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Is Trump planning on using Putin to get him out of the mess of both his low polling and the Iran war? Seems far-fetched perhaps at first, but he is completely snared in Iran, with whatever option he looks at appearing to be a doomsday scenario. Could Putin help him out both with diesel prices back home but also to broker a deal with Iran which makes it appear to Americans that he, and America, are somehow the winners?

For the Russian president to sell close to 2 million tonnes of diesel oil to Western countries, including the U.S. of course, seems like a sticking plaster to a huge wound in the American and Western economies. Unless, that is, there is a second deal behind it which journalists and pundits are not aware of, or are simply choosing not to report. For the diesel initiative from Putin, the amount which is being offered isn’t huge, but there are a couple of precedents which it sets which are more important.

Firstly, it opens the doors for further lifting of sanctions (which could be bundled into Iran’s, given Moscow’s relations with Tehran), but perhaps even more importantly, it makes President Zelensky of Ukraine an even bigger target for Trump. Much will rest on the coming days and the decision that Zelensky will take to continue bombing Russia’s oil facilities. Will he take that suicide pill? Wars are often messy, and there are always grey areas where the two countries at war with one another find situations which are illogical and impractical. Perhaps the bombing of oil facilities within Russia in the Ukraine war has reached its tipping point, and regardless of how close EU leaders are with Zelensky – who at best we can call a caretaker leader – this will test this relationship to breaking point.

Do great numbers of citizens in France and Germany need to die this winter simply because of an energy crisis and/or an economic malaise in their own countries which have poured billions into keeping the war in Ukraine alive? Is Putin so confident that this winter will be the last one for his troops, as the defensive line between Ukraine’s forces and those of Russia’s looks like it is about to break at any moment? Are Ukrainians themselves ready to face a freezing winter in Kiev, unable to power or heat their own apartments? So many wars started over energy reserves, but not Ukraine. Yet it might end over them.

Trump’s threatening comments on social media about Zelensky should be taken seriously. If Trump’s own cabal of unqualified advisers can seriously convince him that a ground invasion of Iran is feasible, if not winnable, one could argue simply that regime change in Ukraine should be a children’s picnic and gives him a huge payday – politically, economically and geopolitically. Removing Zelensky would stop the war immediately, and Trump could claim victory for that, while he asks his friend Putin to quietly intervene in Iran and fix the Straits of Hormuz.

For Trump to actually respond to Zelensky’s outburst to reporters that the move to buy Russian diesel was “weak” by threatening Zelensky with being removed shows that his patience has reached a point where he is starting to think of the Ukrainian president as the source of the problems. To remove Zelensky through backing a rival will be hard and will pitch him against EU leaders, but one could argue relations couldn’t really get any worse, and that once Macron and Merz understand that peace is the only option and Zelensky is actually the only real obstacle to that, they will do what all EU leaders do and follow America’s lead.

We often hear analysts on YouTube talk about the game of “chicken”, but there has never been a more fleeting moment than now, as both Trump and Zelensky will be watching each other to see who blinks first. Zelensky, until now, has been playing a dangerous game of pretending to be servile to U.S. hegemony, while really just taking the cash and weapons and laughing at Trump among a coterie of weak European leaders in their palatial residences. The war has been complex since it began, as the U.S. and EU rarely saw eye to eye, but if Trump goes ahead with his threat of denying the Ukrainians shared intel, then this will be a very bad omen for the future of Zelensky, as he will put even more pressure on the British, French and Germans to come up with more weapons and money in an unwinnable war which they’ve bet the farm on and their entire political careers depend on.

The war, after this diesel decision, might have just become much simpler and more binary, and a collective narrative might emerge from the insanity of EU gibberish from countries who can’t even protect their own people on their own soil against an invasion of bogus asylum seekers. It will not only be the ultimate test for U.S.-Ukraine relations, but also one for U.S.-EU ones, and perhaps represent the end of NATO as we know it.

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No one expected that Donald Trump, after a congratulatory birthday phone call to his Russian counterpart, would declare that Russian diesel fuel would prove to be the solution to America’s current fuel shortages. If the Trump presidency has yielded anything it is a lot of interesting headlines that seem to come out of nowhere, that can sadly, quite often, fade right back into the mist from whence they came. Sometimes Trump’s words can fill us with hope like this ‘Diesel Deal’, and others like his recent UN speech, where he threatened to potentially kill all Iranians, fill us with dread. This declaration by our enigmatic leader presents a very interesting media narrative and a potential end to ‘Project Ukraine’ that is worth taking a deeper dive into.

Trump has blamed Zelensky for the global energy shortages, especially those concerning diesel fuel. At the time, everyone thought this was just a cheap Twitter-style deflection from the failed war against Iran, which certainly caused a lot of fuel transport disruption. That is to say, the White House was projecting this crisis, that it allowed to happen, or actively caused, to be thrown onto the scapegoat Zelensky. However, this form of deflection or projection is no longer just words in a pre-election narrative, but has become action. Sanctions on Russian diesel have been lifted and the first shipment is already on its way as I write these words. Something tangible has occurred.

Zelensky was actually warned some six times to stop attacking Russian oil infrastructure. Blow up children in the Donbass and beyond ‘sure’, but attacking what the West wants from Russia more than anything is ‘totally unacceptable’. Zelensky, who as stated above was warned half-a-dozen times to back of strikes on oil/gas, upon hearing of Trump’s decision to purchase Russian diesel fuel did the following:

1) He quickly attacked Russian oil infrastructure again seemingly to spite the U.S. President

2) He immediately cut off peace talks in Miami with the Trump’s aides, the Kushner-Witkoff duo, which is yet another spitting in the face of Donald Trump.

