.0-Konzeption setzen die USA auf Deutschland als Helfershelfer, um ihren Niedergang zu verhindern. Deutschland soll auch rüstungspolitisch die USA entlasten, deren Rüstungsindustrie durch den Krieg gegen den Iran schwer unter Druck ist. Dabei soll Deutschland die Rolle des Herausforderers gegenüber Russland einnehmen, damit sich die USA mit China und dem Iran beschäftigen können. Die SPD ist die Speerspitze, um die Forderungen aus den USA zu erfüllen.

Deutschland soll die Kriege der USA in Europa führen. Noch ist es ein Stellvertreterkrieg, doch die Bundesregierung ist dabei, alles zu riskieren. Eine Verweigerung wie zu Zeiten des Irak-Krieges durch SPD-Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder gilt den SPD-Granden von heute als Verrat. Insbesondere Verteidigungsminister Pistorius steht Gewehr bei Fuß.

Unter den Bus – und stolz darauf

Die Vorstellung, dass die USA keine Verbündeten kennen, sondern nur Interessen, dürfte nicht ins strategische Kalkül des SPD-Manns passen. Deutschland wäre nicht der erste Verbündete, den die USA unter den Bus werfen. Saudi-Arabien könnte aktuell darüber Zeugnis ablegen.

Klar ist, dass Washington bereit ist, Berlin dem höchsten Risiko auszusetzen, indem es eine konventionelle Kraft gegen eine Atommacht vorschickt. Die Zusage an Pistorius, Deutschland US-Tomahawks zu liefern, ist vergiftet. Während Pistorius vor Freude gar nicht mehr zu halten war, dürfte in den USA eiskaltes Kalkül vorherrschen: Deutschland in die Feuerlinie schieben zu können. Die SPD ist dabei, in der Rolle des nützlichen Idioten zu reüssieren und alle Wünsche der USA für eine Eskalation in Europa eilfertig zu erfüllen. Welch ein Absturz.

Originalbeitrag NachDenkSeiten

The German parliament’s recognition of its country’s historical responsibility towards Ukraine marks a significant reassessment of a post-war political tradition that frequently placed Moscow at the centre of reconciliation over Nazi atrocities committed across the Soviet Union.

Germany’s Bundestag has formally recognised the country’s particular historical responsibility towards Ukraine for atrocities committed during the Nazi occupation, adopting parliamentary resolutions commemorating the 85th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre near Kyiv.

The decision, taken on 9 October, has implications beyond historical remembrance. For decades, Germany’s responsibility for the destruction inflicted on the Soviet Union during the Second World War was frequently interpreted through its relationship with Russia. Moscow occupied a privileged position in German efforts at reconciliation, although some of the Nazi occupation’s worst atrocities took place in territories belonging to present-day Ukraine and Belarus.

The Bundestag’s parliamentary debate and resolutions reflect a different emphasis. Germany’s historical obligations are now being connected explicitly to Ukraine’s sovereignty and its defence against Russia’s invasion, challenging an interpretation of the past that had long influenced Berlin’s approach towards Moscow.

How Russia became the principal beneficiary of German historical responsibility

Following German reunification, reconciliation with Russia became a central element of Berlin’s eastern policy. The Soviet Union’s immense wartime losses, officially estimated at approximately 27 million people, were frequently invoked to explain Germany’s special obligation to maintain constructive relations with Moscow.

That historical argument became intertwined with political and economic considerations, contributing to the belief that Russia should remain closely integrated into Europe’s security and economic arrangements, even as relations with its neighbours deteriorated.

The difficulty lay in the frequent conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany invaded a multinational state, not the present-day Russian Federation. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Jews and numerous other peoples suffered under an occupation whose policies included mass murder, starvation, deportation and the systematic destruction of communities.

Ukraine was among the principal territories where the German war of annihilation unfolded. The Holocaust by bullets, the destruction of entire settlements, the exploitation of occupied agricultural regions and the deportation of civilians for forced labour were central features of Nazi rule there.

Nevertheless, German political discourse often approached this history primarily through the framework of German-Russian reconciliation. The suffering of Ukraine and Belarus was acknowledged, but neither country occupied a comparable position in Berlin’s strategic thinking.

This imbalance has been examined by German scholars of foreign policy, who have argued that the historical justification for rapprochement with Russia sometimes obscured the distinct wartime experiences of other former Soviet republics.

Babyn Yar and the geography of Nazi extermination

The anniversary of Babyn Yar provides a particularly direct illustration of the historical problem.

On 29 and 30 September 1941, German SS and police units, with assistance from local collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women and children in a ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was among the largest single mass shootings of the Holocaust.

Killings continued at the site throughout the German occupation. Approximately 100,000 people were murdered there, including Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and other civilians persecuted by the Nazi authorities.

Babyn Yar was not an isolated atrocity. Similar mass executions occurred across occupied Ukraine, while millions of people suffered under German military occupation. The country’s experience formed a substantial part of the wider catastrophe conventionally remembered in Germany as the war against the Soviet Union.

The geographical distinction matters because the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 did not transfer the historical experiences of its constituent peoples exclusively to Russia. Nor did Moscow’s position as the principal diplomatic successor to the USSR confer ownership of their wartime suffering.

Recognition of Ukraine’s separate experience therefore requires more than acknowledging the location of Nazi crimes. It involves reconsidering the political assumptions that allowed Russia to become Germany’s principal partner in commemorating a history shared by several nations.

Historical responsibility acquires a contemporary meaning

In its resolution on the Babyn Yar anniversary, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU and its Social Democratic coalition partner explicitly connected remembrance of Nazi crimes with Germany’s present obligations towards Ukraine.

The document declares that responsibility for German atrocities does not end with commemorating their victims. It requires opposition to antisemitism, racism, historical revisionism and imperialist violence.

The parliamentary motion calls for continued political, economic, financial, humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine, together with support for its European integration and efforts to secure the return of children transferred to Russia.

The opposition Greens separately submitted a resolution centred on Germany’s historical responsibility towards Ukraine, advocating greater attention to the German occupation in historical education, research and cooperation between memorial institutions.

The development does not mean that Germany has only now recognised Ukrainian victims of Nazi persecution. German officials have previously acknowledged responsibility towards Ukraine alongside Russia and Belarus. In 2016, then foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier explicitly referred to the suffering of all three countries in an address marking the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

What has changed is the political weight attached to that recognition. The historical relationship with Moscow can no longer be treated as the principal expression of Germany’s obligations arising from the war, particularly when Russia is conducting a war of territorial conquest against another country devastated by Nazi aggression.

The consequences for German policy towards Moscow

The reassessment also exposes a contradiction in Germany’s earlier Russia policy.

Historical responsibility was among the arguments used to defend engagement with Moscow, including economic cooperation and efforts to accommodate Russian security concerns. Such reasoning remained influential even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The Nord Stream pipeline projects exemplified the wider policy of maintaining substantial economic ties with Russia despite objections from Ukraine and several Central and Eastern European governments. Those projects had commercial and geopolitical motivations, but they developed within a political culture in which reconciliation with Moscow carried particular historical significance.

Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 fundamentally undermined that approach. Germany subsequently expanded military assistance to Ukraine, while President Steinmeier acknowledged serious errors in his previous assessment of relations with Moscow.

The Bundestag’s latest resolution adds a historical dimension to that policy correction. Rather than regarding restraint towards Russia as the principal lesson of Germany’s wartime conduct, parliament has articulated a responsibility to assist Ukraine in preserving its independence.

