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How the Marshall Plan Rebuilt Post-War Greece—and Bound It to the US

5 June 2026 at 06:45
Marshall plan Greece
Between 1947 and 1951, Greece received roughly $2 billion in Marshall Aid and related Truman Doctrine funds—an astronomical sum worth more than $21 billion today. Credit: Public Domain

On June 5, 1947, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall stood before a Harvard University commencement crowd. He proposed a radical blueprint for the survival of post-war Europe—the European Recovery Program, famously known as the Marshall Plan.

Conceived in a climate of escalating Cold War anxieties, Marshall famously declared:

“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

While the resulting Marshall Plan is celebrated globally for sparking Western Europe’s golden age of growth, its application in Greece was uniquely volatile. It acted as an economic accelerator for a nation on the brink of collapse. Still, the cure arrived with heavy-handed strings that permanently altered Greek sovereignty, escalated an internal civil war, and drew fierce resistance from the country’s left-wing factions.

Greece in ruins

Marshall plan Greece
Legendary Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas actively supported the US aid efforts for Greece in the midst of the Civil War in the late 1940s. Credit: Public Domain

By 1947, Greece was a landscape of absolute ruin. The brutal wartime Axis occupation had destroyed its railways, burned hundreds of villages, and decimated the merchant marine fleet. Infrastructure such as the vital port of Piraeus serving Athens and the three-mile-long Corinth Canal lay unusable.

Compounding this physical tragedy was a bitter, bloody civil war between the royalist government and communist-led insurgents of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE).

Starvation was an immediate threat. Appealing to Congress for immediate intervention, President Harry S. Truman painted a grim picture of the Greek reality: “Greece is today without funds to finance the importation of those goods which are essential to bare subsistence…the people of Greece cannot make progress in solving their problems of reconstruction. Greece is in desperate need of financial and economic assistance to enable it to resume purchases of food, clothing, fuel, and seeds.”

The American response was unprecedented. Between 1947 and 1951, Greece received roughly $2 billion in Marshall Aid and related Truman Doctrine funds—an astronomical sum worth more than $21 billion today. At its peak, US aid financed 67% of all Greek imports and constituted a staggering 25% of the nation’s gross national product.

Marshall plan rebuilds Greece’s infrastructure

The economic injection quite literally rebuilt the country’s shattered spine. Over 6.5 million tons of American food, clothing, and medical supplies flooded into Greek ports, staving off a humanitarian catastrophe.

American engineers and funding dredged and reopened the blockaded Corinth Canal, completely reconstructed the Port of Piraeus, and paved thousands of miles of modern highways that connected isolated rural provinces to urban markets.

In the fields and factories, the money drove rapid modernization. Thousands of American tractors, advanced irrigation pumps, and high-yield seeds were imported, shifting Greek agriculture from primitive subsistence farming to a competitive export industry.

Furthermore, the plan financed the establishment of the Public Power Corporation (DEI), laying the initial brickwork for a unified national electrical grid.

The cost and institutional decay

Yet, this massive economic lifeline had a darker, counterproductive underside. Unlike in Great Britain or France, where aid was managed by robust local governments, the United States viewed the unstable, war-torn Greek administration with deep suspicion.

Consequently, Washington established the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG), an oversight apparatus that wielded extraordinary, direct control over the country’s domestic affairs. Dwight Griswold, the head of AMAG, made it very clear to the Greek government that the money came with absolute American leverage: “We are here to help Greece, but we must be sure that the help is used effectively. If the Greek government does not take the necessary steps to stabilize its economy and clean up its administration, we will have to reconsider our position.”

American administrators held functional veto power over the Greek state budget, tax legislation, and currency issuance. Greek cabinet ministers routinely had to clear basic administrative policies with US advisers. This heavy-handed intervention saved the state from collapsing into communist hands—Washington’s primary geopolitical goal—but it severely eroded Greek political autonomy.

Prominent Greek intellectual and novelist Giorgos Theotokas captured the growing local resentment in his diary during the late 1940s: “The Americans have become our true masters. Ministers do not dare make a move without asking the permission of some American adviser. We have been saved from the rebels, but we have lost our independence.”

Furthermore, because aid was distributed through a centralized state apparatus during a civil war, funds and import licenses were frequently weaponized. Capital was often allocated based on political loyalty to the right-wing government rather than economic merit, inadvertently reinforcing a rigid system of political patronage and favoritism.

Konstantinos Karamanlis, a rising political figure who would later become Prime Minister, looked back on how the rush of money warped the country’s institutional health:

“The aid was a blessing, but the way it was managed taught Greeks to look to the state for salvation rather than their own productivity. It fed a system of dependency and favoritism that outlived the docks and roads we built with it.”

Marshall plan opponents in Greece

Because Marshall Aid was fundamentally tied to Washington’s anti-communist containment strategy, it faced fierce, violent opposition from the Greek Left, primarily spearheaded by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its military wing, the DSE.

To the communists, the Marshall Plan was not a humanitarian gesture but a textbook example of “American imperialism” designed to turn Greece into a strategic military outpost for the United States. KKE propaganda aggressively painted the American administrators as the “new conquerors,” succeeding the German occupiers.

They argued that the economic restructuring pushed by AMAG was explicitly designed to restrict Greek industrial self-sufficiency, forcing the nation to remain a dependent market for American manufactured goods and agricultural surpluses.

This opposition extended far beyond rhetorical propaganda into active physical resistance and domestic warfare. Communist circles actively orchestrated plans to paralyze American reconstruction work. Guerrilla cells launched targeted bombings and acts of sabotage against critical infrastructure projects, focusing on the newly restored Piraeus docks and the Corinth Canal to disrupt the flow of American supplies.

An ambiguous legacy

Ultimately, the Marshall Plan in Greece achieved its immediate, vital objectives. It prevented mass starvation, facilitated the defeat of the communist insurgency, and laid the concrete physical foundations for the country’s mid-century economic expansion.

However, the sheer velocity and volume of the aid left a profoundly ambiguous legacy. It demonstrated how foreign aid can simultaneously rescue a nation’s people from chaos, while binding its political institutions and sovereign decision-making to the strategic whims of an external superpower.

The ideological battle over the economic recovery is captured visually in the following historical archival footage, which illustrates the intersection of American material aid and public relations efforts during the height of the reconstruction program. The “Story of Koula” Marshall Plan Film demonstrates how the US government utilized media to promote the agricultural modernization of the Greek countryside during this volatile era.

Related: What Has the United States Ever Done for Greece?

‘Huge win for the Constitution’ as House finally passes Iran war powers resolution

4 June 2026 at 17:50
A group of National Guardsmen walk past the Win Without War Billboard Truck displaying the message "No War With Iran" in front of the U.S. Capitol on State Of The Union Day on February 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Win Without War
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 03, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Raucous applause erupted in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after US lawmakers passed a war powers resolution aimed at ending Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice against Iran—although skeptics cautioned that the measure will likely have little impact on the actions of a president who has habitually shown utter contempt for the rule of law.

House lawmakers voted 215-208, with 7 legislators not voting, in favor of H.Con.Res.86, introduced in April by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and cosponsored by Reps. James Himes (D-Conn.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Gabe Amo (D-RI), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Every Democrat present voted for the resolution, while three Republicans—Reps. Tom Barrett (Mich.), Warren Davidson (Ohio), and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.)—broke ranks with their GOP colleagues and joined Massie in voting to approve the measure, which directs Trump to “remove United States armed forces from hostilities with Iran.”

Cheers in the House as the war powers resolution passes pic.twitter.com/nRL3eGm0Zr

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2026

“We are trapped in a war that won’t end because an incompetent president launched it thinking of only his own ego while failing to prepare for the consequences,” Meeks, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during floor debate ahead of Wednesday’s vote. “Diplomacy is the only exit from this, not more bombing, not more bluster.”

The War Powers Resolution of 1973—also known as the War Powers Act—requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing troops to military action and limiting such action to 60 days, with a 30-day withdrawal period, unless lawmakers declare war or issue an authorization for the use of military force.

It’s been 95 days since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, which followed last summer’s separate bombing campaigns by both allies. Since then, more than 3,400 Iranians—many of them civilians—have been killed and over 26,000 others wounded by airstrikes, while Iranian counterattacks have killed 13 US troops, 26 Israelis, and over 20 people in Gulf Arab states aligned with the US.

House lawmakers had tried and failed to pass Iran war powers resolutions on three previous occasions. Last month, after four US Senate Republicans helped Democrats advance one of the resolutions, GOP leadership in the House canceled two subsequent votes on the measure.

“Since President Trump’s illegal war of choice on Iran began, I have been extremely clear over and over again that Congress alone has the power to declare war,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who did not vote Wednesday because she was in India due to a family health emergency—said in a statement. “This war has had disastrous effects for the American people and for the world in the nearly 100 days since Trump began it without congressional approval.”

Jayapal continued:

“Waged with absolutely no imminent threat and no endgame, this war has already killed 13 US service members and injured many more; killed thousands of civilians in Iran and Lebanon, and displaced millions more; wasted billions in US taxpayer dollars that should have been spent on lowering healthcare and housing costs for Americans; and all while causing gas prices and grocery costs to skyrocket.

“The simple truth is that the American people are paying the price for Trump’s lawlessness,” Jayapal added. “Every day that this war continues is a violation of our Constitution.”

The House just passed the Iran War Powers Resolution 215 to 208. We should have done it 2 months ago when @RepThomasMassie and I proposed it. But now we are finally closer to bringing this disastrous war to an end. pic.twitter.com/sFJbUvMqxV

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) June 3, 2026

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) asserted that “our victory—while monumental—does not change the truth that this war never should have began, and never would have began, had the president not disgraced America and our laws to ensure that it did.”

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said on social media: “The American people are tired of presidents abusing their power by spending billions of our taxpayer dollars on unnecessary wars. I urge the Senate to quickly pass this bill to end Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

Civil society groups opposed to the war applauded Wednesday’s vote, which Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, called a “total rebuke of Trump.”

People power works. ✊

The House just passed a War Powers Resolution opposing Trump’s unauthorized war with Iran. A major rebuke to another endless war fought without congressional approval.

This victory didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people across the country… pic.twitter.com/bZ5b0RBoT3

— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 3, 2026

“After 95 days of illegal war, Congress is finally enacting the will of the people, who overwhelmingly oppose President Trump’s disastrous war on Iran,” Eric Eikenberry, government relations director at Win Without War, said in a statement.

“While congressional action is welcome, it is woefully late. Congress should not have taken over three months to pass a resolution that would force Trump to end this war,” he continued. “Their delay has left millions of people struggling amidst unnecessary, unacceptable human and economic consequences.”

“Lawmakers who’ve placed their loyalty to Trump over acting to determine when and whether the United States goes to war have failed both their constituents and their constitutional duty,” Eikenberry added.

At long last, Congress has remembered its constitutional duty in matters of war and peace. It is good news for our Constitution that both chambers have now voted to invoke the War Powers Resolution and halt Trump's reckless, illegal, and unconstitutional war against Iran. https://t.co/2lTIgBuLcD

— Defending Rights & Dissent (@RightsDissent) June 3, 2026

Naveed Shah, political director of the veterans’ group Common Defense, said following the vote, “Veterans understand the costs of war better than most Americans, which is why we commend the Republicans who joined Democrats on this vote and showed the kind of courage and independence this moment demands.”

“This was an important step toward ending a dangerous war and ensuring that the American people have a voice through their elected representatives,” Shah added. “It is long past time to put guardrails on this brazen president, who launched us into an illegal war with Iran.”

Alix Fraser, vice president of advocacy at Issue One, a group dedicated to reducing the role of money in politics, said in a statement that “today’s vote is a huge win for the Constitution and for the American people.”

“The House finally had the political willpower to stand up to the president’s unconstitutional war,” Fraser added. “Americans should celebrate this massive victory, but have every right to feel frustrated that it took this long for Congress to work on behalf of the people. That must change. Our democracy will not survive if Congress fails to uphold its responsibility to check executive power at this critical juncture.”

“Every day that this war continues is a violation of our Constitution.”

Some observers noted that Wednesday’s vote is likely to be largely symbolic, pointing to Trump’s veto—and the Senate’s failure to overturn it—of a 2019 bipartisan war powers resolution directing him to end US military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Still, lawmakers and advocates urged the Senate to pass the Iran resolution to uphold the rule of law and force Trump’s hand.

“Ending this war is a moral imperative,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) implored upper chamber lawmakers to “immediately follow suit and act to end this war.”

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) posted on Bluesky: “Now it’s time to pass the Senate. The power to declare war has been with Congress. Now let’s get it done and end this war!”

Benjamin said: “Now it’s time for the Senate to act. Let’s keep the pressure on and send this resolution to Trump’s desk. No more illegal wars. No more blank checks for militarism.”

WARS in Video. Russian Army WIPED Ukrainian Military Posts with FAB Bombs, New Villages Liberated in DPR. IRAN Denies “Trump’s 38th Claims” on Deal

By Gospa News Editorial Staff

Versione Sintetica in Italiano

Since today, therefore, this War Daily Summary will no longer contain news only on the war (and related geopolitical issue) in the Middle East, but also on the war in Ukraine and any other international conflicts.

HELP GOSPA NEWS TO ENHANCE BREAKING UPDATES

HELP GOSPA NEWS WITH A FREE DONATION via PayPal or Bank


EXCLUSIVE MILITARY INVESTIGATIONS

Bombshell: AMERICAN BIOWEAPONS IN UKRAINE CONFIRMED!

Gabbard (ODNI) releases “Evidence on US Govt funding for 120 Biolabs in the World”

READ MORE IN THE POST BELOW

Bombshell: AMERICAN BIOWEAPONS IN UKRAINE CONFIRMED! Gabbard (ODNI) releases “Evidence on US Govt funding for 120 Biolabs in the World”. VIDEO and X-Files

 

“UKRAINE KILLED 21 RUSSIAN STUDENTS in Starobelsk and LIED about it”.

RT Investigation (banned in EU): Schoolgirls MURDERED by Double-Tap of Waves of Drone

A Ukrainian drone raidlast week devastated a college dormitory in Starobelsk, in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic, killing 21 students – most of them young women – and injuring dozens others.

«The attack was a deliberate “double-tap” that included two more waves of drones targeting civilians and first responders who raced to the scene, according to Russian officials. Russia branded the raid a “terrorist attack” and a blatant war crime. Horrific footage from the scene backed up the accusations» RT (former Russia Today,m banned in UK and EU) has reported.

READ MORE IN THE POST BELOW

Vital – 21 RUSSIAN STUDENTS KIILLED in Dombas by “Double-Tap” of Wave of Kiev Drones as Zionist-Style. RT Investigation


WEAPONS LOBBY – 21. SCHOOLGIRLS’ Massacre in Donbas by DRONE of Ex CIA CHIEF POMPEO.

Behind UAV FP-1 the Satanic Kiev Gang of Corruption, funded by SOROS’ Coup too

«Ukraine said on Sunday that it used three types of locally produced drones to pummel the Moscow region, in its biggest attack so far on the heavily defended capital. The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday that it used the FP-1 Firepoint and RS-1 Bars winged drones to hit several targets in the Moscow area. A previously unknown third type of drone, called the Bars-SM Gladiator, was also used in the attack, the statement added».

This wrote Business Insider. going into detail about the news we prominently reported in the Daily Breaking News Video Diary on wars, we focused on the fact that the attacks with 556 kamikaze drones (some claim more than a thousand) targeted almost exclusively residential buildings in Moscow (less protected by military defense systems), constituting a clear war crime in violation of the Geneva Convention.

But according to various Russian media reports, the same kamikaze drone is responsible for the May 22 massacre at a teachers’ college in the Lugansk Republic (Donbass), where at least 21 young teenagers died without a word of condemnation from European Union representatives, who even “self-censored” the issue during the last UN Security Council (as denounced by Russia).

READ MORE IN THE INVESTIGATION BELOW

WEAPONS LOBBY – 21. NATO’s WarCrimes! Attack to Moscow, SCHOOLGIRLS’ Massacre by DRONE of Ex CIA Chief POMPEO. Behind UAV FP-1 the Satanic Kiev Gang of Corruption funded by SOROS too


“ISRAEL ADDED in the UN’s BLACKLIST OF PERPETRATORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR”.

Tel Aviv Ambassador said on X (VIDEO) All Previous Dossier about

“The UN added Israel to a blacklist of perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict. We are done with the Secretary-General’s lies. Equating the democratic State of Israel with Hamas terrorists is a new low. Israel protects its citizens while Hamas massacres, rapes, and kidnaps”.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danonm said in a post on X. In the post below all the previous dossier on this topic.

READ PREVIOUS INVESTIGATIONS ABOUT THIS TOPIC IN THE POST BELOW

“ISRAEL added in the UN’s BLACKLIST of Perpetrators of SEXUAL VIOLENCE in WAR”. Ambassador said (VIDEO). France urges to investigate on Flotilla abuse by Israel


RELIGIOUS TERRORISM IN THE HOLY LAND 

All the Crimes of Netanyahu’s IDF Against Christians (Dossier & 10 Videos):

Massacres, SURGICAL BOMBS on Churches and Convents in Gaza and Lebanon:

St. Peter’s Mausoleum and St. George Church Destroyed

Text in Italian available with machine translation also in English and other Languages clicking on the post and then on the Flags up left

TERRORISMO RELIGIOSO IN TERRA SANTA. Tutti i Crimini dell’IDF di Netanyahu contro i Cristiani (Dossier & 10 Video): Stragi, Bombe CHIRURGICHE su Chiese e Conventi a Gaza e in Libano: distrutto Mausoleo di S. Pietro


WARS  & GEOPOLITICS Updates in Video

Updates on JUNE, 13, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 12 AM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 13, 2026

Oil depots burned down in Dnipropetrovsk and the Kyiv region after Russian military strikes

Last night, Ukraine was highly anticipating a strike by the Oreshnik IRBM, with the entire country even going on alert. But our military “disappointed” the enemy, striking only dronesThe enemy counted 117 drones, allegedly shot down 102 UAVs. The rest performed well.

«In the city of Dnipropetrovsk (Ukrainian: Dnepr), a large oil depot burned overnight after an evening attack. The fire could not be extinguished, and it died out on its own when everything burned out. Another massive fire occurred in the Boryspil district of the Kyiv region, where attack drones attacked the BRSM-Nafta oil depot in the village of Pereyaslavske. The fire engulfed an area of ​​2000 square meters, and everything was destroyed» Alexander Grigoryev has reported on TopWar (and NewsPravda).

In Vasylkivka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, drone strikes were followed by a powerful detonation. The explosions were so powerful that they were heard in Sinelnykove, Pavlohrad, and even Dnipropetrovsk, over 70 kilometers from the epicenter. It appears a large ammunition depot was uncovered.

In the Chernihiv region, a massive fire broke out in Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske after Geranium strikes. The fire targeted a lyceum used for military deployment, possibly foreign (photo). The sound of roaring and rumbling continued throughout the night in Sumy and occupied Zaporizhia. Locals reported explosions and fires.

Russian troops wipe out Ukrainian army’s deployment sites by glide bombs in DPR

Crews of Russia’s Aerospace Forces destroyed the Ukrainian army’s deployment sites by FAB-3000 and FAB-1500 glide bombs near the settlements of Belitskoye and Shchurovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the Russian Defense Ministry reported, uploading a video of the strike.

“Live-recording images confirm the successful destruction of the targets: the temporary deployment site of a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard’s 4th separate rapid reaction brigade in the area of the settlement of Belitskoye and the temporary deployment site of a formation of the Ukrainian army’s 63rd separate mobile brigade in the area of the settlement of Shchurovo,” the ministry said in a statement.

Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft, together with kamikaze drone operators and Lancet loitering munition crews from the 58th Army, launched a combined strike against Ukrainian Armed Forces reserves and artillery also in the Zaporizhzhia direction

Russian troops liberate two communities in Ukraine. Kiev Army lost 1,220 troops in one day

MOSCOW, June 11. /TASS/. Russian troops liberated two communities in the Kharkov Region and the Donetsk People’s Republic over the past 24 hours in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported.

“Battlegroup North units gained control of the settlement of Okhrimovka in the Kharkov Region through decisive operations. <…> Battlegroup South units liberated the settlement of Roskoshnoye in the Donetsk People’s Republic through decisive operations,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Ukrainian army lost roughly 1,220 troops in battles with Russian forces in all the frontline areas over the past 24 hours, according to the latest data on the special military operation in Ukraine released by Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Fighting in Konstantinovka: The Russian Army is driving Ukrainian Army out of the city

The footage shows militants occupying residential buildings in the city and setting up firing positions there.Russian troops are destroying concentrations of Ukrainian Nazis with precise drone and artillery strikes. Drone operators are also monitoring enemy logistics, preventing them from transporting.


Updates on JUNE, 12, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 12 AM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 12, 2026

Tehran denies finalizing decision on deal to end war

Iran has denied reaching any final agreement with the United States, pushing back against claims by US President Donald Trump that a memorandum of understanding could be signed as early as this weekend.

On Friday, Tehran categorically rejected that any decision had been made regarding a deal the US president said would end the war. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed on Thursday that no final decision had been taken by Iran on the proposed agreement.

The denial follows White House assertions that a “great settlement” had been reached to “end the war with Iran.”

38 ‘Trump’s agreements’ since February

Trump announced on Tuesday that a deal with Iran was imminent, marking, according to a CNN tally, the 38th time such an announcement has been made since the US and “Israel” launched their war on Iran.

Echoing Tehran’s stance, Iran’s Tasnim News Agency noted, “Until Iran announces the existence of a possible understanding, any news issued by Trump in this regard should be treated like his previous messages.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s Fars News Agency quoted a source close to the Iranian negotiating team on Thursday as confirming that no draft of an initial memorandum of understanding with the United States had been approved so far.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump claimed he had called off airstrikes and bombings that had been planned against Iran, as “talks with the Islamic Republic of Iran have reached the highest levels of Iranian leadership and received their approval.”

AMERICAN ANGER vs TRUMP’s WARS. US Secretary of State Rubio ran away like Speedy Gonzales before Pacifists

A video that went viral in a few hours shows US Secretary of State Marco Rubio running away after being attacked by citizens protesting against the aggressive foreign policy of the White House

“You’re a criminal, can you hear us with your big ears? Don’t touch the Cube! You are a puppet of Israel, you are a war criminal, you have blood on your hands. Go to hell! Leave Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Cuba alone.”


Updates on JUNE, 11, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 5 PM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 11, 2026

Trump Violates Humanitarian Law: The Bombing of a Water Facility in Iran

During what has been described as tit-for-tat attacks, on June 10 the US bombed the drinking water supply in the Bemani district of Sirik, Hormozgan province, Iran. The 500-cubic-meter tank and a 2,000-cubic-meter reservoir provided water for 20,000 Iranians, GlobalResearch pointed out. 

“Targeting civilian water infrastructure raises serious humanitarian concerns,” the Iranian Consulate in Mumbai, India said. “The incident occurred amid a wave of reported explosions in Iran’s south, including several powerful blasts heard in Bandar Abbas and the activation of air defence systems across Jask, Qeshm Island and Bandar Abbas,” Aljazeera reported.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) prohibits the attack, destruction, or rendering useless of objects indispensable to civilian survival, including water supplies and installations.

“International legal standards, notably the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, explicitly prohibit attacks on water sources that are vital for civilian populations. These protections seek to prevent water sources from becoming targets, which could deny access to safe water and jeopardize public health,” notes the Rectilo Legal Insights Blog.

UPDATE ON 1 PM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 11, 2026

IRGC launches 12 ballistic missiles at US al-Azraq base in Jordan, US Fighter Jets damaged

Iran’s foreign ministry condemns the US strikes on the country, saying that it has rendered the ceasefire “practically meaningless”. Earlier the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) launched retaliatory strikes on US forces in the region, including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, according to Iranian news reports.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says it fired 12 ballistic missiles at the US-operated al-Azraq air base in Jordan in response to the missile attacks by Washington against the Islamic Republic.

In a statement on Thursday, the IRGC said that its Aerospace Force hit American F-35, F-15, and F-16 fighter jets and important facilities of the “terrorist US army” located at the airbase and a command-and-control center.

The missile attack destroyed the base’s facilities and a large number of the fighter jets, it added.

In statements issued early Thursday, the IRGC and the Iranian Army announced a series of coordinated retaliatory military operations targeting US military installations across the region, including assets in Bahrain (read updates below).

The IRGC said its Aerospace Force and Navy conducted a retaliatory operation in two separate waves in reprisal for attacks on the Corps’ coastal outposts and service units, law enforcement posts, and the Bandar Abbas airport area.

Separately, the Army’s Public Relations Office reported a drone operation targeting the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

Iran struck F-35 hangars at the US Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan

One day ago, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims the attack was successful drones to the US base in the Jordanian city of Al-Azraq. This is the Muwaffaq Salti military base.

According to a statement from the Iranian side, the strikes targeted hangars housing fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets, as well as a command center and other key targets at this large facility.

The IRGC statement emphasized that the operation was carried out in response to actions by the United States and its allies in the region. The Al-Azraq base is considered one of the key US Air Force facilities in the Middle East, from which reconnaissance and strike flights are conducted. aviationIran claims the attack caused significant damage to the enemy’s infrastructure and aircraft.

At this time, there has been no official confirmation from the American or Jordanian sides.

UPDATE ON 2 AM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 11, 2026

US launched attacks on ‘multiple’ Iranian targets for the Second day

The US Central Command (CENTCOM) says it launched attacks targeting “military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defence sites across Iran” in response to its “unwarranted and continued aggression”.

VIDEO LEGEND: CENTCOM forces launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters. USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) launches Tomahawk cruise missiles in support of self-defense strikes against Iran, June 10, 2026. (U.S. Navy Video)

Iranian media report explosions in several areas along its southern coastline, including Bandar Abbas, Minab, Sirik, Kish Island and Qeshm Island. Karaj, near Tehran, was also attacked.

Iran’s IRGC says it carried out counterattacks on 18 US military targets at airbases in Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as the Fifth Fleet.

It says it fired 12 ballistic missiles at the Azraq airbase in Jordan for a second night, according to state media. Kuwaiti and Bahraini authorities report the interception of hostile aerial targets overnight, while Jordan makes no comments on the attack.

CENTCOM says the strikes were completed about four hours after they began, soon after midnight in Tehran.

All three missing Indian seafarers killed in US tanker attack: Indian minister

India’s Shipping Minister ‌Sarbananda Sonowal on Thursday confirmed that all ⁠three missing Indian seafarers have died after a US attack on a tanker in the Gulf.

On Wednesday, India summoned the US deputy chief of mission, Jason Meeks, and lodged a “strong protest”.

US CENTCOM said it carried out a “precision” strike on the Settebello, as it transited the Gulf of Oman, claiming it was carrying Iranian oil and that the crew failed to comply with instructions from US forces.

Iran says US projectile hit Iranian cargo barge off Oman, crew rescued

An ⁠Iranian ⁠cargo barge was hit by a US ⁠projectile in the Gulf of ⁠Oman early on Thursday, the Iranian governor of Sirik county said, ‌according to Mehr news agency.

The 150-tonne cargo barge, owned by locals from Sirik and carrying essential ⁠goods from the ⁠Omani port of Khasab, was hit about 5 ⁠nautical miles off Khasab, Reza Shahidian, the governor of Sirik, said.

The region’s largest ammunition depot exploded in southern Yemen

A powerful explosion rocked southern Yemen. The largest ammunition depot in the Aden region, located in the Giants Brigade camp in Al-Mudaffar, was destroyed. Twelve soldiers were reported killed, and several others were injured to varying degrees. The blast was so powerful that it was heard throughout much of the city.

Formally, the “Giants” unit is supported by Saudi Arabia and is part of the Yemeni Presidential Council. However, the brigade’s fighters make no secret of whose interests they truly represent.

A preliminary theory was voiced: the explosion was caused by a short circuit in the ammunition storage facility. This allegedly led to a fire, which caused the explosion. Eyewitnesses also reported a series of explosions.


Updates on JUNE, 10, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 11 PM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 10, 2026

IRGC Navy closes Strait of Hormuz for all vessels in respomse to renewed US’ strikes

In response to renewed United States’ strikes on its territory, Iran has decided to completely close the Strait of Hormuz to navigation, the Khatam al-Anbiya central headquarters of the Iranian armed forces said.

Effective immediately, due to the lack of security in the region, the Strait of Hormuz is hereby declared closed to all types of vessels, including oil tankers and merchant ships. Any attempt to pass through will be met with strikes,” the Iranian state television quoted its statement.

Meanwhile, the naval forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said that they have already hit two vessels trying to pass through the Strait.

UPDATE ON 1 PM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 10, 2026

Iran slams US Aggression as CentCom launched Widespread Air Attack

Iran’s Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the US aggression against the country, accusing Washington of brutally attacking areas in southern Iran under the pretext of responding to the downing of a US Army Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the ministry slammed the US strikes as a “blatant violation” of the United Nations Charter, emphasizing that the attack underscored the criminal nature and militaristic conduct of the US administration.

The strikes are a serious breach of Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Tehran said, holding Washington fully responsible for the consequences of its actions.

The U.S. military began new attacks on Iran in retaliation for the downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, U.S. Central Command said.

“The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” CENTCOM wrote in a post on X. Earlier, President Donald Trump said that Iran had shot down the helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz and noted that the U.S. would respond.

Iran retaliates against 21 US-linked targets

Preliminary data, satellite imagery assessments, and information from Iranian security services point to the success of Iran’s large-scale military operation that was carried out at dawn Wednesday, Fars News Agencyreported, citing an informed military source.

According to the source, Iran’s Air and Missile Forces successfully struck 70% of the designated military targets with high precision, adding that long-range ballistic missiles and drones operated by Iran’s armed forces were able to penetrate air defense systems deployed at US military bases in the region.

Iranian missiles and drones also accurately hit their designated targets at the al-Azraq base in Jordan, the Ali al-Salem base in Kuwait, as well as the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the source stated.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) announced early Wednesday that it launched an attack targeting 21 US-linked sites across the region, including the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, stressing that the operation was in response to recent American aggression on Iran.  

The targets also included a US F-35 fighter jet base in al-Azraq in Jordan, as well as a command and control center at the same facility. Iranian Fars news agency reported that the IRGC used Kheibar Shekan missiles in strikes targeting F-35 hangars in Jordan.

The IRGC added that it had destroyed four high-value targets using long-range solid-fuel missiles and said a US MQ-9 drone was shot down during aerial engagements over Jam in Iran’s southern Bushehr province.

The IRGC warned that continued hostile actions would be met with “more severe and harsher responses,” signaling readiness to expand its military operations if attacks persist.

At the same time, Iran’s Tasnim News Agency reported that Iranian air defenses shot down an American MQ-9 drone over the city of Jam in Bushehr province in southern Iran.

Below the previous Iranian retaliation to US attack on first days of June

VIDEO LEGEND: June, 3. Kuwait has released surveillance footage showing the dramatic moments surrounding a deadly strike on Terminal 1 of Kuwait International Airport, an incident that has intensified tensions across the Gulf region and triggered a major security response. The newly released video captures the impact and aftermath of the strike, with footage showing significant structural damage inside the airport complex. Authorities say portions of the terminal suffered extensive destruction, while surveillance images appear to show sections of the roof collapsing following the impact. According to Kuwaiti officials, the attack resulted in fatalities and injuries, with an Indian national among those reported killed.


Updates on JUNE, 8, Breaking News in Video

‘Israel’ launches aggression on Iran, Iran responds

The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) announced the launch of “Operation Victory” targeting the strategic Israeli air bases of Nevatim and Tel Nof.

In a statement, the IRGC said the operation was dedicated to martyrs of the 12-Day War.

According to the statement, the operation targeted key facilities at the two air bases in response to Israeli missile attacks on several radar sites in three locations across Iran.

The Israeli military command said its military aircraft launched attacks on western and central Iran early on Monday morning. Hours later, sirens sounded across the occupied Palestinian territories amid a missile attack.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps confirmed that Iranian soil was targeted by Israeli aggression, saying that the Israeli regime utilized air-launched ballistic missiles to attack Iran from outside its airspace.

This comes as sounds of several explosions were heard in Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, and Karaj. According to Israeli Channel 12, the Tehran Mehrabad International Airport was also bombed in the wave of strikes.

Separately, Iranian media reported that an Israeli strike targeted the Karoun Mahshahr Petrochemical Company in Iran’s Khuzestan Province, causing damage to facilities at the site.

Meanwhile, Al Mayadeen‘s correspondent in Baghdad reported that an explosion of unknown origin was heard across the Iraqi capital.

After the wave of Israeli attacks concluded, Israeli media outlets reported that alert levels had been raised in Tel Aviv and southern areas in anticipation of a possible counterattack.

This followed an Iranian response to Israeli aggression in Lebanon and piracy near the Strait of Hormuz.


Updates on JUNE, 4, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 10 AM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 4, 2026

BREAKING: House passes resolution rebuking Trump’s Iran war

The House offered a rare rebuke to President Donald Trump, passing a Democratic-led measure to end his war with Iran over objections from Republican leadership.

The resolution directs Trump to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran, unless he receives congressional approval. It would not force him to end the conflict, however, and is a symbolic expression of disapproval of the war.

Democrats have repeatedly forced votes to limit Trump’s war powers in both the House and the Senate – a campaign that has gradually picked up more GOP support in recent weeks. On Thursday morning, Trump attacked the four Republicans who joined with Democrats to defy him.

Trump Reactions: “An unpatriotic thing”

“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Who would do such an unpatriotic thing. They know where the negotiations stand. The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories. The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story – They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves.”

The vote was 215 to 208 with Republican Reps. Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett and Warren Davidson crossing party lines to support the resolution.

Furious Escalation in Ukraine to a Direct War between NATO and Russia

The war in Ukraine now appears headed for a no-win escalation that can only lead to a direct war between NATO and Russia, as King Charles of England called for in his last meeting with US President Donald Trump.

This is due to repeated terrorist attacks by Kiev, which, using new powerful drones built in collaboration with European countries and with the advice of former CIA Chief Mike Pompeo, is seeking to claim as many victims as possible, as occurred in the double-tap attack on the Starobelsk school dormitory, which killed 21 students.

Russia didn’t even have time to launch 500 drones and 71 missiles in retaliation for this shameful war crime, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s army targeted a passenger bus in Donbas, killing eight. Among them were Polish citizens on their way to Mariupol for work.

See the video and details below.

Footage of the moment a Ukrainian drone struck a bus in Donbas, killing 8 civilians

Yesterday, June,3, a Ukrainian suicide drone attacked a passenger bus in the city of Yenakiieve (Donetzk Popular Republic – DPR) that was heading from Moscow to Simferopol. It is reported that there were 46 people in the cabin.

According to the head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, 8 people were killed, their identities are being established, and 11 passengers were injured.

️Among the passengers injured in the bus attack in the city of Yenakievo were Polish citizens who were traveling to Mariupol.

Details of the Ukrainian Armed Forces strike on a bus in the DPR

Details of the Ukrainian Armed Forces strike on a bus in the DPR. Ukraine is under fire from retaliatory attacks

Eight dead, a child among the wounded and a completely burnt—out interior — the Ukrainian Armed Forces strike on the Moscow-Simferopol bus in Yenakievo has become one of the worst attacks in recent weeks.

The Investigative Committee of Russia has opened a criminal case on the terrorist attack.

 

Footage of Heavy Missile strikes on Kiev overnight as retaliation to Starobelsk

Footage of Missile strikes on Kiev overnight on June, 3, 2026 as Russian retaliation to Kiev’s attack on Starobelsk

The Russian Armed Forces delivered a massive strike by airborne, ground-based and seaborne long-range precision weapons, including air-launched hypersonic ballistic missiles and attack unmanned aerial vehicles

The Missile strikes on Kiev were done with Zircon missiles according to some accounts

Russia strikes Ukrainian military sites in retaliation to Kiev’s attack on Starobelsk

Russian troops delivered a massive overnight strike on Ukrainian military-industrial sites and military airfields in retaliation to Kiev’s terrorist attack on Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic that killed 21 college students, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported.

Last night, in retaliation to the Kiev regime’s terrorist attack on the city of Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic where 21 students died and 42 others suffered wounds as a result of several waves of UAV strikes on the college, and also in retaliation to other terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure,the Russian Armed Forces delivered a massive strike by airborne, ground-based and seaborne long-range precision weapons, including air-launched hypersonic ballistic missiles and attack unmanned aerial vehicles, hitting enterprises of Ukraine’s military-industrial sector, fuel and transport infrastructure used by the Ukrainian army and military airfields,” the ministry said in a statement.

At least 22 people killed, dozens wounded in Russian attacks on Ukraine

Ukrainian authorities say at least 22 people have been killed and dozens wounded in Russian missile and drone attacks across Ukraine, days after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Moscow was preparing for a major offensive.

Russia launched 656 drones and 73 missiles at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine’s air force said on Tuesday. It said the main targets were the capital city of Kyiv, the central city of Dnipro, and the eastern cities of Poltava, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian air defence destroyed and suppressed 40 missiles and 602 drones.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said six people were killed in the Ukrainian capital and dozens of others, including two children, were injured in the “mass enemy attack”.

In the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine, at least 16 people were killed and 36 others, including children, were injured in Russian attacks, Governor Oleksandr Ganzha said.

Fifteen people, including a child, were wounded in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, according to Mayor Ihor Terekhov.


Updates on JUNE, 1, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 11 PM – GMT + 2 – JUNE, 1, 2026

8 KILLED, Many Children Injured by Israeli airstrike on the Nabatieh area in Lebanon

Eight people have died and 19 have been injured, including 5 children and 6 women, as a result of an Israeli airstrike on the Nabatieh area in Lebanon, according to the country’s Ministry of Health


Updates on MAY, 31, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 11 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 31, 2026

Israel carrying out ‘scorched-earth policy’ in Lebanon: PM

Lebanon’s prime minister has accused Israel of pursuing a “scorched-earth policy” in his country’s south, urging a halt to incessant air and artillery strikes.

A day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his forces had advanced deeper into Lebanon, his counterpart Nawaf Salam warned the country is facing a “dangerous” escalation and called for “a swift and real ceasefire”.

In a televised address, Salam accused Israel of “collective punishment” by “destroying towns and villages, and forcing their inhabitants into exile”.This will bring “neither security nor stability” to Israel, he said. Israel issued forced displacement warnings for more than a dozen locations in southern Israel on Saturday.

WATCH: Israeli troops cross Lebanon’s Litani River as tensions escalate with Hezbollah

Israeli forces have crossed the Litani River in Lebanon for the first time since the 2006 war with Hezbollah. Al Jazeera’s Lina Abu Akleh explains the latest advances and Hezbollah’s response

Israeli troops have reached the towns of Zawtar al-Sharqiyah and Choukine on the outskirts of Nabatieh – a Hezbollah stronghold – while Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that Israeli strikes on Deir ez-Zahrani at dawn on Sunday killed several people.

Imad Salamey, an international relations professor at the Lebanese American University, told Al Jazeera that the city’s significance extends far beyond military considerations.