The wildest thing of all is that the ‘narcissist’ Trump has already publically thanked President Putin twice for this deal. Appearing at a rally, Americans standing behind Trump wildly cheered in favor of the announcement of peace with Russia plus extra fuel for America. Russophobia is a hobby of the globalist bourgeoisie and Epstein Island, not American truckers and farmers.

It’s a great narrative, let’s hope it lasts

Trump has now put 100% of the blame for global energy/fuel problems directly onto Zelensky, and called him out personally for keeping the war going over the last two years. Thus, the narrative is forming into something like: If the war in Ukraine is the cause of the fuel shortages, and Zelensky is the cause of the war continuing, that means the U.S. can make a deal with Russia even if ‘they started it’, with the corollary that Zelensky logically needs to go as he is the source of the problem. But going even deeper into the narrative we can see the most interesting thing of all or as they like to say online ‘the quiet part’: Trump has essentially declared that Russian energy output is of vital strategic interest to the United States.

It is these kind of words that take the black pill out of my mouth and directly inject ‘hopium’ into my bloodstream. The idea of the American President declaring that NOT being at war with Russia is of vital strategic interest to the USA is something I have been dreaming of my entire adult life. This is exactly the logic that we need to finally and ultimately end the Cold War + Project for a New American Century mentality in politics and finally allow the USA to rebuild and invest into itself. This very well could be America’s mulitpolar awakening by using a logic trap similar to the other ones that have been used to do the exact opposite and keep the USA locked in eternal foreign wars of luxury for ‘national security’. This new logic trap could look something like this: “So you want war with Russia? That must mean you want to harm America, you dirty traitor! You’ll take the fuel from farmer Joe and our kids will starve, you monster! Russia being left alone to produce fuel is a national security interest of America, are you against our country’s national security? Do you want to weaken manly America for those gay Europeans?”.

But as we slam that hopium injection into our veins we have to remember that Donald Trump has said a lot of things, changed his mind many times, or was forced to change it, and perhaps isn’t quite the unilateral decider that he makes himself out to be on TV.

It takes two to tango, but one orange man to keep his word.

The transcripts from this now famous birthday phone chat look very different on the American and Russian sides, which is par for the course. Trump’s team tends to write discussed things as proven facts whereas the Russians are more noncommittal in their language. But the diesel sanctions are gone for now and the boats are moving, so this looks to be real… at least until the mid-term votes are cast.

The American side has since threatened to cut Zelensky off from intelligence sharing, which could be an instant deathblow to their military efforts as many experts believe that only U.S. intel has allowed them to survive this long. Without such targeting data they will be sent back to 20^th century warfare instantly, and they would no longer be able to strike deep into Russia. RT wrote the following on this issue:

A Ukrainian official told Axios that Witkoff and Kushner threatened to cut off US intelligence sharing with Kiev if it continued to ignore Trump’s requests to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries, but the US official denied that any such threat had been made.

But here is where we have to hold our breath, for despite how nice this new narrative sounds, and how it is the perfect exit for the USA from its participation in Project Ukraine we should not forget the words of President Putin from some time ago when he talked about the true power of any U.S. President:

“So a person is elected — he comes with ideas… Then people with briefcases come visit him, well-dressed, in dark suits — kind of like mine.”

So the real question might be, will the Zionist Lobby, Epstein Elite, Three-Letter Organizations, Influential Billionaires, and all the other spooks on Capitol Hill actually let President Trump actually end this war? Will the POTUS be allowed to do this?

We should recall that after Zelensky acted disgracefully in the White House at the start of Trump’s second term everyone thought this conflict would be over. Trump the famous narcissist seemed visibly angry and offended on camera during their verbal spat. But the war went on. There was the Anchorage Summit, which had tons of hype and everyone thought then that the U.S. would pull support from Kiev. But it did not. Trump’s enemies including the Biden Clan are linked to massive corruption in Ukraine which has all been exposed. This would have been a great off ramp from the conflict, but Trump did not or could not take it. And in general, Trump’s rhetoric towards Zelensky and other European politicians has been overtly harsh and disrespectful. The man accused of being a ‘blowhard’ somehow always speaks quite politely behind the backs and to the faces of Putin and Xi.

Thus, although I want peace and mutually-respectful cooperation between the USA and Russia perhaps this deal will only last till the midterm elections, when all of a sudden Zelensky will go back to being “a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, and the conflict will go marching on. Perhaps this is our October Surprise from the Republican side of the aisle? And in December we can all be ‘surprised again’ when the war resumes full-force and thousands more Slavs die on the battlefield?

Now, Donald Trump with gritted teeth is slinging forth the idea that he thinks “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new President”. But after the votes are counted in America he may just go back to passively hating and tolerating Zelensky till the end of his term or till an Oreshnik finds the mark one day. We also cannot forget that the West has been lobbying for a major ceasefire from the Russians for a long time. Presumably this would be used to regroup, rest, rearm and then just go right back to fighting till the last Ukrainian. Now Trump wants elections in Kiev, which will probably demand a ceasefire to enact. But will he be pushing for a three-day ceasefire, or try to trick the Russians into agreeing to a month-long freeze or more?

One ‘good’ sign on this issue from a Russian standpoint is that there are now already calls for Zelensky to resign over this issue on Twitter/X coming from all sides even pro-Ukrainian ones:

“’Zelensky must resign’ – Ukrainian media. That was quick. Zelensky ignored Trump’s warnings not to attack Russian oil refineries SIX times. This morning, Zelensky has bombed another Russian oil refinery. Ukrainians are calling for Zelensky‘s resignation.