The two positions are not necessarily incompatible as matters of historical remembrance. Germany retains an obligation to commemorate Russian victims of Nazism, just as it does Ukrainian, Belarusian and other victims. The distinction concerns whether responsibility for past atrocities should influence contemporary policy towards the Russian state when that state itself is violating another nation’s sovereignty.

That question has become increasingly important as German political parties debate the duration and extent of military assistance to Kyiv. Calls for renewed accommodation with Moscow continue to feature in domestic politics, including among those opposed to further weapons deliveries.

The Bundestag’s recognition of Ukraine’s particular historical experience does not resolve those disputes or establish a new military commitment. It does, however, challenge one of the historical arguments that shaped Germany’s previous relationship with Russia.

The significance of the Babyn Yar anniversary therefore extends beyond the commemoration of crimes committed in 1941. It concerns a belated adjustment in Germany’s understanding of where its wartime responsibilities lie, and the extent to which those responsibilities should inform its conduct towards Ukraine today.

Every day is scary in Gaza; Trump's Board of Peace makes the future scarier ■ Palestinian killed in West Bank ■ Jewish supremacist parties surge in Israel ■ Hooray for Navi Pillay!

El exanalista de la CIA especializado en Rusia, George Beebe, ha lanzado una advertencia que las cancillerías europeas pretenden ignorar: Kiev está perdiendo la guerra, y los líderes occidentales, incapaces de admitir el fracaso de su estrategia, podrían convertir la derrota en una catástrofe nuclear.

Únete a nosotros en Telegram , X y VK .

Escríbenos: info@strategic-culture.su

George Beebe no es un adversario declarado de Occidente. Exanalista de la CIA especializado en Rusia y actual director de estrategia global del Instituto Quincy, conoce la situación rusa desde dentro. Su análisis, publicado por Greater Eurasia, merece aún más atención porque proviene de una fuente incuestionablemente sesgada a favor de Moscú.

Su diagnóstico es inequívoco: la narrativa oficial de una Rusia «estratégicamente derrotada» se está desmoronando sobre el terreno. El ejército ucraniano se encuentra bajo una presión creciente, especialmente por la campaña aérea rusa. Esta realidad militar crea un doble problema para los gobiernos europeos: no solo su estrategia se está volviendo insostenible, sino que además está generando consecuencias políticas internas cada vez más graves.

George Beebe es categórico: una guerra convencional directa entre Europa y Rusia pondría al descubierto profundas debilidades estructurales. Los países europeos carecen de fuerzas terrestres suficientes y presentan importantes deficiencias en logística, transporte, defensa aérea e inteligencia en el campo de batalla. La mayor parte de la infraestructura militar europea depende de Estados Unidos, especialmente en materia de inteligencia y selección de objetivos.

«Si Estados Unidos se mantuviera al margen de una guerra convencional europea con Rusia, Europa se enfrentaría a importantes desventajas militares. Sin embargo, si Estados Unidos interviniera directamente, el peligro sería fundamentalmente diferente, ya que un conflicto directo entre la OTAN y Rusia podría convertirse rápidamente en nuclear. Un conflicto de este tipo sería extraordinariamente destructivo y no tendría vencedor».

Esta ecuación es ineludible: Europa no puede defenderse sola ni soportar las consecuencias de una intervención estadounidense. Está atrapada por su propia dependencia.

El núcleo del análisis de George Beebe reside en lo que él denomina la «trampa rusa»: un sesgo cognitivo occidental que transforma una espiral de seguridad en una profecía autocumplida.

Occidente considera a Rusia una potencia expansionista que debe ser contenida mediante una creciente presión militar. Pero si el conflicto es en realidad una espiral de escalada donde cada bando interpreta las acciones del otro como una amenaza, entonces una mayor presión produce mecánicamente una mayor escalada. Más armas, más despliegues, una retórica más agresiva conducen a respuestas rusas, que a su vez exigen más medidas occidentales.

«El peligro reside en que una política occidental destinada a disuadir a Rusia en realidad exacerbe el problema de seguridad subyacente».

geopoliticarugiente.com

By Philip GIRALDI

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The United States competes with Israel for the “Most Hated” Distinction

It was another horrific week in Washington with President Donald Trump actually succeeding in coming out with an apparently improvised comment that equaled or maybe even exceeded his ghastly performance at the United Nations where he speculated over whether he should “annihilate” Iran and drive it back into the Stone Age. It would seem that ninety plus million dead Persians would satisfy Donald’s blood lust when it comes to killing innocent civilians, but the latest musing by our beloved leader had him addressing a campaign rally in Nebraska, where he appeared to be declaring that he might well consider wanting to continue the war against Iran even if the price to pay from the Iranians were to be retaliation consisting of eliminating some of our cities. He said “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe, and it’s going to be over with very soon. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.”

Trump clearly saw the whole thing as some kind of quid pro quo expecting that even Californians would consider the price to pay worth it if it kept Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but he failed to make any reasonable connection between the nonexistent weapon and the good to come out of annihilation of millions of Americans. The irony is, of course, that since Iran has no nukes and nor is it even developing that resource, a point generally made by US intelligence, it could not in any event destroy either or both of the West Coast cities. But then again, Trump is not given much to deep thinking and what he tends to say is what is roiling around among the three brain cells that might actually be functioning in his oversize head at any moment.

Interestingly, the video recording the gathering shows the Nebraska crowd of MAGA supporters cheering the exchange, seemingly unaware that the war never needed to be fought, that Iran was not and is not any military threat to the United States, and that the whole bloody thing could be ended by Trump repeating his frequent declaration of “victory” before ordering all the troops home and putting an end to it. That way no one “loses” and no more innocents have to die but somehow that does not appear to be an option circulating in the White House.

In the wake of the comment, both California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Diego Republican Mayor Todd Gloria called out President Trump for his willing to see Americans die in large numbers due to bad policies coming out of Washington. Newsom wrote on social media how “After sending the National Guard to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Gloria added “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

The White House inevitably pushed back in support of Trump’s comments, with communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media how “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.” Interestingly, Trump’s communications director, who interpreted the comment backwards by claiming falsely that the president had “stopped” an Iranian nuke, was incapable of understanding what Trump actually said and instead invented what he might have been wanting to say. All of which explains why the White House is as dysfunctional as it is.

Beyond that, something at least veering towards a bit of constructive policy did take place on September 30^th when the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq, which it has been de facto occupying for the past 23 years. The withdrawal, which took place after multiple requests by the Iraqi government, appears to be due to the desire to move US troops out of the effective range of some of the Iranian short range-missiles and drones which could easily reach Iraq. The soldiers and airmen will be moving to next door Jordan which means they will still be near enough to intervene if the Iraqis become naughty and do anything that is not perceived as being in American “interests.”

Some will recall that back in January 2020, then President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qasim Soleimani who had just landed in Baghdad Airport to join in peace talks between his country and the Iraqis. Peace talks are not the sort of thing that Trumpists are good at, particularly if they involve actual or potential enemies of Israel, so Soleimani had to be stopped. The Iraqis are certainly aware that the departure of US soldiers does not mean an end to American intervention, which can indeed be at the point of a gun but which might also be through sanctions and other less kinetic means.

All of which is to suggest that the game is not over yet and Trump is quite capable of doing something very stupid in an attempt to salvage whatever remains from his reputation. What is behind a lot of this nonsense is the evil circle involving Trump himself and his good friends in Israel. Make no mistake that Israel is dedicated to becoming “Greater Israel” while also eliminating its potential enemies in Asia and Africa. And, unlike Iran, it is actually nuclear armed thanks to the material and technology that it stole from the United States before killing President John F Kennedy who tried to stop them. And the witless Donald will do everything in his power to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be reelected, be it because he is being blackmailed or because he loves the man so much. Be that as it may, Trump will cooperate fully with Netanyahu or whoever succeeds him, no matter what. So too will there be the usual consensus on doing everything to please the Jewish state coming from the usual crowd of Israel firsters in Congress, in the mainstream media and among the Foundations that have come to rely on the money and “respect” that comes from inhabiting the same space as those who are beloved by Zion.

