A group of Ukrainian soldiers took to social media to say they were forced to drink their own urine due to Kiev’s failure to rotate or provide them with supplies. The soldiers urged Ukraine’s recently appointed top general, Mikhail Drapaty, to intervene, claiming their immediate command ignored their pleas.

The scandal erupted on Tuesday when the soldiers, claiming to be a fire support platoon with the 121st Territorial Defense Brigade, published their address on social media. The video features several men sitting inside a dark room, likely a basement, with the platoon commander, who identified himself as Anatoly Sischuk, reading out the address.

Sischuk claimed that his platoon was in one position in Zaporozhye Region, Russia for nearly four months, despite their command initially promising the unit that they would be there for four weeks. The soldiers replaced another unit, which was stationed for around eight months, he said.

The position turned out to be largely destroyed despite the command’s claims that the location had entrenchments, dugouts, and reserve positions ready. Apart from this, the platoon experienced severe supply shortages, with provisions delivered by drones in three to seven day intervals on average. The longest period without supply drops was 12 days, and the food was often rotten or spoiled and in insufficient amounts, according to Sischuk. The scarce supplies pushed the unit to take extreme measures, including drinking their own urine to survive, he said.

The command is seeking to replace the platoon with a new unit as soon as “an opportunity arises to perform the rotation safely,” it said in a statement.

The brigade also disputed the claims about scarce supplies, insisting that the unit received 27 nine-kilogram packages of provisions and medical supplies in a single month. It blamed any issues on weather conditions and the Russian military. 

Drapaty – who was appointed to his role last month amid mass protests demanding the firing of his predecessor, Aleksandr Syrsky – has yet to respond to the platoon’s address. Syrsky became highly unpopular during the conflict with Russia. Critics accused him of gross disregard of soldiers’ lives and mass casualties sustained in assaults launched solely to appease the political leadership.

Moderate Democrats are damaging their brand by campaigning alongside crazy leftist radicals who openly call for the destruction of the West, White people, and the United States.

Democrats are quietly expressing concern that the entire Democratic Party is about to go up in flames as increasingly radical voices are going mainstream. As ZeroHedge put it: “Radical leftists and Islamist activists are increasingly converging inside the Democratic Party as Democratic Socialists of America, forming what can only be described as a ‘red-green alliance.’”

The face of the Democratic Socialists of America radicalization belongs to unofficial spokesperson Turkish-American Hasan Piker, 35, who has called on his followers to “kill capitalists.”

“Yeah kill them! Kill those motherf**kers and murder those motherf**kers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f**king red capitalist blood, dude,” Piker said in a recent live podcast.

On another occasion, the revolutionary socialist called for the opening of the border and the extermination of the White race.

“We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, b**ch.”

This is the same guy who socialists Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and newly nominated Democrat Senator Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed want fronting the Democrat Party. Scary stuff. Shockingly, instead of denouncing his crude message, Democrats are taking to the campaign trail with this young man. Needless to say, that is a political strategy that only promises disaster.

“The Republican messaging is communist, socialist,” Clinton said. “It’s going to be a VERY effective attack... All I know is that is the attack that Trump is leading with... They are trying to bring back scare tactics about our followers and candidates.”

With individuals like Piker, whose favorite flag is not the American flag but the flag of Hezbollah (with a clenched fist hoisting an AK-47 in the air), it won’t be necessary for the Republicans to employ scare tactics. Individuals like Piker are political gifts from heaven that keep on giving. All they need to do is replay his heinous comments for average Americans to hear. Even the Democrats will start to ask themselves if this is really the sort of person they want to associate with. It could be enough to make thousands of Democrats switch their political allegiance to the Republicans.

At this point, in order to help end the confusion over terms, it might be helpful to define the various arms of the Democratic Party, which can be roughly divided into five groupings. On the Neoliberal left you have three such groups.

• 1. The democrats. These are the establishment, focused on incremental reform within capitalism. Mostly corporate-aligned.
• 2. The liberals. They think the government should solve inequality through policy, not systemic overhaul. Morally driven.
• 3. The progressives. Want structural reform: Medicare for all, Green New Deal, debt cancellation. They flirt with socialism but don’t want to overthrow capitalism.

Now on the Far Left you have two more.

• 4. The reformist socialists. These want to overthrow capitalism through electoral politics by getting into the system and making small changes over time. Their goal is post-capitalist society.
• 5. The revolutionary socialists. They believe capitalism must be overthrown entirely. They reject elections and reformism, advocates for revolution, abolition, and radical restructuring of society.

In addition to Mr. Piker, there is another individual on the left, the progressive Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, who is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 US Senate election in Michigan. On April 7, 2026, El-Sayed held campaign events on several university campuses in Michigan with Piker sharing the stage with him. El Sayed has drawn scrutiny for his questionable affiliations.

“I look at the connections that his father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, and he has affiliations with two brotherhood-linked groups,” Shideler told the hushed assembly.

Socialists have been in the Democratic Party for years, but it is only now that violent radicals are entering the mainstream spotlight. Coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. AOC, who is the face of ‘The Squad,’ an informal group of progressive Democratic members in the US House of Representatives, brought to the United States a tame version of socialism that many Americans could readily relate to. At least she was not calling for the destruction of the country.

She advocates a peaceful progressive platform that includes support for worker cooperatives, Medicare for All, tuition-free public colleges, a jobs guarantee, and a Green New Deal. These are initiatives that do not send shivers down the voters’ spines.

Her political program is a vast difference from the deranged world of Mr. Piker and others, who literally want to destroy the United States as we know it. The Democratic Party must be far more selective in who it chooses to align itself with. Their hard-fought for reputation is on the line.

Thousands of lawsuits accusing major social media companies of fueling addiction and harming young users can move forward in the US after a federal appeals court rejected an attempt to halt the litigation.

The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed appeals by Meta and TikTok on Monday against earlier rulings that allowed more than 3,000 federal cases to proceed.

The companies sought to challenge the cases under Section 230, a US law that protects online platforms from some claims involving content posted by users.

The appeals court ruled that they could not use the law to stop the cases from moving forward at this stage, saying Section 230 “merely provides a defense to liability – not immunity from suit.” The ruling does not determine whether Meta, TikTok, and other companies are responsible for the alleged harms.

The lawsuits target Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap, and other companies and have been brought by individuals, school districts, US states, and local authorities. They accuse the platforms of using features designed to keep children and teenagers engaged, allegedly contributing to addiction, depression, anxiety, and other problems.