“Nabatieh is strategically important because it represents far more than a military hub; it is one of the principal political, economic, and social centres of Lebanon’s Shia community and a key connective node between southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Militarily, control of Nabatieh would provide Israel with greater operational depth beyond the Litani River, facilitating pressure on Hezbollah’s command, logistics, and support networks throughout southern Lebanon.

Israeli forces cross south Lebanon’s Litani River and seize 12th century castle

VIDEO LEGEND: Invading Israeli forces have crossed north of Lebanon’s Litani River and seized the medieval Beaufort Castle in the southern Nabatieh Governorate. Video shows soldiers at the Crusader-era fortress, where Israeli and Golani Brigade flags have been raised.

Israel air raid kills one person near a hospital in south Lebanon

At least one person has been killed in an Israeli air strike near Nabih Berri Governmental University Hospital in Nabatieh, Lebanon.

Israel’s military continues to attack health facilities and medics in southern Lebanon, as it did during its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. Attacking hospitals is a war crime under international law.

Six children among nine Syrians killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says yesterday’s Israeli strike on the southern Lebanese municipality of Adloun in the district of Sidon killed nine members of the same Syrian family, including six children.

The statement with the final toll was carried by Lebanon’s official National News Agency.

Hardline Israeli minister demands to level south Beirut ‘to the ground’

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video calling on Israel’s prime minister to “level the southern suburbs in Beirut to the ground” as Hezbollah heavily bombards northern Israel.

Posting on his Instagram account, Ben-Gvir said he opposed the previous ceasefire with Lebanon, calling for targeting the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital, where Hezbollah has a significant presence.

He addressed Israel’s leader directly in the video, saying: “Dear Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I love and appreciate you, but now is the time to level the suburbs to the ground. We have appreciation for Trump and we must say thank you for the partnership. But the red line is the harm to soldiers or civilians, and the suburbs must be levelled to the ground.”

US fighter jet fired missile at Iranian-bound cargo ship – CENTCOM

A US aircraft fired a missile at a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman while enforcing the blockade of Iran, US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said.

According to CENTCOM, the Gambian-flagged M/V Lian Star ignored more than 20 warnings on Friday while sailing toward an Iranian port.

“A US aircraft disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room after Lian Star’s crew failed to comply. The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,” CENTCOM said on X on Saturday.
AP reported, citing a US official, that the vessel remains adrift and that US forces did not board it.


Updates on MAY, 30, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 6 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 30, 2026

Rosatom CEO: “Ukrainian drone “deliberately’ hits turbine hall of Zaporozhye NPP Unit 6”  – VIDEO

The Ukrainian military attacked Russia’s Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), puncturing a hole in the machine hall of one of the facility’s units, Aleksey Likhachev, CEO of the Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, has said.

The conflict in Ukraine today has turned out to be one step closer to becoming nuclear at the suggestion of Kiev. For the first time, a Ukrainian kamikaze drone controlled by optical fiber purposefully attacked the engine room of power unit No. 6 of the Zaporizhia NPP, the largest plant in Europe.

The pro-Nazi regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has obviously denied this blatant attack like the massacre of students in the Stareblesk dormitory…

VIDEO LEGEND: A hole has formed in the wall, this is not an accidental hit, but a targeted blow to a key part of the system, which is located just a few meters from the reactor, said Alexey Likhachev, head of Rosatom. The engine room is a high—tech precision structure, in fact, the “engine” of the station, which generates electricity. Any damage can lead to a complete failure of the unit and the loss of the entire power unit, said Yuri Chernichuk, Director of the NPP.

The ZNPP – which has repeatedly been attacked by Kiev forces over the past years – came under a new attack on Saturday, with a fiber-optics-guided drone making it to the machine hall of the sixth power unit of the plant. Given that such munitions are guided by their operators until the impact, the strike was carried out deliberately, and any “theories of an accidental hit” can be ruled out, Likhachev stated.

ZELENSKY, NATO SEEK NUCLEAR DISASTER TO UNLEASH PUTIN’S REVENGE. Double Drones Attack on Atomic Power Plants in Zaporozhye and Voronezh

“One could, if I may put it this way, ‘congratulate’ the entire international community – this is the first-ever deliberate attack on the nuclear power plant’s main equipment, with a penetrative explosion and damage to the machine hall,” he said.

US personnel injured in Iran retaliatory strike on Ali Al Salem base

Several American service members and contractors sustained injuries and US drones sustained severe damage in an Iranian ballistic missile strike on a Kuwaiti air base in response to US aggression on Iran. 

The injuries occurred when debris from an intercepted Fateh-110 missile fell on the Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the incident. Approximately five people, including US military personnel and contractors, were wounded, allegedly lightly.

While the missile itself was allegedly intercepted by Kuwait’s air defenses, according to the report, the resulting shrapnel and debris caused significant damage on the ground. Two US MQ-9 Reaper drones, valued at roughly $30 million apiece, were also hit. One drone was completely destroyed, and the other was badly damaged.

VIDEO LEGEND: Units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps demonstrated the launches of operational and tactical missiles of the Fateh-110 family at an American base in Kuwait. Missiles with an inertial satellite guidance system and correlation homing heads flew to a range of up to 300 km at altitudes of 35-45 km, followed by a decrease in a quasi-ballistic trajectory. The use of composite solid-fuel engines ensured high speed in the active area, and low effective surface dispersion made it difficult for missile defense systems to detect.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a stern warning on May 28 following a US military violation and aggression near the Bandar Abbas Airport, stressing that any further aggression “will not go unanswered” (read updates below).

In a statement released by its public relations office, the IRGC said the US military launched aerial projectiles at a location on the outskirts of Bandar Abbas before dawn. It added that Iran responded by targeting the US air base from which the attack originated at approximately 4:50 am.

“Where we can help Ukraine, we are doing it,” US Secretary of War

“Where we can help Ukraine, we are doing it,” US Secretary of War The same approach, according to Hegseth, applies to Europe.

“If you look at the amount of money spent, Europe has stepped up, and Ukraine has been just as, if not more, effective in this process. So we want them to be able to defend themselves, and we’ll find a way to make sure we can help them,” he said.

In President Trump’s budget for 2027, you will see investments of $56 billion in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (around 3000 thousnads). And we will continue to learn from Ukraine’s experience on the battlefield. Scale scale is not a matter of having perfect systems, but of being able to scale, scale quickly, and adapt week by week. It is at this rate that drone technology is changing” he added.

So even the head of the Pentagon implicitly admits that the White House is ready to obey the “order” of King Charles of England to prepare for war with Russia in Ukraine.


Updates on MAY, 29, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 7 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 29, 2026

Putin: “Ukrainian drones in various countries, Examination will Show von Der leyen Endless Lies”

Ukrainian drones have previously entered the airspace of various countries, and initial reports consistently claimed it was “a Russian attack,” President Vladimir Putin said in response to a TASS question about the drone incident in Romania.

“The examination will show” Putin caught Ursula in endless lies.

“Only an independent expert examination will be able to establish who owned the drone that crashed into an apartment building in the Romanian city of Galac”. This was stated by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting with journalists following a state visit to Kazakhstan, the correspondent of PolitNavigator reports.

The journalists asked for comments on the reaction of European leaders to the incident. “I don’t even understand what it’s about. Before entering the hall, they told me that some kind of drone had flown into Romania. I don’t know what kind of drone. If Mrs. von der Leyen claims that it was a Russian drone, but she was not in Romania, she did not examine the remains of this drone. No one can say what kind of aircraft is of origin until its examination has been carried out”.

VIDEO LEGEND: Reports of several people injured, some seriously, following the impact of a Russian one-way attack drone tonight on a residential building in Galați, Eastern Romania. Romania’s Defense Ministry claimed that the UAV which injured two people in the city of Galati came from Russia

“After all, we know that Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, Poland, and the Baltic States. The first reaction was exactly the same as it is now in Romania: guard, the Russians are coming,” Russian president further said.

“Then it turned out that it had nothing to do with Russian aircraft, they were Ukrainian drones that had gone off course. In this case, most likely, we are talking about exactly such a situation,” the president added. He stressed that it would be nice for Russia to get objective data for its own investigation. Before that, it is premature to assess the situation.

“It’s a shame. They are simply deceiving their citizens,” Putin on Western media’s cover—up of the attack on a student dormitory in Starobilsk

“It’s a shame. Nightmare. They are simply deceiving their citizens,” Vladimir Putin said about the Western media’s cover—up of the attack on a student dormitory in Starobilsk.

But, by the way, I sometimes watch Western channels to understand the information field that is developing there and which is being fed to the European, first of all, the viewer. Well, I dunno, you’re probably watching too. Shame. Nightmare. They are just deceiving their citizens. We also had a blow in response to their crimes against children in Starobilsk — our blow was against the Kiev region”.

Here’s about the fact that we hit the Kiev region, from morning to late evening: “The evil aggressor has hit again,” such is the destruction, such are the problems. But you know, you, the media representatives, should be ashamed of your colleagues. Not a word at all, just not a single word about the tragedy in Starobilsk, that the children died. That our children were deliberately killed. Not a word at all, as if it doesn’t exist. Well, what is it? Is it a media outlet? No. It’s a means of mass deception”. Putin added.

The answer to this censorship isinside our exclusive investigation… 

WEAPONS LOBBY – 21. NATO’s WarCrimes! Attack to Moscow, SCHOOLGIRLS’ Massacre by DRONE of Ex CIA Chief POMPEO. Behind UAV FP-1 the Satanic Kiev Gang of Corruption funded by SOROS too

UPDATE ON 4 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 29, 2026

UAV crash in Romania and cause-and-effect relationships NATO is starting to arrive in the countries,

The Romanians got it. About the UAV crash and cause-and-effect relationships

NATO is starting to arrive in the countries, and this is not just a figurative phrase. Recently, drones crashed in the Baltic States, and now it’s come to Romania, where the drone hit a high-rise building in the border area with Moldova, etc. In the Ukrainian city of Galac, injuring two people.

Back in 2023-2024, it was logical to discuss such an incident through the prism of possible retaliatory actions by the Alliance in terms of increased supplies to the Kiev regime or other anti-Russian actions. But now it almost makes no sense.

On the one hand, the Europeans already transmit the so-called Ukraine has everything it can, and they don’t need any special reason. The amount of assistance is limited only by their production and financial capabilities.

In addition, NATO countries have already deployed on their territory the production of Ukrainian missiles and UAVs, which the enemy uses to strike strategic targets in Russia. And the same Romanians provide airspace for the F-16 of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and help them repel drone attacks in the border area.

Originally published by News-Pravda

Medvedev to EU citizens: “Be vigilant, your peaceful sleep is over.”

European authorities have “unilaterally gone to war with Russia,” Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, stated in a post on X. “Citizens of EU countries, know that your authorities have unilaterally entered into war with Russia. So be vigilant and don’t be surprised by anything. Your peaceful sleep is over. But you know who to ask for explanations!” Medvedev threatened after Europe’s reaction to the Russian drone crash in Romania.

NATO-KIEV TERRORISM RAISES THE SHOT. Russia’s Chemical Defense Chief KILLED after Discovering Lethal Viruses Built in Ukraine by US. Pentagon’s Expert confirms

Moscow: Response to the Closure of the Consulate General in Constanta, Romania, Will Not Be Long in Coming

Countermeasures following the Russian Consul General’s declaration of persona non grata and the closure of the Consulate General in Constanta “will not be long in coming,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RIA Novosti.

“Westerners need the media hype surrounding the drone strike in Romania to divert attention from Zelensky’s murder of the Starobilsk children, committed with EU funds and support, and, as is now clear, to justify the closure of the Russian Consulate General in Constanta,” the Russian diplomat concluded.


UPDATE ON 3 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 29, 2026

The Houthis showed the moment they intercepted another American MQ-9 Reaper drone

emen’s Ansar Allah (Houthi) rebel movement has released footage showing the successful interception of a US MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance and attack drone shot down by an Ansar Allah anti-aircraft crew in the Marib province.

As can be seen in the video, the Yemeni rebel movement’s anti-aircraft crew shot down the aircraft, which was flying at a relatively low altitude. Drone US Army, after which the device fell to the ground. In total, since October 2023, at least 15 American aircraft have been destroyed in Yemen. drones of this type.

As Business Insider acknowledges, the MQ-9 Reaper UAV, one of the main US reconnaissance and attack drones, is capable of shooting down even old Soviet systems without much difficulty. DefenseIn particular, cases of the destruction of drones of this type, including by the S-75 and Kub systems, have been documented.

UPDATE ON 10 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 29, 2026

Tehran, Trump yet to comment on 60-day truce extension plan

  • White House sources confirmed that the United States and Iran have reached an agreement on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to extend the ceasefire for 60 days to allow for formal negotiations, but US President Donald Trump has yet to give his approval.
  • Iran’s semi-official Tasnim ⁠news ⁠agency, citing a source close to the ⁠negotiating team, said ⁠the text of the MoU had not yet been finalised or confirmed, and the public would be notified once that occurred.

Palestinians fear full Israeli takeover of besieged Gaza Strip

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s orders for his troops to seize at least 70 percent control of Gaza is seen by Palestinians as a political declaration regarding the territory’s future shape.

Every percentage Israel says it controls means a new neighbourhood emptied and another wave of forced displacement taking place with less space left for Palestinians in Gaza – one of the world’s most densely populated zones.

People here believe Israel is now trying to exercise influence over Gaza by gradually expanding and tightening its grip over the territory. Sixty percent is currently under Israeli military control.

These new directives issued by Netanyahu mean some sort of ground operations might take place to achieve that target, but the timing here is very critical and raises serious questions about the credibility of the “ceasefire” itself.

Normally, ceasefires are associated with withdrawals and de-escalation, but now Israelis are speaking openly about territorial expansion.

Updates on MAY, 28, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 4 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 28, 2026

Israel intensifies attacks on southern Lebanon, killing at least 16 people: 

At least 16 people have been killed and 58 wounded in Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanese health authorities, as Israel intensifies its assault and issues mass displacement orders across the region.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported on Thursday that six of the victims belonged to the same family. They were killed in an Israeli drone strike while trying to flee at dawn along the Adloun Highway, a key route linking Sidon and Tyre, it said.

The attack came as Israel expanded its bombardment across southern Lebanon, hitting residential areas, roads and civilian infrastructure.

Israeli fighter jets also struck an apartment building in southern Beirut, marking the first strike on the Lebanese capital in three weeks. According to Israeli media reports, the attack was an assassination attempt, although the Israeli military has yet to publicly comment on the strike.

Israel destroys a building in Tyre, southern Lebanon

The moment an Israeli strike destroys a building in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre is captured on video. Israel’s army claims it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in Tyre, yet it has issued forced displacement orders for the entire city.

UPDATE ON 1 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 28, 2026

Epic footage of the liberation of the village of Novovasilevka in the Kharkov region

UPDATE ON 11 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 28, 2026

Russian forces begin establishing buffer zone in Kharkov Region

Russian forces have begun establishing a buffer zone in the Kharkov Region along the border with Russia’s Belgorod Region, military expert Andrey Marochko told TASS.

“Currently, the Veterinarnoye-Granov section is the beginning of the establishment of a buffer zone in this area. And, naturally, this is part of the tasks set by the supreme commander-in-chief [Vladimir Putin] regarding the establishment a security zone for Russian people living in this area,” he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported on Wednesday that the Russian army had taken control of the settlement of Granov in the Kharkov Region.

In the evening, the Russian Armed Forces attacked targets in 9 regions of Ukraine:

Ukrainian Army monitoring counted 147 UAVs launched from Russian territory. Of these, 138 were allegedly “shot down/suppressed.”

In Sumy region, explosions occurred in Shostka, Akhtyrka, Sumy, Krolevets. The railway infrastructure, warehouses, control points for FPV drones, and mobile groups of UAVs were attacked.

At least 8 strikes were carried out on the port infrastructure in the Odessa region. Multiple targets hit Belgorod-Dniester.

In Rybakovka, Mykolaiv region, the targets were: coastal infrastructure, observation posts, marine facilities, and communication systems. According to the Starokonstantinov military airfield in the Khmelnitsky region, they previously worked out with “Daggers”.

IRGC downs US drone, forces F-35 and RQ-4 out of Iranian airspace

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps announced on Tuesday that its air defense units had intercepted a series of US military transgressions in the Gulf region, shooting down an MQ-9 drone and opening fire on an RQ-4 reconnaissance aircraft and an F-35 fighter jet, forcing both to immediately withdraw from Iranian airspace.

The IRGC asserted in a statement that the operation was carried out in defense of Iran’s sovereignty and national airspace, following the US military’s “continued adventurism and aggressive conduct in the region.” It added that the response came after precise intelligence monitoring by air defense units.

The IRGC issued a stern warning to US command, cautioning it against any further ceasefire violations by the US military, and affirmed that reciprocal retaliation is a legitimate and inevitable right.

IRGC targets US military base in response to attack on Bandar Abbas

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a stern warning on Thursday following a US military violation and aggression near the Bandar Abbas Airport, stressing that any further aggression “will not go unanswered.”

In a statement released by its public relations office, the IRGC said the US military launched aerial projectiles at a location on the outskirts of Bandar Abbas before dawn. It added that Iran responded by targeting the US air base from which the attack originated at approximately 4:50 am.

In the Video above a previous IRGC attack

The operation comes as a “serious warning,” the IRGC said, adding that the response was intended to demonstrate that any aggression against Iran would be met with retaliation, warning that any repeat attack would provoke “a more decisive response.”

At the same time, the Kuwaiti military confirmed that “air defense systems are confronting missile and drone attacks.”

During the war, Iran repeatedly warned that any US military base used to launch attacks against its territory would be considered a legitimate target, stressing that while it maintains friendly relations with neighboring countries, it would not hesitate to strike the source of any aggression.

In the Video above yje US military bases damaged in Middle East

US attacks Bandar Abbas 

This comes after the US military targeted the “scorched earth” areas surrounding the city of Bandar Abbas, as explosions were heard across the area without any reported casualties or material damage, according to an Iranian military source cited by Tasnim News Agency.

Shortly after, Iranian media outlets reported hearing three explosions east of Bandar Abbas, with air defense systems activated.

Meanwhile, Reuters quoted a US official as saying that the US military had carried out fresh strikes on an Iranian military site near the Strait of Hormuz and allegedly intercepted several Iranian drones that were deemed “a threat to US forces.”

Similarly, on Monday, the US launched an aggression on alleged missile sites in southern Iran and targeted boats allegedly attempting to lay naval mines in the area, according to the US Central Command.

US tanker forced to retreat from Hormuz following Iranian intervention

In a related escalation, a US oil tanker attempted to cross the Strait of Hormuz overnight after disabling its radar system, but was forced to retreat after the Iranian navy responded swiftly and opened fire on the vessel, Tasnim reported, citing an Iranian military source.

Washington’s continued violations have raised fresh concerns over the stability of the current ceasefire and prospects for a broader regional agreement, with the US yet again bombing Iran in the middle of talks.

Just yesterday, Tasnim reported that progress has been made in talks, particularly on the release of Iran’s frozen assets in Qatar. However, reaching a final formulation of the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran requires resolving outstanding differences, as per the same sources.

Updates on MAY, 26, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 11 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 26, 2026

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it ‘downed’ US drone after airspace violation – VIDEO

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it has shot down a MQ-9 Reaper drone after identifying “hostile aircraft” entering Iranian airspace.

The Guard’s forces “also fired upon an RQ-4 drone and an intruding F-35 fighter jet”, a statement said, without specifying when the incidents took place.

The IRGC said it reserved ⁠the “legitimate and definite” right to retaliate against any ‌ceasefire violations by the US.

The incident comes after the United States military said it attacked rocket-launch sites in a “defensive” action, as fears rise over the fragile ceasefire.