For those who have not yet aware of just how deeply the Zionist activists have inserted themselves in the body politic, I would greatly recommend an article put out by the highly respectable Quincy Institute that just appeared this past week written by Kelley Vlahos, the Editor in Chief of Responsible Statecraft. It provides the sordid details of how the Israel Lobby backed up by Jewish billionaires has been able to create and then subvert a conservative movement that originally appeared to support American interests to make them instead do Israel’s bidding. She describes how “The annual confab, [NatCon 2026] ostensibly launched for American conservatives in 2019, is in Jerusalem this week, largely focused on shoring up US support for the Jewish state.” If Israel is successful, it will bring about a proposed US-Israeli integration at the Pentagon and take its place as a “partner” of the United States in defense matters as well as in foreign policy. Make no mistake, Israel will bleed us dry and then discard our carcass without even a backward glance. It will be the end of our country. President Donald J Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have done much to move this process along and it is to them and the cowards in Congress and the media that we the owe the deep hole that we as a once-upon-a-time proud and independent people will soon find ourselves in.

Original article:  www.unz.com

The more technology distances the actor, the more responsibility must increase.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

From person to target

What becomes of humanity when technology becomes capable of recognising, classifying, tracking and ultimately killing human beings without those carrying out the strikes ever having seen them? My friend Mohammad Reza Dehshiri asked this very question, and his answer is a powerful one. The danger, he writes, is not artificial intelligence but artificial inhumanity – that is, the possibility that machines will become more accurate precisely as humans cease to feel responsible for what those machines do in their name.

With this article, I am launching a series that takes Dehshiri’s analysis as its starting point and attempts to take it further. If the problem is ‘artificial inhumanity’, the answer cannot lie in a ‘more ethical’ AI, as if ethics were a module to be installed as an afterthought to a system that has already been designed. We need to reclaim a category that technological jargon has rendered almost unmentionable: human intelligence, understood not as a remnant to be protected amidst the complexities of automation, but as a form of knowledge with its own distinct characteristics, which no increase in computing power can replace.

I shall call it Human Intelligence, and the ambiguity is deliberate. In intelligence service jargon, HUMINT refers to the oldest of the intelligence disciplines: that which relies on people, sources, languages and the patient frequenting of places. In philosophical terminology, the expression denotes the faculty of understanding. The thesis of this first contribution is that these two meanings now converge, and that their convergence has geopolitical implications that extend far beyond the debate on the ethics of weaponry.

We can describe the operational chain of contemporary warfare in seven stages: detect, identify, classify, predict, prioritise, target, strike. Each link can be technically refined without the sequence, taken as a whole, being morally refined. The resulting phenomenon is called the ‘datafication of human life’: the individual reduced to an identity, a location, a behavioural pattern, a threat score.

This is no abstraction. In April 2024, an investigation by Yuval Abraham for +972 Magazine and Local Call described ‘Lavender’, a system used by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza to assign tens of thousands of people a probability of affiliation with armed groups. According to internal sources cited in the investigation, the human verification of each name often amounted to no more than twenty seconds – the time needed to ascertain that the target was male. The Israeli Defence Forces have disputed this account and described Lavender as a database designed to support analysts. Even if one accepts the official version, however, the crux of the matter remains: a human operator was present, and their presence was not sufficient to transform the system’s recommendation into a judgement.

Cognitive psychology has a name for this phenomenon, automation bias: the tendency of those working with an automated system to treat its recommendations as a substitute for their own verification, and to fail to seek out the information that might contradict them. Back in 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum – who had built one of the first conversational programmes in history – already distinguished between the ability to calculate and the ability to judge, and argued that there are tasks that should not be entrusted to a computer even if the computer were capable of performing them. Half a century on, this distinction has become even more pressing. Computation works on what has already been translated into data. Judgement must decide whether that translation has been faithful.

Dehshiri drives the point home with four distinctions: technical precision is not ethical precision; accuracy is not justice; automation is not responsibility; technological superiority is not moral superiority. I would add a fifth, of an epistemic nature, upon which the others depend: correlation is not understanding. A machine-learning system recognises statistical patterns in a dataset. It does not know what a school is, because it does not know what a child is, and it does not even know that it does not know this.

L’iraniano cites an interesting case study: On 28 February 2026, in the early hours of the war, the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province, was struck several times during school hours. The figures provided by the Iranian authorities range between 150 and 175 deaths, the vast majority of whom were girls, along with dozens of teachers and a few parents; the district prosecutor put the final death toll at 156. Washington has never directly acknowledged its responsibility nor published the findings of the Pentagon’s investigation. Amnesty International has described the incident, at best, as a serious intelligence failure.

There is one detail, revealed by satellite imagery, which shifts the analysis from the moral to the factual plane. According to Western media, the school stood next to a naval base belonging to the Revolutionary Guards and had previously formed part of it; among the explanations circulating in US circles is that of out-of-date targeting data. If this hypothesis were confirmed, Minab would not be a case of a machine making a mistake, but of a database that had ceased to correspond to reality. The building had changed. The data had not.

No classification algorithm, however sophisticated, can detect that an old military building has become a school if no one has recorded the change. Everyone living in Minab knew this: the parents who took their daughters to school every morning, the schoolbus driver, the teachers. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that HUMINT gathers and that remote warfare tends to regard as superfluous, because it is slow, costly and difficult to scale. Based on publicly available sources, US responsibility appears highly probable, whilst the exact circumstances remain unclear and confidence on this point is low: a database error, a classification error, or a conscious acceptance of the risk. The three hypotheses, however, all converge on the same question. Who, prior to the strike, checked whether there were people in that building?

Beyond ‘human-in-the-loop’

The international debate has long been content with the principle of human-in-the-loop, whereby a human being is part of the decision-making loop.

This formula is insufficient: a person may be present in the loop yet merely rubber-stamp the algorithm’s recommendation. He proposes replacing it with a more demanding principle, which he calls humanity-in-command: the effective ability to question, reject, override and halt the automated process.

The history of the Cold War offers two examples that clarify what this means in practice. On 26 September 1983, the Soviet early-warning system Oko signalled the launch of five ballistic missiles from the United States. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, dismissed the alarm as a false alarm and did not report it as an ongoing attack, reasoning that a first American strike would never consist of just five missiles. He was right: the satellite had mistaken the sun’s reflection off the clouds for missile launches. Twenty-one years earlier, on 27 October 1962, in the Caribbean Sea, the Soviet submarine B-59, isolated and under fire from signal depth charges, was on the verge of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo. The launch required the consent of the three senior officers on board, and Vasily Arkhipov refused to give it.

In neither case did the man approve a recommendation from the system. He contradicted it. And he did not do so because he had more data: indeed, the data were the problem. He did so because he knew how to ask himself a question that no procedure required him to ask, namely whether what he was seeing made sense in the context of everything else he knew about the world. Petrov was familiar with American nuclear doctrine; Archipov knew the difference between an attack and a threat. It is this ability to compare the signal with the bigger picture, the detail with what is plausible, that I call Human Intelligence. It is worth noting that the Dena was sunk by a submarine. We do not know what its officers were asked, nor what scope they had for judgement.