The decision follows another setback for the industry in March, when a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict. It awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child. Both companies denied wrongdoing and have challenged the verdict.

The legal battles come as governments around the world tighten rules on children’s access to social media amid concerns over addictive features, harmful content, and weak age checks.

The leader of the center-right European People’s Party has called on the EU to set up migrant return hubs in Africa to enable swift deportations. However, similar schemes have failed before.

“Just as a village policeman has no chance against organized crime, no single member state will defeat the internationally operating people smuggling mafia alone,” he wrote. “Only a united Europe can put an end to their activities.”

The EU, he continued, should set up migrant hubs in Africa, where illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers could be sent once ordered to leave the bloc’s member states. Governments in Africa could be enticed with “offers of strong trade relations, economic cooperation, and [pathways to] legal migration,” he suggested.

Weber is not a fringe MEP. The EPP is the largest umbrella party in the European Parliament, and counts European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and Parliament President Roberta Metsola among its members.

The EPP’s stance on immigration has never been considered ‘hardline’, and the group’s manifesto once described housing refugees as the EU’s “responsibility.” However, with right-wing parties surging in popularity across the bloc – 27% of sitting MEPs now belong to the so-called ‘far right’ – the group has finally hardened its positions. Yet even if the EU elite now has the political will to deport migrants to Africa, Weber’s scheme faces some significant obstacles – from other EU institutions.

Are migrant return hubs legal?

Until recently, the EU’s common rules on deportation were set out in the 2008 Return Directive, with enforcement left up to individual member states. The directive explicitly banned ‘return hubs’ in third countries, specifying that migrants could only be sent back to their home countries or countries they had transited on their way to the EU – with these countries’ consent.

This directive was overruled in June with the passage of the Return Regulation. The regulation allows for the establishment of return hubs and the detention of illegal immigrants pending removal, and forces individual member states to recognize deportation orders issued in other states.

We’ve just concluded the final negotiations on the Return Regulation - and we have a deal.

We now have longer detention, real entry bans, and return hubs in third countries.

The era of deportations has begun.

If you try to enter Europe illegally — you will never make Europe… pic.twitter.com/tncWDVt6Wu

— Charlie Weimers MEP 🇸🇪 (@weimers) June 1, 2026

Could migrants cheat the system?

However, while the regulation allows for the use of return hubs, their use will be optional. “It should be noted that the establishment of return hubs under the regulation is not mandatory and that it will be up to individual member states to determine whether they will seek to establish such an arrangement with a third country,” Irish Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan said during a parliamentary debate on the issue in July.

As such, the EU’s returns policy will likely remain fragmented. Even if a member state negotiates a return hub arrangement with a third country, as Italy de-facto did with its establishment of processing centers in Albania in 2024, a migrant would be able to evade capture and deportation by entering the EU via a country with more lax immigration policies, such as Ireland or Spain.

“Independent, unannounced checks at Europe's border crossings to verify compliance with EU border protection law must become standard practice,” he wrote. “And it's also clear: if national authorities are unwilling to protect our borders, then Frontex must be given command authority. European laws must be upheld, if necessary, by the European border protection service. “

“At the next regular European Council meeting, we therefore need a binding implementation plan – with clear responsibilities, fixed deadlines, and verifiable targets.”

What do EU courts say about deportation?

If Weber gets his way and the EU’s 27 members synchronize their deportation policies, one major obstacle remains: the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). This Strasbourg-based court is tasked with interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights, which explicitly states that “no one may be removed, expelled or extradited to a state where there is a serious risk that he or she would be subjected to the death penalty, torture or other inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

In 2018, the court ruled that member states may not deport migrants to a third country where they would be at risk of deportation to a fourth country that may be unsafe, a practice known as “refoulement.” The 2018 case involved two Bangladeshi migrants who had entered Hungary via Serbia. The ECHR ruled that Hungary had broken the law by deporting the migrants back to Serbia, as the Hungarian authorities could not adequately prove that Serbia would not send them somewhere else afterwards.

Under Weber’s proposed system, the EU would still have to prove that migrants sent to African hubs would be “guaranteed access to reception facilities adapted to their specific vulnerabilities,” and would not be at risk of refoulement, a tall order in some of the states floated as potential hub locations: Ghana, Senegal, and Uganda. The EU does not consider these countries “safe,” meaning any effort to transfer migrants there could instantly be stricken down by the ECHR.

Have migrant return hubs been tried before?

As mentioned above, Italy signed a bilateral agreement with Albania in 2023, and two Italian-run detention centers opened on Albanian soil the following year. However, these were offshore processing centers rather than return hubs, and were intended as temporary facilities where adult males intercepted in international waters en route to Italy would have their asylum claims processed. Single adult males made up 74% of migrants arriving on Italian shores at the time.

The legality of the centers was immediately challenged in Italian courts, and at the Court of Justice of the European Union. Out of just 24 migrants transferred to the centers since October 2024, all have since been taken to Italy after Italian judges refused to validate their detention.

However, the UK Supreme Court declared the scheme unlawful in 2023, ruling that Rwanda could wrongfully reject claims and transfer migrants to unsafe countries. The ruling explicitly cited ECHR guidance on the subject. Although the UK is no longer a member of the EU, it is still a party to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Britain’s Conservative government challenged this ruling, signing an agreement with Rwanda in which the latter vowed to bring its asylum system up to British standards. Ultimately, the scheme was ended when Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer took power in 2024. The UK paid the Rwandan government £290 million ($391 million) in total before the scheme was scrapped, and not a single deportation flight departed for Rwanda.

Has anyone asked the Africans?

EU officials have not commented on negotiations with officials in Africa, although the idea of placing return hubs on the continent has been opposed by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Union, and officials in individual African nations.

Speaking to AFP in April, a European diplomat said that some African leaders have expressed contempt at the idea of being treated as a “geographical dump area” for people rejected by the EU.

In an era defined by fierce geopolitical competition, FBI Director Kash Patel has charted a course that prioritizes pragmatism and results.

By building selective yet substantive law-enforcement partnerships with China and Russia, the bureau is demonstrating that great powers can set aside deeper differences to confront transnational crime that endangers citizens everywhere. This development deserves recognition as a mature, interest-based approach, showing that effective governance in a multipolar world requires the capacity to cooperate wherever it delivers concrete gains.

