O preconizado corte de 50% na retenção de IRS em novembro, fará com que um salário de 1.000 euros fique sujeito a 34 euros de IRS para o conjunto do vencimento e subsídio de natal, em vez de 70 euros, segundo veicula o Notícias ao Minuto com base na publicação de hoje em Diário da República (DR).
O montante final a reter em novembro para refletir a descida intercalar do IRS em 2026, por despacho do Governo publicado hoje em DR, estabelece que, nesse mês, as entidades pagadoras de salários e pensões, em vez de cobrarem a percentagem habitual de IRS, só retêm metade desse valor.
Como o corte se aplica quer ao vencimento mensal quer ao subsídio de natal, que é sujeito a retenção de forma separada, a quantia de IRS a entregar ao Estado em novembro relativamente ao conjunto das duas remunerações – salário e subsídio – será semelhante àquela que em condições normais se aplicaria apenas ao salário mensal. As diferenças decorrem de arredondamentos a que as regras da retenção obedecem.
Saliente-se que o NM divulga os cálculos realizados pela Lusa os quais permitem visualizar esses efeitos em diferentes níveis de rendimento, como poderá observar adiante.
Confira as diferentes simulações dos salários
No caso de um trabalhador solteiro sem filhos que ganhe 1.000 euros brutos por mês, a retenção na fonte atual é de 35 euros. Em novembro, com o corte de 50%, a retenção sobre o salário baixa para 17 euros – não para 17,50 euros, uma vez que o Código do IRS prevê que “a importância apurada mediante aplicação das taxas de retenção é arredondada para a unidade de euros inferior”.
Como o subsídio de natal é idêntico ao vencimento mensal, a retenção a fazer de forma autónoma sobre essa componente remuneratória também será de 17 euros. Dessa forma, o valor global a reter de IRS nesse mês será de 34 euros. Sem o ajustamento agora fixado pelo Governo, seriam retidos 70 euros, 35 relativos ao salário e outros 35 ao subsídio.
A simulação é igual para um trabalhador casado com alguém que também aufere rendimentos. Ou seja, num vencimento de 1.200 euros brutos por mês, a retenção mensal, atualmente nos 96 euros, baixa em novembro para 48 euros. Sobre o subsídio, a retenção será igualmente de 48 euros, colocando o total do IRS a entregar nos 96 euros.
Num vencimento bruto de 1.500 euros, a retenção passa de 168 euros para 84 euros, aplicando-se um valor idêntico ao subsídio.
Já para um rendimento mensal bruto de 2.000 euros, a retenção reduz-se dos atuais 301 euros para 150 euros, a que se soma uma cobrança igual sobre o subsídio de natal.
Para um trabalhador que recebe 3.000 euros brutos mensais, a entrega de IRS de novembro, em vez de 663 euros, recua para 331 euros, aos quais acrescem outros 331 euros sobre o subsídio de natal.
E num salário bruto de 5.000 euros por mês, a retenção mensal baixa de 1.452 euros para 726 euros, cobrando-se o mesmo sobre o subsídio.
Os cálculos são semelhantes para trabalhadores solteiros com filhos, com a diferença de que o valor de IRS a entregar é menor consoante o número de dependentes.
E acerca das pensões?
Numa pensão de 1.000 euros brutos mensais, de um reformado casado com alguém que também aufere rendimentos, o IRS a reter em novembro sobre a pensão será de 10 euros, em vez dos 20 habituais, sendo o pensionista chamado ainda a entregar 10 euros relativos à retenção do subsídio de natal.
Um pensionista com uma reforma de 1.500 euros, em vez de entregar 151 euros, fará uma retenção de IRS em novembro de 75 euros, a que acrescem 75 euros sobre o subsídio de natal.
Numa pensão de 1.800 euros, o valor a reter em novembro, em vez de 223 euros, será de 111 euros, acrescendo outros 111 sobre o subsídio de natal.
Um pensionista que receba 3.000 euros brutos, e que atualmente retém 678 euros por mês, irá entregar 339 euros em novembro, mais 339 sobre o subsídio de natal.
É de referir que tanto os salários como as pensões até aos 920 euros não fazem retenção na fonte, porque se encontram isentos de IRS por via do mínimo de existência, que exclui de tributação os rendimentos mais baixos.
A redução da cobrança de IRS em 50% só se aplica em novembro, para refletir nesse mês a descida das taxas gerais do 1.º ao 6.º escalão de rendimento. Em dezembro, voltam a aplicar-se as taxas normais fixadas desde o início do ano, ou seja, sem a redução de 50%.