This proposal needs to be clarified, as there is a risk of reducing it to a generic humanistic appeal. Human Intelligence, as I understand it, is structured across three distinct levels, each of which marks a structural – rather than contingent – limit of artificial intelligence.

The first level is epistemic. The scholastic tradition distinguished between intellectus, the act by which the mind immediately grasps a truth, and ratio, the discursive process of moving from one element to another: for Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 79, a. 8), the two are not distinct faculties but aspects of a single intellect, in which reasoning begins with an understanding and returns to an understanding. Current machine learning systems realise a ratio of unprecedented power, capable of inferring, combining and predicting on scales inaccessible to the human mind. They lack the aspect of intellectus, that is, a grasp of the meaning of what they process. This is a philosophical thesis and must be presented as such, but it has precise practical consequences: a system devoid of understanding cannot know when its own model of the world has become false.

The second aspect is practical. Prudentia, in the Thomist definition, is right reason applied to action, and its specific task consists in applying the universal principle to the particular case. The machine generalises: its value lies in mapping the individual case back to a class. Prudence does the opposite, because it must recognise what, in this particular case, falls outside the class. War, which is the realm of the singular and the unforeseen, is the arena where this difference carries the most weight. The Vatican’s Antiqua et nova note of January 2025 took up this line of thought, emphasising the embodied and relational nature of human intelligence and its irreducibility to a mere processing function.

The third level is relational, and it is here that philosophical meaning meets that of the intelligence services. Sherman Kent, who effectively founded the field of intelligence studies in the post-war United States, defined it first and foremost as knowledge, even before organising or activity. HUMINT is the form of this knowledge that passes through the other as a person: someone who speaks their language, knows their customs, can read a neighbourhood, and can distinguish a festival from a rally. Over the last three decades, the major powers have progressively shifted resources towards technical disciplines, from signals intelligence to satellite surveillance, right through to data fusion platforms. Minab illustrates the cost of this imbalance.

None of this implies a rejection of technology. Human Intelligence does not stand in opposition to AI in the same way that a manual stands in opposition to a mechanic. It establishes a hierarchy: the algorithm as a tool subservient to a judgement it cannot produce on its own. And from this it derives a principle, formulated by Dehshiri, which deserves to become an operational criterion: the more technology distances the actor from the consequences of their own actions, the more the conscious responsibility of the decision-maker must increase, not decrease.

Geopolitically speaking

So far, the issue might seem to be one of moral philosophy. It is not merely that. The distribution of algorithmic warfare capability is a distribution of power, and the rules governing it will be written – if they are written at all – by those with an interest in limiting them as little as possible.

The state of international law confirms this. The group of government experts established under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has been discussing lethal autonomous weapons systems since 2017 without having reached a binding instrument. In November 2023, the United States promoted a political declaration on the responsible military use of AI, which is by definition non-binding; in December of the same year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first resolution dedicated to these systems, whilst the International Committee of the Red Cross has been calling since 2021 for a ban on unpredictable autonomous systems and those designed to target human beings. In June 2024, speaking at the G7 summit in Borgo Egnazia, Pope Francis called for no machine ever to be placed in a position to decide on a person’s life. The gap between these positions and the reality on the battlefields of 2026 is measured in casualties.

There is also a deeper asymmetry. Those who control the data decide who is a target, and the victims of algorithmic warfare are largely found outside the West: in Gaza, Iran, the Sahel and Yemen. For states that do not produce the platforms or control their databases, human intelligence thus becomes a matter of sovereignty. A country that maintains linguistic expertise, regional knowledge and human intelligence networks retains its autonomy of judgement; a country that entrusts its worldview to systems designed elsewhere – often by private companies – surrenders it along with its data. In an order tending towards multipolarity, this distinction will separate the actors who judge from those who are judged.

This leads to a concrete proposal, which I shall develop in future articles. Alongside the general principle of meaningful human oversight, international humanitarian law could codify a specific obligation for human verification of the civil status of every fixed infrastructure included on a list of targets, with an expiry date beyond which the information becomes invalid and must be renewed using direct sources. This is a minimum standard. Applied to Minab, it would have required someone to ask whether that building was still what the records stated it to be.

Technology can determine how a weapon reaches its target, whilst it is up to humanity to decide whether that target should be struck. The question underlying all this is who, in practical terms, exercises that humanity, with what tools of knowledge and within which institutions. In Minab, someone should have known that there was a school there. The fact that nobody knew, or that nobody asked, is the point from which we must start again.

Il controllo iraniano sui passaggi strategici di Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb si trasforma in un’arma economica capace di influenzare i prezzi dell’energia, alimentare l’inflazione e condizionare le decisioni della Federal Reserve. Teheran dimostra così che la pressione militare e il controllo delle rotte petrolifere possono mettere in difficoltà Washington ben oltre il campo di battaglia.

Segue nostro Telegram.

Nei giorni scorsi, Kpler ha quantificato in almeno 16,5 milioni di barili al giorno l’ammontare medio raggiunto nel mese di settembre dalle esportazioni di petrolio dalla regione del Golfo, nell’ambito di graduale ritorno dei flussi sui livelli prebellici. Una quota significativa dell’output è transitata attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz, che la scorsa settimana ha registrato volumi medi di greggio in uscita superiori ai 14 milioni di barili al giorno segando un incremento di oltre il 210% rispetto al minimo di circa 4,5 milioni di barili giornalieri di media toccato nel mese di marzo.

Un risultato strabiliante, ascritto generalmente al danneggiamento e/o distruzione dei radar e dei sistemi di comunicazione iraniani situati nelle zone costiere ad opera delle forze statunitensi. Le operazioni di “bonifica” hanno posto le basi per l’instaurazione di un corridoio di navigazione a doppio senso a ridosso delle coste dell’Oman, di cui i mercantili si sono serviti per entrare nel Golfo Persico, imbarcare petrolio, riattraversare lo Stretto e trasferire il carico su navi in attesa al di fuori del passaggio marittimo, sotto la supervisione della Us Navy.

Di questa “rotta sicura” si è avvalsa anche l’Arabia Saudita, specialmente in seguito al danneggiamento in più punti dell’oleodotto East-West ad opera delle milizie irachene. La conduttura aveva assicurato a Riyadh la possibilità di convogliare parte rilevante (4-5 milioni di barili al giorno) della produzione petrolifera verso il porto di Yanbu, sul Mar Rosso, così da aggirare lo Stretto di Hormuz.

L’Iran, di contro, è stato tagliato fuori dal mercato petrolifero globale dal blocco navale statunitense, che accentua le pressioni economiche sulla Repubblica Islamica esercitate dalle sanzioni annunciate lo scorso agosto dal segretario al Tesoro Bessent.

La Repubblica Islamica, hanno concluso gran parte degli analisti, stava rapidamente perdendo il controllo sullo Stretto di Hormuz.

Lo scenario è cambiato radicalmente a partire dal 28 settembre, quando gli iraniani hanno ripreso le operazioni offensive contro le petroliere che si accingevano ad attraversare lo Stretto di Hormuz senza autorizzazione di Teheran. Kpler ha documentato almeno sette attacchi contro navi mercantili, di cui quattro avevano effettuato due o più viaggi di andata e ritorno attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz a partire da giugno. Nel novero degli obiettivi figurano due Very Large Crude Carrier (Vlcc) gestite dalla Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, in grado di trasportare fino a due milioni di barili di petrolio.