Former Ukrainian MP and Metinvest co-owner Vadym Novynskyi has called on Zelensky to resign and hand over all power to Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada following the Trump-Putin agreements.”

We have to remember that Ukraine in 2026 is already a police state where any dissent means you could get thrown into a bus and taken to the front to die or vanish into a prison as a Russian ‘spy’. Thus, when important people gang up against Zelensky openly it is much more of a potent statement than Hollywood actors safely making Tik-Toks against Trump from their luxurious bedrooms.

The rest of the world won’t sit around and do nothing.

Some moronic ‘Putin sold out the BRICS’ counter-narrative is sure to arise from Kiev’s bot accounts soon. Obviously someone is going to say that the Kremlin threw their Iranian brothers to the Zio-lobby machine! But in actuality, it looks like the Iranians are going to just ship their oil through Russia and sell it as ‘Russian’ and everyone will be happy. The Caspian Sea will be even more busy in the near future. If sanctioned accomplished anything they really increased trade between Russia and Iran.

No one in Moscow is planning on selling out Tehran; they want America to join the Multipolar World while still saving face and reduce the global threat level of nuclear war which is vastly too high at present. Iran and China were surely consulted on this issue before any Diesel Deal was finalized.

The real danger of Trump calling for the removal of Zelensky comes from Europe, where certain factions, politicians and their financiers may take radical action in response. And Trump’s reaction to this response could be even more radical now. Would it be possible that NATO might greenlight the Baltics to just open up another front to ‘see what happens’? Will France finally go through on its threat and just deploy troops openly en masse to save the Napoleon in Green from political or potentially physical death? So far the EU has only threatened even more sanctions. If the previous 20+ packages of sanctions failed, I wonder what is left to actually sanction. Ursula is promising the biggest and most expansive sanctions packet for Monday, October 12^th, but I doubt it will change anything. The only thing that would change the situation is if the EU did something really aggressive, drastic and stupid militarily.

What about the rest of the sanctions?

The Russian media has done a disservice to the public by writing that “Trump will lift sanctions” over-and-over again when the only sanctions being lifted are on diesel exports for half a year. All of the rest of the sanctions are still there. You still cannot fly directly from Moscow to New York, and money transfers via SWIFT are still mostly blocked. We have to remember that at least in theory sanctions are a form of punishment for crimes committed against, in this case, international law and the United States. So how can relations between the USA and Russian Federation truly be normalized when one still accuses the other of crimes it believes it did not even commit?

After Project Ukraine ends things could change rapidly, but there can be no true friendship until Washington trusts Aeroflot enough to let them land on U.S. territory. We cannot be both under a sanctions war and normalized at the same time. But this new Trump narrative, if he can stick with it to its logical conclusion, is the perfect off-ramp for America and the way we can finally end this war and go back to some sense of normalcy with the apocalypse pushed far off into the future beyond all of our lifespans.

By rejecting the transformation of their country into a new front against Russia, Georgians preserved their strategic autonomy.

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In recent years, Georgia has become the stage for a struggle whose implications extend far beyond its borders. The political conflict, often presented as a debate over democracy, European integration, and civil rights, should in fact be understood as another chapter in the delicate geopolitical game unfolding across the Caucasus.

It is against this backdrop that Tbilisi’s decision to distance itself from the confrontational policies promoted by its Western partners takes on particular significance.

The fundamental question is not whether Georgia should be “European” or “Russian.” Such a framework is excessively simplistic. The real issue is whether a small state situated between major centers of power should be free to determine its own foreign policy or whether its international position should be dictated by the strategic interests of outside actors.

The Georgian government chose the first option.

The rise of Georgian Dream brought about a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy. Rather than automatically echoing the anti-Russian rhetoric prevailing in  Brussels, Tbilisi adopted a more pragmatic approach. Its priority became avoiding another war while preserving economic relations with its neighbors.

For Georgia, this is no abstract matter. Russia remains an important economic partner. Trade, tourism, energy, and the movement of people create realities that cannot simply be erased by political decisions. Fully adopting the Western sanctions regime against Moscow would have particularly serious consequences for an economy far smaller and more vulnerable than those of Europe’s major powers.

This is where Tbilisi’s policy fundamentally diverges from the strategy advocated by Brussel’s hawks. Brussels wants Georgia to become increasingly integrated into European political structures. The Georgian government, however, has insisted that integration cannot mean automatically submitting to the European Union’s geopolitical priorities.

The adoption of the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence became the main symbol of this dispute. Its critics regard the legislation as a democratic setback. Its supporters see it as a legitimate attempt to limit the political influence of organizations financed from abroad.

The same divide is evident in cultural matters. Georgian legislation concerning LGBT propaganda provoked a strong European reaction and reinforced the perception among its critics that Tbilisi was abandoning the liberal values promoted by the European Union.

Yet one question rarely receives the same attention: who should determine Georgia’s political and cultural rules?

For Georgian Dream, the answer is the Georgian state itself. It was precisely this insistence on autonomy that made the government the target of increasingly intense international pressure.

Recently, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze openly accused Brussels of financing an attempted coup in Georgia during last year’s protests. He claims that European actors funded groups involved in the demonstrations and supported efforts to bring about a change of government. According to Kaladze, the objective was to install political forces more closely aligned with the interests of the European Union.