Privatização promete reaver investimento público até 2040. Desconto no IRS em novembro garante liquidez às famílias, mas gera custos de gestão para patrões antes do regresso das tabelas normais.
Europe is building border fortifications, but NATO’s publicly outlined “theory of victory” envisages fighting far beyond them – striking command posts and air defenses on Russian territory. Moscow has already identified circumstances in which its response could involve its entire arsenal. Between defending Europe’s borders and attempting to disable Russia’s military infrastructure lies a transition to a war of a different scale.
What Warsaw Put on the Table
At the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12–13, NATO’s top commander in Europe, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, outlined a three-stage response to an attack on the alliance: “block, blunt, break.” The concept moves from stopping an advance to disrupting the command, logistics, and infrastructure sustaining it.
“Block, blunt, break.” NATO has three words for winning a war with Russia. Keeping that war limited will take more than a slogan
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski addressed the forces Europe might eventually field, saying he expected a combined European army by 2030, at least on the eastern flank.
These statements followed regional consultations in Lithuania, where the Nordic-Baltic Eight’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee chairs discussed security and border protection. Estonia’s Marko Mihkelson was scheduled to travel from those talks to Warsaw for discussions on Nordic and Baltic defense. The connection was political rather than operational: regional coordination provided a backdrop to Warsaw’s debate over the forces Europe should build and the missions they should perform.
A united front for the cameras. Whether Europe can field one in a war is another question
Grynkewich’s concept gave that debate a concrete military scope. Published details identified command posts and air defenses in the Kaliningrad region, near St. Petersburg, and in Belarus as potential targets. Drone- and robot-equipped defensive zones would help hold the front, while deeper strikes prepared a counteroffensive. Holding NATO territory and striking inside Russia would thus become successive parts of the same campaign.
Grynkewich says NATO does not seek Russia’s strategic defeat. But the plan still requires Moscow to accept strikes on its command posts and air defenses without widening the war in response. That is not a condition NATO can dictate. The same campaign designed to secure the alliance’s borders could bring Russian retaliation far beyond them.
Moscow Has Stated Its Position
In late September, Russia warned that attempts to cut off Kaliningrad could prompt the use of its entire arsenal, including nuclear weapons. On October 13, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko described the warning as a preventive signal intended to avert armed confrontation. Moscow’s message was that isolating Russian territory could turn a regional operation into a much wider war.
That warning gave particular significance to a question put to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte the following day in Tallinn: would the alliance close the Gulf of Finland to Russian ships in wartime? Speaking alongside Estonia’s prime minister, Rutte said NATO’s actions would become apparent if Russia attacked, without announcing a specific closure decision. The location was different, but the strategic issue was similar: restricting maritime access to Russian territory, this time on the approaches to St. Petersburg.
“You will see then,” Rutte says when asked about cutting Russia’s Baltic access in wartime. Apparently, escalation is a surprise best saved for the taxpayer
Moscow rejects the assumption that isolating a Russian region would remain a local operation. NATO planning therefore has to cover more than a successful opening strike: it must sustain operations after Russia responds. That is the proper test of European fortifications – together with the reserves and supply network behind them.
Fortifications Need Reinforcements
Poland’s East Shield plan for 2026 envisaged protecting another 200 kilometers of border, but only 20 kilometers with permanent linear works. The remainder would rely on pre-positioned construction materials.
Estonia plans 600 small bunkers by the end of 2027. Such positions must be occupied, supplied, and reinforced in time.
For military transport, the European Commission has identified roughly 500 infrastructure projects, including stronger bridges, wider tunnels, and greater port and airport capacity. It also identifies shortages of rail wagons and ferries for equipment. Around €1.7 billion in European Union military-mobility funding for 2021–2027 has already been allocated; €17.65 billion was proposed for the next budget period. But an allocation is not a completed transport route.
History illustrates the distinction. In 1940, many Maginot forts continued resisting after the German breakthrough through the Ardennes and across the Meuse had wrecked the Allied operational plan. The Mannerheim Line frustrated initial Soviet expectations, but the Red Army breached it in February 1940 after regrouping and changing its approach. Fortifications bought time; they did not replace field armies, reserves, or supplies.
Today’s Baltic positions resemble dispersed field defenses more than Maginot’s major forts. Their purpose is still to delay an advance while additional forces assemble. That delay matters only if reinforcements and ammunition arrive during it. Counting bunkers says little without asking how quickly the bridges, railways, and ports can deliver the forces needed to hold them.