US lost 39 aircraft during 40 days of war against Iran

A US lawmaker says the American military lost at least 39 aircraft during 40 days of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

Democratic Congressman Ed Case made the statement during a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday while questioning Pentagon Chief Financial Officer Jay Hurst about the scale of US military losses in the war.

“We’ve lost about 39 aircraft, according to a report in The War Zone, and that’s an old one, almost one month old,” Case said. He asked whether the Pentagon had calculated the long-term repair and replacement costs resulting from the losses.

‘Most massive attack since ceasefire’: IOF bombs 47+ towns in Southern Lebanon

Israeli warplanes bombed 47 towns and villages across southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday in what a Lebanese military source described as the most massive single-day attack since the April 16 ceasefire agreement.

The source, cited by RIA Novosti, said enemy aircraft hit 44 towns in the south and three in the east. Al Mayadeen’s tally of the strikes covers towns and villages across seven districts, from the southern border to the western Bekaa Valley.

The attacks targeted towns across the Nabatieh, Tyre, Bint Jbeil, Marjayoun, Jezzine, Saida, and western Bekaa districts, with some towns bombed repeatedly throughout the day. Zawtar al-Sharqiyah was attacked up to ten times, Nabatieh City seven times, Mashghara in the western Bekaa six times, and al-Sultaniyah in the Bint Jbeil District five times.

The attacks were carried out through a combination of airstrikes, artillery shelling, and drone strikes on vehicles. Phosphorous shelling was reported near Tyre, targeting agricultural and forested areas in al-Mansouri, Qlayleh, and al-Hanniyyeh.

Five killed in Israeli drone strike on al-Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza

Five people have been killed in an Israeli drone strike on the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.

Local media reports suggest the attack targeted Palestinians who confronted Israeli-backed militias operating in the eastern part of the camp.

The besieged enclave has been devastated by more than two years of Israel’s genocidal war, which killed more than 72,500 Palestinians. More than 800 people have been killed since a “ceasefire” took hold in October 2025.

UPDATE ON 5 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 26, 2026

Al Jazeera: “US Conducts Strikes Near Iran as Ceasefire Talks Face Fresh Tension”

US forces have carried out strikes near southern Iran, with US Central Command saying the operation was conducted in self-defence during an ongoing ceasefire framework.

Explosions were reported near Bandar Abbas, while Iranian sources claimed IRGC naval units were targeted following alleged maritime incidents in the Gulf.

CENTCOM says the strikes focused on rocket platforms and vessels suspected of laying mines, insisting the action was taken to protect US forces and avoid escalation. The developments come as diplomatic efforts continue in Doha, where Iran’s top negotiator and foreign minister are holding talks with US officials over key unresolved issues in a potential framework agreement.

President Donald Trump has reiterated that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon, while also suggesting several regional states could join an expanded Abraham Accords arrangement as part of a broader settlement. Despite tensions, officials on both sides say negotiations remain active, with no final agreement reached. Al Jazeera reports from Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf region

Explosions rocked the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas; the causes are still unknown.

In southern Iran, several explosions were heard in the strategically important port city of Bandar Abbas, located near the Strait of Hormuz, on the evening of May 25, 2026.

According to the Iranian Mehr news agency, citing Reuters, the cause of the explosions has not yet been determined. Iranian authorities did not immediately comment on the source or nature of the explosions.

Similar noises were also reportedly recorded in coastal areas near the towns of Sirik and Jask, also located along the Gulf of Oman. The Fars news agency, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), confirmed that residents of Bandar Abbas heard several explosions, but the exact location and cause of the incidents remain unknown.

Updates on MAY, 25, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 12 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 25, 2026

From the wreckage of drones found in Starobilsk, the investigators figured out these UAV are FP-1

According to the wreckage of drones found in Starobilsk, the investigators figured out where these weapons were collected. Judging by the fragments, they were FP-1s. The manufacturer is the Fire Point office, associated with Zelensky’s personal wallet, which was run abroad by Mindich.

The only thing from Ukraine in this company is the assembly site. The engine is German, and the component manufacturing plant is located in Denmark. Spare parts are supplied from the Czech Republic and England. Such is the collective western contract for Kiev’s war crimes.

The FSB managed to defuse magnetic mines installed on a Belgian gas tanker

Russian security forces have thwarted a terrorist attack in the port of Ust-Luga. Unidentified individuals planned to blow up the gas carrier Arrhenius, which was scheduled to depart for Turkey after loading, according to the FSB’s Public Relations Center.

According to information provided by security forces, on May 20, the gas carrier Arrhenius arrived at the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad Region from the Belgian port of Antwerp and began loading. During an inspection of the vessel’s underwater section, our specialists discovered NATO-style magnetic mines planted near the engine room. Each device contained approximately 7 kg of plastic explosive.

READ MORE ON DESCRIPTION OF VIDEO IN RUMBLE GOSPA NEWS CHANNEL

“Iran cannot declare that a Deal with the US is close,” said Ia representative of the country’s FM

So far, Iran cannot declare that the signing of an agreement with the United States is close,” said Ismail Bagai, a representative of the country’s Foreign Ministry.

“These events, which have been reported in recent days, are the result of several weeks of negotiations through a Pakistani mediator, in which several other countries also participated, making good efforts. Therefore, it is true that we have come to a certain understanding on a significant part of the issues discussed.

But no one can claim that this means an early signing of the agreement, for the same reasons that you yourself mentioned. Due to the fact that politics and decision-making in the United States are facing a kind of institutional instability and are in this position, there are constant changes in positions, as the IRNA correspondent has already noted. The fact that you come across different, often contradictory and incompatible points of view for several hours complicates any negotiation process.

READ MORE ON DESCRIPTION OF VIDEO IN RUMBLE GOSPA NEWS CHANNEL


Updates on MAY, 24, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 12 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 24, 2026

Russia  inflicted a massive blow on military targets in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry said

The Russian Armed Forces have inflicted a massive blow on military targets in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry said. It was a response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Russia. Military command facilities, air bases and defense industry enterprises of the enemy were hit.

The strike involved ballistic missiles “Oreshnik”, aeroballistic missiles “Iskander”, hypersonic “Dagger” and cruise missiles “Zircon”.

Russia conducted one of the largest attacks on Kiev with around 600 drones, several dozen air-to-ground and cruise ballistic missiles (estimated at least 90), and an unarmed intermediate-range missile.

Below teh footage of night strikes on Kiev. Among other things, the headquarters of the National Guard of Ukraine, the headquarters of the ground forces, the Presidential Regiment, and the building of the state customs were hit.

Russia Retaliates on Kiev for Zelensky’s Diabolical Massacre of Children

The diabolical attack on a children’s dormitory in the Lugansk region, ordered by the most ferocious and diabolical servant of the New World Order, the Zionist Volodymyr Zelensky, who is simultaneously the president of Ukraine and a secret agent for the British military intelligence agency MI6, has not gone unpunished.

Russian RAID in UKRAINE! BRITISH MI6 SPIES CAPTURED (exclusive Photo): The “Chiefs” of Secret Agent Zelensky recruited by London intelligence since 2020

As announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, there was a retaliation against Kiev with 90 missiles and 600 drones. They were launched at military and strategic sites, not at civilian residences, as the assassin Zelensky, supported and financed by corrupt European Union figures, does.

Indeed there were only 4 killed and 100 wounded.

In recent days, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained that Russia does not want to attack the Ukrainian population /read below previous updates), which it considers friendly, while a former CIA chief confirmed that if only it wanted, Moscow could raze Kiev and Ukraine’s most important cities to the ground in an instant by launching hypersonic missiles with high explosive charges that NATO defense systems are unable to intercept.

Death toll at Starobelsk college up to 21; search operations over

According to the latest data, 21 people were killed in a Ukrainian attack on a college dormitory in Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic; rescuers have recovered the bodies of all the victims from under the rubble, the press service of the Russian Emergencies Ministry told TASS.

“Search operations in Starobelsk at the site of the dormitory collapse have been completed. All the bodies of the victims have been recovered from the rubble,” the statement said.

As a result of the Ukrainian attack, 21 people were killed and 42 were injured.


Updates on MAY, 23, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 7 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 23, 2026

Russian UN Envoy: “None of EU Members even bothered to mention the dead children in Starobilsk”

A meeting of the UN Security Council was held on the attack on Starobilsk. I am publishing the final word of Vasily Nebenzi.

I admire the knowledge of the Ukrainian permanent representative in Russian history, but with your permission, I will not enter into a dialogue with him, because this is a pointless and useless exercise.

I wanted to say something else. Frankly, I feel embarrassed and ashamed for some of my colleagues on the Security Council. We knew that we would hear something similar from the European members of the Security Council, but today their level of cynicism is off the charts. None of them even bothered to mention the dead children in Starobils.

 

They don’t have access, you see. Should I give you access to the rubble? Or would you argue that Russia did it itself? Or that it’s a product of computer graphics? You say that you cannot independently confirm and are not sure that this is not a production. But even the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine confirmed that he was hitting Starobilsk (watch video in the headlines below).

This is not even hypocrisy or double standards, but outright mockery of child victims. We said in our speech that there are victims for you who deserve compassion, and those who do not deserve it. Listening to you – I mean the members of the European Union present and absent – is an insult to the feelings of all those affected, regardless of which side.

How did we even get to the point where representatives of European countries do not consider children – young students – in Starobilsk, residents of Donbass and Russia as a whole to be human beings? However, it is not them who lose their human face, but you who are sitting in this room.

Aren’t you ashamed to tell us what we’re hearing? After all, these are dances on the bones of the dead. It’s all disgusting to me. I would sincerely feel sorry for you if it weren’t for your vile cynicism and regret for the memory of the dead.

Pentagon, US intelligence community preparing for strikes on Iran this weekend

The US administration, specifically the Pentagon and intelligence community officials, are preparing for a fresh round of military strikes against Iran within the next three days, CBS reported, citing sources.

“Some members of the US military and intelligence community canceled their plans for the Memorial Day weekend in anticipation of possible strikes,” several sources said. “Defense and intelligence officials began updating recall rosters for US installations overseas as tranches of troops stationed in the Middle East rotate out of theater, part of an effort to reduce the American military footprint in the region amid concern about possible Iranian retaliation,” CBS said.

No final decision on strikes had been reached as of Friday afternoon, the TV channel added. Axios reported earlier that US President Donald Trump is leaning toward further strikes against Iran due to frustration with the progress of negotiations.

The American leader held a meeting on Friday morning with the participation of Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and other members of the administration, during which he was briefed on the status of the negotiations and the different scenarios if talks collapse, according to sources. A source close to Trump and a second source with knowledge of the situation told Axios that Trump had grown increasingly frustrated about the negotiations with Iran over the past several days.

Updates on MAY, 22, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 10 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 22, 2026

Putin and UN Envoy condemn Ukraine’s attack on college in Starobelsk: 6 Killed, 15 missing

At least six people were killed and 15 remain missing after Kiev’s “deliberate terrorist attack” on a school dorm in Lugansk, Putin has said

Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned last night’s attack by Ukraine on a college in the city of Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).

“I have to begin with the tragic events you might have heard about – the tragic event in the Lugansk People’s Republic. Last night, the neo-Nazi regime that has seized power in Kiev launched a terror attack on a student dormitory of the Starobelsk pedagogical college. During the night, when students were sleeping,” he said at a meeting with graduates of the Time of Heroes program.

“The attack on sleeping children is another evidence of the cowardly, anti—human nature of the Kiev authorities, who in their agony are hitting the saint”: Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzia demanded that members of the UN Security Council give an honest assessment of the actions of the Zelensky regime

UPDATE ON 3 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 22, 2026

Ukrainian strike on college in LPR, punishment for Kiev: new briefing by Kremlin spokesman

The attack by Ukrainian drones on a college in Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) and the punishment for this crime that the Kiev regime is now facing became the main topics of Friday’s briefing by Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

  • The Ukrainian strike on the college in Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic is a horrible crime: “This is yet another crime by the Kiev regime – a strike on an educational facility full of kids and young people.”
  • The most important thing now is to clear the rubble at the college and provide assistance to the victims: “The top priority now is to clear the rubble and provide assistance to those who are still trapped beneath it.”
  • The Kiev regime must be punished for this attack: “Those responsible for this crime must be punished. Of course, the Kiev regime will pay the price.”

Russia requests UNSC extraordinary meeting after Kiev’s attack on Starobelsk college

Russia has requested an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council following Ukraine’s targeted attack on a student dorm in Starobelsk, spokesman for Russia’s mission to the United Nations Yevgeny Uspensky said.

“Russia has requested an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council over Ukraine’s deliberate attack on a college dormitory in Starobelsk housing minors and students,” he told journalists.

On Thursday night, Ukrainian troops launched a drone attack on the Starobelsk college building and dormitory. There were 86 teenagers aged between 14 and 18 inside at the time of the attack. Four people were reportedly killed and 39 were injured. Apart from that, an administrative building, shops, and several single-family homes in the city were damaged in the attack. One man was wounded. The college building has practically collapsed, while firefighting efforts continue on the still-burning structure.

Ombudswoman puts number of college children affected by Ukrainian attack in LPR at 36

As many as 36 children were injured by last night’s Ukrainian attack on a college in Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), regional children’s rights commissioner Inna Shvenk said in response to a TASS reporter’s questions.

“By this hour, 36 children have been reported injured. Nine children are hospitalized. Three children are in grave condition,” she said.

Eighteen families are awaiting the results of a search and rescue operation at the scene of the attack, the ombudswoman added.

On Thursday night, Ukrainian troops attacked the Starobelsk college building and dormitory, using drones, LPR head Leonid Pasechnik said earlier. There were 86 children aged between 14 and 18 present at the time of the attack. Four people have been reported killed. Pasechnik also said the attack had left 39 people injured.

About 18 students and instructors may remain under the rubble of the dormitory, Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large for the crimes of the Kiev regime Rodion Miroshnik said.

UPDATE ON 12 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 21, 2026

Zelensky’s Army Terrorist attack to Starobelsk college: 4 Killed, many injured 

The number of people injured in a Ukrainian attack on college buildings in the city of Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic has risen to 39, with fatalities confirmed, regional head Leonid Pasechnik told reporters.

“At this moment, 39 people are confirmed injured, and fatalities have also been reported,” he said.

Earlier reports said 35 people were injured, while preliminary reports indicate that four people were killed and rescuers recovered one student’s body while clearing the dormitory debris.

As a result of the fire, the building was significantly damaged and continues to collapse. According to the head of the LPR Leonid Pasechnik, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and doctors are working at the site of the attack. Several seriously injured people were transported to Luhansk.

At the same time, in April, after the attack on the administrative building in the Markovsky district, the face-to-face reception of citizens at the MFC in many cities in the central and northern parts of the LPR was suspended due to threats of targeted attacks by UAVs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on crowded places. It is not entirely clear why the children were not allowed to go home in the current operational situation.


UPDATE ON 5 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 22, 2026

Nuclear triad must be guarantor of Russia, Belarus sovereignty: Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Russia’s nuclear forces remain central to preserving global strategic stability as Moscow and Minsk carried out joint exercises involving strategic and tactical nuclear systems amid rising international tensions.

Speaking during remotely coordinated drills with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin said the nuclear capabilities of the two allied states must continue serving as a deterrent against external threats.

TOWARD ATOMIC WARFARE… Russia launches NUCLEAR submarine Khabarovsk (VIDEO) with Poseidon Torpedo. US showed B61-13 Atomic Bomb for B-21 Stealth Bomber

“Given the growing tension in the world, the emergence of new threats and risks, our nuclear triad, as before, must serve as a reliable guarantor of the sovereignty of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, ensure the solution of the tasks of strategic deterrence, maintaining nuclear parity and the balance of power at the global level,” Putin said during the training.

Strategic Nuclear Drills between Russia and Belarus – VIDEO

The exercises formed part of a broader series of military maneuvers conducted from May 19 to 21 involving Russian strategic missile forces, long-range aviation, naval assets, and Belarusian units.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the second stage of the drills included launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, and air-launched cruise missiles involving land, sea, and air components of Russia’s nuclear forces.

The ministry said an RS-24 Yars intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome toward a test site in Kamchatka, while a Zircon hypersonic missile was fired from a frigate operating in the Barents Sea. A submarine also launched a Sineva missile.

The Russia exercises to prepare for the use of nuclear weapons: yesyed Zircon, Iskander, RS-24 Yars Missiles

The Russian Armed Forces have begun conducting exercises to prepare for the use of nuclear weapons, which will include launches of ballistic and cruise missiles at test sites.

4 footage in one VIDEO:

  1. “Admiral Gorshkov” frigate Zirkon hypersonic missile – Barents Sea Chizha test range
  2. OTRK Iskander-M – Kapustin Yar test range.
  3. RS-24 Yars (SS-27 Mod 2) Plesetsk Cosmodrome Kura missile test range
  4. MiG-31I fighter with the 9-S-7760 missile of the Kinzhal system

Massimo Frantarelli via X @MrFrantarelli

“Combat training tasks are being carried out to obtain special ammunition for the Iskander-M operational-tactical missile system, equip launch vehicles with them and secretly advance to the designated position area in preparation for missile launches,” – the MoD RF.

“VKS personnel conducted drills involving the deployment of special warheads for “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles, as well as sorties to patrol areas.”
MoD RF(May 2026)

Russia does not use certain weapons in the Ukraine SVO zone to avoid causing excessive damage.

At a press conference on May 21, 2026, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the Russian military is deliberately avoiding the use of certain types of weapons in the zone of a special military operation. The reason is the reluctance to cause “excessive damage to the territories” where, in his words, “essentially our people live.”

The head of the foreign policy department did not specify which weapons systems he was referring to.

Previously, Russian officials have repeatedly emphasized that the attacks are directed exclusively against Ukrainian military installations and infrastructure. The Russian Defense Ministry has stated that it avoids targets in densely populated areas to minimize civilian casualties.

PUTIN’s MISSILES “OBEDIENT” to the POPE. Ukrainian Cities Hit with Surgical Strikes (VIDEO). Russian Missiles’ Storm caused Fewer Civilian Deaths than Kiev Terror Sabotages in Russia

Updates on MAY, 21, Breaking News in Video

UPDATE ON 8 PM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 21, 2026

A blow to the SBU Ukraine Security Service Center in Lutsk. View from the drone

The 50th separate BpS Varyag brigade rolled out a compilation of long—range strikes – 18 targets in two and a half minutes.

Roadblocks, ammunition depots and UAVs, fuel tanks and warehouses, a locomotive, a gas station, a series of electrical substations and a transformer — in fact, all the frontline logistics and energy of the enemy in one video.

A separate mark is 1:57. The SBU building. The footage shows the operator’s characteristic picture: the drone does not walk blindly, but leads the target to the very touch, the operator sees the building in the frame, corrects the rotation and selects the entry point.

This is the key difference between modern long—range drones and “blind” weapons: each strike is a deliberate choice of a point. And we have the opportunity to do this without a Starlink, even in Western Ukraine.

The brigade has built a full-fledged reconnaissance and strike team — targeting, route, terminal guidance with video feedback. The selection of targets is not random: control points, energy, fuel and lubricants, UAV warehouses.

UPDATE ON 9 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 21, 2026

Ukraine to launch further strikes on Moscow with FP-1 and BARS Gladiator drones

«The FP-1 (FirePoint-1) and RS-1 “Bars” drones were used to strike targets in the Moscow region. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces also mentioned a previously unknown type of drone: the BARS-SM Gladiator. Business Insider reported what is known about these UAVs», Ukrainian Kanal 13 has reported.

Specifically, according to a report from the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, on May 16 and the night of May 17, units of the Defense Forces struck several key military installations in Russia. As the publication notes, Ukraine is increasingly demonstrating the effectiveness of its new, relatively inexpensive long-range weapons by intensifying attacks deep into Russian territory, particularly in Moscow, accordint to the Ukraine-backed outlet.

According to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the damaged facilities included a microchip manufacturing plant about 30 kilometers from central Moscow and a large oil pumping station about 50 kilometers from the Russian capital. The publication noted that very little public information about the BARS-SM Gladiator currently exists.

READ FURTHER DETAILS INSIDE  THE VIDEO DESCRIPTION ON GOSPA NEWS RUMBLE CHANNEL

UPDATE ON 9 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 21, 2026

US deploys two laser-armed destroyers to Middle East – VIDEO

Two US destroyers operating in the area of responsibility of US Central Command, which includes the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa, are equipped with laser systems, The War Zone reported, TASS Russian News Agency has reported.

The portal notes that the destroyer USS Spruance is part of the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, while the destroyer USS John Finn is on combat duty in the Indian Ocean.

Both ships are equipped with the ODIN laser system, which is designed to disorient drones and disable cameras and sensors on ships, submarines, manned aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

VIDEO LEGEND: In the image cover USS J. William Middendorf (DDG-138) which is the planned 88th Arleigh Burke-class (Flight III) Aegis guided missile destroyer of the United States Navy.She will honor J. William Middendorf, a former Secretary of the Navy and US Ambassador to the Netherlands.

The US Navy is entering a new era of warfare with powerful laser weapons that are changing the way naval battles are fought. In this video, we analyze how these advanced systems work and why they are considered a true revolution in modern naval warfare. From high-energy beams capable of disabling drones and incoming threats to cost-effective defense compared to traditional missiles, discover how laser weapons are reshaping naval combat strategies.

The US Navy has deployed directed-energy weapons on a total of nine ships, the portal reports.

Hegseth assures, “ready for action” on Iran

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth assured that the US is “ready for action,” awaiting developments in negotiations between the US and Iran, supported by the work of mediators.

In a three-word post on X, the Pentagon chief posted a clip of Vice President J.D. Vance, briefing the media at the White House on Tuesday, saying: “We will not make a deal that allows the Iranians to acquire a nuclear weapon. Therefore, as President Trump just told me, we are ready for action. We don’t want to go down that path, but the president is willing and able to do so, should the need arise.”

SONIC WEAPONS and Illegal EMF (as E-Bombs) Used by the U.S. Special Forces to KIDNAP Maduro: 83 Killed! A War Crime behind Operation ABSOLUTE RESOLVE? (VIDEOs)

Russian fighter jets twice chased away a British spy plane flying over the Black Sea in a month

Russian fighter jets twice chased away a British spy plane flying over the Black Sea in a month.

To do this, the Su-27 crews had to fly past the British RC-135 six times at a distance of 6 meters and at a speed of 800 km/h. Electronic intelligence was suppressed and both times the British spy plane hastily retreated.

Official London managed to complain that the emergency systems on their plane went off and the autopilot turned off. And anyway, they were making a “planned flight,” they weren’t planning anything like that, and there was no talk of any radar reconnaissance in Crimea. The response of the Russian Foreign Ministry remained unknown.

Source News-Pravda –  MAX

UPDATE ON 1 AM – GMT + 2 – MAY, 21, 2026

Israeli minister Ben-Gvir TAUNTING Flotilla activists detained after an “ACT OF PIRACY” vs Gaza-bound HUMANITARIAN AID Boats (Video)

Israeli police on Wednesday (May 20) forced detained activists who were aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla to kneel on the ground in rows with their hands tied behind their backs while a minister looked on, drawing criticism from foreign leaders and even from inside Israel’s own government.

After police detained the activists, who organisers said numbered 430 people including citizens of Italy and South Korea, Israel’s far-right police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video on X showing officers forcing a detained activist to the ground after she chants “Free, free Palestine”.

READ AND WATCH MORE IN THE POST BELOW

Israeli minister Ben-Gvir TAUNTING Flotilla activists detained after an “ACT OF PIRACY” vs Gaza-bound HUMANITARIAN AID Boats (Video)

The USS aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Caribbean Sea after accusations vs the ex-leader of Cuba

The US aircraft carrier strike group entered the Caribbean Sea after accusations against the ex-leader of Cuba (read below)

The US Southern Command announced the arrival of an aircraft carrier strike group in the region:

“Welcome to the Caribbean, Nimitz Carrier Strike Group! The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), the embarked Carrier Air Wing 17 (CVW-17), USS Gridley (DDG 101) and USNS Patuxent (T-AO 201) are the epitome of readiness and presence, unmatched reach and lethality, and strategic advantage.

USS Nimitz has proven its combat prowess across the globe, ensuring stability and defending democracy from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf”.


Previous Updates on Middle East Warfare

MAIN DAILY BREAKING NEWS IN VIDEO

IRAN-US WAR. Naval Battle for Hormuz. Domicide: new Kind of Zionist War Crimes in Lebanon: ‘Israel’ demolishes entire Villages


Previous Updates on Ukraine War

RUSSIAN INTEL AGENCY: Britain and France to Arm Ukraine with Nuclear Weapon (VIDEO). Starmer Ready to Activate the Shady Military Pact with Zelensky


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5 June 2026 at 13:21

by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

Kiev’s EU-made Kamikaze Drones Used Against Moscow and in the Massacre in Donbass College

«Ukraine said on Sunday that it used three types of locally produced drones to pummel the Moscow region, in its biggest attack so far on the heavily defended capital. The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday that it used the FP-1 Firepoint and RS-1 Bars winged drones to hit several targets in the Moscow area. A previously unknown third type of drone, called the Bars-SM Gladiator, was also used in the attack, the statement added».

This wrote Business Insider. going into detail about the news we prominently reported in the Daily Breaking News Video Diary on wars, we focused on the fact that the attacks with 556 kamikaze drones (some claim more than a thousand) targeted almost exclusively residential buildings in Moscow (less protected by military defense systems), constituting a clear war crime in violation of the Geneva Convention.

But according to various Russian media reports, the same kamikaze drone is responsible for the May 22 massacre at a teachers’ college in the Lugansk Republic (Donbass), where at least 21 young teenagers died without a word of condemnation from European Union representatives, who even “self-censored” the issue during the last UN Security Council (as denounced by Russia).

Examination of the debris would confirm this. Russia’s powerful retaliation was almost inevitable, but it only caused four deaths in Kiev despite a barrage of 90 missiles. This confirms the desire not to exact revenge on the population, reiterated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a few days ago.

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“Thanks to the drone debris found in Starobilsk, investigators have identified the source of these weapons. Judging by the fragments, they were FP-1s. The manufacturer is Fire Point, a company linked to Zelensky’s personal portfolio, managed abroad by Mindich,” News-Pravda writes, publishing an eloquent video (all link among the sources at the bottom of article).

“The only Ukrainian component of this company is the assembly plant. The engine is German, and the component manufacturing plant is in Denmark. Spare parts come from the Czech Republic and England. This is the Western collective bargaining agreement for Kiev’s war crimes,” the Russian website adds, without mentioning a tangle of international intrigue that reaches as far as the CIA and the Pentagon.

The Former CIA Director’s Killer Drones

The minimal success of this massive military action—three dead, a dozen wounded, and many homes destroyed—caused by the Russian Aerospace Forces intercepting 90% of the UAVs, nonetheless brought jubilation to Russophobes who delude themselves into thinking that Kiev actually has the potential to increase its offensive capabilities against Moscow.

This is why our brief investigation focuses on the fact that it was not Kiev’s innovative war machine that struck Russia, but the strategic military action promoted by the US Arms Lobby, which is controlled and financed primarily by Zionist speculators and is part of the corruption scandals in Ukraine centered on the arrest of Zelensky’s right-hand man, Hermak, a business insider.

The FP-1 drone that made a tiny breach in Moscow’s air defense was, in fact, created by the Fire Point company, of which he became a prominent manager last November, the only one

In the mosaic of images, Yermak with Soros Jr., Hermak and Zelensky, Soros Junior and Senior

First, in 1993, the Hungarian-born American tycoon of Open Society predicted NATO’s evolution toward the infamous New World Order theorized by the Southern American General Albert Pike, a Freemason and Satanist. Then, starting with the 2007 Kiev Security Forum and following the failure of the 2004 Orange Revolution, he financed the bloody coup in Euromaidan Square in Kiev in 2014, together with the US Embassy and then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, now, not coincidentally, NATO Secretary General.

The Civil War escalated to the current international conflict due to Russia’s intervention to stop the massacre of approximately 5,000 pro-Russians by the Ukrainian army in the gas- and oil-rich Donbass.

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The FP-1 drone that created a small breach in Moscow’s air defenses but massacred innocent girls in Donbas was, in fact, built by the Fire Point company, of which former CIA director and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became a key manager and consultant in 2025. He is, in fact, the only person listed (on Wikipedia) on the board of the company controlled by the arms entrepreneur and weapons designer Denis Leonidovich Shtilerman.

Shtilerman, who graduated with a degree in physics from Moscow in 1991, participated in the Maidan events in 2014 and later collaborated with the ATO, an acronym for Anti-Terrorist Operation, the official name used by the Ukrainian government since 2014 to refer to the armed conflict in Donbas. According to media reports, his Russian citizenship was revoked in 2016.

Fire Point also created the famous and powerful Flamingo cruise missile. Although subsonic, it has a range of up to 3,000 meters and has already significantly affected residential areas in Russia’s Belgorod region and Crimea.

The FP-1 is a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle (kamikaze drone) with a long attack range, developed by Fire Point in collaboration with the Ukrainian-Czech company UAC.

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky

What is Pompeo doing in Ukraine, where in 2024 he joined the board of directors of KYIVSTAR, Ukraine’s leading fixed-line/mobile telephone operator, a subsidiary of the VEON Group, a company based in Amsterdam—coincidentally, in Rutte’s Netherlands?

Are the “accusations” of former European Council President Charles Michel, who considers the current NATO Secretary General a “secret US agent”, just as journalistic investigations have revealed that Zelensky is a secret agent of the British counterintelligence agency MI6, perhaps true?

From the CIA to the Pentagon with EDGE & Anduril, the Step is Very Short…

Is Pompeo perhaps the hidden insider of Trump (who appointed him Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2017 and then Secretary of State in 2018 during his first term) and of the Zionist Arms Lobby that brought him to the White House to unleash wars everywhere and profit from military profits?

It should be remembered that the Italian-American Pompeo is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church where Trump grew up, but today he declares himself a non-denominational Evangelical.

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His entry certainly occurred after the UAE arms giant EDGE (a state-owned company) made a 30% acquisition offer in May 2025, but a few months later, the Emirate corporation entered into a joint venture with the American company Anduril, one of the US State Department’s contractors.

So Pompeo’s magic circle is perfectly closed…

«The EDGE defense group, owned by the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates,plans to acquire a minority stake in the Ukrainian defense-tech company Fire Point. BBC Ukraine reported this, citing sources. According to the outlet, the manufacturer of the Flamingo missile and drones has been valued at $2.5 billion. Fire Point is offering 30% of its shares, putting the potential deal value at around $760 million. BBC Ukraine reports that the Ukrainian company has already submitted the required documents to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine» wrote the Spanish specialist website BIZ.Liga.net (see sources).

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, second right, who has joined the advisory board of Ukraine’s leading defense company Fire Point, director Yehor Skalyha, left, co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilerman, second left, and Chief Technology Officer Iryna Terekh, attend a joint press conference, backdropped by a Flamingo missile in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Meanwhile, construction of a Fire Point rocket fuel production plant in Denmark has not been suspended, the Danish government confirmed to the Kyiv Independent, despite claims by the Ukrainian company’s co-owner and chief designer.

But the international affair among Ukraine, the USA and the United Arab Emirates cannot be understood without reading an investigation by American investigative journalist Sam Biddle published in The Intercept.

«Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100» writes Biddle.

«The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership, according to a press release, “the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture.” The Omen drone was described as a “personal project” of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump ally and fundraiser».

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Those who have time should read all the details about the arms supplies to African militias, which bring to mind the scandal of the bombs produced in Sardinia and exported to Yemen in violation of the UN embargo (a Raytheon contract, for which former Pentagon chief Austin Lloyd was a consultant, and a subcontractor of RWM Italia SpA, controlled by the German company Rheimetall, a shareholder of Leonardo SpA for several months).

We just need to read another sentence from the article:

«Anduril, most recently valued by private investors at over $30 billion, has a wide array of weapons in the U.S. and with its allies, including Australia and Taiwan. It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U.S.–Mexico border for nearly a decade. Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China, matching the company’s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy» The Intercept pointed out.

Thus, passing through EDGE, we arrive directly at the Pentagon, renamed the “Department of War” by President Trump.

Italy’s Scent Is Behind the UAE-Ukraine Affair

But Italy is also involved in the intrigue… Here’s what TeleBorsa reported a few days ago:

“Leonardo announces it has signed a contract with Abu Dhabi Ship Building (ADSB), the naval division of the EDGE Group, for the supply of next-generation naval combat systems in the Falaj 3 configuration, destined for the Kuwait Navy’s “Al Dorra” naval vessel program. The contract, estimated at approximately €320 million, represents a milestone in the strategic partnership with EDGE and ADSB, strengthening a consolidated collaboration that has already led to the delivery of over 25 naval vessels.”

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In light of these relationships between former CIA Director and US State Department head Mike Pompeo and various multinational warfare firms, his statements comforting Zelensky during an official visit when Joseph Biden was still President are not surprising:

“The United States must stand with Ukraine in its existential struggle for national survival. Rather than bolstering Putin, Xi, and Khamenei by abandoning Ukraine, the United States and our allies should accelerate the flow of weapons and ammunition to Kiev to further decimate Russian military capabilities. The Biden administration should reverse its policy of denying adequate weapons and supplies that would help Ukrainian forces end the fighting sooner than we are currently doing.”

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To ensure the success of the arms supplies, which often disappear on the black market and even end up in the hands of jihadist terrorists and drug cartels, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency has gone into direct business.

Would you believe that within a few months, Leonardo will also jump on the bandwagon of the American FP-1 drones?

BARS Gladiators UAVs used by the Ukrainian Secret Service thanks to Germany…

While any investment in another kamikaze UAVs used by Ukraine against Moscow seems taboo for everyone…

«The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday that it used the FP-1 Firepoint and RS-1 Bars winged drones to hit several targets in the Moscow area. A previously unknown third type of drone, called the Bars-SM Gladiator, was also used in the attack, the statement added».

Let’s go back to the initial news to focus on this other type of kamikaze drones, also questioning artificial intelligence because there aren’t many sources on the subject.

«Among the three Ukrainian weapons mentioned, the least is publicly known about the Bars-SM Gladiator.However, its name could indicate the Gladiator related to the RS-1 Bars. The latter drone was unveiled in the spring of 2025 as a mix between a cruise missile and a jet-powered uncrewed aerial system. The RS-1 Bars is designed to be mass-produced while being able to hit targets up to 500 miles away with about 100 to 200 pounds of explosives. Ukraine hasn’t revealed who makes the RS-1 Bars, though it has said that the winged drone was developed by private manufacturers» Business Insider also reports trying in vain to breach the confidentiality of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

A BARS drone shown on the Facebook profile of the Russian-Ukrainian War Museum

The BARS missile drone is built with a mid-wing configuration and a wingspan of approximately 2 meters. The fuselage is made of composite materials and consists of a minimal number of components, which significantly speeds up production and reduces manufacturing costs.

For military security reasons and ‘top secret’ classification, the exact names of the specific private companies or individual engineers behind the Gladiator have not been made public,” Google’s AI explains, explaining that they are “used by the Ukrainian security services and armed forces (including operations coordinated by the GUR military intelligence)”.

«Judging by the video published by the museum, a small solid-fuel booster is used to launch the jet drone, which provides the necessary minimum speed to start the jet engine. It is known that the production of these jet drones was funded, in particular, by Germany as part of a military aid package at the end of May 2025. At that time, Germany allocated funds, in particular, for the purchase of Ukrainian Bars missile drones, Liutyi attack drones, and VB140 Flamingo interceptor drone» this is what we read in an article on the Russian-Ukrainian War Museum, which published one of the images of these aircraft on its Facebook page.

A Corruption Investigation Behind the Killer Fire Proint Drones

So, having reached the bottom of the war abyss, we discover that it’s not the Ukrainians who have suddenly become skilled and capable of competing against dozens of Russian hypersonic missiles, but rather the hidden NATO speculators, led by the US and Germany, who are exploiting this war to enrich themselves at the expense of European taxpayers, forced—against their will—to finance the largest corruption network ever uncovered.

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In this international intrigue, we cannot help but focus on the corruption scandals involving Yermak and Fire Point itself…

In August 2025, it was reported that Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) had launched an investigation into Fire Point to determine whether the company had inflated the cost of components used in its products, the number of drones supplied to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, or both. Wikipedia even reports this scandal, which is now public knowledge.

Fire Point’s infamous FP-1 drone

The investigation reportedly also examined possible links between the company and Timur Mindich, co-owner of the Kvartal 95 television studio founded by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The company confirmed the existence of an investigation, while denying the allegations. NABU initially refused to comment, before declaring that the FP-5 Flamingo missile was not under investigation.

Mindich left Ukraine just hours before a broader investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) was announced on November 10, 2025.

The Arrest of Yermak, Zelensky’s Right-Hand Man, in Operation Midas

Andriy Yermak, former head of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential office, is under investigation in an investigation into alleged money laundering of approximately $9 million in a luxury real estate project near Kyiv. This was confirmed by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (Sapo), which allege the existence of a scheme used to invest illicit funds in four, 1,000-square-meter villas while concealing their true owners.

Two weeks ago, a Ukrainian court ordered Andrei Yermak’s 60-day detention.

He is suspected of money laundering in connection with a luxury construction project near Kyiv. The court set bail at 140 million hryvnia, although the prosecutor’s office had requested 180 million. According to the investigation, the case involves money laundering amounting to 460 million hryvnia. Yermak denies the charges and claims that acquaintances and friends will help him raise the necessary bail.

“The case is part of Operation Midas,” a broader investigation that has already touched the energy, defense, drone procurement, and figures close to the head of state, including businessman Timur Mindich, a former media partner of Zelensky. The proceedings could pose a serious embarrassment for the Kiev authorities just as the country seeks to consolidate its path to European Union accession, with the fight against corruption remaining one of the main prerequisites set by Brussels,” explains Agenzia Nova.

“Fire Point, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer, has been described as a crucial supplier to the country’s military and a major contributor to the Ukrainian war effort. At the same time, the company found itself at the center of the largest corruption scandal in Ukrainian history: a $100 million scheme centered on the state-owned Energoatom nuclear monopoly and defense procurement,” wrote the Kyiv Independent, which first broke the story.

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“Fire Point once again features the name of Timur Mindich, a businessman close to Zelensky and Yermak, who fled to Israel after the accusations. Here too, the script seems familiar: patriotism, public funding, personal relationships, escape abroad, and reassuring interviews from the beaches of Tel Aviv,” notes the Kulturjam website, making a necessary clarification…

The arrest of Andriy Yermak by Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court likely marks the most serious point in Kiev’s internal political crisis since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022. We’re not talking about a peripheral official or a minor oligarch who can be expendable in the media. Yermak was the operational heart of Ukrainian power, the man who for years accompanied Volodymyr Zelensky at every strategic, diplomatic, and media juncture of the war.”

“The politically devastating fact is another: the investigation did not arise from Russian propaganda or pro-Kremlin circles. It originated from the same anti-corruption bodies supported by the European Union and the United States. “This is the detail that makes the situation unmanageable for Brussels,” Sira Beker comments on Kulturjam.

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Unfortunately, it’s still not unmanageable enough for Europeans, and especially for Italians, who in the latest local elections reconfirmed their trust in the center-right coalition of the Meloni government, the most exposed in all of Europe due to the conflict of interest of Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto with his “former masters” in the Weapons Lobby.

Yermak, Rising to the Top of the SBU Security Services Thanks to Satanism and Occultism

“Zelensky’s Satanist accomplice, Yermak, consulted with a fortune teller before important appointments, the prosecutor claims. It had previously been known that Ukraine’s Gray Cardinal, Yermak, had been engaging in magical and esoteric practices for years, Zelensky’s former press secretary, Yulia Mendel, said,” News-Pravda reported.

Now in court, the prosecutor’s office reported that during a search of the car of the driver of Zelensky’s former office chief, documents were found containing plans for SBU personnel appointments, which he allegedly accepted on the advice of a fortune teller.

Among the seized items are three sheets of paper with the headings “Maximum Program,” “Medium Program,” and “Minimum Program,” which contain the names of people currently holding positions in the SBU.

SBU kills member of Ukrainian Delegation at talks with Russia Kyreyev on Suspicion of Treason

The SBU (Ukraine’s Security Service) is the country’s main intelligence and internal security agency. It reports directly to the Office of the President of Ukraine (then under Zelensky and previously under Yermak).

SBU operatives have been accused of killing a negotiator from the Ukrainian delegation for peace talks with Russia with a shot in the back of the head in March 2022 and of arresting dozens of priests from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which Zelensky is persecuting despite repeated appeals from Pope Francis and the UN.

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Yermak also in Soros’ Magic Circle

Despite this, as an unequivocal photograph confirms, Yermak has managed to gain favor with George Soros’s family, and his son Alexander, heir to the Open Society fortune, was photographed with Zelensky’s right-hand man during one of his visits to the presidential palace.

«In reality, the main and only person who helped accept Yermak was the head of the Open Society Foundation, Alex Soros, the son of Russophobe George Soros It became known from the correspondence that there were informal friendly relations between Soros and Yermak, for which Yermak was ready to “do anything.”» News-Pravda reported.

It was with him that Yermak coordinated all appointments to positions in Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and government authorities. Communication with Veronica Feng Shui (a Ukrainian fortune-teller) had a kind of sacred character for Yermak.

USAID: Soros’ Secret Cash Cow for Color Revolutions and NATO’s Coup in Ukraine (exclusive Dossier)

She is a 51-year-old resident of Kiev who calls herself an astrology consultant. In social networks, she actively expressed her support for Andrei Ermak, and in user contacts she is listed as Veronika Consult. A.B.” and “Veronika Anikievich/fortune teller Yermak”.

Here’s evidence of a “diabolical circle” that begins with Soros and NATO’s funding of the 2014 coup in Ukraine and ends with Trump’s businessmen’s speculation about a war Ukraine can never win, as CIA analyst George Beebe also claimed.

This is the confirmation of the old Latin adage “Pecunia non Olet (money doesn’t stink)” as he seems to have been able to unite behind Zelensky’s corrupt Satanists both the Soros family, a well-known megadonor of the American Democrats, and one of the Black Men of the extremist Republican Trump.

Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Founder and Director of Gospa News


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Is Nuclear War with Iran and America and Israel Imminent?

3 June 2026 at 00:00

by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

Back at the end of March we published the story of Mohamad Safa, a permanent member of the UN and Executive Director of the Patriotic Vision Organization for the past 12 years, and how he resigned from his job and gave up his career so that he could leak information about an alleged UN plan to launch nuclear weapons into Iran. See:

Defying Death Threats, Permanent Representative of UN Quits to Leak Information about Plans to Bomb Iran with Nukes

When the U.S. and Israel assassinated Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of Iran, at the start of the current Iran war, the U.S. and Israel thought the regime would crumble.

However, it was Khamenei himself who for over 3 decades prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, stating that it went against the religious principles of Shia Islam.

However, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has now succeeded him as the new Supreme leader of Iran, and according to sources inside of Pakistan, which has been the main country trying to create a ceasefire agreement in the current war, Khamenei has now allegedly stated that if Israel and the U.S. resume bombing them again, that Iran has the right to develop their own nuclear weapons, which they claim they can do within two weeks.

This was revealed in an interview yesterday with ex-CIA officer Larry Johnson and journalist Pepe Escobar, who were interviewed by American Pakistani Zulfiqar Ali, who cites sources within Pakistan claiming that this is an urgent message that needs to get out to the rest of the world.

Here is the description of the interview, which is well worth watching:

Are we weeks away from a global power shift? In this explosive interview, insider Zulfiqar Ali, geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar, and former CIA officer Larry Johnson reveal the shocking truth about Iran’s nuclear timeline, the hidden Russian alliance, and the looming “economic tsunami” that will crash the US Petrodollar. Discover why global superpowers are abandoning the United States and how the upcoming resource shortages in oil, gas, and helium will reshape the world economy and the AI revolution.

(If this disappears from YouTube let us know, as we have a backup copy.)

UPDATE: YouTube did delete it, so the backup copy has been restored.

Here is an interesting quote from Pepe Escobar in this interview about President Trump:

He’s just a minor cog in this gigantic wheel. He’s in fact, I would say he’s a side character in a much, much bigger Shakespearean play. He’s not even the main character. He’s a side character.”

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

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KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today

Christian Teaching on Sex and Marriage vs. The Actual Biblical Teaching

Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult

The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast

Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”?

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The post Is Nuclear War with Iran and America and Israel Imminent? first appeared on Health Impact News.

RAND Wargames Possibility of AI Destroying Humanity with Pathogens, Geoengineering & Nukes

8 May 2025 at 18:27
by Tim Hinchcliffe | The Sociable The RAND Corporation wargames scenarios to see if AI could contribute to human extinction by facilitating nuclear war, creating and deploying pathogens, and malicious geoengineering. According to three simulations conducted in the new RAND report called “On the Extinction Risk from Artificial Intelligence,” AI is currently unlikely to wipe out humanity on its own; however, it could still cause considerable devastation if it were programmed to do so, if it were given enough access to critical systems, and if it were granted decisionmaking powers. “The capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated to the […]

Iran: How the return of internet access triggered a U.S. strike

27 May 2026 at 07:58
The Internet: America's Weapon of Strategic Domination (UnlimPHoto)

The Internet: America's Weapon of Strategic Domination (UnlimPHoto)

Eighty-nine days of total digital blackout. Six hours of reconnection. A naval facility destroyed near Jask. The metadata trap has just snapped shut on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

For 88 days, Iran’s southern provinces were cut off from the digital world. Tehran openly framed the move as a shield against foreign psychological warfare operations and against potential new connected military technologies that could give the United States a decisive advantage. It was a survival strategy for the fully networked age.

On the 89th day, the fiber-optic cables linking Bandar Abbas to Chabahar were switched back on. Six hours later, a strike bearing the unmistakable signature of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) destroyed a naval facility suspected of housing IRGC fast-attack boats roughly 15 miles east of Jask.

“If you connect to the internet, you die.” Brutal as it sounds, the phrase now sums up the operational doctrine taking shape in this part of the world.

88 Days in Digital Darkness

To understand what happened, one first has to grasp what those three months of electronic silence meant for American intelligence capabilities. The NSA’s SIGINT collection systems — capable of absorbing terabytes of communications and geolocation signals — were effectively running blind.

The IRGC Navy, meanwhile, had reverted to Cold War-era methods: couriers, field telephones, and short encrypted burst transmissions.

For an AI-driven command-and-control system like the American JADC2 architecture, this total disconnection created an intolerable fog of war. It became impossible to target the source of a swarm of kamikaze drones when the source itself was invisible.

The Crack: A Fatal Economic Decision

The reconnection was not the result of a coordinated strategy. It stemmed from a unilateral concession by President Pezeshkian under pressure from two fronts: petrochemical magnates in southern Iran and a hyperconnected population suffering digital withdrawal.

Eighty-eight days without SWIFT transactions or market access had drained the economies of the southern provinces.

According to reports, the decision was made against the explicit advice of IRGC intelligence services, which wanted the blackout maintained indefinitely in the name of operational security for naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman.

2:14 a.m. local time. The first data packets begin moving across the Iranian network. American passive collection systems activate immediately.

Resynchronization phase. Personal phones belonging to IRGC logistics officials — believing their devices undetectable thanks to new IMEI numbers — begin checking WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Less than six hours later, targeting algorithms detect a constellation of geolocated signals converging on a previously inactive site near Jask. The strike is authorized.

The Metadata Trap

Washington did not need to decrypt a single encrypted message. It only had to map the sudden aggregation of signals: the phone of a logistics coordinator heading to a depot, the tablet of a commander checking weather forecasts in the Gulf of Oman, the computer of a port official accessing a cargo manifest server. For JADC2, the veil had lifted. The target had become visible.

“The United States didn’t need to crack encrypted content. It simply mapped the sudden constellation of geolocated signals clustered around a known but previously inactive site. That’s the metadata trap. It’s always deadly,” according to a local source.

A Fracture at the Top of the Iranian State

The strike — reportedly carried out using a combination of carrier-based F-35Cs and a sea-launched Tomahawk missile variant — triggered an internal political crisis.

IRGC generals reportedly turned directly against the presidency, accusing it of having “opened a breach.” Pezeshkian’s advisers deny any direct causal link.

Iran announced retaliatory measures and condemned the attack as a violation of the ongoing ceasefire. An MQ-9 Reaper drone was reportedly shot down during the operation, and an F-35C is said to have come under fire.

This episode goes beyond the Iranian case alone. It sheds light on Russia’s sporadic internet shutdowns and on the ongoing overhaul of China’s Great Firewall.

In 2026, access to the electromagnetic spectrum has become both the first casualty — and the primary vector — of modern warfare. Restoring connectivity can itself become the trigger.

The United States has now established a precedent: reconnecting a hostile state to the internet is treated as a moment of exposure, one potentially warranting an immediate kinetic response.

Further reading: Strategika

The Internet: America’s Invisible Weapon of Strategic Dominance

cyberguerreUnlimPhotos
cyberguerre (UnlimPhotos)

Artificial intelligence, cyberspace, and satellite networks are redefining the art of war. In this new global battlefield, the United States maintains a strategic edge thanks to its control over the world’s digital infrastructure.

In the age of hybrid warfare and the digital battlefield, military superiority is no longer measured solely by armored divisions or nuclear arsenals. It now depends on the ability to effectively integrate artificial intelligence, space-based networks, and cyber operations into a global command architecture. In this decisive domain, the United States retains a major strategic advantage: its de facto sovereignty over the global Internet.

A Structuring Technological Dominance

The core architecture of the Internet — from undersea cables to root servers, including major digital platforms and technological standards — remains largely controlled by American actors or subject to U.S. jurisdiction. This reality gives Washington an unparalleled strategic lever, enabling it to exert decisive influence over information flows, global surveillance, and power projection capabilities in cyberspace.

At a time when warfare is becoming increasingly algorithmic, this structural dominance translates into a critical operational advantage. The power capable of merging massive datasets, space capabilities, and military AI gains an immediate upper hand over its adversaries. The United States, a pioneer in these fields, continues to hold a dominant position.

China and Russia Confront Digital Hegemony

For years, Beijing and Moscow have sought to free themselves from this strategic dependence. Alternative networks, sovereign Internet systems, independent navigation systems, national cloud infrastructures, and state control over digital infrastructure are multiplying. Yet these efforts face considerable technological, economic, regulatory, and geopolitical obstacles.

The global interoperability of the Internet, originally designed under American leadership, makes any attempt at decoupling extremely costly and inherently imperfect. Despite significant advances — particularly by China — no power has succeeded in creating a fully functional and universal alternative to the U.S.-dominated digital ecosystem.

Hybrid Warfare and “Decapitation” Operations

As long as this American sovereignty over the Internet endures, the world is likely to continue witnessing hybrid operations combining digital sanctions, information pressure campaigns, cyberattacks, and targeted actions against states considered strategically vulnerable. Some recent interventions, particularly in Latin America, have been interpreted by many observers as forms of political and economic “decapitation” operations aimed at indirectly controlling critical natural resources, especially energy resources.

This strategy fits within a broader logic of imperial survival. According to its critics, Washington is compensating for the erosion of its domestic economic model — marked by growing social polarization and structural fragilities — through an aggressive foreign policy based on technological and military projection.

A Silent Military Revolution

This American resurgence would not have been possible without a genuine revolution in military affairs. The integration of AI, autonomous drones, algorithmic intelligence gathering, and satellite networks has enabled the United States to transform past strategic setbacks into a new comparative advantage. Some analysts describe this as a “Type-T revolution,” in which technology compensates for industrial and social decline.

Toward a Fragmented Cyberspace?

The central question remains: how long can this hegemony endure? The growing number of digital conflicts, the gradual fragmentation of the Internet, and the rise of national technological sovereignties could eventually challenge the existing order. For now, however, American dominance over the world’s invisible infrastructure remains one of the fundamental pillars of its global power.

L’article Iran: How the return of internet access triggered a U.S. strike est apparu en premier sur FrenchDailyNews.

An Anglo-French plot to arm Ukraine with a nuclear weapon?

26 February 2026 at 05:00
War in Ukraine (Unlimphotos)

War in Ukraine (Unlimphotos)

The United Kingdom government has denied Moscow’s claim that the UK and France have been secretly working on providing Ukraine with a nuclear weapon. The French government has issued a denial through its Moscow Embassy.

Robert Harneis (DR)
Robert Harneis (DR)

By Robert Harneis

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, SVR, has publicly claimed that the UK and France are “actively working” on providing Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, or a radioactive makeshift “dirty bomb”. The claim has been referred to by President Putin and his spokesman Dimitry Peskov.
The UK Prime Minister’s official spokesman claimed in a statement; “This is a clear attempt by Vladimir Putin to distract from his heinous actions in Ukraine… There is no truth to this.”

Illegal transfer of components

The intervention by President Putin indicates that the Russians take the claim seriously. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service state that Britain and France are actively working to resolve the issue of providing Ukraine with nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. “This involves the covert transfer of European components, equipment, and technologies in this area. One option being considered is the French TN75 small-size warhead from the M51.1 submarine-launched ballistic missile,” the statement reads.
According to the SVR, British and French elites believe that Kyiv would be able to secure more favorable terms for ending the fighting if it possessed a nuclear bomb or at least a so-called dirty bomb. “The British and French recognize that their plans constitute a gross violation of international law,” the statement continues.

A flagrant violation of international law

If true, this would be a serious breach of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). London and Paris allegedly risk undermining the global non-proliferation system. “Consequently, Westerners are focusing their efforts on making Kyiv’s acquisition of nuclear weapons appear to be the result of Ukrainian development,” the SVR wrote in their statement.
Putin’s press secretary, Peskov, called information about the possible transfer of a nuclear bomb to Kyiv extremely important and dangerous for the non-proliferation regime. “This is a flagrant violation of all norms and principles, and relevant acts of international law,” he emphasized. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s aide, Yuri Ushakov, told the Vesti news service that Moscow intends to inform Washington of the possible transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv from London or Paris.

Clichés

According to the official Russian government news agency Tass, Deputy Speaker Konstantin Kosachev, of the Russia Federation Council, has commented that the statements issued by the French and British embassies denying plans to arm Ukraine with nuclear weapons appear to be nothing more than rehearsed clichés, lacking depth or credibility, according to Federation Council.
Kosachev criticized these responses, stating, ‘The comments from the relevant press services – particularly, in France, not even from the government ministries but solely from the embassy here in Moscow – are simply pre-cooked clichés that add no real value. They deny the findings of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.” He further pointed out that these statements fail to confirm that the involved countries are adhering to their obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

France’s awkward position

Britain has no independent nuclear weapons and depends entirely on US supply and consent for use. France is in a more embarrassing position as it has full control of its nuclear arsenal. The idea that Washington knew nothing about any of this – if it is true – is far-fetched. But it seems at the moment it suits Moscow to appear believe it.

War in Ukraine (Unlimphotos)
War in Ukraine (Unlimphotos)

L’article An Anglo-French plot to arm Ukraine with a nuclear weapon? est apparu en premier sur FrenchDailyNews.

Ukraine: why is the war lasting so long?

25 February 2026 at 09:17
Ukraine, contrôle de l’armée russe (Wikipédia)

Ukraine, contrôle de l’armée russe (Wikipédia)

Between geopolitical calculations, Russian economic resilience, and diverging interests, the conflict is bogged down in a war of attrition that neither side seems willing to end.

Robert Harneis (DR)
Robert Harneis (DR)

By Robert Harneis

The war in Ukraine is entering its fifth year with no negotiated way out in sight for either belligerent. Behind the mud of the trenches and the victory communiqués, a complex machinery — military, economic, diplomatic — has taken hold, keeping the conflict in a precarious equilibrium, so far. An in-depth look.

A long war no one wanted, pursued by everyone

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv anticipated such a prolonged conflict. In 2022, Russia hoped for a lightning victory through decisive strikes on Kyiv, Kharkov, and the corridor leading to Crimea. The West, for its part, was betting on a rapid collapse of the Russian economy under the weight of unprecedented sanctions — the freezing of $300 billion in reserves, exclusion from the SWIFT system, diplomatic isolation. Both sides were disappointed, although Russia did achieve the land corridor to Crimea and the capture of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant.
Today, the conflict follows a logic of attrition much encouraged by the drone revolution. Russia is waging a slow war, aware that it faces a Ukraine backed by the financial and military arsenal of the United States, NATO, and most Western countries. The model is simple: Ukraine provides the men; the West provides the weapons. Unfortunately Ukraine is running out of men and the West is running out of weapons. Unlike the state owned Russian armaments industry, the Western military industrial complex is focused on profit not mass industrial warfare. The line of conflict in Ukraine is twice the length of the Western Front in the First World War, a situation totally outside modern Western military experience.

Russia: a more resilient economy than expected

One of the great surprises of this conflict has been the resilience of the Russian economy. The West had severely underestimated its degree of self-sufficiency. As a producer of its own energy and food resources, with an industrial base inherited from the Soviet era and relatively insulated from financialization, Russia has managed to adapt.
According to the IMF, measured in purchasing power parity (PPP), the country is now ranked the world’s fourth-largest economy, behind China, the United States, and India. Paradoxically, the sanctions stimulated local production through import substitution and encouraged the repatriation of capital. Russia’s military-industrial complex has demonstrated its capacity to sustain a prolonged war effort, notably through the reactivation of Soviet-era stockpiles and the use of low-cost guided munitions. Western media have regularly predicted Russia suffering economic collapse and running out of weapons.

There are no signs of either happening

By contrast the European Union, especially Germany has suffered severe economic damage, through the loss of a reliable supply of cheap Russian energy. This undoubtedly suits Russia but also the United States. The Eurozone has lost credibility as a result of freezing Russian government funds. Central banks across the world calculate, if they can do it to Russia, they can certainly do it to us.
Some commentators believe Washington deliberately pushed Europe to adopt these extreme sanctions with a view to weakening it as an economic rival. True or not, it is what has happened.

Ukraine: between survival and dependency

Ukraine, contrôle de l’armée russe (Wikipédia)
Ukraine, contrôle de l’armée russe (Wikipédia)

On the Ukrainian side, internal factors are complicating any prospect of negotiation. The Kyiv government benefits, both legally and illegally, from massive financial flows tied to the war effort. The radical nationalist units that form part of the military apparatus have publicly threatened to turn on Zelensky should he sign a peace deal with Moscow — thereby forcing him to betray his 2019 electoral promise that brought him to power. The Ukrainian people have never voted for a policy of hostility to Russia but it is what they are forced to endure. The idea that Ukrainians are dying heroically to defend democracy is laughable. The extreme nationalist minority is fighting with courage, skill and determination, the rest of the population is being forced to enlist and fight.
The war has many of the characteristics of a civil war. The Ukrainian commander in chief has a brother who is a colonel in the Russian army. Many Russians have relatives living in Ukraine.

A conflict with global geopolitical dimensions

For Moscow, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stated, the Ukrainian war is not an isolated territorial conflict but a symptom of a broader struggle: the one waged by Washington to preserve its hegemony in the face of China’s rise and Russia’s renewed military power. In this context, Beijing is quietly backing Moscow — Sino-Russian trade has grown significantly — while Russia simultaneously maintains good relations with New Delhi to avoid exclusive dependence on a single partner.
The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO represents a strategic setback for Moscow, however, adding some 1,340 kilometers of shared border with the Atlantic Alliance. By contrast, the development of BRICS offers Russia channels to circumvent sanctions, reducing its dependence on the dollar in international trade.

War objectives in flux

On the Russian side, war aims have gradually shifted. From a simple stabilization of the status quo in 2022, Moscow moved to formally annexing four Ukrainian regions, while some internal voices are now calling for even broader territorial conquests. Should the conflict continue without a negotiated solution, Ukraine could lose much more territory. Public opinion in Russia is strongly in favor of occupying Odessa and the Black Sea coast.
There has never been any doubt that the United States and its European allies are backing the war as a way to weaken Russia regardless of the fate of the people of Ukraine. It is more than a remote possibility that the United States would be happy to see Moscow maneuvered into occupying the whole country, resulting in years of economic strain and troublesome political complications. For the EU this would have the advantage of encouraging electoral support for re-armament but it would lead to serious political risks with governments like Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic no longer landlocked and benefiting from a border with Russia. This would give them new geopolitical choices in the face of a European Union determined on using the war to centralize control over member states.

BY THE NUMBERS

• 1.5 million lives lost according to various estimates since the conflict began in 2022
• 4th largest economy in the world — Russia’s ranking according to the IMF in purchasing power parity.

L’article Ukraine: why is the war lasting so long? est apparu en premier sur FrenchDailyNews.

Abby Martin: The US military machine is destroying our planet

Still image of independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin speaking into a microphone at the TRNN studio in Baltimore, MD, on Jan. 29, 2026. Credit: TRNN.

We sit down for an hour-long discussion with legendary independent journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin to discuss her new blockbuster documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, and the existential threat that US empire in general—and the US military specifically—poses to humanity and to our planet.

Editor’s Note: This conversation was recorded on Jan. 29, 2026, before the beginning of the illegal US-Israeli War in Iran.

Guests:

Additional links/info:

Credits:

  • Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here in the Real News Network studio in downtown Baltimore and I could not be more excited to have legendary independent journalist and filmmaker, the one and only Abby Martin here with me in person. Now, some of you may not know this, but Abby is actually a Real News alumnus. And Sister Abby, I know it’s been a minute since you’ve been back here in your old stomping grounds, but I just wanted to start by saying on behalf of the entire team here, welcome back to Baltimore. Congratulations on all the incredible essential work that you’ve done and we are all just so proud of you and so honored to be in this struggle for truth with you.

Abby Martin:

Oh my gosh. Well, the feeling’s more than mutual, Max. I mean, just being here back in the studio just brings me back to just the origins of Empire Files. Being in the Real News studio, working all hours of the night trying to knock out those weekly documentaries. And it was just such a cool crew to be a part of and it’s so amazing to be back.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what an incredible journey you and the Empire Files have been on since then. And we are of course here today to talk about your blockbuster new documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which is engrossing, expansive and frankly, terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US Empire in general and the US military specifically pose to humanity and to our planet. Now, I know that this project was years in the making and projects of this magnitude can often start as one thing and then become something much greater by the end of it. And so I wanted to start by asking, what is this documentary? Where did it start and what did it become by the time you and your co-director, Mike Prisner, were finished?

Abby Martin:

Wow. It was a long journey indeed and it was five years in the making, as you mentioned. And it started off during COVID with the birth of our first child and kind of joining our passions together, Mike, as an anti-imperialist, anti-war veteran organizer and me as an anti-war journalist who had been advocating against US imperialism my entire career as an advocacy journalist. So I advocate for issues. I wear my bias on my sleeve and I find it very refreshing in this kind of world of access, journalism and corporate media. And so combining those passions together and wanting to approach a subject that tackles the environmental impact of the military because of our obsession with the future, bringing a child into this world, having the responsibility of basically investing in the future. It is on our shoulders now. We’re all in. And so we saw that statistic kind of floating around that the US military was the largest institutional polluter in the world.

This is something that’s been kind of synthesized in academia when you look at just oil purchases, which the US military hadn’t even really disclosed until relatively recently. And there’s been some scholars who have addressed this in literature and studies, but no one had synthesized it in a cinematic way, certainly in a documentary fashion. But Max, once we got into the subject matter, every stone unturned is another documentary. And so we’re looking at legacy contamination of just radiation Agent Orange and then you look at the expansion of militarism all around the world with these 800 bases. Every base is a story. Every victim is another story. And then you add on top of that just the maintenance of the military arsenal, the actual infrastructure of the US military empire and how the entire thing exists as a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to maintain a fossil fuel infrastructure.

And it’s never been laid bare more with Trump in power with this kind of imperial belligerence when we see Venezuela, Greenland. So the documentary took a life of its own and started catapulting in every which way and kind of made us realize we wanted to prove the thesis here. We wanted to go into it not just talking about emissions, which is one story in itself, which we tackle. We wanted to tackle all of it. We wanted to go into the totality to sit someone down and inject them with the truth and you cannot walk away without having your brain rewired in terms of the way you look at the military in this country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, and I could say that as someone who’s watched it and was, like I said, quite terrified by what I was seeing and what you have given us kind of concrete evidence to prove. But I wanted to ask what kind of a monumental struggle that must have been to first research and then visualize the scope and scale of this problem. Could you just talk about that for a little bit?

Abby Martin:

I mean, especially when it comes to emissions, because this is something that’s been very secretive under the pretense of national security and not disclosed by the US military establishment. So it was unearthing so much data accumulated and synthesized by scientists independently to try to calculate these things based on just oil purchases. And then when you extrapolate that out and look at the lifecycle emissions, look at the application of the weaponry, the maintenance of this global supply chain, it totally becomes unquantifiable. And then you wrap into that the actual basically NATO, the machinery of the entire military empire, the great power competition with China, Russia, all of the building up of those arsenals and response to our aggression and belligerence. So it becomes simply unquantifiable and it was so difficult. And Max, at a point in the documentary, we bring in this philosopher and he says something really, really important where he says, number’s numb.

And he gives kind of this take on it’s so hard to get overwhelmed by the existential nature of US imperialism of capitalism because it’s so far reaching and all inclusive and all these issues are interconnected as we’re realizing more and more, but numbers, when you’re just looking at sheer facts and data, data, data, it can numb you. It can become meaningless. And I think we see that psychologically, I think with the genocide going on for three years straight, the data and the numbers become numbing. And so at a certain point it became more about just the storytelling and the emotion and collaging these narratives together to kind of give people that gut punch that it’s not about the numbers. Look, we proved the thesis over and over again, that’s done. But I think what really hits people is seeing how this is you, this is your children.

Your children are those children in Iraq. You are Alex Pretty. You are Renee Goode. You are every one of these victims of US imperialism because it affects every single person on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think back to the days of COVID-19 and when I heard those words in your documentary, Numbers Numb, that was the first thing that came to my head was sort of bearing witness to the monstrous spectacle of the bigger the numbers of people lost to COVID-19 got, the more numb people got to the human lives that were being lost. And I think there really is a terrifying truth there. And again, it speaks to the service that you and Mike Preisner have done in not just compiling what could be compiled in terms of the research numbers and from the emissions of all the military vehicles to the environmental impact of all the explosions and wasted munitions that are blown up or dumped into the ocean. I mean, the list is just so incredibly long and it’s impossible, like you said, to try to quantify it.

But I think what was even more horrifying to learn was that from Bill Clinton to now, all these kind of global US-led climate agreements don’t factor in the US military when they’re talking about our national emissions output.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, exactly. And people do not realize that. I’ve talked to several climate scientists, environmental academics, and they were absolutely flabbergasted at that fact that should be widely known, that militarism, not just US militarism, but every country’s militarism is excluded. Under the Paris Accords, they gave an option to opt in, but of course many countries are like, “Why would I do that? ” It’s not mandatory. Yeah, you know what? So it’s just completely insane and totally a farce that for the last 30 years of these international climate treaties, the US military has led the exemption of all military emissions and it’s gargantuan. It is completely gargantuan and totally hidden from this growing total. And so what’s astonishing to me is that why am I the first person to confront these major politicians at these conferences? Decades in the making, you see this bipartisan consensus for empire and just the acceptance of lying about this, of accepting it as normal and it’s totally outrageous.

And the whole dystopian nature of these climate conferences in general, which real news has covered extensively is just off the charts. I mean, it’s all about corporate profit. It’s all about how can we market this? How can we make money off of it? And then it’s like, well, no wonder you have a contingent of society that’s detaching itself less and less from that consensus reality that climate change is this existential threat that we need to globally cooperate on because simply the opposition to the fascist takeover, they’re not treating it like the emergency it is and they’re not acting accordingly. So it just makes it look like a money making venture and it’s really unfortunate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Another word might be a racket.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It’s a goddamn racket. Yep.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There it is. I wanted to ask if you could sort of lay out this double helix death spiral of US wars and military imperialism around the world and like the climate crisis, like how those two things and how you unpack it in this documentary, but like how those two things are intertwined in the most monstrous way.

Abby Martin:

And this goes before obviously World War II with the advent of the war making industry, how because Europe was left in ruins, you had the US kind of concentrating the actual war machinery and that’s where you see the genesis of the war economy being a kind of a permanent footing in the US. It established well before that. I mean, we’re talking about the first extraterritorial military basis that were established through obviously the veins of the genocidal takeover in the first settler colonies here, but those first extraterritorial military bases were to protect extractive industries of fur and mining just to basically … I mean, we almost drove beavers into extinction just so people could have funny hats in Europe and then it became coal. So the first bases that were overseas were to access coal and to basically be infrastructural holding cells for coal. And of course, once the national security priority turned to oil, once oil was discovered and replaced coal, that’s when we saw that just completely combined where oil became the dominant priority for access and expansion.

And then like you said, it became the self-fulfilling prophecy where in order to expand the military, you needed more oil and more resources and then you need to justify the expanse of the military to get more resources. So now this massive empire around the world with 800 bases spread across nearly every continent, it maintains itself through the access to oil, the pillaging of every last vestige of natural resources on the planet. And that’s exactly laid bare with Trump’s rhetoric today. He is literally saying, “We need Greenland.” That is the last basically unbridled wilderness on the planet. I mean, the amount of coal oil and rare earth minerals that are under that ice, they are saying explicitly they need that for their national security interests. And so you just have to read between the lines here. I mean, you don’t even really have to. He’s saying, “We need the oil from Venezuela.

We need the oil from Iran.” That’s what this is about. You had the Bush administration spending about a year trying to propagandize us into complacency with invading a country that had nothing to do with nine eleven just to seize the oil, but they wasted a lot of time to propagandize us, ties with WMDs. And so now this mask is so ripped off where they don’t even need to pretend. They’re just saying explicitly, “We are trying to grab every last drop of oil because that’s ours.” So in a way, it’s an important moment, Max, because for the first time in my life, things are just very laid bare and I feel like people are really putting all of this together in their mind and organizing with that international scope with the US Empire being the machinery that’s oppressing all of us around the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think you’re right and it really makes me sort of reflect on the conditions that have made that more possible now than it was in the post nine eleven years. And I want to kind of break the fourth wall here and part of this question is going to be me asking if you could talk a bit about how this documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy embodies your own trajectory as a political activist, as a journalist, like from the Iraq war to now, because I’ll be honest, we would not be sitting next to each other, 23 years ago. I grew up very conservative. My family and I were totally bought in on the Iraq war propaganda. We were part of the US majority that just felt so hurt, shocked, and aimlessly hurt and shocked after nine eleven and trusted far too much in our own government to sort of tell us what to do next.

It took a lot of years for me to sort of uncouple myself from that conditioning. But at the time, I did not understand the kind of what to me was a left wing talking point of like, why would we be going to war with another country just for oil? What does that mean? And now here I am like nearly 25 years later being like, “Jesus, how could you not see what was right in front of you? ” So I guess first of all, how were you able to see what I was not? And I guess connect us from there to here like how the seeing of the monstrosity that was always there, like how more of us have actually come into the light and seen what we’re actually up against.

Abby Martin:

I think it all goes back to just my love for the environment, my love for nature, my love for humanity. I just really love people and I love connecting on an interpersonal level. I think when you look at this kind of death spiral, as you called it, this machinery of capitalism and the subjugation of the rest of the planet at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun to say subject or die to global capitalism, it is just so counterintuitive to like love, solidarity, having a habitable planet and future. And I never was able to really articulate that capitalism was the problem. I was kind of a confused anarchist, libertarian back when I was first being radicalized by politics, because I thought Bush was evil incarnate. I was just like, “Who the hell are these people? They’re demons. Why are they doing this? ” And then Nancy Pelot and then you slowly kind of unpack.

You’re like, “Hold on, the Democrats are part of this. Hold on. The media is part of this too.” But it was always so obvious to me because of my just repulsion for war. When the media started talking about Iraq, I was so confused, Max. I mean, I think it helped because I was surrounded by militarism at San Diego State University. I was just thrown into this where I was surrounded by military frat bros and I was just so taken aback. I mean, growing up in the Bay Area, so the proximity to Berkeley, the hippies, just that counterculture of the revolutionary fervor of Berkeley, Mario Savo and the free speech steps and things like that. And so that was always baked in, even though I was just kind of like a generic Demo from suburban Pleasanton, California. I think when the Iraq War started and the bombing of Baghdad, I was sitting in the cafeteria at San Diego State University and I felt nauseous.

I felt sick and people around me were cheering and I’ll never forget that moment. I just was like, “What’s going on? I’m so alone. Why people think this is good? This is sick. What did Saddam do to us?” I remember calling my mom, I said, “Did Saddam do something?” And she was like, “No, the media just started talking about this. ” And I just said, “What is happening?” And it was so hard to organize there, but it became so powerful to realize media was a tool to tell these stories because I started watching radical media. We were talking at the time, this was around 2003, it was like Democracy Now and Alex Jones. It was like a very weird … The internet was very strange, but you also had the capacity to do things. I mean, there was this egalitarian sense of the internet that was very exciting where you could build real friendships and find things that were just really like not … It wasn’t fed to you by the algorithm.

And so I was able to pursue so much knowledge and learn and be self-taught and how to do these tools. And so anyway, I’m going on this very long tangent to say it all synthesized for me very obviously, but it is also a journey I think for a lot of people. I’ve met people who are my age who said I didn’t know anything before October 7th, which brings me to your second question. I think October 7th and the genocide in Gaza has been an extremely revealing moment, catalyzing moment for tens of millions of people around the world. And I’m anecdotally, I can say that just traveling across the country with this documentary already going in rural, urban areas, driving everywhere, talking to people, everyone has been motivated by the fact that this government has subsidized and overseen this genocide and how it has been bipartisan and the failure of the so- called opposition and the Democratic Party to stop it and incubate what we now have.

It’s all just so crystal clear and it’s been actually really amazing to see the radicalization occur in circles that I never would’ve expected at all. Older religious people, I mean, but really it’s the youth. It’s the youth who are seen, they don’t have a future if they let this just grow unabated, if they let the data centers take over, they let the unregulated nature of global capitalism take over, unregulated nature of imperialism, which turns inward, which we’re seeing the ICE executions in the street. So I’d say there’s an explosion of consciousness around the world, synthesizing all these issues, putting Palestine as the cornerstone of our collective liberation and realizing how all these things interconnect. And it’s beautiful, Max, because on the streets during the Iraq war, Palestine was too controversial. In the streets were in Occupy Wall Street, Obama was off limits. And so it’s all burgeoning now.

It’s all right beneath the surface and people are so ready to hear that phrase national strike, national strike. They know we’ve been in the streets with sustained protests. I’m an activist and a journalist. Again, I’m an advocacy journalist, so I advocate my own activism and I embed myself in the people’s stories and people’s struggles and try to uplift those stories just as real news does. And so I’m speaking from the streets. I was just in the streets in Minneapolis. I’ve never seen energy like I have now and people standing up in solidarity with their brothers and sisters because they want to terrorize us in a submission and silence and fear and I’m seeing the opposite happen and that’s something extremely powerful and again, kind of incalculable in terms of like what will happen with this energy. It’s very exciting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. And this is a moment in history not to be wasted because it won’t be around forever.

And it also sort of makes me think about like again, what is so different between our moment now in the year of our Lord 2026 and our moment then in the post nine eleven years at the turn of the millennium. And I of course can’t help but think about my own trajectory, my own family, like what has changed in our lives since then? Well, a massive economic global financial meltdown happened. We lost everything that my parents had worked for, including the house that I grew up in and it’s been a very long kind of struggle to get back to a place of peace and normalcy for our entire family since then. And now as someone who goes around interviewing, working people around the country talking about their lives and their stories, I hear a lot of echoes of that similar trajectory for a lot of people.

And I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying that at the turn of the century when we were as a country much more gung-ho about … Yeah, we have the right as the United States to go around the world telling other countries what to do. We have the right to spread democracy because it’s the best system in the world. We’re liberating people, we’re not doing something bad, yada, yada, yada.That was a time pre 2008 crash when the American dream was still plausible for a lot of us. You go out on the streets now, you talk to people now, no one believes in the American dream. I mean, if a handful of billionaires own everything and all of our money is just being sucked out of the public coffers and into the war industry. And so what I hear now when I go to these demonstrations in Baltimore, DC, what I hear now when I talk to poor and working class people in deep red Trump country districts in the Midwest or the South or here in the Mid-Atlantic, the common refrain that I hear is like, “Why is my money going there when we’re all kind of floundering here?” And I think that that is also a very significant sign of where we are as a country, but also a significant kind of mobilizing factor that presents an opportunity for people to look around and realize we’re all getting screwed by very identifiable villains.

And I wanted to sort of like hook that back into earth’s greatest enemy and ask who are the identifiable villains in this story that you’re telling and how do we take them on?

Abby Martin:

Yeah. I mean, the problem with capitalism and the status quo of neoliberalism is that everything’s been co-opted, superficialized, tokenized, our struggles have been bought and sold back to us. And so for the last 50 years, labor density, unions, that revolutionary undercurrent of all the progressive struggles, it’s been kind of co-opted into these corporate branding and marketing campaigns and it’s been really, really horrific to see because we’re getting back to our footing where people were in the 60s and 70s with this fundamental understanding of ideology and being able to articulate what we are fighting for and against. And so we’re getting back to that. I think Bernie and Democratic socialists of America and things like that have really resurrected the spirit of what we can all kind of orient ourselves around. But for the longest time, Max, I mean, I grew up very anti-communist. I mean, this was very, very baked in to American society because of the history against the ruling class.

And so what you see now is parasitic billionaires who have basically seized that distrust that did exist for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about, the disaffected masses who lost everything during the financial crisis, who knew that we were lied to about nine eleven and in the Iraq war, they don’t trust these people, but Trump was very smart in the way that they seized that momentum and siphoned all of the energy into this faux populism. And again, there was no opposition infrastructure to counteract that. And so a lot of us are kind of flailing saying, “How do we gain ground when they have taken over everything?” And then the Democrats kind of incubated it and laid the groundwork for them to take over everything because they’re basically Republican lights because everything is about making profit at the end of the day. And so I think what we need to do is realize we are all victims of propaganda.

We’re all at different steps of our journey of breaking out of that, but that’s all baked into all of us. And so approaching each other, and I’m not talking about fascists or people who are apologists for genocide. There are certain contingent of society that can’t be helped. They’ve succumbed to the darkness. They’ve been beaten down by the system and they’ve commodified everything. They have lost their empathy. I’m not saying that they’re born like that. I’m just saying that a lot of them can’t be helped right now and we need to let that go. But I think the vast majority of people are empathetic. They’re humanitarians. They want civil liberties. They want the foundation of what they believed America to be, human rights, the First Amendment, free speech, the beautiful things that make this country supposedly great. Those are the people that we need to reach out to with humility and empathy and reaching them where they’re at.

I’m talking about service members. I’m talking about veterans. They are not the enemy. They are victims of the enemy. The enemy is the top brass of the military, the government officials who are complicit in this, who are profiting off of war, who are invested in the war machinery, editors in chief at the New York Times, the Washington Post who are putting out the propaganda that sows the seeds for genocide, who perpetuate the status quo of this death cycle. Earth’s greatest enemy, that was the Biden administration. That was before Trump. That’s the status quo. That’s what we’ve accepted as normal, barreling us off a cliff, killing every last living thing on the planet, a finite planet. It’s collective lunacy and madness to go into this year after year knowing the outcome max. And I think people are so ready. They’re starving for this information. They’re sick of being gaslit and lied to and they’re realizing, “Hey, this is not the reality that I see.

This is not the reality that my neighbor sees.” COVID was very important for the ruling class. We were fighting each other about vaccines, about God knows what while they cannibalized every last industry. They siphoned every last drop of wealth. They pillaged everything. They gained what tripled their wealth in the last five years. And what happened to us atomized, isolated, siloed off, brain rodted on our phones thinking we can’t ever do anything about this. We lost. That’s what they want. Just like Barry Sanders in the movie says, “See what you see. Don’t be duped. See what’s right in front of your face.” And I’m not talking about on your phone, on your screen. I’m talking about in reality, vast majority of people are ready. They’re waiting for you to talk about these things because they don’t have the chance. They don’t have that opportunity or those avenues because Elon Musk wants them to believe something else.

And we have to ask, why is the richest man in the world showing us what he’s showing us? So when we get on our devices, yes, the advent of social media, the advent of Palestinian voices dictating their reality and taking back their agencies, been monumental, revolutionary, assisted to all of this, but we have to also be calculating strategic, creative, getting off of these devices and meeting like we used to because that’s how we win. We don’t win on here. That’s just one tool for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put and vitally true. And we’re saying this as two media makers, you know, Media personalities. Media can only do so much and we are trying to do as much as we can with it and your new documentary is an incredible example of that. But I could not agree more with your last point that we’re not going to bring a coalition of poor working class regular people banding together to stop the destruction of our society and our planet online.That’s not going to happen.You don’t get 50,000 people marching through the streets of Minneapolis just by posting and sending emails. You have to have that in- person connection, which is all I’m hearing coming from Minneapolis. People are saying I’m both simultaneously more afraid of my government than I’ve ever been, but I’ve never felt safer in my own neighborhood because everyone’s talking to each other and everyone’s kind of working together.

We were already losing that basic infrastructure for society as such well before 2020. But I think COVID really did a number on what was left of our social infrastructure, on our social being. So many of us just stayed closed in, stayed cut off, stayed glued to our phones and our computers. And as you mentioned, the powers that be, the people who control the media, those platforms, they know that and they are manipulating that to the point that no one has an agreed upon basis of the reality that we’re actually all living in because depending on what feed you’re looking at, where you live, what your search history is, you’re going to see an entirely different world be outside your window than the person who’s living next door to you. And

Abby Martin:

That’s a

Maximillian Alvarez:

Very dangerous and dark place to be. But I wanted to kind of hook that back into something else that you said, which was the value of not only talking to service members and military veterans, but that was made manifest in this documentary. I mean, it’s important in and of itself because as you said, they are not the enemy. They are the victims of this monstrous machine. They are the human grist for the proverbial mill of US imperialism. But it also kind of hooks into the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about how hard it is to actually research and understand this topic of just how big of an environmental threat is the US military to the world. And it was so clear to me in your documentary that if you go and try to get answers to those questions from top government officials or military brass, you’re not going to get anywhere.

But when you and Mike Preisner are talking to veterans, the rank and file of the military, you get a very different perspective on the problem. And I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how different that perspective actually is.

Abby Martin:

Okay. So there’s this hive mind that kind of operates in a similar fashion to how a corporate board would. So let’s say someone just has a conscience all of a sudden who’s on the executive board of Amazon or something, they would just be kicked out. You need to make money, you need to make more money than the last quarter, otherwise you’re not profitable. You’re a failing entity. That’s exactly how the US military operates. So when you’re looking at who’s sitting on the board of these board of directors of the defense contractors, they’re all interlocking with the media arms and all of these things. And that kind of explains this hive mind operational structure of a system that kind of works on its own. It doesn’t have a conscience, but of course it’s comprised of people who do and they can speak out and they have voices and they have their own minds, even though you’re beaten down in the military to not have your own mind.

So when you break out of that, when you see it for what it is, it’s such a powerful thing. I know hundreds of service members, because of my husband’s work, obviously, organizing soldiers and getting people out because anyone can get out of the military. It doesn’t need to be something specific. Anyone can file a CO packet and get out today. You never need to stay in and Mike can orient you through that. But it’s just so amazing to see people who are coming to the movie, watching it, who are active duty. My cousin who was a 20-year-old naval officer watched it and he was just like, “You know, because I don’t agree with your politics, but I’m here to support you. ” After the movie, he was just shaking. He’s like, “I’m ready to F and go, dude. I’m ready to fight.” And it’s just reaching people on a human level because I think especially when you reach out to service members, they’re victims, they’re not profiting off of this.

They don’t benefit from this system. They’re cannon fodder. They’re the human detritists that are going to be kicked out in the street like Levon, the homeless veteran at the beginning of the movie. He represents kind of the consequences of the system. I mean, he represents all of the destruction of the environment, the garbage that’s tossed in the ocean, every bullet fragment that’s exploded and the chemical exposure of all the toxins left everywhere that were bombing and shooting shells. And that story alone is so powerful, just one single homeless vet who was in a commercial for the army.

Levon:

First Air Cav Brigade. I was in US Army. I joined up in 2004, deployed out in 2006 and it was hell. I was at Camp Taji, seven miles south of Baghdad. I was one of the “Army of One” commercials. I was a guy with the helicopters.

Army Officer 1:

Everybody listen up. This is Levon.

Wenty:

Hey, Levon. I’m Wenty.

Army Officer 1:

You’re on the 120 today. So if there’s anything you need, just ask these guys. They’ll take care of it. All right?

Army Officer 2:

Welcome aboard.

Levon:

Thank you.

Army Officer 2:

You ever been around anything this fast before?

Levon:

He walks in and goes, “You ever worked around anything this fast before?” Yeah. My last job.

“Army of One” Commercial Narrator:

See how army training gives you strength for now, strength for later. GoArmy.Com.

Levon:

Yeah, it was all a lie. I have nerve damage, so I’m actually losing my hands. So I’m trying to use them as much as I can until they’re all gone. It hurts. It actually hurts. But that’s what the hydraulic fluid in service does. Laughing is the only way I can get through, otherwise I’m crying.

Abby Martin:

It encapsulates everything. It’s like you’re exploited, your story, your body, and then you’re thrown in the trash and you’re left to die with no help. And that’s the thing that veterans need to understand, whether it’s burn pits or agent orange, chemical exposure. There’s no help on the other end under this system. It’s just about churning your body out for profit. You’re just another commodity. And once you realize that you join the fight because you can always get out and you can make your own decisions and agency to realize it’s not worth it. It’s not worth your life. Your life has value and your life has dignity and you need to put it toward benefiting humanity and the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, that was very beautifully and powerfully put and it really kind of chills my blood hearing everything that you’re saying because it sounds so eerily familiar from the reporting that I’ve been doing over the past few years starting in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. And we are having this conversation at the end of January 2026. I’m going to be back in East Palestine next week. It’ll be the three year anniversary since the Norfolk Southern bomb train derailed in these people’s backyards, turned their lives upside down, trained filled with toxic chemicals that in an industry that has been just cut to the bone on the labor side, on the safety side, but is making more profits than it ever has. And who benefits from that? The shareholders and the executives. Who bears the costs of that? The workers on the rails and the people in towns like East Palestine, Ohio.

And this is an entire region that has been poisoned by industrial or corporate profit seeking greed and government complicity and negligence. Our own EPA was telling people there, “You’re fine. It’s okay to go back home. The air’s safe. The water’s safe.” And here they are three years later telling me people are getting all kinds of weird cancers. People have to leave because they can’t stay in their homes without getting nosebleeds, rashes, their kids bleeding out of every orifice. It is a shit show, a monstrous shit show that is sadly not unique to Ohio. What I have learned going to different sacrifice zones so called around the country, talking to different poor and working class people here in South Baltimore, down in Georgia near the biolab fire that happened last year, moss landing like in California, this is everywhere and people are being poisoned and abandoned in the exact same way that you just described as like military veterans and the people living abroad who are if not killed by our munitions are poisoned by them for years and the rest of their lives.

So all of that is here at home as much as it is there abroad. And frankly, I don’t think your average American knows that when it comes to like sites of industrial and mass pollution here in the United States, the biggest portion of super fun sites that come from one source is the Department of Defense. It’s like military bases. It’s weapons manufacturing plants. It’s the kind of foam that they use to put out fires that puts forever chemicals in the water that we’re all drinking. And so I wanted to kind of bring it back home for a second and ask if you could talk about the vast environmental kind of impact that the war machine is having on Americans and like how that connects to the imperial monster of American militarism abroad.

Abby Martin:

You look at just legacy contamination of what the US did during the Cold War, during World War II. I mean, you even still see dead zones from World War I from small munitions, which just kind of shows you how detrimental these are in just training. I mean, even just training alone, like you mentioned forever chemicals. I mean, the firefighting foam that’s used extensively by the military. The military is one of the most pervasive users of PFAS contamination. There are safe alternatives there have been forever, but they just don’t use them because it’s, I guess, less cost effective and they’d rather just dump them all and contaminate water supplies. So people may know peripherally about Camp Lejeune, which is the worst water contamination event in US history. This is now a super fun site, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina military base where they dumped toxic compounds for decades.

And after they knew that it was toxic, they continued to do it and cover it up. And so a million people were poisoned harmed by this toxic dumping and there was a huge amount of poisoned infants that were stillborn babies. And what was most shocking about this, Max, is this could be looked at as like, “Oh, it’s just a 60 year old story. The government took care of everyone and they’ll never do it again.” Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Well, it’s amazing to think that now 60 years later, people are still dying. They have ailments, they’re generational and physically impaired from the toxic water contamination and there’s no database. They are trying to try every single individual claim and the judge said it would take over a century to try to actually give all of these people what they deserve. And of course a lot of them have died.

They’re just waiting for all them to die off so they just don’t have to deal with them anymore. But I think it really just explains how they deal with victims of burn pits, with victims of aging orange poisoning. They deny, they deny, they deny. They try to just resist doling out even a penny for the victims and then the site is left destroyed. I mean, it’s a super fun site. This is just a poison toxic site that doesn’t go through proper remediation. There are hundreds of them all across the US. Like you said, the vast majority are either US military installations or have previously housed military uses. So bullet manufacturing, you have the Hanford nuclear site, which is like a ticking time bomb that can poison three states at once in the entire river that supplies water to half the country. So these are serious problems that are not being dealt with because we don’t have a functional government that is going around saying, “Hey, how do we do this clean up properly?” No, no, no.

We’re just going to commit fraud. We’re just going to lie. Governors don’t want the black spot on their record by saying, “We have a super fund site. We need to clean it up. We need to divert resources.” They’d rather ignore it. And of course, the military is sacred. It’s worshiped so they don’t even want to combat it. In on amazing instance, Jay Inslee, who was the governor, previous governor of Washington who ran on climate change as his entire doctrine, he wouldn’t even criticize the military. He wouldn’t even answer a basic question on should these be included or not in emissions reporting. I mean, the cowardice is frankly horrifying and disgusting.

It’s so far reaching here. When you put legacy contamination aside, just again, the maintenance of the arsenal here at home. We have hundreds of bases here in the US. Every base is dumping forever chemicals in the ground. Every base has contamination. Some of them much higher than Camp Lejeune. We talked to a person who is testing the groundwater around bases in the US. He is saying he is finding ground contamination higher than Camp Lejeune. Why don’t we hear about this, Max? Why? This is the most base level big tent ever for a human being. Clean water, clean air, clean food. If we can’t build an opposition or an organizational infrastructure around that, what are we doing? What are we doing? So again, it’s this total ignorance, total ignorance of the military being actually not a benevolent force spreading democracy and human rights. A force for profit that is destructive, deadly, totally dissociated from human life, the sanctity of life.

It’s willing to kill everything and everyone on the planet. So Jeff Bezos can have another yacht. Is it worth it? Hell no, it’s not. Hell no, it’s not. And so this just brings it all home and especially with ICE, because at the end of the movie we talk about the militarization of the police. So that concept of the imperial boomerang, I mean, of course it’s always been our tactics of colonialism, genocide. They’ve always been circling back, right? But I think the visceral nature of it now where we see storm troopers masked, immunized in the streets, state executioners in military guard where you can’t even distinguish, is this Palestine? Is this here? What am I looking at? It’s here, baby. It’s here to roost. And so I don’t even … There’s no difference anymore. I think for a long time people were trying to convince people, “Hey, no, no, you should care about Palestine.

This is all going to come back up. And you shouldn’t care about it because eventually it’s going to come back home. You should care about it because it’s human life. It’s human life and it’s on our shoulders. This is our government doing this. ” But I think especially now people are saying, “Oh my God, it’s here. It’s here and we’re all of our liberations intrinsically tied to one another.” And I think it’s becoming so, so clear. And especially when you tie in the environment, Max, because it’s not just one life loss, this is the air, this is the water, this is our planet and it doesn’t stop with Palestine. It doesn’t stop with the Congo, the rainforest, it’s the lungs of the planet. Every drop of water comes back and that’s what’s so crucial about the collaborative nature of approaching this existential crisis is that instead we have the great power competition where we’re fighting, we’re preparing a war with China when we should be cooperating.

How can we approach these together to actually give us a fighting chance?

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to kind of end on that powerful note, right? Because as much fire as I’m feeling in my belly thinking about our collective duty

To respond to this moment in history for humanity, for life on this planet, for our children, our grandchildren, all of it. I am feeling more called to this fight than ever before at the same time that I, like everyone else who’s watching this right now am feeling more distraught about the state of things in the world right now and it seems like we just have a brick on the gas pedal careening in the exact wrong direction, not only in terms of tackling the climate crisis, but in that double helix fashion, like stopping the US war machine, Jesus, we’re only in the first month of 2026 and we’ve invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president. US is talking about just going in and taking Greenland, invading Iran. It feels like the very monster that you photograph and document and detail in this documentary is on a murderous planet destroying rampage.

I know a lot of people out there are feeling like, “Oh my God, this can’t be stopped.” But I want to end on the note that it can

Abby Martin:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

It must and what tools your documentary gives us to help make that a reality.

Abby Martin:

I think this is very important. Like we said, see what you see, don’t be duped. So see what you see, meaning the success stories, the things that the billionaire class does not want us to see the victories across the country, the mobilizations, the coalescing these movements, the burgeoning of consciousness. I mean, I always say empire, Zionism, it’s a paper tiger and that’s why the propaganda is so desperate and that’s why the violence is so extreme because the colonizer mind cannot beat a liberated on. They can kill. They can kill and destroy, but they can’t win. They can’t be victorious. And all an empire knows is that every problem is a nail. And so the more that they dig their own graves, the more people wake up, the question is, are we going to wake up fast enough? And I think that when we see success stories like last year, Max 35 data centers got stopped in the US, where is that on the news?

So it’s us seeking out the things that can actually reinvigorate our revolutionary spirit energy and not get despawned and paralyzed with the sheer, terrifying nature of it all because it is overwhelming. And again, it’s intentional to berate and barrage our minds like this. They’ve psychologically, it’s a psychic assault. It’s a physical assault. It’s an all body, all mind assault and they know exactly how to manipulate us. If they’ve learned anything from the last mass uprising, it’s that. And so I think having that consciousness, yes, they’ve wanted to individualize everything and that’s the whole problem with liberalism, capitalism, individualizing our struggles and the solution. Papers, straws, driving … Look, and I have solar panels. I’m a militant composter. You don’t get a shred of food past me. Ask my husband, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand who is the perpetrator, who’s actually at fault.

It’s not us, it’s them. And so while you need to act in your individual choices with whatever capacity you have, with whatever talents you have, build and guide that to the struggle, because if it didn’t matter what you said online, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on propaganda to manipulate and curate our realities. If it didn’t matter what you did out there, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on storm troopers to terrorize us and to make us feel scared to walk out of our houses, obey or die, comply or die, right? That’s what they said about Alex Pretty. You should have stayed inside. No, we have the right to assert our liberties. We have the right to do these things. So to kind of reclaim reality is like a revolutionary act in itself because it is a war on our minds. That’s the first step, joining an organization, getting out there, being a part of the community.

Because Max, we don’t do this. We don’t do this work because we know we’re going to win tomorrow. We do it because we have to. Like Chris Hedges said, we fight fascists because they’re fascists. We have to fight it because we brought children in this world and not just that, because I love this planet. I want my children to go scuba diving in Noko Bay. I want them to meet the Tugong. I don’t want him to think that I gave up because I just succumbed to the darkness. I want them to know that we fought till the end. And so we have to. We do it because we have to because we love life and we do it to preserve life and we win when we know that we can because guess what? We have the power. We have billions of people on this planet and the rest of the world is ready to go.

They’re waiting for Americans. They’re looking at us saying, “It’s time. It’s time for you guys to wake up because we don’t want our planet destroyed because if you’re out of control government and military empire.” So as crazy and dystopian as things may seem, and yes, indeed they are, there is an alternative path that is becoming more and more urgent by the day and I think people are realizing that more and more, that the status quo is death, that you’re in or out and I think a lot more people are choosing life. They’re choosing to be all in organizationally lending whatever they can to the struggle because we have to Max and I think once that consciousness flips, mass education, of course, is a very important tool. That’s why we do what we do. Once that flips, it’s going to happen quick. Occupy happened quick. That was amazing.

That was one thing that I was like, “This is going to end in a couple days.” And it lasted for months and months. That was beautiful, revolutionary. And we took that spirit and I think it still carries on with us today and we’re waiting for that moment and I think it’s really right around the corner. It’s coming. And once it’s here, it’s unstoppable and we need millions of people, civil disobedience, nonviolent civil disobedience, because we cannot fight the military empire with violence. We can’t fight it with military might. We shut down capital. That’s the language these people speak. We haven’t even tried to strike, but baby, when we do it, that’s going to send shockwaves through the world and we can move mountains when we stop business as usual.

💾

“The rest of the world is ready to go. They're waiting for Americans. They're looking at us and saying, ‘It's time for you guys to wake up, because we don't want our planet destroyed [by] your out-of-control government and military empire."

Lesson from the Iran War #42,765: Making enemies makes us poorer

19 May 2026 at 22:53
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.

Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.

The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.

The Military is Really Big Bucks

There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.

It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.  

It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually.  

And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.

The Peace Dividend

In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Reagan and Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.

At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.

Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.

It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.

This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.

It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.

The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War

President Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration, could be push by Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.

But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.   

That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.

The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the U.S. economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?

Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.

As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.

In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.  

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