In fact, such allegations should come as little surprise in the current geopolitical environment. Brussels is now discussing the possibility of imposing sanctions on most Georgian Dream leaders and government officials. These developments nevertheless reveal the broader geopolitical dimensions of the crisis. The dispute is not merely a controversy over domestic legislation, but a genuine struggle over the country’s strategic orientation.

Here lies the principal danger facing Georgia. The Caucasus is not a neutral space. The region lies between Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the Euro-Atlantic world. Any attempt to turn Georgia into a platform for confrontation with Moscow would have far greater consequences for Georgians themselves than for the powers supporting such a policy from a distance.

The experience of Ukraine has made this reality even more obvious. A state can receive political, financial, and military support from foreign powers while ultimately paying the highest price when rivalries between those powers escalate into open conflict. For a small country such as Georgia, avoiding this fate is a fundamental strategic consideration.

It was precisely on this point that Tbilisi projected a different course from Kiev. Rather than accepting the transformation of the country into another frontline state, the Georgian government sought to preserve workable relations with Moscow. This does not mean that Georgia has formed an alliance with Russia. The two countries still lack formal diplomatic relations, and Tbilisi maintains its own disagreements with the Kremlin. The national priority, however, is to safeguard strategic autonomy, peace, security, and development.

By avoiding direct confrontation with Moscow, Georgia reduces the risk of opening another military front near Russia’s borders. It also preserves economic ties with neighboring countries and retains greater freedom to engage with different centers of power simultaneously.

What is at stake is the sovereignty of a small state amid competition between major powers. In a region increasingly shaped by geopolitical rivalry, the most important question may not be which side Georgia belongs to, but how the country intends to protect itself amid the confrontation between opposing external forces.

The Georgian people have shown that Georgia’s interests come first. And they were right to make that choice.

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

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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.

NATO’s full Military Committee just visited Kiev. They’re studying Ukraine’s war as their own testing ground.

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Everyone off on a trip to Kiev

On 6 October, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, arrived in Kiev with military representatives from all thirty-two Allied nations. He wrote this himself on X: the delegation was there to reaffirm its ‘unconditional support’ for Ukraine. ANSA reported the news as an official visit. A strategic signal aimed at Moscow as well.

First, the facts. The Military Committee assists and advises the Atlantic Council, the Defence Planning Committee and the Nuclear Planning Group; its role is to set military policy and strategy. It was invited by the new Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Mykhailo Drapatyi. The Committee returned to Kiev in full force after eight years, and the meetings with Drapatyi and the Ukrainian General Staff served to obtain a first-hand assessment of the battlefield, to discuss Kiev ’s military priorities and to bring to the Alliance the lessons learnt from over four years of high-intensity warfare. Dragone speaks of military priorities and lessons useful for the Allies’ operational readiness in the face of today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

Now for the interpretation, which must be kept distinct from the facts. A body that advises the Nuclear Planning Group does not travel through a country at war merely to make gestures of solidarity. It goes to gather information and to calibrate its own preparedness against it. The flow described by the sources runs in both directions: from Ukraine to the Alliance as operational experience, and from the Alliance to Ukraine as guidance on priorities. When the military leaders of thirty-two states sit down with the General Staff of one of the belligerents to assess their own readiness in the context of the ongoing war, that war ceases to be an external affair. It has become the Alliance’s testing ground.

This sequence confirms the direction. On 3 June, the North Atlantic Council met in Kiev , and the NATO-Ukraine Council was held there for the first time. In October, it is the military’s turn. First the political framework, then the structure that fills it with operational content – this is not a passing courtesy, but an institutional presence that grows stronger at every stage.

Then there is the statement that shifts the discussion beyond Ukraine. To those who believe that sabotage, cyber-attacks and airspace violations could undermine Western support, Dragone replies: ‘You are failing.’ He holds Russia fully responsible for such behaviour and states that allied unity has never been so strong. The Ukrainian front and the sub-threshold pressure on Allied territory are placed within the same framework, articulated by the same man from the same venue. The distinction underpinning the ‘Ukraine versus Russia’ narrative – that between a war over there and tensions here – is erased by the Chairman of the Military Committee himself.

Images, symbols and meanings

The image remains. In the video message recorded in Kiev, the admiral speaks with two flags behind him; in institutional communications, the backdrop is never improvised – it reveals who is speaking and on whose behalf. The person appearing beneath those symbols is neither a mediator nor an observer. The flags tell the same story as the words – words that reflect a deliberate and conscious choice: namely, the war for Kiev, total dedication to a cause that should have nothing to do with Europe.

The serious objection is another, and it must be acknowledged. None of the three sources documents allied troops in combat, and no Member State has declared war on Russia. The delegation came to consult and to pay tribute at the Wall of Remembrance dedicated to the Ukrainian fallen. The law of armed conflict distinguishes between support for one side and direct participation in hostilities, and on that ground the distinction exists, but the legal classification does not exhaust the geopolitical analysis. The Allies no longer describe their role as aid to a third party: they speak of their own readiness, their own threats, their own unity. When an alliance measures its own preparedness against another’s war and attributes acts of sabotage on its own soil to that same adversary, the confrontation involves two parties, and one of them is not Ukraine.

The assessment, then. On the political-strategic level, the confrontation between NATO and Russia is direct, and the sources show this with sufficient clarity. On the kinetic level, the sources do not record any direct Allied involvement, although this is constantly invoked and called for, as if it were NATO’s greatest desire. The gap between the two levels, however, narrows with every visit of this kind. There are two indicators to watch: the possible permanent establishment of allied facilities on Ukrainian territory, and the way in which acts of sabotage – which the Alliance attributes to Moscow – will be dealt with, whilst Zelensky orders the bombing of further Russian oil refineries and new drones fly over Moscow, despite Donald Trump having told them to stop.