Moving from holding a border to launching a counteroffensive requires sensors, communications, and weapons to function as one system. Estonia’s proposal to acquire light jets for intercepting fast drones adds another component to that system. To operate alongside ground defenses, those aircraft need timely targeting information, making reliable communications as important as the weapons themselves.
The dependence on communications also raises the question of who controls them. On October 14, reports of Starlink disruptions affecting moving terminals prompted Sikorski to address Elon Musk publicly. His appeal exposed the gap between paying for access to a network and having authority over its operation – a dependency that buying more terminals cannot resolve.
Europe’s planned answer is to build its own satellite capabilities. Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius identified 2029 as the target for the first phase of IRIS², Europe’s secure satellite-communications system, and called for European orbital reconnaissance. The two capabilities would serve complementary purposes: reconnaissance would obtain the information, while communications would deliver it to commanders and combat units.
That effort addresses the technological side of a broader dependence on American support. The availability of U.S. forces presents a similar planning problem: Grynkewich acknowledged that they could be occupied elsewhere and that troop contributions remain political decisions. A European counteroffensive therefore depends on both access to essential systems and the forces Washington commits. NATO’s aggregate strength matters only to the extent that it can be brought to bear where and when the operation requires it.
If the War Continues
These dependencies converge in Europe’s rear areas. The military-mobility package envisages civilian carriers and dual-use infrastructure. Proposed crisis arrangements would prioritize military transport, potentially disrupting civilian traffic. Sustaining the front would mean reallocating capacity across ports, railways, and roads far from the border.
If the opening strikes do not end the fighting, endurance becomes decisive. Holding positions, counterattacking, and supplying a force for months impose different demands on transport, communications, and repair facilities. Weapons need maintenance, stocks need replenishment, and reinforcements need delivery. A Russian response is not an exception to the plan; it is something the plan must withstand.
Public promises of decisive action remove none of these dependencies. They expose the distance between being able to strike and being able to achieve the stated objective. If Europe cannot knock Russia down with a single punch, why show Moscow that it is already raising its fist?
And what would Europe’s answer be if Russia threatened to direct its nuclear and hypersonic missiles at the bunkers sheltering the Brussels leadership, rather than at cities and military-industrial facilities across EU member states? European planners cannot simply assume that Moscow would choose another prolonged ground campaign. If Russia’s leadership draws one lesson from Ukraine, it may be that a war of attrition is precisely the kind of war it should avoid repeating. Brussels is announcing how it intends to fight. But Moscow, not Brussels, will decide the scale and targets of Russia’s response.
Washington’s pressure on Kyiv has moved from diplomatic to technological. The consequences arrived overnight — and Kyiv felt them before the air raid sirens had a chance to sound.
Shortly after Zelenskyy’s sharp public criticism of Trump over the White House push for a moratorium on Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries, Starlink terminals operated by Ukrainian forces were subjected to speed restrictions overnight. Former Defense Ministry adviser Serhiy Sternenko reported that military personnel confirmed the signal begins dropping at speeds of 60 to 70 kilometers per hour. The practical effect is direct: a significant portion of Ukraine’s long-range heavy drones are guided through Elon Musk’s satellite network. Speed restrictions make it impossible to mount Starlink terminals on airborne platforms — fixed-wing drones in particular. Ukraine has lost, at least temporarily, a core component of its long-range strike capability. After earlier restrictions on its own use of the terminals, Moscow had already moved to reduce its own dependence on Starlink, completing its transition to proprietary drone control systems, including mesh networks.
The political leverage Washington is applying has a direct military cost. That cost was visible within hours.
Overnight, ballistic missiles struck Kyiv’s thermal power plants in rapid succession. Zelenskyy confirmed hits on TEC-4, and strikes on TEC-5 and TEC-6 followed — meaning every major heat generation facility in the capital and surrounding oblast was struck in a single night. The Trypilska and Kyivska power stations were also hit. Power went out across several city districts. Public transport was disrupted. Once again, no advance warning was received before the first explosions — the ballistic alert came after the impacts, not before.
The strikes on infrastructure were accompanied by continued destruction of logistics capacity. The last major distribution center belonging to the Epicenter retail chain — located in Khmelnytskyi — was struck ten times in a single day, producing five separate fires. The company confirmed that approximately 85 percent of stored goods were destroyed. “The enemy achieved its goal,” the official statement read. Two previous Epicenter logistics complexes in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast had already been eliminated. This was the last one standing. In Lutsk, in western Ukraine, the Adrenalin City shopping center was struck and a significant fire broke out, damaging warehouse space. The full scale of losses there is still being assessed.