Il 3 ottobre, la divisione navale dei Pasdaran ha lanciato un chiaro avvertimento alle navi intenzionate a percorrere il corridoio allestito dagli Stati Uniti, minacciando di prenderle di mira e distruggerle. «Non fidatevi della Marina statunitense, non utilizzate assolutamente il corridoio meridionale e non mettete a rischio la vostra vita», recitava il messaggio radio trasmesso dalle Guardie Rivoluzionarie su un canale pubblico comunemente impiegato per la navigazione commerciale. Secondo gli specialisti, gli attacchi iraniani starebbero già producendo un impatto negativo, con i primi segnali di un rallentamento dei flussi petroliferi.

La passività con cui Teheran ha assistito alla ripresa dei flussi petroliferi in uscita dal Golfo Persico era quindi frutto di una preciso calcolo politico. Una strozzatura prolungata dell’offerta petrolifera danneggia non soltanto i nemici della Repubblica Islamica, ma anche un grande importatore di idrocarburi alleato come la Cina e la vasta platea di Paesi neutrali che gli iraniani non hanno alcun interesse a inimicarsi.

La riattivazione del traffico attraverso quel cruciale braccio di mare non è per di più coinciso con un crollo delle quotazioni internazionali di petrolio, gas e derivati, i cui prezzi sono rimasti mediamente del 50% più alti rispetto ai livelli pre-bellici. Costi di trasporto elevati (i broker navali stimano che i produttori di petrolio del Golfo Persico sborsino tra i 30 e i 40 milioni di dollari per un viaggio di andata e ritorno attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz), rincaro delle polizze assicurative, prolungamento dei tempi di riparazione e/o ricostruzione degli impianti energetici del Golfo Persico danneggiati e/o distrutti nell’ambito del conflitto e insufficiente capacità di raffinazione all’interno del sistema globale hanno mantenuto i valori dell’energia sufficientemente alta da imporre conseguenze molto pesanti all’economia globale nel suo complesso e in particolare agli Stati Uniti. Paese in cui i riscaldamenti domestici, i mezzi agricoli, i treni e i camion che percorrono oltre 400 miliardi di miglia ogni anno per trasportare il 73% circa di tutte le merci sono alimentati a diesel. Nella settimana compresa tra il 21 e il 28 settembre, il prezzo del diesel è salito a 6,53 dollari, a fronte dei 3,76 registrati nei giorni antecedenti all’attacco israelo-statunitense contro l’Iran.

Si tratta di un aumento di circa il 74%, che pesa soprattutto sugli agricoltori, chiamati proprio in questo periodo di raccolto a fare maggiore impiego di trattori e mietitrebbie. Devono anche prepararsi alla stagione della semina, accumulando fertilizzanti che provengono in larga parte proprio dalla regione del Golfo Persico. A partire dall’urea, derivato petrolifero il cui prezzo è aumentato dell’80% soltanto tra marzo e aprile.

Anche le compagnie aeree risentono pesantemente dell’instabilità nel quadrante del Golfo, perché le loro flotte consumano carburante speciale derivato dal petrolio. Dopo lo scoppio della guerra, i prezzi del carburante per aerei sono pressoché raddoppiati.

L’inflazione è conseguentemente aumentata, anche a causa del concomitante, frenetico attivismo di Ansarallah. Nell’arco di pochi giorni, la compagine yemenita alleata di Teheran ha strappato al governo internazionalmente riconosciuto di Sana’a il controllo delle aree costiere che si affacciano sullo Stretto di Bab el-Mandeb, imposto il blocco dei porti sauditi, preso di mira petroliere riconducibili al regno e colpito, di concerto con le milizie sciite irachene, il cruciale oleodotto East-West in più punti rendendolo inutilizzabile per quasi due settimane.

L’azzeramento provvisorio dell’export petrolifero saudita si è istantaneamente riverberato sui prezzi internazionali del greggio.

Segno che, controllando i due cruciali punti di strozzatura di Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb, l’Iran e i suoi alleati regionali esercitano una notevole capacità di influenza sulla quotazione del petrolio e, a ricasco, sulle politiche monetarie di gran parte dei Paesi del mondo. A partire proprio dagli Stati Uniti.

Lo ha sottolineato di recente il presidente del Parlamento iraniano Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, attraverso un sottilissimo post sul suo profilo X in cui presentava versione opportunamente ritoccata dell’equazione elaborata nel 1993 dall’economista di Stanford John Taylor e affermatasi rapidamente come una delle formule di riferimento per le Banche Centrali in materia di determinazione dei tassi di interesse.

Nello specifico, l’equazione mette in relazione il tasso di interesse sui titoli di Stato a dieci anni con l’andamento dell’inflazione e l’output gap, raccomandando di innalzare i tassi di interesse quando l’inflazione supera l’obiettivo del 2% e/o la produzione economica eccede il suo potenziale.

La logica è elementare: tassi di interesse più alti rendono più costoso indebitarsi. Quando il costo del credito aumenta, privati ​​e aziende riducono la propria propensione all’indebitamento e riducono la spesa, raffreddando così la dinamica dei prezzi. Ghalibaf ha integrato a questi dati già ricompresi nell’equazione di Taylor due nuove variabili, rappresentate dallo Stretto di Hormuz (denominato “SOH”) e da quello di Bab el-Mandeb (denominato “BM”) .

Nella “Stratis Taylor Rule” – i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*) + α(SOH−SOH*) + β(BEM−BEM*), α,β > 0 – coniata da Ghalibaf, i tassi di interesse statunitensi crescono proporzionalmente alla gravità dell’interruzione dei traffici di idrocarburi in questi due nevralgici punti di strozzatura. Alla formula, il presidente del Parlamento iraniano ha accluso un commento: «vediamo se un rialzo dei tassi contribuirà a riaprire lo Stretto di Hormuz o a produrre una singolo barile di petrolio in più. Non si possono risolvere i problemi di un punto di strozzatura con 25 punti base aggiuntivi».

Tradotto: un innalzamento dei tassi di interesse ad opera della Federal Reserve non garantisce la riapertura dei due stretti, né l’aumento dell’offerta di petrolio. In compenso, chi controlla Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb influisce indirettamente sulla determinazione dei tassi di interesse negli Stati Uniti in quanto titolare della prerogativa di dettare tempi e modi del traffico marittimo. E, quindi, di aumentare discrezionalmente i prezzi petroliferi. Ovvero di far lievitare l’inflazione.

Le dinamiche belliche che di recente hanno interessato la regione del Golfo Persico avvalorano la tesi di Ghalibaf. Nei dieci giorni antecedenti al 16 settembre, data in cui il direttivo della Federal Reserve si sarebbe pronunciato in materia di tassi, gli iraniani hanno preso di mira alcune petroliere nei pressi dello Stretto di Hormuz, mentre Ansarallah ha bersagliato la raffineria saudita di Jizan e assunto il controllo della costa prospiciente lo stretto di Bab el-Mandeb. Parallelamente, uno sciame di droni lanciato dalle milizie sciite irachene ha colpito l’oleodotto East-West, sospingendo il prezzo del petrolio al di sopra della soglia critica dei 100 dollari per barile. Un copione sostanzialmente analogo era andato in scena poche ore prima della riunione del board della Federal Reserve di fine luglio, quando alcuni missili lanciati da Ansarallah avevano centrato due petroliere saudite facendo anche in quel caso salire il prezzo petrolio sopra i 100 dollari.

Il prossimo vertice del direttivo della Federal Reserve è previsto per il 28 ottobre. Si tratta di una data da tenere d’occhio, visti i precedenti.

Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.

On September 24, 2026, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed Directive No. 2631-r approving the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences in the Russian Federation through 2030 and in the Long Term through 2036 (the Concept). The full text of the document is available here. At a meeting with his deputy prime ministers on September 28, Mishustin explained that the document is meant to “ensure the active application of fundamental research in high-priority, high-tech fields.” In his words, this “will open up additional opportunities not only for industry, medicine, and agriculture, but also for energy, aircraft manufacturing, and the space industry.” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko has been put in charge of overseeing its implementation.