Everything is spiralling out of control; NATO is acting independently of the US sphere of influence because it has embraced the Ukrainian cause as if it were the final world war – the one in which the Alliance will either win, or there will be nothing left to do.

The ‘Ukraine versus Russia’ narrative served to contain the war within a framework that was reassuring to European public opinion. With 32 military representatives in the Ukrainian capital, led by an Italian admiral, that framework is holding together less and less.

Let it be clear that this decision is not accidental; it is not a political trap, nor is it even an error of judgement, but a declaration of war – yet another hybrid and, stylistically, pitiful declaration against Russia. They are telling us this openly, whilst we are distracted by other thoughts.

It remains to be seen whether governments will tell their voters this. And it also remains to be seen whether the brave four-star generals will realise a wise truth that the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his manuals: “The mistake lies not in making a misstep, but in failing to recognise it and in seeking to defend it at all costs”.

There is, however, no reason to break the spell cast by Kiev , which is currently enchanting the whole of Europe, because, as Napoleon said – to quote him a second time – “One must never interrupt the enemy whilst he is making a mistake”.

CNN’s plague scare in Russia: “damn them if they do, damn them if they don’t.”

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We are going to talk about various aspects of the supposed ‘plague outbreak’ in Russia but there is a greater tendency at hand when we look at the media interpretation of this event be it real, fake, or an enigma of sorts. If anyone is familiar with my work they would have heard me say something to the effect of “everything you know about Russia, written in English, is a lie” and I still believe this statement. When Western politicians declare that “Russia has the economic potential of Spain” or that “Russia is Nigeria with snow” or other such statements they are not lying in a direct and conscious way.

Based on all the data and information that they have ‘over there’ about Russia’s economy this view was logically ‘true’. If you crunch the numbers based on Western data then I guess Russia is just an enigmatic economy wrapped in mystery the size of a second-tier EU nation, but obviously this is not the case in reality. Russia is horribly draconian and repressive, because it is written all over the place that this is indeed the case. The calculations that Russia would immediately fold and that the ‘Ruble would be rubble’ after the Special Military Operation began were not fake, they were just based on false data. If you look at the West’s information about Russia, it would really seem that the nation’s economy stands only on oil prices, the population is waiting for a single spark to rise up against the tyrant, and that overall, the house of cards is just waiting to be blown over. But as the war years have proven, this has not been the case, but the initial calculations were ‘correct’ based on the data put into them.

Even the famous quote by Lenin that “a lie told often enough become true” ironically may not have ever been said by him, but this pseudo statement makes Russia look bad so the West keeps saying it. In Russia, because some people have been arrested for online activities since the start of the Special Military Operation, that would include organizing terrorism, this is “bad”, but the fact that there are 70 times more people behind bars in the UK for what they have said online doesn’t count, because that is different and has never once been considered by a British journalist. Arrests for statements and actions online only applies to those who are bad as proof that they are bad.

If Russia’s army is strong this is militarism, if Russia’s army is weak this is proof of corruption and ineptitude. If there are trials for corruption this is proof of the heavy-handed Putin regime taking out its enemies, and if there were not trails for corruption then it is proof of corruption and the totalitarian control of the regime. There is no possible win state for Russia in the Western press, even during the supposed media friendly treatment of Yeltsin in the good ole days, the entire establishment was an orgy of shadenfraude at the downfall of the USSR and humiliated state of 90s Russia.

To put things in very blunt terms: if something happens or is said to have happened related to Russia:

-If the Russian media goes along with it then that is proof that Russia is bad

-If the Russian media resists that is proof of a cover up for the evil deed that proves Russia is bad

– Ultimately, any action or inaction by Russia is bad and proof of its badness.

CNN’s take on this issue is stock Russophobia

And right on cue comes CNN to prop up this plague narrative that seems to be fake at its core. But we will talk about what is actually happening with this ‘outbreak’ a bit later, but for now let’s stick to the media side of things. Even in the title of the CNN article in question “Checklists, masks and mystery: What we know about the plague scare in Russia” you can already see the spin revving up.

“Russian authorities have sought to allay global worries over the death of a young woman who worked at a Siberian anti-plague laboratory. But moves to isolate her contacts and introduce new disease-control measures at local hospitals have raised concerns among people who fear they’re not being told the full story.”

In regards to the paragraph above, as you can see, the Russian side is bad because it has a different narrative and has the audacity to share it with the world. However, if the Russian media were to have been silent on this, it would also be bad as it would be proof of guilt via inaction. The fact that the Russian authorities are doing some actions to try to stop an outbreak is bad because these measures create fear or something, but at the very least this is good enough to use for condemnation. However, if the government took extreme measures this would be ‘draconian’ and if they took no measures this would be ‘horribly irresponsible’. So taking medium level measures is ‘fear inducing’ or something and of course this is bad and absolutely unacceptable.

“Ulyana Gavryunina, a 29-year-old blogger from Angarsk, a city in the Irkutsk region, told CNN she had to change maternity hospitals at 40 weeks pregnant after newly imposed quarantine restrictions meant her husband could no longer be with her during labor.”

So because the local government has limited facilities, sadly this woman had to give birth in less than ideal conditions. This is unfortunate for her and I am sure it was quite frustrating, but again CNN says the Russian authorities taking action is bad because it affected people negatively, yet if they did nothing it would also be just as bad. If the people had not been quarantined at that facility that would be ‘dangerous and irresponsible’ or something like that.