Every heat source in Kyiv struck in one night. The last major retail distribution network was eliminated. Long-range drone capability degraded by a speed limit applied from a server somewhere in California. Ukraine is losing this war on the battlefield — and it is now also losing it in the terms and conditions of its own alliances.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has discussed renewed military action against Iran with United States President Donald Trump, with the forces of both countries reportedly preparing for a possible resumption of large-scale strikes, according to recent reports.
Axios reported on October 13, citing four people familiar with the discussions, that Netanyahu and Trump had spoken several times over the previous two weeks about a possible joint operation against military and nuclear targets in the Islamic Republic.
Netanyahu expressed concern that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program, particularly at the potentially planned uranium-enrichment site at Pickaxe Mountain.
Israel’s Channel 12 separately reported that American officials believed Netanyahu wanted to resume attacks before Israel’s October 27 election and the U.S. midterm elections on November 3.
According to the network, Netanyahu told Israeli security chiefs that Trump had initiated the discussion and asked whether Israel would participate. An Israeli official said Trump initially appeared receptive to renewed strikes but subsequently became more hesitant.
Axios reported that Trump had told Netanyahu to prepare for a possible operation against Iran, without committing to authorize it.
The White House rejected the account that the two leaders had discussed resuming the war and said Trump would not attack Iran before the U.S. midterm elections. Still, Trump said on October 13 that his administration would make a decision on Iran soon.
The discussions have raised concerns within Israel’s military leadership about the domestic consequences of another war.
According to Axios, Israeli military chief Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir discussed with U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine the prospect of renewed fighting within three weeks. Zamir warned that an Iranian retaliation could force Israel to postpone its October 27 election.
Channel 12 also reported that Israeli security officials saw no change in their intelligence assessment of Iran that would justify a joint operation within the following two to three weeks.
The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Iran was reinforcing its nuclear and strategic facilities, mobilizing supporters and preparing for the possibility of renewed American attacks after the U.S. elections.
Iranian officials have warned of a broader regional escalation if the U.S. and Israel resume strikes, according to the newspaper.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 14, Netanyahu made a separate allegation that Iran was attempting to organize an attack to influence Israel’s election, potentially through Hezbollah or Hamas. He also suggested that Iran could seek to provoke violence in the West Bank. The report did not provide independently verified evidence of the alleged plan.
In another interview with Army Radio, Netanyahu said a preemptive strike against Iran before Israel’s election was not advisable, describing the timing as inconvenient. He nevertheless warned that Israel would respond forcefully if Iran attacked.
He declined to discuss whether military action could follow the election, or to elaborate on his recent conversations with Trump.
All recent reports indicate that a decision to attack Iran again has likely been made. Only the timing and scale remain unclear. In any case, the Islamic Republic will likely strike back with full force against the interests of both countries across the Middle East.
Ukrainian officials said on October 14 that new restrictions on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service had disrupted several military drone missions, raising concerns about the potential impact on Ukraine’s military operations.
Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov said SpaceX had restricted the operation of military-grade Starlink terminals at high speeds, preventing Ukrainian forces from using them to guide drones effectively.
“Our defence forces did not receive a warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions,” Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Reaction Corps, deployed on the southeastern front, reported that Starlink connections could drop for 10 to 20 seconds when drones traveled at speeds of 110 to 120 kilometers per hour. The drones continued flying during the interruptions but became harder to control, the corps said in a statement to Reuters.
A source in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry cited by the news agency said the restrictions significantly complicated logistics and some drone operations.
The disruption has also drawn criticism from Poland, which pays for Ukraine’s Starlink subscriptions. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski questioned whether Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, was using the service for political purposes.
“Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again?” Sikorski wrote on X, adding that European customers were watching Musk’s actions.
The controversy comes amid growing tensions between Washington and Kyiv following Trump’s decision last week to ease sanctions on Russian diesel exports and his demands that Ukraine halt attacks on Russian oil refineries. Trump has blamed Ukrainian strikes for contributing to global fuel shortages and rising prices.
Musk has publicly supported Trump’s position. On October 11, he endorsed the president’s criticism of Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries by reposting a video of Trump attacking the strikes and writing, “Zelenskyy has gone too far.”
Trump’s push to restrict Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure has added to concerns in Kyiv that Washington could use its influence over military support to pressure the country into concessions.
Those concerns have been compounded by disputes over intelligence sharing. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on October 13 that Ukraine had received no advance warning from its partners before Russian ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv.
Trump denied that Washington had stopped sharing intelligence, telling reporters later in the day, “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel.”