The Concept’s stated goal is “to achieve and strengthen Russia’s position in the mathematical sciences in order to ensure the state’s technological leadership, competitiveness, independence, and security.”

The Concept runs to about twenty pages. It opens with reflections on the role of mathematics in the world, then describes the “current state of affairs” and the tools for achieving its objectives. The main tool is the Program of Fundamental Scientific Research in the Russian Federation for the Long Term (2021–2030), adopted on December 31, 2020, and substantially amended on December 25, 2025 (the Program). In addition, a network of international and regional mathematical centers is expected to play an important role in developing mathematics. The document closes with a table of four indicators under two scenarios: a target scenario and a conservative one.

Negative Growth

If the Concept is to be believed, mathematics in Russia is developing quite normally. There are, admittedly, a few difficulties: “At the same time, unfavorable trends have persisted… In 2020–2024, the number of researchers in the group of scientific specialties 1.1, ‘Mathematics and Mechanics,’ fell by 24.3 percent, including a 20.3 percent drop among holders of advanced degrees. In research training, the share of graduates who defended dissertations among all graduates of PhD programs in field group 01.00.00, ‘Mathematics and Mechanics,’ rose in 2020–2022 (from 10.6 to 17.9 percent), but this growth gave way to a decline in 2023–2024 (to 11.2 percent).”

Apparently, something happened in 2022 that made PhD graduates far less likely to defend their dissertations. But the authors of the Concept have an answer: “The trends described are caused by a combination of factors, including the low level of material support and social guarantees for graduate students, scientists, and faculty, which does not match their actual workload and adversely affects both the quality of teaching and research activity. In addition, access is restricted to scientific and technical information in mathematics and related sciences contained in international citation and analytics databases, including scientific monographs, analytical reviews, and other sources of information.”

The answer is simple: raise salaries and “ensure access.” If such measures were enough to advance Russian mathematics, then it really would be in fine shape. But the Concept warns that unless something changes now, “within the next 10 years the Russian Federation will lose its competitive advantage in training research and teaching personnel in mathematics.” The conservative scenario shows a gradual contraction: mathematicians’ share of all researchers falls from 2.8 percent in 2026 to 1.8 percent by 2036. The Concept admits that unless the salary problem is solved and access is “ensured,” Russian mathematics will shrink by more than a third. So the government had better hurry.

History of Mathematics: The Unwritten Chapters

The Concept includes a section on the glorious traditions of Soviet mathematics. It mentions the November 13, 1986, resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the USSR Council of Ministers On Strengthening Research in Mathematics and Its Applications and Improving the Working and Living Conditions of Scientists. According to the authors of the Concept, implementing this resolution “contributed to steady progress” that has allowed Russia “to maintain world leadership in a number of areas of mathematical research to this day.” True, some problems did arise, but they were successfully overcome: “The Soviet school of mathematics held leading positions in the main areas of the mathematical sciences. The socioeconomic and political upheavals of the late 1980s and the 1990s led to an outflow of scientific personnel abroad and into other sectors of the economy. Nevertheless, the Russian Federation managed to preserve its high potential and global competitiveness in mathematics and related sciences.”

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.

Anyone who remembers the late 1980s will read this with a bitter smile. Three or four years after the 1986 resolution was adopted, the largest exodus of mathematicians in the country’s history began. Many of those who had made the Soviet school of mathematics famous left for Princeton, Berkeley, Paris, Bonn, and Tel Aviv. Today, every Fields Medalist who came out of the Soviet school — Grigory Margulis, Vladimir Drinfeld, Efim Zelmanov, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Okounkov, and Stanislav Smirnov — works abroad. The only Fields Medalist who stayed in Russia, Grigori Perelman (awarded in 2006), has not published any new work in twenty years.

The second historical episode is just as telling. The Concept cites as an example Kolmogorov’s 1957 theorem on representing continuous functions of several variables as superpositions of functions of one variable and addition. According to the Concept’s authors, the theorem “created the theoretical foundation for the effectiveness of neural network architecture.” That is a gross exaggeration. Together with Arnold’s result, Kolmogorov’s theorem settled Hilbert’s 13th problem — a remarkable achievement, but one only indirectly related to neural networks. The real theoretical grounding for neural networks comes from entirely different theorems that appeared much later, in the 1980s. Interest in Kolmogorov’s construction revived only in 2024 with the emergence of the KAN neural network architecture, and its practical value is still an open question.

Yet Soviet and Russian science has made genuine contributions to machine learning. These include Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory and Nesterov’s accelerated method, both widely used in today’s neural networks. Vladimir Vapnik and Yurii Nesterov are both still working — but not in Russia. In 2024, Vapnik received RASA-America’s George Gamow Award. Nesterov, a professor at the University of Louvain, received the Gauss Prize this summer and delivered a special plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Their contributions to machine learning are beyond dispute. Yet for some reason, the Concept points to a decades-old result by Kolmogorov.

Invisible Supercomputers

The section on supercomputers is a frank admission of how far behind Russia has fallen. The best academic machine named in the Concept, Lomonosov-2, no longer appears in the current TOP500 list (as of June 23, 2026). The document says Lomonosov-2 ranks 451st, but that stopped being true long ago: all of the TOP500 data it cites are from 2025 or even earlier and do not reflect the list as it stands today. All of the Russian machines on the TOP500 belong to private companies — Yandex and Sber. The most powerful of them, Chervonenkis, has a peak performance of 29.4 petaflops (ranked 101st). The Concept speaks of the need to develop “Russian computing resources based on open hardware architectures.” This can be read as an admission that modern Nvidia processors are hard to come by in Russia: they are not supplied legally, and gray-market channels are unreliable and cannot meet demand.

Among the countries ahead of Russia on the TOP500 list (Russia has slipped to the bottom of the top 20) is the Netherlands. Listed under the Netherlands are two machines owned by Nebius, the company led by former Yandex head Arkady Volozh: ISEG and ISEG2, with a combined peak performance of about 425 petaflops. By the Concept’s own figures, the five Russian machines on the TOP500 together deliver less than 100 petaflops of peak performance. In other words, Arkady Volozh’s company alone has more computing power than all of Russia’s TOP500 systems combined.

[[socialnetworks]]

The TOP500 is a list of machines (and not all of them, only those whose developers have submitted their systems) ranked by high-precision performance on the Linpack benchmark. It is a good “yardstick” for comparing computing power for climate modeling or numerical solutions to fluid dynamics problems. Neural networks, which the Concept’s authors keep bringing up, run today on low-precision arithmetic, and for such computations the same GPUs deliver orders of magnitude more operations. AI workloads are handled by other machines. The world’s largest AI clusters, owned by xAI, Meta, OpenAI, or Google, do not appear on the TOP500, and neither do the largest Chinese AI clusters. The document invokes the AI race to justify developing Russian supercomputers, but it talks about machines that are only indirectly relevant to that race: they were not built for it.

Among the priority problems listed in the Program is this one: “Differential equations are essential for modeling all physical, technical, or biological processes, from celestial motion to bridge design and interactions between neurons. The central problem in this field remains the global existence of smooth solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes system, which describes the motion of a viscous Newtonian fluid and underlies fluid dynamics. It is also one of the ‘Millennium Prize Problems.’” A team of mathematicians, engineers, and AI agents working on an AI cluster owned by OpenAI has proved the opposite: rather than existing globally, a solution can “blow up” even under a smooth external force. This was a huge step forward in the study of the Navier–Stokes equations. Yet the Concept didn’t even notice these machines (after all, they aren’t on the TOP500): it cares only about classical supercomputers traditionally used for mathematical modeling, and today that is no longer enough.