“Russia’s health watchdog said Wednesday said there is no epidemic risk following the woman’s death, and that it was winding down response. Rospotrebnadzor said medical monitoring has been completed for “over 90%” of contacts of the deceased lab worker, and no “dangerous” pathogens have been found. But unanswered questions remain.”

The expression “but unanswered questions remain” was used here to negate the opinion of the Russian government. If this paragraph were to have ended without these words, it would make the views of local authorities seem fully legitimate. When “questions remain” it hints at a conspiracy, that the official story does not match reality. Again, no matter what the Russian authorities would have publicly stated the response would have been bad because CNN sees them as the enemy. The enemy can do no right. And Russia’s actions are the actions of an enemy and thus they are universally negative to any proper journalist.

“According to its website, the Anti-Plague Institute employs around 95 researchers and is a major public health facility responsible for monitoring and preventing outbreaks of high-risk bacterial and viral infections across Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

The institute was established in 1934 to combat plague and continues to study the disease because Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, still circulates naturally in wildlife across parts of Siberia and neighboring regions.”

Shockingly, CNN did not label the research facility where Ms. Shipilova worked as a biolab or some other nefarious term. They actually ‘took their word for it’ and just relayed information from their website. This was both true and pleasant to read.

So what actually happened?

Now let’s discuss the actual situation with a potential plague and the mysterious death of the disease researcher who was working on fighting it. There is a video from an unnamed American woman living in Irkutsk (Channel name: American in the Motherland) about the entire situation that in less than 15 minutes breaks down the whole story with sources, facts, and video directly from the region. I will share the bullet points of her presented views for brevity. As you can see, just one citizen journalist yet again crushes the mainstream media point-by-point. The image below is from the video and shows the ‘brilliance’ of the international press and their hot takes on this issue.

The videos key points were:

• There are no mass lockdowns in Irkutsk or anywhere else in Russia, the only people who are quarantined had direct contact with the woman who died (Daria Shipilova) and their number is less than 200.
• Shipilova did not work at a military biolab, but a plague\disease research institute designed to fight diseases. It’s location and work was neither secret nor military.
• Shipilova was hospitalized outside of Irkutsk because at that location they had a facility designed to handle this type of disease outbreak from the Covid era, not as part of some conspiracy.
• There is no second other death from the same cause as Ms. Shipilova’s demise.
• Daria Shipilova’s cause of death was “pneumonia of an unknown origin”
• The ‘broken test tube’ narrative is a myth as it was thought up by some Russian blogger. When working with serious diseases they don’t just walk around an office-like environment with fragile test tubes. Russia does not operate by the same methodology as the Umbrella Corporation, flailing around with fragile vials of diseases willy-nilly.
• The Russian side found no evidence of an accident at the research facility.
• The researcher did not travel to Buryatia prior to her death. Thus, she did not get the disease from local marmots or other types of rodents.
• There have been no other cases of what killed Ms. Shipilova at the moment of writing this article or the creation of the video linked above.
• The plague is treatable as it is caused by bacteria that continues to exists around the world. A handful of people in the USA and other countries still contract it every year. Antibiotics are an effective countermeasure against it, thus this does not seem like cause for international panic.

Why did the plague pass on medieval Russia?

One thing that is important about to note about this issue, is that historically, although the Bubonic Plague did kill people outside of Western Europe, it only had devastating effects within it. Russians continue to be proud to this day of having a high level of cultural hygiene that dates back to medieval times. Dark Age Russians and others outside of the West seemed to ‘put two and two together’ about the necessity for regular bathing and washing one’s hands. This hygienic culture is believed to be the reason why Russia had such a massive population in the 1800s compared to others around them. Many in Russia believe that if it weren’t for massive mistakes like WWI, The Revolution, WWII, and the 90s they would have a current population halfway closer to something like China’s or India’s.

So from a Russian cultural standpoint this very much looks like another campaign of projection; a third of England died to the plague, only a handful in Russia did. Thus, the Black Death had really no cultural impact on Russia, and judging by writings from the 1800s, tuberculosis seems to have been a much more long-term nagging problem for this society that to this day still has relevance. There are anti-tuberculosis facilities all over Russia and one cannot immigrate to the country if they have signs of it. The whole ‘living with vermin’ thing was not a fact of life for medieval or modern Russians, that honor goes to the enlightened liberal West.

The Media is the disease.

We only looked at one particular written piece on this issue, but there are plenty of insane musings from the Western press that follow the “damn the Russians if they do, damn them if they don’t” formula. Headlines like this one from the Daily Mail are the perfect example:

“Trump offers Putin lifeline as Russia scrambles to contain deadly airborne plague after lab worker’s death”.

Again, if ‘Putin’ did nothing he would be bad, but he is doing something, thus he is ‘scrambling’ in a panicked way which is also bad. Trump offering him a ‘lifeline’ means that Putin has no choice to accept this help, whatever it may be or he is bad. But guess what? If he does accept the lifeline it surely means he is weak or something which means he is bad.

When you go back and really look at the historical representation of ‘Russian realities’ in English-language media you see this hysterical Nietzschian untermensch narrative manipulation in everything. Putin has been on the brink of being ousted since 2000 and the Russian economy has been on the verge of collapse since then too. Everything written about Russia in English in the West is a lie.

A proxy war against Russia is now spiralling into an all-out confrontation.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern discusses how the Western official news media have systematically promoted lies about the Bucha Massacre in Ukraine.