Starlink’s resistance to electronic jamming has made it vital to Ukraine’s drone operations, battlefield coordination and military logistics. Restrictions could make it harder for Ukrainian forces to control drones en route to targets deep inside Russia while disrupting frontline communications and resupply. Thus, the restriction shows that Washington is serious about pressuring Kyiv.
Trump scheint seine Forderung, die Ukraine solle ihre Angriffe auf russische Raffinerien einstellen, ernst zu meinen und lässt dem, nachdem Selensky Trumps Forderungen offen ignoriert hat, nun Taten folgen. Die USA haben Kiew schon die zweite Nacht infolge keine Aufklärungsdaten über russische Raketenangriffe geschickt und dann SpaceX den Zugang des ukrainischen Militärs zum Satelliteninternet Starlink […]
For years, Washington insisted that economic relations with Russia should remain restricted until Moscow changed its policies towards Ukraine. On 9 October, the White House found a reason to make an exception. Following a conversation with President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump announced that Russia would supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel to American and […]
Beim Qincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft ist ein Artikel erschienen, in dem ein hypothetisches Zukunftsszenario zur Ukraine durchgespielt wird, das zeigt, zu welchen Gefahren die derzeitige Politik des Westen zu führen droht. Ich habe den Artikel übersetzt. Beginn der Übersetzung: 2027: Der Winter in der Ukraine, von dem wir gehofft hatten, dass er nicht kommen […]
O candidato à Presidência da República Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) anunciou que não participará do debate contra o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), marcado pela TV Bandeirantes para o próximo domingo (18/10). O senador também deixou em aberto sua presença no confronto que a TV Globo realizará em 23 de outubro, dois dias antes do segundo turno das eleições presidenciais de 2026. A decisão sobre o último encontro caberá à equipe técnica de sua campanha.
Ao conversar com jornalistas nesta terça-feira (13/10), Flávio descartou sua participação no programa da Band, apesar das sinalizações anteriores de que compareceria aos debates da reta final da disputa. O candidato afirmou que seus assessores ainda estudam a possibilidade de um confronto direto com Lula na televisão. “Não está previsto esse debate domingo”, declarou Flávio Bolsonaro ao responder sobre sua presença no encontro organizado pela Bandeirantes. O senador acrescentou que a definição sobre a participação no último debate dependerá de uma avaliação de seus assessores. “Estamos analisando, quem vai dar a palavra final vai ser a minha equipe técnica de um último debate.”
Após Flávio Bolsonaro confirmar que não irá ao debate da Band no próximo domingo (18/10), a emissora decidiu manter o encontro com a presença apenas do presidente Lula, candidato à reeleição pelo PT. Sob reserva, integrantes da cúpula da Band disseram que o canal não pretende abrir mão do debate, apesar da ausência confirmada do candidato do PL. Com isso, Lula participará sozinho, enquanto a Band manterá no cenário o púlpito destinado a Flávio Bolsonaro, que ficará vazio durante a transmissão.
O presidente e candidato à reeleição Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) confirmou participação no debate presidencial promovido pela Band. A Band confirma que o debate está mantido e, de acordo com as regras estabelecidas pela emissora para o encontro, a ausência de qualquer um dos candidatos confirmados resultará na manutenção de um púlpito vazio no estúdio durante toda a transmissão. Em vídeo publicado nas redes sociais da Band, o petista desafiou Flávio a comparecer no debate.
A TV Globo programou o último debate presidencial para 23 de outubro, após o Jornal Nacional, nos Estúdios Globo, no Rio de Janeiro. A emissora pretende reunir os dois candidatos para discutir suas propostas antes da votação de 25 de outubro. O filho de Jair Bolsonaro ainda não confirmou sua presença. A campanha do PL avaliará a participação no encontro, que representa a última oportunidade prevista no calendário de debates para um confronto entre os dois presidenciáveis.
O posicionamento do senador contrasta com suas manifestações anteriores sobre a necessidade de debater com Lula. Durante o primeiro turno, Flávio Bolsonaro chegou a chamar o presidente de “fujão” e afirmou que desejava enfrentá-lo diretamente. A ausência dos dois candidatos marcou a primeira etapa da campanha eleitoral. Nem Lula nem Flávio Bolsonaro participaram dos debates realizados antes da votação de 4 de outubro. Na ocasião, o candidato do PL chegou a confirmar presença no encontro organizado pela TV Globo, mas desistiu depois de decisões judiciais alterarem as condições previstas para o programa. Uma das determinações assegurou a participação de Renan Santos (Missão). Outra impediu a emissora de manter vazio o púlpito destinado a Lula, caso o presidente não comparecesse. O debate da Globo acabou cancelado justamente após Flávio desistir de participar, alegando interferência da Justiça Eleitoral no encontro.