Breaking the ice with Beijing

Patel’s engagement with his Chinese counterparts marks a clear departure from years of a near-total freeze in high-level law-enforcement contacts. In November 2025, he became the first FBI director to visit China since 2016, meeting Vice Minister of Public Security Xu Datong. He returned in July 2026 for discussions with State Councillor and Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong.

Chinese officials have called for deepening constructive dialogue grounded in mutual respect. According to Patel, the results were made possible by direct engagement under the Trump administration’s leadership. The relationship did not emerge overnight; it followed President Donald Trump’s May 2025 visit to China and subsequent high-level understandings on fentanyl precursors. What matters is that both sides chose to institutionalize the opening rather than allow it to remain a one-off diplomatic gesture.

Four dedicated working groups now operate on cyber fraud, violent crimes against children, counternarcotics, and a fugitive task force. Chinese Ministry of Public Security officers travel to FBI facilities in the US on a monthly rotating basis; FBI personnel make reciprocal trips to China. Officials on both sides report near-daily communication – an intensity of contact that had not existed for years.

This steady exchange has already produced operational results. One notable joint action, Operation Sand Dollar, brought together the FBI, China’s Ministry of Public Security, and Dubai police against a major cyber-scam center. The effort yielded roughly 300 arrests, the seizure of approximately $300 million, and the liberation of thousands of trafficked workers. Such outcomes illustrate the practical value of treating certain criminal networks as shared problems rather than exclusive domains of competition.

Patel has been explicit about the philosophy guiding this work. He has noted that the decision to pursue cooperation with China despite widespread advice against it proves what is possible with almost any counterpart: “The fact that we did it with China when everyone said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and, ‘You can’t do it,’ shows what we can do with almost anyone.” The partnerships are deliberately limited to specific categories of transnational crime; they do not pretend to resolve broader strategic disagreements. That clarity of scope makes them sustainable under the current circumstances.

Opening a channel to Moscow

The same pragmatic approach is being applied to Russia. Patel is preparing a visit to Moscow and St. Peterburg, tentatively scheduled for mid-October, with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) expected to serve as host. The last sitting FBI director known to have traveled to Russia was Robert Mueller in 2013. Patel’s planned trip builds on quieter collaboration already underway for more than a year against violent criminal networks.

This outreach occurs against the backdrop of Trump’s broader effort to reduce tensions with Moscow. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have made repeated visits, including meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and further contacts are anticipated. Putin’s special envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation, Kirill Dmitriev, has publicly welcomed the emerging China-Russia-US intelligence and law-enforcement cooperation, signaling that Moscow sees value in the channel.

Patel’s initiative does not stand alone. Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, long regarded as a China hardliner, has expressed clear interest in visiting China and revitalizing professional military-to-military ties. Colby’s willingness to explore direct engagement signals an important evolution: Even those most focused on strategic competition now recognize that sustained channels of communication and cooperation on discrete issues can reduce miscalculation risks and open space for practical problem-solving.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has likewise signaled openness to restoring reliable military communication channels with Beijing. Hegseth has publicly emphasized the need to reboot US-China military hotlines and crisis-management mechanisms that had atrophied in recent years. These steps are framed not as concessions but as tools for managing competition responsibly – ensuring that routine incidents at sea or in the air do not spiral into larger confrontations.

Together, Colby’s interest in revitalizing professional ties and Hegseth’s push to restore functional hotlines illustrate that selective engagement is gaining traction across key national-security institutions. These parallel moves suggest a wider recognition that treating every interaction as zero-sum is neither realistic nor in the interest of American, Chinese, or Russian security.

Other recent examples reinforce the point. The US and China have coordinated on precursor chemical controls and fugitive repatriations even without an extradition treaty. Quiet work with Russian counterparts against organized crime has continued despite the larger geopolitical climate. In each case, the governing principle is the same: Identify overlapping interests, establish disciplined mechanisms, and measure success by results rather than by empty moralism.

Looking ahead, the Patel approach offers a template for how great powers can manage coexistence. It rejects both naive engagement and reflexive isolation. Instead, it practices disciplined pragmatism: Cooperate where interests align, and compete where they do not. In a world no longer organized around a single dominant power, the ability to work with ‘non-traditional’ partners on concrete problems is a strategic asset, not a liability.

The emerging US-China-Russia law-enforcement architecture will hardly dissolve deeper disagreements over Iran, Taiwan, Ukraine, or technological rivalry. It does not need to. Its value lies in demonstrating that even adversaries can still protect their interests from common threats. That demonstration strengthens, rather than weakens, national security. By proving that such cooperation is possible, Patel has expanded the toolkit available to American policymakers. In an unpredictable international environment, that expansion is both necessary and overdue.

Western Europe hasn’t stopped fearing Russia. In fact, it fears it so much that it is prepared to accept the very idea of a major war. Why is the West no longer united? Why is the US distancing itself from the Ukraine crisis? And why can Moscow not wait for the EU’s internal contradictions to resolve its problems?

Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy and editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Politics, spoke about these issues in an interview with Ukraina.ru.

Bloomberg recently reported on a closed-door meeting in Vienna involving former senior officials from the UK, France, Germany, and Russia, held in July to discuss the terms of a potential settlement of the conflict in Ukraine. These weren’t official government negotiations, but informal track-two consultations.

Anna Cherkasova: Mr. Lukyanov, what does the concept of the collective West mean to you?

Fyodor Lukyanov: For me, it means exactly what we mean by it today, because it’s our term. In foreign sources, English-speaking political scientists tend to use other concept, such as Atlanticism and the political West.

The collective West, as we understand it today, didn’t exist before 1945, and for centuries, there was debate over what the West actually was in terms of geography, civilization, religion, a political system or a set of values.

The French and Anglo-Americans saw themselves as the West, while Germany only came to be regarded as part of it after the Second World War, as before that it had been seen as the embodiment of barbarism. In this narrative, Russia alternately disappears and reappears as the key adversary against which the West constructs its own identity.

Cherkasova: So the collective West we are talking about today emerged after the Second World War?

Lukyanov: Yes, the modern collective West emerged after the Second World War for two main reasons.

First, Germany was defeated in the form in which it had existed before the war, or at least that was how the victors saw it, and the part of Germany that came under the control of the Western Allies was integrated into the new Western system on prescribed terms.