No Western official outlet has questioned the narrative purporting that Russia perpetrated a mass killing of civilians. Credible Russian information to the contrary is dismissed out of hand as Kremlin propaganda.

Ironically, it is Western media that are seen as the propagandists and the purveyors of Big Lies – if one cares to examine the record objectively.

The alleged Bucha atrocity involved the apparent execution of hundreds of civilians by Russian forces as they were withdrawing from Kiev and surrounding areas at the end of March 2022. European leaders ritualistically visit a memorial in Bucha and condemn Russian barbarity.

The political objective of those shocking Western media claims was to sabotage a potential peace deal with Moscow and to prolong the proxy war with the aim of NATO strategically defeating Russia. That culminated in nearly five years of war, millions of casualties, a failed NATO objective, and worse still, the danger of a general war in Europe going nuclear.

Ray McGovern points out that the timeline of the Bucha killings does not fit the Western media narrative. The corpses on the streets of Bucha appeared days after the Russian forces made their withdrawal to what was then the East of Ukraine.

Recently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov presented new details at the United Nations that substantiate the claim that the Bucha killings were a false-flag propaganda stunt to smear Russia and to wreck any prospect of an early peace deal with Ukraine. A Russian-led investigation reveals that many of the alleged civilian victims whose names are inscribed on a memorial wall were identified as Ukrainian soldiers who had been killed in action and buried elsewhere.

The Russian report is entitled “Heirs of Goebbels: falsification of the events in Bucha and bloody staged performances of the Kiev regime.” (Western internet has suppressed links to the report, though it can be accessed from the Russian foreign ministry.)

As McGovern notes, not one major Western media outlet reported on Lavrov’s presentation at the United Nations and his delivery of the Russian investigation to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. McGovern believes the perpetrators were MI6, CIA, and the Kiev regime operatives.

This egregious example of Western media suppression of Russian information and perspective on the conflict in Ukraine is repeated over and over. Another example, as McGovern amply recounts, was the attempt by Moscow to engage the United States and European NATO partners in a security treaty in late 2021. Washington and European partners dismissed the diplomatic efforts to avert war, which then erupted on February 24, 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

The Russian invasion was not unprovoked aggression, as Western media have dutifully asserted. It was a preemptive response to NATO covert aggression via the NeoNazi Kiev regime over seven years since the coup in 2014.

The Nord Stream gas pipeline sabotage is another case study of how Western media have systematically ignored the evidence implicating a NATO provocation and the background to the proxy war against Russia.

Official Western media are in the service of a political agenda and not the public interest. Their function is to prevent popular understanding of the real nature of the war in Ukraine, a proxy war against Russia that is now spiralling into an all-out confrontation.

We refer to the quote from Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, who warned: “Our liberty [democracy] depends on freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Ray McGovern laments that there has been a dreadful erosion of democracy and media independence over recent decades since the end of the Cold War and the rise of U.S. unilateralism.

However, on a positive note, he sees hopeful signs from the phenomenal growth in alternative media and independent information, generating more critical public awareness of government abuses of power. He believes that genuine democracy can survive and thrive – despite the official Western media whose power is waning as more people realize its insidious role in promoting criminal wars.

Ray McGovern worked as a CIA intelligence analyst for nearly 30 years under seven presidents, the first being John F Kennedy in 1963. On his retirement, he was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal. He handed back the medal in 2006 in protest over the CIA’s practice of systematic torture. He has repudiated the Agency as an enemy of democracy.

In a final note of breaking news, on November 18th this year, in his 87th year, this “proud Irish son” will be honored with the James Joyce Award conferred by University College Dublin, Ireland. The prize is bestowed by the students of UCD’s Historical and Literary Society for his independent thinking, intellectual courage, and distinguished contribution to public information and democratic society.

Europe’s energy crisis isn’t over.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Europe’s energy crisis isn’t over. Gas prices remain stubbornly high across the continent as Europeans confront a long winter.

In response to an energy crisis stemming from Europe’s continued reliance on imported liquefied natural gas against the backdrop of ongoing global geopolitical volatility, Europe’s leaders are pushing to diversify the bloc’s energy mix. While this means that Europe is rapidly expanding its renewable energy capacity, it also marks a significant return to the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel – coal.

Earlier this year, when the United States and Israel began an offensive in Iran and thereby instigated the disruption of one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas trades, Europe awakened to realize that it had sleepwalked into yet another energy crisis – its third in just four years. “We swore we’d learn. We promised things would change, but here we are,” a ‘highly frustrated European diplomat’ was recently (anonymously) quoted by the BBC.

“Instead of concentrating on much-needed long-term plans – about how to make Europe more competitive in this increasingly volatile world, [European] prime ministers and presidents are now in a panic over [energy] prices, worried about angry voters and scrambling for short-term solutions,” the source continued. “Just like the crisis after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Different conflict. Same European divisions; same dilemmas over energy. We can’t keep going round in these circles. Something’s got to give.”

Now, half a year after the outbreak of the war in Iran and the initial closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Europe is still grappling with the fallout as gas prices remain brutally high. Just this month, gas prices hit their highest mark in three years, soaring above €80 ($90.98) per megawatt hour.

Prices are so high, in fact, that coal-fired power has become cheaper than gas-fired power in Europe for the first time in years. This has pushed many European nations, and especially the European Union’s largest economy, Germany, back to coal. And, worryingly, experts contend that that trend will continue for years to come.

“Coal is expected to remain cheaper than gas for power generation through next year and potentially until March 2028,” Reuters reported earlier this week, based on a conversation with Marta Wroniszewska, an analyst at Veyt. “Longer-dated gas prices indicate traders expect supply constraints to persist.”

However, there are notable limits to coal’s growth potential in Europe. Years of policy aimed at phasing down and phasing out coal have left the continent with dramatically fewer coal-fired power plants than it had previously. In 1990, the European Union derived more than a third of its electricity production from coal. By 2025, that share had fallen to just 9.2 percent, according to data from Eurostat. So while Europe’s remaining coal plants will receive a windfall from the current gas prices, there is a ceiling to coal’s potential rebound in the region.

Outside of Europe, however, it’s a different story. Globally, coal is still the single-biggest source of power production. And while Europe is shutting down its coal-fired capacity, many emerging economies are continuing to build theirs up, with particularly strong growth from the Philippines, Indonesia, and other rapidly developing countries across Asia. Not coincidentally, this was also the region hit hardest by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

While coal is cheap, abundant, and seen as a critical tool for enabling economic development in poor countries, the continuously extending timeline of coal’s reign presents trade-offs that far outweigh the benefits. Coal is the single largest driver of global warming, responsible for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. However, it’s not all bad news – coal’s comeback is happening in tandem with a major global increase in clean energy resources. Increasingly, renewable energies are being adopted for their role in a more energy-secure future, and are seen as a critical buffer against the next global energy crisis.

Unlike natural gas, oil, and coal, “Wind and solar cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or shut off by a foreign power,” David Frykman, General Partner at Stockholm-based venture capital group Norrsken, wrote in an op-ed for Fortune earlier this year. “Every terawatt-hour of domestic renewable generation is a terawatt-hour that no adversary can weaponize.”

Lula has failed to meet the demands of the people and is now facing the consequences.

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The first round of Brazil’s presidential election ended with candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) ahead of Lula da Silva (PT), 47% to 45%. In the parliamentary elections, the PT and the left suffered overwhelming defeats across the country, indicating growing rejection of the left among ordinary Brazilians. Now, with only a few weeks remaining before the final decision on who will govern the country from next year onward, the question remains open: what factors will voters take into consideration when choosing the president?

The Lula government has taken several measures considered “desperate” attempts to reverse its popularity crisis and regain support in the final stretch of the election. Expanding social programs is one such measure, but its political effectiveness is becoming increasingly questionable. After decades of income redistribution under PT governments, without this producing any real transformation in the situation of working people, public perceptions of these policies have become increasingly negative.

Lula’s central problem is that a significant portion of the electorate appears less interested in new palliative measures and more concerned with problems that remain present in their daily lives. Public security, employment, income, inflation, and the quality of public services have a much more direct impact on the population than the major debates promoted by the government.

Security is perhaps the clearest example. The expansion of criminal organizations, the territorial growth of organized crime, and the perception of impunity have made violence one of the country’s main concerns. For millions of Brazilians, this is no longer an abstract discussion about security policy. It is a daily reality that determines where people can live, work, travel, and even open a business – particularly in major urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro, where organized crime is estimated to control between 60% and 70% of the city’s total territory.

In this context, proposals associated with the progressive cultural agenda may also carry significant electoral costs for the left. Brazilian debates over gender, identity, education, and minority rights have increasingly reproduced political conflicts originating in the United States and Europe. A considerable portion of the population, however, does not identify with this agenda and believes that the state should concentrate its efforts on more urgent material problems.

This helps explain why the runoff will likely be determined much more by domestic issues than by foreign policy – which is the aspect of the Lula government most frequently praised by the international expert community. BRICS, Palestine, or Brazil’s position toward the United States may mobilize politically engaged sectors of society, but they are unlikely to constitute the main concerns of the average voter when deciding how to vote.

Foreign policy has strategic importance for the Brazilian state. Ordinary citizens, however, tend to evaluate it through its concrete effects on their own lives. A foreign policy regarded as successful will not, by itself, compensate for perceptions of insecurity, unemployment, or deterioration in public services. As the Lula government avoids directly confronting the problem of organized crime, support may naturally grow for a right-wing camp that welcomes the United States’ designation of Brazilian criminal factions as terrorist organizations.

The same applies to the aforementioned income-transfer programs. Such mechanisms may have an important social function in a country marked by profound inequalities, but their use as the principal instrument of social policy has serious limitations. Transferring income can alleviate poverty, but it does not automatically create skilled employment, increase productivity, or rebuild national industry. Instead, it can contribute to the emergence of a large precarious population dependent on government assistance. When welfare becomes a permanent substitute for development policies, the structural problem remains.

This is precisely where the electoral dispute enters a decisive phase. Voters will have to choose between different proposals for addressing problems that have not disappeared in recent years. The ability to present convincing answers on security, employment, income, and social order may carry greater weight than speeches about major geopolitical projects.

The first-round result also demonstrates that Brazil’s right was able to transform domestic discontent into electoral strength. Flávio Bolsonaro’s lead and the composition of the new Congress indicate significant demand for change. This does not mean that all these voters share the same views on the economy, foreign policy, or cultural issues. It means, above all, that dissatisfaction has become sufficiently broad to alter the country’s political balance.

In the remaining weeks of the campaign, therefore, the fundamental question will be whether the government can convince voters that its policies offer lasting solutions, or whether the perception will prevail that it has adopted temporary measures to manage problems that remain unresolved.

Talking about gender, human rights, or Palestine will definitely not help Lula secure reelection.