O encontro entre os presidenciáveis será no dia 18 de outubro (domingo) às 20h, com transmissão ao vivo na Band TV, BandNews TV, nas rádios BandNews FM e Bandeirantes, no canal do YouTube de Band Jornalismo, no Band.com.br e no Bandplay. Além dos canais do grupo, o confronto contará com transmissão da parceria de um pool de veículos formado por TVs Gazeta, Cultura, Jovem Pan e o jornal O Estado de S. Paulo, o Estadão. A cobertura também trará análises em tempo real diretamente da Sala Digital, em parceria com o Google.
The deteriorating relationship between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has moved from diplomatic friction to operational consequence. Ukraine is now paying for it in real time.
On October 12, Russia struck Kyiv with ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s Air Force confirmed publicly that no warning of the launches was received from its American partners. The intelligence blackout was not accidental. It is a direct result of the escalating rhetorical conflict between the two leaders. Ukraine risks losing early warning coverage entirely.
Russia appears to be exploiting the rift with deliberate efficiency. Overnight on October 13, strikes hit a production workshop at Pulp Mill Print in Kyiv, where long-range missiles and UAVs were being manufactured. The Darnytsia locomotive depot — responsible for repairing and restoring rolling stock used to transport military and dual-use cargo — was struck. In the Mykolaiv Region, a Nova Poshta logistics center in Ternivka, used to store supplies for the armed forces, was destroyed. A UAV storage facility in Meshkovo-Pohorilove was wiped out. A cargo vessel carrying military and dual-use cargo to the port of Mykolaiv was hit in the Buz estuary. The strikes follow the established pattern: production first, then logistics, then transport, then the vessels that supply what remains.
The front lines offer no relief from the pressure building in the rear.
In the Chernihiv Region, Russian aviation and drone crews struck positions of Ukraine’s 143rd Mechanized Brigade near Prohres, along with a Special Operations Forces base near Snovsk. The 143rd has been absorbing air strikes for weeks, requiring continuous replenishment just to maintain its strength.
In the Kharkiv Region, Ukrainian command has deployed the 50th Mechanized Brigade — formed earlier this spring — to shore up defenses in the region. The unit is expected to be directed toward Velykyi Burluk. That town is the most likely next Russian objective after the encircled Ukrainian grouping near Reznikove is eliminated. Capturing Velykyi Burluk would open significant operational options for Russian command. Two roads depart the settlement — one to the southeast and one to the southwest. Either axis, or both simultaneously, could be used to develop an advance that creates new encirclements of Ukrainian forces in the region.
Ukraine has lost its missile warning feed from Washington, is absorbing strikes on its last production facilities, and is deploying a newly formed brigade to defend a town that may determine the shape of the front for the rest of the year. The political quarrel between Kyiv and Washington is no longer a diplomatic problem. It is a battlefield problem. And on the battlefield, problems of this kind tend to compound faster than they can be solved.
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Entre a poker face de Montenegro e os recados de Passos Coelho, a direita vive em sobressalto. Quem sai a ganhar com este duelo enquanto o Chega espreita?
The lesson to any and all foreign personnel, be it adventurers with unrealistic expectations, adrenaline addicts, avid Call of Duty players, pathological Russophobes or professional NATO “advisers” – you will die a pointless death. Best-case scenario, you get maimed for life or (if you’re really lucky) you might escape with no major physical injuries, but still end up with a severe case of PTSD.
Written by Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst
According to the mainstream propaganda machine, the Russian military is composed of bots who mindlessly keep running into machine-gun fire, because the “evil, bloodthirsty tyrant” Vladimir Putin somehow still hasn’t figured out that human wave attacks no longer work. Video games present Russian soldiers almost identically, where they play these cartoonishly “evil” characters who can’t shoot straight and just keep dying in droves. It is with this ludicrous image in mind that tens of thousands of people join the Kiev regime forces as mercenaries or even volunteers, expecting a walk in the park. Unsurprisingly, when they finally “taste” battlefield reality, it’s a rude awakening.
Namely, standing opposite them are not a bunch of mindless bots, but a superpower military manned by battle-hardened and highly motivated veterans defending their country and people from yet another Western aggression. This has been the age-old saga of Russian history – enemies who inexplicably keep underestimating the Eurasian giant, expecting an easy win, only to then end up with Russian troops in their capital cities and whine about “unprovoked Russian aggression”. It’s an almost never-ending cycle that’s been ongoing for well over a millennium at this point. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, the political West won the first prize in it long ago.