The second factor was the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat. In a certain sense, you could say that Stalin was the godfather of European unity, given Western European integration was shaped by fears that the Soviet Union wouldn’t stop after the war and would embark on further expansion.

Today, we realize that these fears were largely unfounded as the Soviet Union had been ravaged by the war and needed time to recover, and Stalin didn’t harbor some delusional notion that he would become the ruler of Europe. He understood the realities of the geopolitical balance and abided by the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam.

In the West, however, the prevailing view was that the Russian barbarian would deceive them anyway, and he would lie in wait and then pounce, so it was precisely these fears that gave rise to the collective Western system as we know it.

Cherkasova: The Cold War ended, yet the Western system endured. Why?

Lukyanov: Because it survived the Cold War and demonstrated its resilience and effectiveness. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed that the Western order had finally proved itself right and since it had triumphed, it followed that it should be expanded.

But a question arose asking if the former threat had disappeared, what still united the US and Western Europe? Apart from big money, mutual ties, a new tradition of educating the European elite and the assumption that things simply couldn’t be otherwise, was there still the same objective necessity to remain together?

The Europeans wanted to expand their own sphere of freedom but were unwilling to give up American guarantees and this continued until Trump came along and asked, “who are you, anyway?”

Today, the West as a whole is going through an interesting phase. On the one hand, having spent 30 years after the Cold War searching for an enemy, it’s once again found an old adversary in us, so it would seem that everything has become simple again as there’s a common enemy, so we must unite. But the world has changed.

Western Europeans are genuinely afraid of Russia because it’s a large neighboring country, a military power, a state situated right on their doorstep. For the US, however, Russia is primarily a European and Eurasian problem. It’s important, but it doesn’t pose a direct threat to America, for which China, the Pacific region, Islamic terrorism and the Muslim world are of greater concern.

And here lies the main question: why does Western Europe need the US today, and what can it demand of it? It used to be taken for granted that, in the event of a serious crisis, the US would automatically step in to assist with European affairs, but now the question is: why should it do so automatically, so there’s no certainty that it will,  hence all the current anxiety.

On the one hand, Western Europe expects complete loyalty from the Americans, but on the other, when it disapproves of US policy, it believes it has the right to deviate from it. But bloc discipline doesn’t work that way.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2003, during the Iraq War, one of the first serious rifts within NATO emerged. Germany and France refused to support President George W. Bush’s actions. This came as a shock to the Americans, while these two European powers appealed to the liberal world order and insisted that a war couldn’t be started without the authorization of the UN Security Council.

The Americans reacted sharply and there was talk of trade restrictions, boycotts of French wine and other goods, plus there was even a dispute over the name French fries. But it then became clear that the US needed Western Europe’s support to extricate itself from the situation in Iraq, and the conflict gradually eased.

The question now is different: it is does the US still need Western Europe in its previous capacity?

But we should not delude ourselves because this doesn’t mean that transatlantic ties will immediately begin to unravel. We’re talking about deep economic and financial integration, vast amounts of American money at work in Europe, companies, institutions, and military and political structures and there are also decades of conditioning Western Europeans to believe that things cannot be any other way.

We are still dealing with a single conglomerate, but its collective nature is becoming something entirely different.

Cherkasova: Is Ukraine driving a wedge between the collective West?

Lukyanov: Yes, Ukraine is driving a wedge between the West, but in a specific way.

The Western Europeans can broadly be divided into two groups: some consider the Ukraine issue important for reasons of security, geopolitics or their own identity; others believe that, for them, it’s not all that important.

Southern Europe is far from Russia and does not perceive it as an immediate threat. There Ukraine is known primarily for the large number of Ukrainian workers, nannies, caretakers and others who have come to work. In Portugal, Spain and Italy, this is a significant factor in everyday perceptions.

Of course, they say: we must stand together and support Ukraine, but if that support starts to cause economic damage, it quickly becomes a problem, so should there be even a slight change in the situation in the leading Western European countries, this stance could end up working against active support for Ukraine.

The situation with the US is different. Following active involvement under Biden, Washington adopted a position under Trump which, if we set aside our own interests, appears entirely reasonable from an American perspective in that they’re effectively telling the Europeans: “this is your business.”

That doesn’t mean the Americans are withdrawing from Europe. The scale of mutual economic and political interests is simply too great, but the former grandstanding has disappeared.

Cherkasova: Western Europe has stopped fearing Russia’s red lines and is prepared to go almost as far as waging war against Russia, if not directly, then by other means.

Lukyanov: Yes, they have stopped fearing red lines, but it would be more accurate to say that Western Europe fears Russia, and that’s precisely why it believes there is no need to fear red lines. Its logic goes something like this: now is the time for everyone to pull together, finally corner Russia and then stop fearing it.

All the groundwork for normalizing the very idea of war with Russia is already underway, with hysteria whipped up and the appropriate psychological atmosphere being created. It’s difficult to say at this stage how effective this is in shaping public opinion, but propaganda can sometimes be very effective.

As far as the Ukraine crisis and Ukraine are concerned, there’s no solution for us other than to achieve an acceptable military outcome. However, we must closely monitor what is happening within the West, like how the balance of power between America and the EU is shifting, how Britain is trying to find its place, how the composition of the elites is changing and how demographic processes are reshaping political systems.

These changes will not happen overnight, but it’s already clear that the old model, which took shape in the second half of the 20th century, no longer functions to its full extent.

That means every important election, in Germany, France, Poland, and the United States, will reveal just how far this process has progressed.

This interview was first published by Ukraina.ru, translated and edited by RT.

Ukraine has exhumed the remains of Evgeny Konovalets, founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that collaborated with Nazi Germany, from a cemetery in the Netherlands for reburial as a national hero, Vladimir Zelensky’s office has announced.

The exhumation took place in Rotterdam at the Crooswijk cemetery on Tuesday, officials said, adding that the operation was overseen by several top Ukrainian officials, including Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga.

Konovalets’ remains are to be temporarily reburied at Ukraine’s National Military Memorial Cemetery, with a farewell ceremony planned at a Kiev cathedral, the statement added.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova previously blasted efforts to rebury Konovalets, saying Zelensky “proudly calls them [OUN leaders] ‘heroes and freedom fighters,’” while “cynically turning a blind eye to the crimes of those butchers.” She also accused Zelensky of “dancing on the bones” of those who fell victim to the OUN, once again confirming the “misanthropic essence” of his government.