Just Give Us Access

Several times, almost word for word, the Concept repeats the same formula: Russian scientists must be guaranteed “access… to scientific and technical information… contained in international citation and analytics databases.” Once, it says that this access is “restricted.” By whom, when, and why it was “restricted” is never specified.

But on the whole, mathematicians don’t suffer much from this “restricted access.” Many results are published open access, preprints are posted on arxiv.org, and authors upload their papers (and even monographs) to academic social networks. Colleagues working in the same area also rarely refuse to share their papers with one another.

What Russian mathematicians really do need is legal “access” — but not to papers. Vladimir Arnold wrote: “Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.” One can argue about whether mathematics is part of physics, but the claim that mathematical experiments are cheap no longer holds up: they simply aren’t. What’s more, with the rise of neural networks, mathematics is becoming a very expensive science. The 88 hours of work by 10,000 AI agents searching for a solution to the Navier–Stokes equations, plus another 17 hours spent verifying the results, cost OpenAI (by its own estimate) millions of dollars. And that was just one problem, albeit a great one. This is the kind of “access” Russian mathematicians lack. Russia has no “sovereign” AI clusters comparable in power to OpenAI’s machines — and, as the work of Arkady Volozh’s Nebius shows, it would have them, were it not for the events the Concept never mentions.

The Concept portrays global science as a warehouse to which “access must be ensured,” rather than as a community to take part in: publishing in top journals, attending conferences, working with leading mathematicians from other countries. Yet this is precisely where Russian mathematicians face their biggest problems: they can’t pay open-access publication fees, their coauthors have scattered around the world, a Russian affiliation makes things awkward, and traveling to a conference is risky.

As one of its development tools, the Concept names a network of mathematical centers, above all four “world-class international mathematical centers”: the Steklov Mathematical Institute, the Moscow Center for Fundamental and Applied Mathematics, the Euler International Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg, and the “mathematical center in Akademgorodok” (oddly, not capitalized as a proper name). There is nothing “international” about how these centers are described today. Their mission, according to the Concept’s authors, is “to promote the interests of the Russian school of mathematics worldwide,” not to engage in active collaboration.

The Russian Academy of Sciences is mentioned in the Concept many times and is given a separate section on its “role in the development of the mathematical and related sciences.” There, the Academy is described in the present tense and exclusively with active verbs: it “develops,” “takes into account,” “participates,” “carries out.” Among the Concept’s objectives is “scaling up the system of scientific and methodological guidance” — in other words, expanding the powers of the Academy itself. Universities are barely mentioned.

Yet three of the four “world-class centers” are consortia with universities. The Moscow center includes Moscow State University (its Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, and Research Computing Center) together with two institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Euler Institute’s lead institution is St. Petersburg State University. The Akademgorodok center brings together the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and Novosibirsk State University. The document lists the centers but carefully “erases” any mention of universities, even when a university is the lead institution.

An Unenviable Share

All four of the Concept’s target indicators are shares: mathematicians as a share of all researchers, the same share for computer science, and two ratios of dissertation defenses to the number of students admitted to PhD programs. There is not a single absolute number, and no quality indicators either. Perhaps the Concept’s authors mean that some absolute numbers and quality indicators (including the percentage of publications in White List journals [Russia’s official list of recognized academic journals — T-invariant]) can be found in the Program, but that should have been stated explicitly.

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

Shares have a well-known property: they grow not only when the numerator goes up, but also when the denominator goes down. Cut the number of physicists and chemists, and the share of mathematicians will “grow” even if not a single mathematician has been added. The share can rise even as the number of mathematicians falls, as long as everyone else is declining faster. A document that promises “accelerated development” has chosen a metric by which the shrinking of science can look like a success for mathematics.

Mathematics, meanwhile, has a “yardstick” that can’t be gamed by cutting chemists: the number of invited speakers at the International Congress of Mathematicians. At the 2026 congress in Philadelphia, according to our count based on the official list, there were three sectional talks with a Russian affiliation and not a single plenary.

In 2022, the International Congress of Mathematicians was supposed to take place in St. Petersburg. Many Russian mathematicians were involved in preparing it, and the bid had been championed by Fields Medalists Stanislav Smirnov and Andrei Okounkov, who were then actively working in Russia. But the congress was relocated and held online. Smirnov and Okounkov removed their Russian affiliations from the congress materials. Even so, HSE University and the Steklov Institute fielded five speakers, two of them plenary. In addition, Nikolai Andreev received the Leelavati Prize for popularizing mathematics, and there were invited speakers from St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. Overall, Russian mathematics was well represented at the congress. But four years have passed, and a lot has changed.

How many Russian mathematicians were invited to the 2026 congress but declined is unknown: the International Mathematical Union does not publish refusals. But consider the climate in which Russian scientists were deciding whether to attend. Since 2022, Article 275.1 of the Russian Criminal Code has made “confidential cooperation” with a foreign state or organization a crime. To bring charges under this article, it is enough to establish the mere fact of contact. According to data from Mediazona, 82 people had been convicted under this article by fall 2025. On January 26, 2026, half a year before the congress, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Konstantin Mogilevsky sent out a letter. It advised scientists to “carefully assess the nature of events for possible politicization,” to weigh the “advisability of participating” in events held in “unfriendly” countries [Russia’s official term for states that have imposed sanctions on it — T-invariant], and to inform the ministry. The 2026 congress was held in the United States. In a climate like this, you’d think long and hard before accepting even an invitation as prestigious as speaking at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

The Concept does contain some things that are unquestionably right. It calls for a “decent salary” for mathematicians and teachers, and for stipends that let graduate students study and do research “without having to take” side jobs. It acknowledges the shortage of math teachers and identifies math circles and olympiads as the core of the tradition, to be made accessible regardless of family income. Any mathematician would sign on to that. But young mathematicians don’t leave the country just for the pay. They go where they can publish freely, attend conferences, work with the best people in their field, and not worry about what an email exchange or a meeting with a coauthor from another country might cost them.

Impersonal Sentences

The strongest impression the Concept leaves is not any particular figure or error, but the document’s style. The number of researchers has “declined.” Access is “restricted.” The competitive advantage may be “lost.” All of this just happens on its own, like fog rolling in or the weather turning bad. The Concept contains no war, no sanctions, no post-2022 emigration, no criminal cases, no relocated 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians. There is only a “combination of factors,” chief among them low salaries.

It is impossible to believe that the document’s authors are unaware of all this. It is equally clear that a 2026 government Concept cannot name the causes, and impersonal phrasing makes it possible to ask for money by blaming “bad weather.” The document records the decline but leaves out what caused it. And so it seems as though the decline can be fought with higher salaries, stipends, and new Kolmogorov prizes. But that won’t work.

T-invariant has been keeping its Chronicles of the Persecution of Scientists for three years now. Instead of studying in Paris, the young and gifted Leonid Katz is sitting in pretrial detention. Azat Miftakhov, instead of talking with colleagues at international conferences, is writing his study of Chui’s conjecture in a prison in Dimitrovgrad. Andrey Dymov, an associate professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at HSE University who was named best teacher in 2022 and 2024–2025, is now awaiting transfer to a penal colony to serve a three-and-a-half-year sentence instead of teaching students. Distinguished Professor Mikhail Volkov has been dismissed from the department where he had worked for half a century and ordered to pay a fine. The Concept is deeply worried about Russia falling behind in supercomputing, yet Sergei Abramov, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a leading expert in parallel computing, has been barred from working, ordered to pay a fine, and stripped of his civil rights, and he waits for hours for his own pension to be released from his own account so that he doesn’t starve. These are far from all the mathematicians in our files. It is no surprise that their names are absent from the Concept. What is strange is that it reads as if their names were absent from its authors’ memory as well. And yet its authors are mathematicians, too. Some of them are even real ones.