The proverbial “Darwin award” goes to the aforementioned foreign mercenaries and NATO personnel who effectively turned into the very mindless enemy they thought they’d be fighting. Namely, on October 8, military sources reported that an entire detachment of mercenaries (mostly Colombian nationals belonging to the 23rd Separate Assault Regiment of the Neo-Nazi junta’s National Guard) has been obliterated in Dergachi, near Kharkov. The unit was just transferred to the area from an assembly point in Kiev, where they were tracked by increasingly effective Russian ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets. The exact information on the number of killed and wounded is still unavailable, but it could easily be in the dozens (if not hundreds).
Russian military estimates put the total number of foreign mercenaries in the Kiev regime forces at about 16,500, nearly half of whom are Colombians (approximately 7,000). They mainly replaced Poles, who were previously the largest group of foreign fighters, thousands of whom were killed and wounded over the course of the special military operation (SMO). Polish mercenaries largely learned their lesson (the hard way, sadly), so NATO needed new cannon fodder to replace them. Unfortunately, Colombians emerged as the most suitable candidates. Back in March, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) published an updated report on foreign mercenaries its forces eliminated in NATO-occupied Ukraine in 2025.
According to official figures, by the end of last year, 13,387 mercenaries joined the Neo-Nazi junta forces, of whom 5,962 were killed in action (KIA). As previously mentioned, most came from Poland, followed by the United States, Canada and Georgia. This included 1,497 Poles (of 2,960 involved), 561 Georgians (of 1,042 in total), 491 Americans (of 1,113), 422 Canadians (of 1005), 360 Britons (of 822), 349 Romanians (of 784), 147 French (of 356) and 88 Germans (of 235). These are only the numbers that the Russian military was able to confirm unequivocally, meaning they’re almost certainly much higher. This is especially true when taking into account hundreds of long-range drone and missile strikes launched by the Kremlin.
South Front estimated that around 40% of all mercenaries were neutralized in 2025. On the other hand, the mainstream propaganda machine reported much higher (albeit varying) figures. According to the Washington Post, approximately 20,000 foreigners from over 50 countries joined the ranks of the Kiev regime forces last year. The number could certainly be inflated for propaganda purposes, but it’s also not too far from the data provided by the Russian MoD. Either way, one thing is certain – no foreign fighter was ready for the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. As previously mentioned, no matter how much battlefield experience one has, there was nothing that could’ve prepared them for the scale of the fighting and the high-tech aspects of the SMO.
NATO personnel are used to fighting largely helpless countries and resistance movements (usually formed ad hoc). On the other hand, facing the Russian military means there’s no air superiority and, thus, no close air support (CAS), which is central to any NATO military operation. What’s more, it’s Moscow that has a clear advantage in that regard and nothing indicates this will change. Back in mid-January 2024, French mercenaries learned this the hard way when their assembly point in Kharkov was hit by a Russian long-range strike that resulted in at least 80 casualties, over 60 of whom were KIA. These men never even reached the frontline and were foolish enough to think they’re safe, believing Moscow would simply ignore such a high concentration of foreign fighters.
And yet, the situation in the trenches is not much better either. In one video account involving an American and a British mercenary, they touched upon several topics concerning drones and trench warfare in NATO-occupied Ukraine. Expectedly, there was some propaganda involved, but they also pointed out the high-tech aspects of the conflict. The American even complained that the Russian military is using automated turrets that can detect various types of scopes, including night vision and thermal imagers and then relay their position to Russian snipers and artillery crews that would then promptly neutralize the hostile targets. Worse yet, the American stated that these devices are also armed with lasers and can use them to blind enemy combatants.
Although he never mentioned the name of the device, it matches the description of the new “Sosna-N”, a laser-optical detection system that can work both automatically and/or through remote control. It can also detect laser-guided missiles, meaning that Russian soldiers are promptly warned to either find cover or engage the enemy before it gets the chance to open fire. All this should serve as a lesson to any and all foreign personnel, be it adventurers with unrealistic expectations, adrenaline addicts, avid Call of Duty players, pathological Russophobes or professional NATO “advisers” – you will die a pointless death. Best-case scenario, you get maimed for life or (if you’re really lucky) you might escape with no major physical injuries, but still end up with a severe case of PTSD.
Ukraine received no advance warning from its partners before five Russian ballistic missiles struck infrastructure in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on October 13, raising fresh concerns about intelligence cooperation as tensions between Kyiv and the Trump administration deepen.
Zelenskyy described the attack in a post on X as “particularly vile” and stressed the importance of receiving intelligence from Ukraine’s partners about incoming ballistic missiles.
