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

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

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

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

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The Trump administration’s assault on the ICC isn’t just about protecting Netanyahu from war crimes prosecution. It’s about preserving “imperial impunity” – Israel’s just “the smokescreen,” says Noura Erakat, professor of criminal justice and Africana studies at Rutgers University and human rights attorney. She traces Washington’s bipartisan refusal to ratify the Rome Statute to explain why the International Criminal Court has spent two decades indicting mostly African and Arab leaders. The 2024 warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant just show the court “between a rock and a hard place”: finally give up its legitimacy entirely, or face destruction by the US.

Now more than a dozen ICC judges, prosecutors, and the court’s president have been sanctioned, as Washington reportedly prepares sanctions against the entire institution, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling it an “intolerable threat” to US sovereignty. Can the court survive a war with Washington? Should it? And why do Global South states stay invested in a court that’s clearly stacked against them?

Plus: Erakat describes her arrest at a Palm Beach County budget hearing on their $1 billion-plus investment in Israel bonds; warns that Gaza’s Board of Peace could become a blueprint to replace the UN; and explains why she believes, even as public opinion on Palestine shifts, “there’s no way to be safe in this moment by hiding.”

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Can the United Nations be saved? Should it be? As world leaders and war criminals gather for the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, says that despite today’s gangster rule by the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the UN Charter still sets the standard for judging powerful states, making it “the most important treaty document that the world has ever had” – even with the institution built on it in shambles.

Prashad slams Secretary-General António Guterres’s failure to get “creative” to end the genocide in Gaza or to stand up to Trump on Iran, instead opening a free lane for the US president who has “put a loaded gun on the table and has threatened the world.” 

After the US denied visas to the Palestinians for a second year and heavily restricted Iran’s delegation, Prashad makes the case for moving the high-level UNGA out of the US: “New York doesn’t deserve it anymore,” he says, offering alternatives in Geneva or Nairobi. “Let’s move it to the Global South. Why not?”

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Diesel is approaching $9 a gallon in California, the Federal Reserve just raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, and Americans have lost roughly 30% of their purchasing power in just six years. That’s not the economy malfunctioning – it’s proof of the American empire in decline, says Dr. Richard Wolff, economics professor and founder of Democracy at Work. He tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek the Strait of Hormuz is where Washington’s unchecked economic conquest finally hit a wall, and the costs are being offloaded onto working families.

From Washington’s “lucky” inheritance of a global empire after World War II, to Trump’s war on Iran choking the world’s oil supply, to a $40 trillion national debt now costing more in interest than the entire Pentagon defense budget, Wolff argues the capitalist system is doing just what it was designed to do: protect the interests of the ulta-rich. But history is instructive: Wolff points to Europe, where the end of empire and “decolonization” paved the way for extreme far-right (and left) politics in countries like France and Germany – a pattern he says is already unfolding stateside in real time.

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Is the UK about to break apart? For the first time ever, Scotland, Wales, and the north of Ireland are led by pro-independence parties committed to “the right of each nation to determine its own future.” Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson and a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the north of Ireland, joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek to break down the historic Cardiff agreement, and why he says the United Kingdom is truly on the edge of becoming “disunited.”

Kearney digs into how Brexit set off a populist realignment across British politics that’s still reshaping the map, and why Westminster’s refusal to set a date for an Irish reunification referendum may violate the very terms of the Good Friday Agreement – a treaty that still hasn’t delivered the vote it promised the north of Ireland 28 years ago. And what would a UK breakup mean for the world beyond these islands, considering Ireland’s deep solidarity with Palestine, Cuba, and the wider Global South, and growing anger at the British government’s continued role in arming and supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

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Ansar Allah’s Red Sea wins last week torched Saudi’s decade-long strategy in Yemen – and the tens of billions it poured into trying to hold one of the world’s most vital shipping chokepoints. Shireen Al-Adeimi, Yemeni-born anti-war activist and Michigan State University professor, joins Zoe Alexandra to unpack what the seizure of Mokha and control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait means for a global economy already brought to its knees by record $6/gallon diesel prices.

With the Strait of Hormuz still slowed to a trickle by the US-Israeli war on Iran and Riyadh’s East-West pipeline offline, Al-Adeimi says it’s in the whole world’s interest to “push the Saudis to just end this war. Admit that you’ve lost, cut your losses, and move on.” She breaks down how Riyadh’s violation of the 2022 ceasefire capped a decade of failed Saudi and UAE intervention, and why it matters that Pakistan just refused, for the second time, to back the Saudis under the Mecca joint defense pact – leading Riyadh to claim Mecca is under attack in a desperate PR stunt to shore up support it’s been cut off from in the West.

“This is hugely significant for Yemen as part of its long fight to end foreign intervention in Yemen… A strong Yemen – an anti-imperialist Yemen, a Yemen that is not going to allow the Gulf countries to treat it any way they wish, or to have a puppet government there in Yemen as we had before — is an inconvenience to these oil-producing countries.”

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Robert Kraft tapped friend Jeffrey Epstein for legal advice after he was charged in a Florida police sting targeting suspected human trafficking. Zoe Alexandra traces the legacy of scandals and crimes behind the billionaire Zionist and owner of Gillette Stadium – and ostensible destroyer of Ed Sheeran’s career – after Kraft pushed NFL stadium owners to drop Macklemore from the Loop Tour for speaking out on Gaza at MetLife Stadium.

From an alleged AI surveillance command center at Gillette, to winning Israel’s Genesis Prize, to the Blue Square Alliance/Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and his ties with Friends of the IDF — this is the story of the American billionaire who bankrolled a decades-long “Speak Out for Israel” campaign to silence criticism, and how his latest attempt has backfired spectacularly into a global watershed moment for Palestine solidarity.

“You can’t make this stuff up: billionaires helping billionaires get out of sex crimes, sharing defense strategies — all while they promote ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other horrific crimes against humanity being carried out against the Palestinians by Israel.”

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Is Türkiye next? That question is dominating Israeli airwaves as Ankara – a NATO ally that’s suspended trade with Tel Aviv but not Tehran – may be running out of room to stay neutral in the US-Israeli war on Iran. Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to break down what’s really driving Israel’s growing antagonism toward Erdogan’s Türkiye: no longer just a difficult diplomatic counterpart, but a country that may hold the power to reshape the region’s entire security architecture in ways that threaten Netanyahu’s “freedom of action” – Israel’s ambition for total dominance.

Cafiero lays out why, after the fall of the Assad government in 2024 and the start of the genocide in Gaza, Israel fears a strong, centralized Syrian state aligned with Ankara. He draws a line between Israel’s deepening relationship with Greece, Türkiye’s expanding influence in Somalia near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, and the new Mecca Defense Pact linking Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – a configuration Israel sees as a direct threat to regional hegemony. And with Turkey a NATO member, Cafiero breaks down the real question everyone’s asking: if Israel strikes Turkish forces directly, does NATO’s Article 5 actually kick in?

Cafiero also explains why Doha and Ankara have built one of the Middle East’s most consequential partnerships – and why, a year after Israel’s strike on Qatar, Doha is working to diversify its security relationships beyond Washington, with Türkiye’s partnership central to that strategy.

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Palestinians across the West Bank are facing at least six settler attacks per day – the highest rate ever documented – with nearly two dozen people killed, more than 1,000 injured, and more families displaced in the first months of 2026 than in all of last year. This is Israel’s apartheid carceral system working exactly as designed, Basil Farraj tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek.

Farraj, an assistant professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, joins from the occupied West Bank to break down the surge in Israeli settler violence in cities like Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, and increasingly Birzeit, connecting it to a decades-long Israeli displacement policy he says is finally becoming impossible for the world to ignore. This week, the UK, France, Canada, and nine other countries announced a coordinated trade ban on Israeli settlement goods, with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy accusing settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”

Farraj explains why he sees sanctions against Tel Aviv’s settlement enterprise – even as the US under Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to join them and Ambassador Mike Huckabee accused Britain of “Jew hate” – as a meaningful but insufficient first step, making the case for a full boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli state. He connects the West Bank escalation to Israel’s plans to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza, and to his own research on Israel’s prison system – arguing that the abuse, starvation, and isolation faced by Palestinian detainees, intensified under Benjamin Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, mirrors the same architecture of control now expanding across the occupied territories, increasingly reaching Palestinian citizens of Israel as well.

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