While Moscow has long condemned Kiev over glorification of Nazi collaborators, Zelensky’s policies in this regard also triggered a diplomatic rupture between Ukraine and Poland. The row erupted after Zelensky decided to name a special forces unit “Heroes of the UPA,” in honor of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which killed more than 100,000 Poles during the 1943–1945 Volhynia massacres.

Malian forces have killed more than 50 terrorists and wounded several others while repelling a large-scale attack on an army base in the central city of San, the Sahel state’s military has said.

The assault began early Sunday morning, when fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al-Qaeda affiliate, and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) attacked the base of the Malian Army’s 23rd Infantry Regiment, according to an official statement on Tuesday.

The Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) said the militants used heavy machine guns, kamikaze drones, payload-dropping drones, and two armored vehicles, one of which breached the base’s perimeter wall.

“The vigorous and coordinated response of the defending units made it possible to repel the assaults, neutralize several terrorists who had infiltrated the base, and restore control of the facility,” FAMa stated.

The military acknowledged that Malian soldiers were killed and others injured in the clashes but did not provide figures.

In an earlier statement on Sunday, FAMa said its troops, backed by partners, had struck militant positions near Abeibara in the Kidal Region, Razelma in the Timbuktu Region, and northwest of Mahou in the Koutiala Region over the weekend.

The army said armed vehicles, drones, and motorcycles belonging to the militants were destroyed. A group accused of participating in the San attack was later located 17 km from the city, pursued and killed, according to the statement. Some of its equipment was reportedly destroyed and the rest recovered.

Last month, Malian troops backed by Russia’s Africa Corps retook the strategic northern town of Anefis after nearly a week of fighting with JNIM and FLA forces.

Moscow has released ex-US Marine Robert Gilman, who had been incarcerated in Russia since 2022, US President Donald Trump has confirmed. The move was made “very much on a humanitarian basis,” Trump said, adding that Moscow did not ask for anyone in return. 

The impending release of Gilman was first reported earlier on Tuesday by US media. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a key figure in negotiations with Washington, apparently confirmed the reports by reposting a piece by Reuters on social media.

“After my discussions with President Vladimir Putin, Russia has agreed to release him, very much on a humanitarian basis. We appreciate this decision, and the fact that Russia asked for no one in return – No exchange took place,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also commented on the release of Gilman, expressing his gratitude to Russia in a post on X for “allowing him to receive the necessary medical treatment here in the United States.”

Gilman has already been flown out of Russia on a State Department plane after reportedly being granted a presidential pardon over his deteriorating mental health. 

The 32-year-old US national was detained in Russia in early 2022 after drunkenly assaulting a police officer while traveling through the country by train. Gilman, who served with the Marine Corps for a year between 2019 and 2020, is the son of a Russian immigrant to the US.

Gilman is now slated to be transferred to a hospital in Texas for medical evaluation and treatment, AP reported, citing sources. 

The US is said to have sought Gilman’s release for some time, with the issue raised during a recent meeting between Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The US has tightened travel restrictions on people arriving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) as the country struggles with a rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak.

US citizens and nationals who have been in the DR Congo within the previous 21 days are currently barred from returning to the US on commercial flights. The restrictions come as the outbreak has surpassed 4,000 confirmed cases and the death toll continues to rise.

Despite the increasingly stringent measures, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to assess the overall risk to the American public as low, with no cases linked to the outbreak confirmed in the US. 

How do the US Ebola travel restrictions work?

The US has progressively tightened travel restrictions since the Ebola outbreak was declared in May, citing the risk that infected travelers could enter the country before developing symptoms.

The CDC initially suspended entry for foreign nationals who had been in the DR Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan during the previous 21 days, later extending the restrictions to US lawful permanent residents.

Washington has since gone further, barring anyone who has been in the DR Congo within the previous 21 days from boarding commercial flights bound for the US, including American citizens and nationals. Affected travelers have been advised to remain outside the country until the 21-day period has elapsed.

How serious is the Ebola outbreak?

The latest figures from the DR Congo show a sharp increase in infections and deaths in just one week. On August 1, health authorities reported 3,748 confirmed cases and 1,657 deaths. By August 8, the figures had risen to 4,294 cases and 1,960 deaths.

The case fatality rate also increased from 44.2% to 45.6%, while the number of affected health zones rose from 49 to 53. The WHO has described the epidemic as the largest Ebola outbreak the country has ever faced, surpassing the 2018-2020 outbreak.

However, some response indicators have improved. The number of recoveries rose from 708 to 849 between August 1 and August 8, while the share of identified contacts being monitored increased from 80.1% to 84.6%. 

Treatment capacity is also being strengthened. The UN says a new 100-bed Ebola treatment center in Bunia is set to become the largest in the country, while Doctors Without Borders says it is operating seven treatment centers with more than 480 beds.

Are other countries imposing Ebola travel restrictions?

Other countries have introduced varying restrictions and screening measures. Bahrain has restricted entry for travelers with recent stays in affected countries, while Uganda has suspended flights to and from the DR Congo. Russia has stopped short of imposing an entry ban but has stepped up sanitary and quarantine controls at border checkpoints, while several countries in Africa and Asia have introduced additional screening and health monitoring for travelers arriving from affected areas.

Does the WHO recommend Ebola travel bans?

Despite the measures introduced by the US, Canada, and other countries, the WHO has advised against restricting travel to countries affected by the outbreak.

Under temporary recommendations issued in May, the agency urged neighboring countries to keep their borders open and advised all countries against suspending flights or denying entry to travelers arriving from areas where the Bundibugyo virus is circulating. Instead, it recommended strengthened surveillance, health information for travelers, and measures to rapidly identify and manage suspected cases.

The WHO has maintained that position as the outbreak has expanded. In its latest assessment, the agency said the risk remains very high within the DR Congo and high at the regional level, but low globally.

Why did the US set up an Ebola quarantine center in Kenya?

The decision has proved controversial in Kenya, which had recorded no cases linked to the current outbreak when the facility was established. The project triggered protests and a legal challenge, with a Kenyan court temporarily blocking the facility.

Nigerian professor of virology Oyewale Tomori has questioned why the facility should be reserved for Americans. “If that center is open, it should be open to everybody, not just Americans,” Tomori told RT. “If any Kenyan gets any infection, it should be treated in that place.”

India has its work cut out in responding effectively to the Mecca pact signed last week between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan, an international relations expert has said.

The pact between the three Sunni Muslim countries has created a new “worrisome reality” for India, Robinder Nath Sachdev told RT India on Tuesday.

He noted that while there is not much clarity on whether the treaty envisages a collective defense on the lines of NATO’s Article 5 commitment, it still gives nuclear-armed Pakistan an edge if hostilities break out with India. The two South Asian nations briefly clashed last year with missiles and drones, following a terrorist attack in Kashmir that New Delhi blamed on Islamabad.

Riyadh could provide money and military assets to its new treaty partner in this situation, even if it doesn’t take part in the conflict directly, Sachdev, the president of the independent think tank Imagindia Institute, said.

The key, he said, is for India to look inside and “estimate what all we need to do, shift in order to counter this new reality, which is a worrisome reality.”

The country has to “go deeper and wider” with existing partners and new partners, he said, adding that the question should be “how much… further can we progress down a mutual, stronger partnership?

The bottom line, he said, is “much more work has to be done in India within the country” as it addresses the Mecca pact.

Sachdev said India will have to de-hyphenate its economic partnership with Saudi Arabia from the security relations that Riyadh has developed with Islamabad. “That would be one relationship which India… needs to address and nurture.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has broken ranks with the EU’s push for solidarity with Spain after the Ceuta crisis, calling Madrid’s migrant amnesty a “very bad idea” that risks a repeat of Europe’s 2015 influx. He warned that Spain’s potential legalization of more than a million people creates a loophole for migrants to push north across the EU’s open borders.

His comments come after tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave from Morocco within days in late July, completely overwhelming the local authorities. More than 100 people died in the crisis and the city plunged into chaos.

The surge drew criticism from other EU leaders, several of whom linked it to Spain’s migrant regularization program targeting 500,000, though it is feared that the figure could double. Subsequently, 22 member states, including Sweden, signed a joint letter demanding that Spain introduce tighter external border controls.

“It symbolizes that we still have to be very, very careful not to act in a way that could even come close to what happened in 2015,” he said. “I think Spain got the message… but it shows the vulnerability.” 

“It is not the time to get relaxed on this… there is a huge majority in Sweden saying they cannot go back to an uncontrolled situation,” Kristersson said. “Doing things that could jeopardize a stable situation would be a very bad idea.”

Last week, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Magnus Brunner said there is “full solidarity with Spain around the table,” framing the Ceuta crisis as a test that the bloc passed. Regarding amnesty, Brunner said the commission does not see “a direct link… between regularizations and the incidents in Ceuta.”

After the crisis began, he called out Spain, saying: “We warned of the risks of this. When you make such large amnesties for people who do not have grounds for asylum, it creates an incentive… to come to Europe.” 

He drew parallels to Sweden’s own experience a decade earlier, when “250,000 people came in two years.” 

“We have learned from that,” Forssell said. “That is why we have changed the policy. But Spain has gone in a completely different direction.”

Spain has rejected the criticism. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the joint EU letter “selfish, polarizing and unlawful,” claiming that the Ceuta episode was “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” rather than a consequence of its migration policy.

UK officials announced last month that they had cancelled a planned British army exercise in Kenya after the latter’s government did not grant the required permissions. The UK had said that the exercise, which normally happens in Laikipia, would instead be moved to another location. The announcement sparked speculation about the future of the Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) between Kenya and the UK.

Nelson Koech, chairperson of Kenya’s National Assembly’s departmental committee on defense, intelligence and foreign relations, told RT that the delay in issuing the approvals was not primarily about the military training itself but about scrutiny related to the new agreement that is intended to replace the existing framework governing British military activities in Kenya.

On July 28, Kenya and the UK announced that they had reached an understanding allowing military training to resume.

The new agreement is still not signed, however, because the parliament is blocking it.

The question of crime and punishment

When Kenya gained independence in 1963, the UK maintained its military presence in the African country. The security relationship has, over the decades, evolved around British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK), the UK’s permanent training support unit in Kenya.

In 2015, the two countries signed a five-year agreement on defense cooperation in Nairobi to replace older arrangements (it was ratified in 2016). It established the legal framework governing the presence of UK military personnel in Kenya, including training, logistics, and also criminal jurisdiction over British troops.

In the agreement, Britain retained powers to investigate and prosecute officers accused of committing serious crimes such as murder and rape. This remains one of the major issues that has stalled the signing of a new agreement.

The new agreement (from 2021) outlined a broader framework for defense cooperation. However, unlike the previous agreement, which was ratified by Kenya’s parliament, the new one has never entered into force. Kenya’s legislature withheld ratification after raising reservations over key points, particularly those relating to criminal jurisdiction over British soldiers, accountability for alleged abuses, and the protection of Kenyan communities affected by BATUK activities.

Kenya wants to have jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute British soldiers accused of committing serious crimes. The 2016 agreement continues to operate through mutual extensions, while negotiations on a revised text go on.

The murder of Agnes Wanjiru

The issue became increasingly controversial more than a decade ago following allegations of misconduct by British troops, including the 2012 murder of Agnes Wanjiru, claims of sexual abuse, environmental damage, and injuries linked to military training.

In March 2012, Wanjiru, a Kenyan woman who was 21 at the time, was found murdered moments after she had been spotted in the company of British soldiers in the town of Nanyuki, where BATUK is housed, about 200km north of Nairobi.

Wanjiru’s body was discovered in a hotel septic tank. Soldiers from BATUK, which hosts up to six British infantry battalions for training each year, were blamed for her death.

In a 2024 report, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) said investigations into reported rights violations are often frustrated by both the Kenyan and UK authorities. In the report, KNCHR documented cases of reported killings, alleged sexual violence and exploitation, arbitrary arrests, environmental degradation, and infringement on community land.

In August 2023, Kenya’s parliamentary defense, intelligence and foreign relations committee officially launched an inquiry into BATUK activities. The probe was to look into human rights violations by British soldiers, including the murder of Wanjiru and the Lolldaiga community conservancy fire incident in 2015, which happened amid BATUK activities in the area.

The committee collected views from residents, victims, the government and community leaders. Two years of investigation saw the committee receive submissions from the Inspector General of Police, the Ministry of Defense, the Human Rights Commission, and the Anti-Corruption Commission. Members of the public from Isiolo, Samburu, and Laikipia, regions where BATUK soldiers operate, also shared their views.

In November of last year, the parliamentary committee tabled a report on the inquiry into BATUK’s conduct. The committee concluded that stronger accountability measures were needed before a new agreement could be approved.

“It makes no sense to deny Kenya the right to prosecute crimes committed within its boundaries”

Nelson Koech, the chairperson of the parliamentary committee that launched the inquiry, told RT that the postponement of the signing of a new agreement was partly due to disagreements over the legal jurisdiction for British troops stationed in Kenya.

“The question of who should investigate and prosecute British soldiers accused of crimes like murder and rape remains contentious and is likely to drag the ongoing negotiations and eventual drafting of the final agreement,” stressed Koech.

According to Koech, while Britain wants to retain primary jurisdiction over offenses committed by its personnel while on official duty, Kenya wants to have absolute authority to investigate and prosecute British soldiers on its territory.

“It makes no legal or sovereignty sense to deny Kenya the right to investigate and prosecute crimes committed within its boundaries,” he told RT.

Speaking on the delay in signing the new agreement, Georgina Woodhouse-Hills, head of communications at the British High Commission in Nairobi, told RT that the UK “deeply values the defense relationship with Kenya, which delivers a broad and mutually beneficial program of cooperation in training, education and capability development, geared towards countering shared threats.”

“The Defense Cooperation Agreement underpins this relationship,” she said, adding that British authorities are working closely with the government of Kenya.

“The new agreement will set the scale of ambition for our partnership with Kenya for the next five years,” she told RT.

There has been growing public scrutiny of BATUK following years of allegations of human rights violations, including murder, sexual assault, environmental damage and military training fires, unexploded ordnance injuring civilians, and compensation disputes involving affected communities and victims.

BATUK requested that the Kenyan High Court dismiss the lawsuit filed by Wanjiru’s family in November 2023, arguing that Kenyan courts lacked jurisdiction over any case involving a UK Army unit in the country.

Wanjiru’s family felt closer to justice in April 2025, when UK Defence Secretary John Healey visited them and pledged full support for the investigation. Last June, a British soldier was finally arrested for allegedly raping a woman inside a bar in Nanyuki. He was later taken back to the UK.

On September 16, 2025, Kenya’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) said that a British court had issued a warrant of arrest for Robert James Purkiss, the soldier accused of killing Wanjiru. Later ODPP confirmed the arrest of Purkiss in the UK.

Mbiyu Kamau, a lawyer representing Wanjiru’s family, had been contesting the British Army’s argument that its soldiers cannot be prosecuted in Kenya for the murder.

Additionally, in 2024, Kenyan lawyer Kelvin Kubai, in collaboration with a British law firm, filed a case in a UK court on behalf of ten biracial children, seeking to compel the British Army to reveal the identities of the soldiers who fathered them. Last August, a court in the UK delivered a landmark ruling when it ordered the release of the names, contacts, and last known addresses of 11 British soldiers alleged to have fathered and abandoned children in Kenya.

What does Kenya want?

In a report tabled before the National Assembly in 2023, the Koech-led committee recommended approval of the agreement. Still, only after amendments were made to key provisions did it say they conflict with the constitution.

The committee specifically proposed changes to Articles 6(5) and 23 of the agreement. Under this article, lawmakers want murder expressly included among offences that fall under the jurisdiction of Kenyan courts. Under the current agreement, any British soldier accused of murder while on duty in Kenya can only be investigated and prosecuted by the UK under UK law.

The committee also wants Article 23 amended to require BATUK to undertake mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in communities where it operates.

Although the article requires visiting British troops to respect local customs, compensate for damage and address sexual exploitation, it, as of now, contains no obligation for structured community investment.

The committee is also pushing for stronger accountability measures, including jurisdiction over serious offenses, enhanced protection of local communities and implementation of recommendations arising from the BATUK inquiry.

Civil society organizations have petitioned Kenya’s parliament, arguing that ratifying the new defense agreement with the UK without stronger accountability provisions would entrench legal immunity for foreign troops.

The petitioners are pushing for Kenya to have the power to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on its soil and for communities affected by BATUK activities to be given stronger legal protections.

Human rights activist Bob Njagi, leader of the Free Kenya Movement and one of the petitioners, says the agreement must uphold Kenya’s sovereignty.

“Any agreement must recognize that Kenya is a sovereign state and must be allowed to independently handle any crimes committed by foreign troops against its people,” Njagi told RT.

The petitioners are also pushing for independent investigations into unresolved cases linked to BATUK operations, compensation for victims and their families, and greater public participation in negotiating any future defense agreement.

“We want the government to carry out an audit of foreign military training activities in the country before a new DCA is signed,” stresses Njagi.

Meanwhile, a 2025 investigation by the British Army found that some UK soldiers stationed at the BATUK base continue to engage the services of sex workers despite being banned from doing so.

The report said that the BATUK soldiers used sex workers “at a low or moderate” rate and called for more work to stamp out the practice. The investigation, which was commissioned in October 2024, covered a period of more than two years, dating back to 2022.

Former speaker of Kenyan parliament Justin Muturi says the UK cannot continue using the argument that BATUK brings economic benefits to local communities while turning a blind eye to the atrocities being committed by its soldiers.

“Kenya must not give in, and the parliamentary committee must stand its ground and ensure that the recommendations they made are fully agreed upon and captured before any new agreement can be signed,” he concluded.

BRICS nations are discussing linking their payment systems and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as they explore ways to reduce the costs and increase the speed of cross-border payments, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Tuesday.

Last week, Indian Trade Minister Piyush Goyal said New Delhi prefers trade settlements in national currencies to a unified monetary system, or a BRICS currency, which has been touted as an alternative to the US dollar.

The Indian central bank chief said on Monday that “cross-border payments is an area of interest for all of us, including the BRICS, because we ⁠feel there is a lot of scope for reducing cost.” He added that various options are being discussed, including CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) and linkages of fast payment systems.

The RBI proposed that a plan to link the CBDCs of BRICS countries to make cross-border trade and tourism payments easier be included on the agenda of the group’s 2026 summit, Reuters reported in January, citing sources. India, which hosts the BRICS presidency this year, is hosting the summit September 12-13.

China, India, Russia, and Brazil have already implemented pilot rollouts of CBDCs.
The BRICS countries generate around 40% of the world’s GDP, surpassing that of the G7 group of developed nations.