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

The post Access Restricted: What Russia’s Concept for the Development of Mathematics through 2036 chooses not to see appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

A multibillion-dollar private initiative to overhaul US submarine manufacturing marks an urgent push to revitalize naval industrial capacity at a pivotal moment in the Indo-Pacific balance of power. This month, multiple media outlets reported that defense technology firm Anduril Industries will invest US$3.7 billion of its own capital to build a 2-million-square-foot “software-defined shipyard” at […]

The post Anduril’s plan to save US sub edge from China’s undersea surge appeared first on Asia Times.

On October 4, the US pulled its 12 B-1 strategic bombers out of Fairford, UK and returned them to the United States. Reports say the planes returned to Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, South Dakota. The bombers were pulled out when intelligence reported that an attack by armed drones against Fairford was imminent. […]

The post Moving B-1 bombers from UK to US is no drone warfare solution appeared first on Asia Times.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The European Union is witnessing a full-blown social revolt. Governing political parties and their economic policies are held in open contempt as public protests and strikes escalate across multiple countries.

Protests, mass marches, and industrial strikes are spreading across the EU in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and other countries. The grievances are various, from students and teachers over woeful education services, to healthcare professionals and transportation workers denouncing crumby wages and pension cuts.

But at the core is a warmongering, dehumanizing system of capitalist inequality.

Unbearable living costs for basic needs, from food to housing, are driving millions onto the streets in desperation and anger at the lack of adequate political response to their concerns. As one French student said: “Too young to be listened to, old enough to be tear-gassed.”

The entire political system is being brought into disrepute for its dysfunction and indifference towards meeting rudimentary human needs. Then, infuriating all the more, are lies from the elite rulers and their propaganda media about “national defense and threat of war from Russia.”

In Spain this week, an 87-year-old frail woman known as Maricarmen died in hospital after she was evicted from her Madrid home because she could not pay the extortionate rent increase. Her plight has come to galvanize a nationwide protest against Spain’s housing crisis, a crisis that is repeated across every European country. Protesters shouted furiously that the pitiful old woman was “murdered by the state and corporations.”

In France, the brutality of police against student protests has shocked the nation and the world. Nearly 7,000 young people have been arrested, as riot police tear gas and shoot at largely peaceful rallies. Students gathering at the Place de la Bastille in Paris and other cities vow that they will not back down. One student had his hand blown off by a police stun grenade while another teenager lost an eye from a rubber bullet fired at close range.

The Place de la Bastille is where the French Revolution manifested in 1798 against a hated aristocracy amid abject misery. Today, the tensions are boiling towards another momentous rebellion, this time inspiring again similar movements across Europe.

These protests and the inhumane suffering that underlie them are channeling uprisings all over the EU.

There is a palpable sense that populations en masse have had enough of decades of inequality and chronic deprivation inflicted by capitalist policies that enrich a few and are enforced by governments slavishly serving the interests of capital over the needs of the citizen majority.

Western media reports talk about “cash-strapped” governments under pressure from bond markets to reduce record debt levels while workers, students and pensioners demand more public investment and relief from economic hardship.

That is a misleading partial portrayal of the problem. Omitted is the crucial backdrop that European governments are directing vast economic resources towards militarism and the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. That is what is causing the “cash-strapped governments.” In other words, their declared fiscal straits are a policy choice, not some mysterious dilemma.

The social crisis sweeping across Europe is also seen in the United States and other Western-aligned nations. The background is a failed economic system that no longer provides a modicum of acceptable living conditions. The problem has been decades in the making from growing inequality and diminishing political representation. Today it is even questionable if Western states are democracies, controlled as they are by corporate oligarchies.

Nevertheless, the social crisis that is unfolding across Europe has been intensified and amplified by European political rulers operating in a relentless war mode against Russia.

The European Union has pumped hundreds of billions of euros into Ukraine over the past four years to prop up a NeoNazi regime run by a corrupt dictatorship – all for the objective of defeating Russia. The EU leaders – many of them unelected, like Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and António Costa – are driven by an obsessive Russophobia. But that is only part of the explanation.

Other elected leaders and parties like France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz are also despised for their elitism and delusions of grandeur. Merz declares that he wants to make Germany the strongest military in Europe, in total tin-ear deafness to his nation’s economic and social problems and the sinister historical connotations of resurrecting Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, as his government suffers electoral defeat after defeat, European elites deprecate German voters as being blind because they dare to choose parties that are opposed to war with Russia.

There are many grounds for the Europe-wide contempt of ruling parties. Inequality, poverty, unemployment, soaring living costs, declining wages, deteriorating public services. Uncontrolled immigration amid the pressure on inadequate public resources is another cause for grievance. Europe’s complicity in the Israeli genocidal war on Palestinians, and Europe’s complicity in Trump’s aggression towards Iran, Yemen, Cuba, and so on, are other factors.

However, the bogus narrative that governments are “cash-strapped” is a cause for immense public disgust. There are plenty of economic resources to meet public needs. It’s a question of those resources not being permitted to create just and humane societies under the prevailing capitalist system with its priority of enriching a tiny elite class.

The conditions of “tight budgets” and “austerity for the masses” are created by deliberate policies of militarism and fuelling a proxy war in Ukraine.

European “leaders” and their NATO lobbyists like Mark Rutte demand hundreds of billions of euros to boost military industries while at the same time calling for draconian cuts in public spending and social welfare in order to pay for this reckless militarism. The EU is “lending” an additional €90 billion over the next two years alone just to prop up the corrupt regime in Kiev so that it can keep fighting a futile war with Russia. The perverse priority is driven by the military-industrial complex and its corporate investors. It is also driven by an ideological, propagandized mindset that demonizes Russia as an enemy. President Putin and other Russian voices have repeatedly stated that they do not want war with Europe. They say the conflict in Ukraine has root causes that can be resolved through diplomatic engagement. Why are European politicians implacably opposed to peace?

A major factor is covering for internal political and economic failure of the European system. The EU’s economies, as with those in the U.S. and other Western states, are bankrupt dystopias in terms of delivering on social and democratic needs. The failure has been compounded by the costs of war in Ukraine.

That failure is criminal and fatal for the politicians and governments who have overseen the policies. Thus, the political class, including the propaganda news media, cannot admit their criminal policies.

In the face of their own internal contradictions, the European political elites are seeking a solution by externalizing Russia as an enemy. This is the same modus operandi that European rulers have used for the past century and more, unleashing two world wars as a result.

These criminal politicians and their dysfunctional economic system are again pushing war as their escape plan for survival at the expense of millions of lives and at the risk of starting a third world war, one that this time around could involve catastrophic nuclear nemesis.

It is damning of virtually every European government, including primarily the British, that there are no calls for diplomacy and political settlement with Russia. They are committed to waging war on Russia to absolve themselves from the social devastation they are responsible for.

One positive thing, though, is that increasing numbers of people can see through the chicanery and lies. A German student placard summed it up: “We won’t fight your wars… Education not bombs!”

A day of reckoning is imminent. Criminal political leaders and their warmongering system are exposed like never before and in a way that demands total revolt as a proper solution. The consequences are not to be externalized this time. Chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcom X once said.

President Donald Trump said Friday that Russia has agreed to release millions of tons of diesel fuel into U.S. and global markets following a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir...