Tag: Russia

NATO and the Need for Resolve

The ever-brilliant NATO strategists who have been losing for three straight years now claim to believe that going head-to-head with Russia in Ukraine is the way to AVOID a Russian invasion of Europe:

Military experts have warned NATO must take seriously the recent drone incursions into eastern Europe or risk invasion, after Russia tested the military alliance’s resolve with intrusions into foreign airspace last week.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE, a former British Army colonel, told the Daily Mail that he has ‘no doubt’ that Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep going, after UAVs repeatedly breached NATO airspace in eastern Europe.

Poland called the intrusion a deliberate provocation, as Russia insisted it had not targeted objects in Polish territory. European allies have rushed to organise an ‘Eastern Sentry’ mission, bolstering the eastern frontier with greater materiel.

‘NATO has suddenly woken up – or finally woken up,’ said de Bretton-Gordon. ‘We played lip service to the peace dividend … really giving the impression to Putin that we weren’t that bothered and we didn’t care. So in a way, it is slightly our own fault. We’ve got a show resolve now, otherwise he will keep going.’

The Europeans wouldn’t be so desperate to provoke WWIII if they understood that the USA is not going to intervene and fight for them. But they certainly know that what they’re doing by pretending they’re going to respond to a false Ukrainian flag is the best way to assure Russia invades the NATO countries on its borders, not avoid it.

The liars always lie.

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“NATO is at war with Russia”

No doubt this official observation will spark all sorts of denials from the various neocons and Eurocrats. And none of them will matter, because in the end, the only opinion that matters is Russia’s.

For the very first time, the official spokesman for the Kremlin in Moscow, Dmitry Peskov has said publicly “NATO is at war with Russia.” This statement is a harbinger of dramatic and horrifying developments soon to come.

It is vital to point out that for three and a half years, Peskov has NOT said this. The fact that he uttered these words over this past weekend, is no accident.

Peskov is the official Spokesman for the Kremlin. He says exactly, precisely, what the Russian government wants said. He doesn’t embellish. He doesn’t take liberties with what he says. Never once in history has the Kremlin had to “walk-back” anything Peskov has said. The words that come out of his mouth are exactly, precisely what the Russian government intends to express.

The fact that the Russian government is now openly saying “NATO is at war with Russia” holds all the severe implications any rational person would think, could stem from such a statement.

And in truth, this is nothing more than a statement of the obvious. NATO is, and has been, at war with Russia since at least mid-2023. Russia’s patience in simply absorbing the economic and military attacks has been tremendous. But now that NATO’s proxy has been defeated, NATO isn’t doing what it should be doing and laying down its weapons, instead, it is doubling down and making preparations to fight Russia directly.

Russia, it is now clear, will behave accordingly. And it is very unlikely that more than a few of the current European regimes are going to survive the experience, however tangential it might prove to be.

And the European leaders know NATO is responsible for starting the NATO-Russian war. They’ve even admitted as much.

French President Emmanuel Macron has privately admitted that NATO is the driving force behind the Ukraine conflict, prominent American economist Jeffrey Sachs has said. Macron, along with other Western leaders, has repeatedly claimed that Russia launched its military operation against Ukraine in 2022 without provocation and has insisted that Moscow is solely responsible for the conflict.

However, speaking during a foreign policy debate with the Italian daily il Fatto Quotidiano, Sachs recalled that when Macron awarded him the Legion of Honor in May 2022, the French leader privately told him “exactly the opposite of what he says publicly” and admitted that “NATO was causing this war.”

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Remember, Everything is Fake

The “Russian drone attack” on Poland was a comical attempt at a false flag.

The incident was obviously very strange because, while a few errant Russian drones had maybe fallen over other countries here and there—after likely being jammed off their course—this has never happened in such a large scale. This heavily suggests something very fishy, in the way of either a false flag or a coordinated campaign; that is to say, something like an Israeli Stux-net or “pager” operation where a large amount of Russian drones are “tampered with” before hand, whether that’s by digital infection of firmware via virus, or something else.

There were several signs pointing to the ‘false flag’ explanation, for instance a photo of a Russian drone that landed on a Polish “chicken coop” that shows the drone taped together with literal duct tape. This is important because Ukraine was known to have been collecting previously-downed Russian drones in order to “creatively” reuse them for such a purpose. So a previously-destroyed or damaged drone could perhaps need some “work” to make it look whole for the ‘presentation’.

Additionally, Polish homes presented as “destroyed” by Russian drones were outed by citizens as houses that were damaged long ago by natural disasters.

The USA is much better at staging false events because it’s been doing so for much longer than most of other countries; since at least 1898 and the “Remember the Maine” false flag that was used to justify the Spanish-American War.

After reading a newspaper story in 1974 about the sinking of the Maine, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover decided to reexamine the issue. He recruited historians, archivists, and two Navy experts on ship design: Robert S. Price, a research physicist at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at White Oak, Maryland, and Ib S. Hansen, assistant for design applications in the Structures Department at the David W. Taylor Naval Ship Research and Development Center at Cabin John, Maryland. Among Price’s Navy projects had been an analysis of the wreckage of the nuclear-propelled submarine Scorpion (SSN-589), which was lost in May 1968.

The Hansen-Price analysis, as Rickover called it, was the heart of a short book published in 1976. The 23-page analysis reached this conclusion: “We found no technical evidence . . . that an external explosion initiated the destruction of the Maine. The available evidence is consistent with an internal explosion alone. We therefore conclude that an internal source was the cause of the explosion. The most likely source was heat from a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the 6-inch reserve magazine. However, since there is no way of proving this, other internal causes cannot be eliminated as possibilities.”

As far as the “confession” concerning what has been reported as Charlie Kirk’s murder goes, remember that Tyler Robinson isn’t even the first person to confess to shooting the Turning Point USA founder. Whatever the truth eventually turns out to be, remember, the one and only thing we know cannot be true right now is the Official Story as reported by the mainstream media.

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False Flag in Poland

Three drones, supposedly of “Russian origin” were shot down in Poland.

Russia’s defence ministry denied targeting Poland and its foreign ministry accused Warsaw of spreading ‘myths’ to escalate the war in Ukraine.

The military said ‘there had been no plans to target facilities on the territory of Poland’.

The Russian embassy in Warsaw separately told AFP that ‘Poland has failed to provide evidence of the Russian origin of the objects that entered Polish airspace’.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: ‘We wouldn’t like to comment on this.’

‘This is not for us to do so. It’s a matter for the [Russian] defence ministry.’

Now, what is more likely? Russia violates Polish airspace for no reason with drones that can be easily shot down and do no damage or Ukraine obtains a few Russian drones and flies them across the border in order to give the Europeans more ammunition to demand US military support? Look at where the drones were flying.

If Russia ever decides to attack Poland, it’s not going to be slow drones flying out in the countryside, but hypersonic Kinzhals and Oreshniks hammering military sites. This is an obvious Ukrainian false flag of the sort we’ve been expecting for months.

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Switzerland Isn’t Neutral

The Swiss media is quite rightly beginning to worry about the inevitable implications of the Swiss government’s decision to abandon neutrality now that the rest of the world has taken note of the way in which the Swiss government is waging economic and proxy war on Russia at the behest of the European Union.

Is Switzerland still neutral? People ask Google this question, or a similar one, some 14,000 times a month – outside Switzerland and in English.

In a trial search, an English-language article from Turkish state media shows up quite high on the list. “Why Switzerland is breaking away from 500-year-old neutrality,” says the headline. Although the text itself is more nuanced, the headline sets the wrong tone and skews the readers’ interpretation. And as journalists know, far more people read the headline than the actual article.

There are various reasons why people abroad may be asking Google about Swiss neutrality. One is that foreign players – in particular Russian propaganda channels – are spreading misinformation on the issue.

It is important that people who take the trouble to research Swiss neutrality have access to reliable and accurate information. Anyone who claims that Switzerland is no longer neutral is assuming that Switzerland has picked a side. And anyone who has taken sides can be viewed with hostility.

It is therefore in Switzerland’s interest to ensure that its neutrality, which has been the guiding principle of its foreign policy since 1815, is correctly communicated to the international public. If a person hears over and over again that Switzerland is no longer neutral, they can easily come to perceive this as the dominant view. This is the case even if the statement is made multiple times by the same source but reaches them through different channels. Frequently repeated untruths have a proven effect.

And frequently repeated truths have an even greater effect, because the most powerful rhetoric points toward the truth.

Switzerland obviously isn’t neutral. It has engaged in many hostile actions toward Russia over the last three years. In fact, it has engaged in so many of them that it has been formally declared an “unfriendly nation” by Russia as a result of those actions.

The Russian Federation has decided to add Switzerland to its list of “unfriendly nations”, after the country imposed sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. The move follows a letter from the Russian Foreign Minister, who asked the Swiss government, “Which side are you on?”

In the press conference announcing the sanctions, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis dismissed Russian accusations of a violation of neutrality by saying, “Playing into the hands of an aggressor is not neutral.” Speaking to Blick about the allegation made by Vladimir Putin that western sanctions amounted to a declaration of war on Russia, the president said, “Switzerland is not at war with Russia.”

“Switzerland remains a neutral country,” said law professor Oliver Diggelmann, from the University of Zurich. He noted that a commitment to neutrality did not mean a commitment to inaction and that “the Swiss government recognised that not fully sanctioning such a blatant violation economically would make (Switzerland) an indirect accomplice of the aggressor.”

These word games don’t fool anyone. Cassis’s response is both irrelevant and disingenuous, and is the sort of sophistic rhetoric that doesn’t even merit being taken seriously, let alone at face value.

Doing nothing is not “playing into the hands of an aggressor”. It is, quite literally, NOT doing that. It is, quite literally, doing nothing. If we combine both statements by Cassis and Diggelman, it’s easy to see how inverted the “economic sanctions are neutral” logic is.

  • Neutrality does not mean doing nothing.
  • Doing nothing would make Switzerland an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions is necessary to avoid becoming an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions makes Switzerland a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • Therefore, neutrality requires Switzerland to become a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • In other words, neutrality requires Switzerland to take sides against Russia.

This isn’t merely incorrect logic, it is inverted sophistry that relies upon an implicit redefinition of the term “neutrality” from “not taking sides” to “not taking the side of the aggressor”. Which means that the “interventionist neutrality” approach literally requires the abandonment of genuine neutrality and the replacement of the word with something that means its exact opposite.

The claim that Switzerland has taken a side is observably true. The claim that Switzerland is still neutral is observably false.

We’ve seen this sort of inversion before. We’ve seen it many, many times. As with the EU’s “democracy” that fights the will of the people and the UK’s “liberalism” that imprisons people for having opinions, this new Swiss “neutrality” is the exact opposite of what everyone historically understood the word to mean. The worldwide observations of the recent Swiss abandonment of neutrality aren’t false, they are 100 percent correct.

The more important point is to recognize that no one from Beijing to Washington cares even a little bit about how Swiss policy or Swiss law formally defines neutrality. All the legalistic word games are irrelevant. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t take two to war. If Russia says you’re at war with them, then guess what? You’re at war with Russia. And as has been made very clear by the SCO summit, if you’re at war with Russia, then you’re at war with China too. Good luck with that.

The small nations of Europe are still stuck in the post-WWII mindset of an invincible USA, but the post-WWII era is over. The USA can’t defeat either Russia nor China anymore, and it would now lose both a land war in Europe and a sea war in the Pacific. At this point, the US military might not even be able to prevent a joint invasion if the Sino-Russian alliance elected to launch a 10-year all-out war of invasion and occupation, although fortunately neither China nor Russia has any interest in doing that.

So while taking sides is foolish, taking the side that is guaranteed to lose, taking the side that has the military-industrial deck stacked even more heavily against it than the one that was stacked against the Axis powers in WWII, is downright insane.

It’s not too late for the Swiss. No one in China or Russia is under any illusion about the Swiss people wanting to go to war with them. They know perfectly well who is responsible for the economic war on them. But that means it’s time to start fixing the diplomatic damage of the last three years, not to double down and make it worse while trying to deny it. It needs to be fixed before it’s too late and no one cares anymore what is said or done.

The Swiss government’s opinion on neutrality is perfect clear. It is absolutely against it.

Bern, 26.6.2024 – The popular initiative ‘Safeguarding Swiss neutrality’ (Neutrality Initiative) seeks to enshrine neutrality and its practical application in Switzerland’s Federal Constitution. At its meeting of 26 June 2024, the Swiss Federal Council decided to recommend that the people and the cantons reject the Neutrality Initiative.

30.5.2025 – The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Council of States soundly rejected the neutrality initiative, reported SRF. The Council of States’ Security Policy Committee also resoundingly rejected the popular initiative in mid-February.

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Not Without Odessa

The Russian Army has sent a strong signal how it believes the war is going to end.

A routine and seemingly innocent news release photo from the Russian Ministry of Defense, is rapidly becoming quite controversial.  General Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation,  giving a briefing about the ongoing Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.   But . . . . . . .  on the wall behind the man seated to the left of Gerasimov, is a map.

I’ve believed from the beginning of the war in 2022 that while Russia had no interest in taking the entirety of Ukraine, the Russians wouldn’t stop it without reacquiring Odessa. Not only is it strategically important, but the trade union massacre there on 2 May 2014 remains an important symbol of the inability of the Kiev regime to govern the Russian people justly.

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Ukraine Must Surrender

We knew it was bad, we knew it was very bad, but we didn’t know it was this bad. The true wickedness and inhumanity of the UK and the European Union can be seen in their determination to force the Ukrainian Armed Forces to continue resisting the Russian victory that was already known to be inevitable back in February 2022.

Ukraine has lost 1.7 million servicemen during the special military operation, these are killed and missing in action. The information comes from the database of the Ukrainian General Staff, which was hacked by killnet.

Over three years of the special military operation, the Ukrainian army lost 1,721,000 people killed and missing in action.

118.5 thousand in 2022
405.4 thousand in 2023
595 thousand in 2024
621 thousand in 2025

A total of 1.7 million files — with full names, descriptions of circumstances and places of death/disappearance, personal data, contacts of closest relatives, and photos.

If the war isn’t ended by an unconditional surrender that provides Russia with whatever it wants, the total KIA and MIA in 2025 alone will approach one million. This has been one of the bloodiest wars in European history; the infamous 30 Years War that is cited as one of the great evils of religion only accounted for 450,000 combat deaths in 30 years.

To put this into historical perspective, by the end of the year, Ukraine will have lost as many men as Japan did in WWII. It has already lost FOUR TIMES more men than the USA lost in WWII.

It is absolutely unconscionable for President Trump to permit even one more dollar to go toward such a lost, lethal, and pointless cause. And now that the degree of losses are known, I can’t imagine that the Ukrainian people are going to suffer the Kiev regime much longer.

The reported figures far exceed official estimates. In February, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told CBS News that 46,000 of his soldiers had been killed since 2022, alongside about 380,000 wounded – numbers questioned in Western media. Moscow has also claimed higher Ukrainian losses, putting the toll at more than 1 million killed or wounded as of early this year.

UPDATE: By contrast, total Russian losses are independently estimated to be around 165,000. This should suffice to explain why Russia has been content to take as much time as it takes to execute the Special Military Operation, as the 10-1 kill-ratio is astonishing, particularly considering that Russia has been on the offensive without much of a numerical advantage until recently.

If these numbers prove to be more or less correct, then the SMO has essentially been the Battle of Cannea writ large and is one of the greatest strategic accomplishments in military history.

Ukraine and NATO have not only lost this war, they appear to have lost it as comprehensively as any defeated military force in human history.

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The Fake Peace Plan

Reuters reports that this is the agreement to which the Russians have concurred and which President Trump will be selling to Zelensky and the Europeans today:

Reuters publishes Putin’s proposals on Ukraine, presented to Trump at the summit:

  • No ceasefire is planned before signing a full agreement.
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine will withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
  • Russia will freeze the front lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
  • Return control of areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to Ukraine.
  • Formal recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea.
  • Cancellation of at least part of the sanctions against Russia.
  • Ukraine will be prohibited from joining NATO.
  • Putin seems to have been open to Ukraine receiving certain security guarantees.
  • Official status of the Russian language in some parts of Ukraine or throughout Ukraine, as well as the rights of the Russian Orthodox Church to operate freely.

But Simplicius is, in my opinion, correct to be very skeptical that this is an accurate report.

This, if true, would obviously be a huge departure from Russia’s earlier demands. It is difficult to believe, however, because Putin already signed both Zaporozhye and Kherson at their administrative borders into the Russian constitution, and thus there is no real mechanism of abandoning those uncaptured portions.

There are a variety of angles to this. Firstly, recall that media ‘reports’ about claimed Russian concessions have been proven fake every previous time. We went through it repeatedly: a media claim is made that Putin is ready to ‘concede’, and soon after a high ranking Russian official states that all previous ‘Istanbul plus’ demands are still in place…

The only logical explanation is the above: that Russia knows no agreement can ever be reached anyway, and is thus playing for time by pretending at concessions to affect the peacemaker and transfer responsibility on Ukraine and Europe. Why can’t it be reached? Zelensky himself again just stated no uncaptured land can be ceded, as it is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution. Previously, he’s stated many times that demilitarization is definitely out, also. Now, European “partners” have again reiterated their intent to immediately station troops on Ukraine’s territory upon the cessation of hostilities.

Personally, I believe that the focus of both the USA and Russia is extricating the former from its obligations to assist Ukraine. Once the US is out of the picture, Russia can easily handle the EU-Ukraine alliance by launching new offensives and forcing the surrender on whatever terms it requires. But in order to get the USA out of the picture, there needs to be an agreement on the table to which the US can agree and to which Ukraine will not.

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Peter Turchin Kept the Receipts

One of my favorite analysts, Peter Turchin, is one of the few people who loves data even more than I do. He quite usefully chose a pair of opposite predictions concerning the Ukraine war back in 2022, one from Paul Krugman and one from Scott Ritter, and constructed models on the bases of those predictions in order to track the way the war unfolded.

Now, I could have told him that Paul Krugman’s model would be wrong, because Paul Krugman is always wrong. But that’s some high-level UHIQ pattern recognition in action; warning: do not try this at home! In the statistical world, one has to at least pretend to take his predictions seriously and give them a fair shake, even though one has a very high level of confidence that they’ll comprehensively fail.

One of the topics that I wrote about in End Times was Ukraine. After I turned the final version of the text to the publisher in late 2022, I continued monitoring the news about the course of the conflict there, because I was curious to see how well my assessment of the Ukrainian state (a plutocracy) and the war there (a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia) would fare as history unfolded. It was, thus, interesting to see that in the early 2023 the views on this conflict, and predictions about its future course, could be so diametrically opposed, depending on who was writing and what ideological background they came from. The tone in the MSM (main-stream media reflecting the official American position) was quite triumphant. But many American analysts, former military and intelligence professionals, held a very different view.

It occurred to me at that time that this difference in predictions is actually amenable to an empirical test. As long-time readers of my blog (now here on Substack, previous posts archived on my web site) know, I view ability to empirically test predictions from rival theories as key in doing Science (with a capital S). Just search my blog archive using the keyword “prediction” and you will see multiple posts on this subject. So I decided to conduct a formal test.

For concreteness sake, I selected two predictions, both based on an explicitly quantitative argument, but coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. One was from Paul Krugman, channeling the official American position. The other was from another American, who is, however, considered as a “rogue actor” and a “Putin’s stooge”, Scott Ritter. You can read the actual quotes from both in the Introduction of the SocArxiv article, in which I “pre-registered” predictions of my model.

I won’t repeat the details here, because you can read them in the series of blogs I published two years ago, followed by the SocArxiv article that put it all together in a systematic manner and provided R scripts that allow others to replicate all my results.

They’re all well worth reading, although by the middle assessment, it’s already perfectly clear which of the two models, which Turchin labels the Economic Power model (Krugman) and the Casualties Rates model (Ritter), works better, although he combined elements of both into what he describes as an Attrition Warfare Model that appears to outperform both. This makes since, because what really matters most is Industrial Capacity and Male Population Demographics, both of which are presumably incorporated in Turchin’s AWM.

And he explains exactly what his AWM suggests at the moment.

As you can see (the dashed red line “We are here”), we’ve already entered the region where Ukrainian army can collapse at any moment, although this “moment,” according to the model can happen at any point between now and February 2027 (corresponding to 60 months after the start of the conflict). As I explained in my posts and the article, the final outcome is not much in doubt, but the rupture point is extremely difficult to predict. The situation is akin to seismology. For example, the recent Kamchatka earthquake of exceptional power was predicted 30 years ago, except nobody could know when it would actually strike. The Attrition Warfare Model is actually more precise than that. From its point of view, it would be a surprising outcome if Ukraine is still fighting beyond February 2027.

Note that I said, “from its [the model’s] point of view.” I emphasize that the future is unknowable in precise terms. In any case, the goal of this article was not to predict the future, but to use the method of scientific prediction to empirically test between two, or more theories.

The Attrition Warfare Model (AWM) encodes both alternative theories, (1) the Economic Power hypothesis, which predicts a win for Ukraine (Krugman) and (2) the Casualties Rates hypothesis, which predicts a win for Russia (Ritter). It is clear that the first theory will be rejected, no matter when the war ends.

Turchin’s work can be a little wonkish for the average individual to follow, but it’s not as complicated as it might look at first. He keeps things simple enough, and his writing style is clear enough, that with just a little concentration, that it’s both insightful and educational for anyone with the intelligence to be paying attention to these small matters of war, revolution, and societal survival.

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The Military War is Over

At least, that’s what Col. Macgregor thinks.

What I’m trying to say is that you have this picture on the one side of Ukrainian forces that are literally bled white, that are falling apart—not for lack of courage or any of that sort of thing. That’s nonsense. It’s simply impossible for them to mount an effective resistance against the onrushing Russians.

And then on the Russian side, you have this 21st century force, extraordinarily well-equipped, technologically savvy, essentially knocking drones out of the air with either electronic warfare or other means and moving not at high speed, but fast enough that the opposing force has no chance of recovering.

And right now they keep talking about the so-called Azov formations. I guess there’s something like four, five, six, seven, eight brigades left. I don’t know what their strength is. There’s probably not much. But these are the sort of diehard Nazis. They seem to be nowhere in the path of the Russians. I think they’ve beat a path elsewhere. So I’m not sure there’s really much in front of the advancing Russian forces.

So from a purely military standpoint, I would say this is the end of the war.

“Is it fair to say that Russia is close to achieving its military objectives in the war if those objectives are the acquisition of the four oblasts?”

“Oh, well that’s being achieved. But remember, the key thing for them has always been not so much capturing territory, but annihilating the Ukrainian forces on the ground. That’s the problem. So they’re very force-oriented in what they do. Now, we may see finally a buildup of forces in various places of 100,000 or more that are large enough and well-supplied enough that they can move deeper.

I think you’re going to see that in the direction of Zaporizhzhia. The bridges over the Dnipro are intact. Zaporizhzhia has real strategic value. If they decide to cross the river, they can go north or south from there—attacking north to Kyiv or south to Odessa. I think those are the decisions that they’re going to make now in the next couple of weeks. And we’re going to see more and more movement.

But the point is the Ukrainian force is almost annihilated. There are still some people left, and they’re not going to stop. As long as there’s anyone from these Azov units around, I would expect the Russians to plow forward. But securing the Russian areas, the Russian-speaking areas, yes—but then the next question is, what are you going to do to secure the outcome of the war? They’re going to be victorious militarily. That’s not enough. In other words, how do you come to an arrangement with somebody who is confident in the west that brings you the measure of security that you want?

All of this has been about protecting Russia. This was never about conquering territory and marching west into Poland or Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. That’s all nonsense. And I think that’s in the back of people’s minds right now in Moscow.

The problem, of course, is that there is a very good chance that President Trump and his advisors don’t understand that the time for playing word games with Russia is over. If the USA can’t be a reliable security partner capable of keeping the Ukrainians and the Europeans under control, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it cannot, then Russia will do whatever it has to do in order to establish a sufficiently secure situation.

While I hope something useful will come of Friday’s meeting between the presidents, I am not very optimistic that anything substantive will do so. Although if the rumor of a shipment of an Israeli adrenochrome seized by Russians are factually based, one hopes that Putin will bring it to Trump’s attention.

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