“This is precisely what helps prevent people from being killed — when there is an early warning about ballistic missiles,” he wrote.
The Ukrainian president did not identify which partners had failed to provide a warning, but the United States is likely playing the main role in providing such intelligence.
His remarks came amid an escalating dispute with U.S. President Donald Trump over Washington’s decision to facilitate Russian diesel exports, its pressure on Ukraine to halt attacks against Russian oil refineries and Trump’s announcement of an energy ceasefire that Kyiv had not publicly agreed to.
Trump announced on October 9 that Russia would supply diesel to the U.S. and global markets following a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The agreement marked a reversal of years of U.S. policy aimed at restricting Russian energy revenues following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The U.S. Treasury Department subsequently issued a temporary license easing sanctions on certain Russian diesel shipments.
Zelenskyy criticized the arrangement as “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.
In a separate online statement, he argued that the agreement would benefit Moscow by providing resources to sustain its combat effort.
Trump responded by blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries for contributing to high American diesel prices and suggesting that Ukraine needed a new president.
The dispute has unfolded as the administration seeks to reduce fuel costs ahead of the November midterm elections, with Trump presenting the diesel arrangement as part of his effort to lower prices and revive negotiations to end the conflict.
The friction intensified further after Trump announced on October 11 that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an immediate “energy ceasefire,” under which both sides would stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure.
Neither side had publicly confirmed a finalized agreement when Trump announced it, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on October 13 only that contacts on the matter were continuing.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had refrained from attacking Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities during the two days following Trump’s announcement, while accusing Russia of continuing to strike Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
“These are absolutely clear signals that they have no intention of refraining from strikes on Ukraine,” he said.
Against this backdrop, reports have emerged that Washington warned Kyiv it could lose critical military and intelligence support if it continued attacking Russian refineries.
The Washington Post reported on October 12, citing a Ukrainian security adviser and a Western official familiar with the matter, that U.S. officials had urged Ukraine to suspend the attacks and reminded Kyiv of Washington’s role in supplying weapons and intelligence.
The Ukrainian adviser said Kyiv interpreted the message as a warning that Washington “could cut intel and everything going under PURL if you don’t stop.” PURL is a NATO mechanism through which European allies finance purchases of U.S. weapons for Ukraine.
CNN separately reported, citing two European officials, that the Trump administration had warned Ukraine it could suspend intelligence sharing and the mechanism through which European countries purchase American weapons for Kyiv.
Zelenskyy’s latest remarks suggest that the Trump administration may be escalating pressure on Kyiv, with the growing rift potentially beginning to affect the security relationship between the two countries.
This is the newest update of the ‘U.S. Carrier Strike Groups Locations Map’ exclusive series showing the approximate locations of U.S. Carrier Strike Groups. SouthFront: Analysis & Intelligence tracks locations of U.S. aircraft carriers using the available open-source information. No classified information was used in production of the map.
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Carrier strike group (CSG) is an operational formation of the United States Navy. It is centered on an aircraft carrier and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircrafts. It’s composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a destroyer squadron of at least two destroyers and/or frigates. A carrier strike group also, on occasion, includes submarines, attached logistics ships and a supply ship. Carrier strike groups comprise a principal element of U.S. power projection over the world’s oceans
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James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)
I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.
Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.
I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor.
Credit: Preston, Samuel, “The Gorham Phelps Purchase,” RBSCP Exhibits, accessed October 8, 2026, https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/items/show/4541.
As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.”
Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe.
The forest, however, was real.
Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through.
So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.
On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s.
While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:
From the 82 mile Stone
120 Rods the groth is Beech
Maple birch ash Basswood
and Hemlock mixt
Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.
Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.
Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants.
The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.
It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.
Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.
A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped:
“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.”
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground.
Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge.
Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective.
The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived.
After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid.
I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned.
As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.
Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.
It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.
I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.
The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.
If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil.
In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.
He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.
He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.”
It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields.
Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.
At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot.
Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted.
The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me.
Maxwell wrote of this site:
The line of this town is very
good land covered with a thick
growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood
Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.
No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though.
I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home.
Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.
In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.
Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.
I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed.
The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.
I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it.
I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon.
I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.
Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language.
As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast.
There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.
I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.
When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong.
He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls.
He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.
He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.
The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.
In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring.
No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.
James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post. He teaches at SUNY Brockport.
This phenomenon has been described by political scientists long ago. A recognition of this fact by someone who was close to former president Joe Biden is quite impressive. White House Press Secretary from 2022 to 2025, Karine Jean-Pierre, published an article in The New York Times on October 2 in which she acknowledges that many […]
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