An alternative payment system that connects these countries would challenge the SWIFT messaging system, which has been weaponized by the West to keep targeted nations out of global payment networks through sanctions and banking bans.

Bulgarian opposition leader Kostadin Kostadinov has called for Ukrainian Ambassador Olesya Ilashschuk to be expelled from the country, accusing her of interfering in domestic affairs and citing a series of security incidents involving Ukraine.

The Revival party leader said Sofia should declare Ilashschuk persona non grata after the Foreign Ministry announced it would summon her over a Ukrainian drone that crashed and exploded near a strategic gas pipeline over the weekend.

The UAV entered Bulgaria through Romanian airspace and detonated near the former Kardam border checkpoint, around one kilometer from a compressor station on the Trans-Balkan Pipeline. The Defense Ministry said the aircraft was likely a Maya decoy drone of a type used by Ukrainian forces, but noted there was no indication the incident was deliberate.

Kostadinov accused the authorities of downplaying the episode, arguing that the damage at the site was inconsistent with an unarmed reconnaissance drone. He described it as an “act of aggression” and questioned whether other Ukrainian drones had also entered Bulgarian airspace.

Kostadinov also cited Bulgarian media reports about alleged diplomatic pressure by Ilashschuk over the case.

“She clearly does not contribute to good diplomatic relations between Ukraine and Bulgaria and there are sufficient grounds for her to be declared persona non grata,” he said.

The dispute comes as Sofia has been distancing itself from Kiev. Bulgaria’s new government halted weapons deliveries to Ukraine earlier this year and has called for negotiations to end the conflict with Russia.

The latest episode also follows several cases of Ukrainian drones straying into neighboring countries. In June, four Ukrainian naval drones exploded in and around the Romanian port of Constanta after Kiev said it had lost control of them.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Kiev of seeking to spread the conflict and provoke incidents that could draw NATO countries into direct confrontation with Russia. Russian officials have also argued that continued Western military support for Ukraine increases the risk of further escalation.

The Ukrainian state has no political will to root out corruption, as powerful interests reap illegal benefits from the increasingly compromised system, including the massive defense sector, senior anti-graft officials have warned.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies are facing growing resistance from powerful interests that benefit from entrenched graft within the government, according to senior investigators.

Efforts to obstruct the work of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) are being compounded by shortages of personnel and legal powers needed to pursue major cases effectively, the heads of the two Western-backed bodies said at a press conference on Monday.

“The state demonstrates that it has no political will to fight corruption properly,” SAPO Head Aleksandr Klimenko told journalists. He said graft remains a serious problem and is becoming more acute at the highest levels of government, which are the primary focus of NABU and SAPO investigations.

“Corruption is transforming to a certain degree now. Large arms suppliers can have powerful beneficiaries, including top-level law enforcement officials, members of parliament and people from other branches of the government leveraging secret agreements,” he said.

The two agencies were established under pressure from Kiev’s Western backers and were designed to operate with a significant degree of independence. In recent years, they have investigated several figures linked to Vladimir Zelensky’s inner circle, and the Ukrainian leader has unsuccessfully attempted to bring the institutions under his political control.

Graft entrenched in arms industry

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has been hit by a series of corruption scandals in recent years. One of the latest high-profile controversies involved former Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. Leaked NABU surveillance recordings suggest that he had close links to businessman Timur Mindich.

Mindich, a longtime business associate of Zelensky, fled to Israel last November shortly before NABU and SAPO formally accused him of involvement in an alleged $100 million kickback scheme at a state-owned energy company. He has also been linked to Fire Point, a former film production company that later became a major Ukrainian drone manufacturer.

Not enough detectives to tackle defense graft

According to Krivonos, companies linked to influential figures can receive no-bid contracts from the Defense Ministry, effectively removing competition. Proving corrupt arrangements of this kind in court, however, remains particularly difficult, he added.

“Can NABU and SAPO alone defeat corruption in the defense sector? No, we can’t. The defense funding is huge, a lot of procurement is taking place, and there is corruption risk everywhere,” Klimenko said.

He argued that the agencies do not have enough personnel to investigate every potential case and called on the Defense Ministry to establish stronger internal safeguards.

SBU accused of spying on anti-graft agencies

The anti-corruption chiefs also repeated allegations that their investigators have been subjected to surveillance by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a powerful agency subordinate to Zelensky. Krivonos said the latest suspected case of unlawful monitoring was uncovered just two weeks ago.

“A lot of resources are being thrown at learning what we do and what we plan,” Krivonos said.

Klimenko said complaints about potentially illegal surveillance have gone unanswered, while officials allegedly responsible for these actions have in some cases received promotions.

The agency chiefs also accused parliament of delaying reforms they consider essential to their work. NABU and SAPO are seeking broader powers to investigate lawmakers, pursue the extradition of suspects from foreign countries, and cooperate more closely with overseas authorities on cross-border money-laundering schemes, which they said are frequently used by corrupt Ukrainian officials.

Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) has warned that it could shut down the country’s largest operating refinery following repeated drone attacks on oil facilities in the western city of Zawiya.

The latest attack on Monday targeted an oil-blending and packaging plant operated by the Zawiya Oil Refining Company, according to the NOC. The drone fell near its main oil tank and a pipeline network used to manufacture products for the domestic market, but caused no casualties or material damage, according to the NOC.

“If these attacks continue, [the board] will be compelled to declare force majeure and completely halt operations at the refinery,” the state oil company said on Tuesday, urging firefighting and safety crews to remain on high alert.

The NOC said a previous strike hit a gasoline tank belonging to its subsidiary Brega Oil Marketing Company, igniting a major fire. The tank, which contained around 4.5 million liters of gasoline, later “collapsed completely,” it added.

On Saturday, a strike damaged a tank holding untreated naphtha, creating two holes and causing part of its contents to leak, the company reported.

The corporation declared the highest state of emergency in the area on Monday and called on the authorities to investigate the attacks and bring those responsible to justice. No group has claimed responsibility.

#Zawiya | Two fuel storage tanks at Brega Oil Marketing Company’s Zawiya Oil Depot .. one containing gasoline and the other kerosene .. were struck by an FPV drone, causing fires at the facility.

A damage assessment is ongoing.#zawia pic.twitter.com/vHx5aabr3Z

— Mohamed Elganga (@Elganga90) August 10, 2026

Located around 40 km west of the capital Tripoli, the Zawiya refinery can process about 120,000 barrels per day and is connected to the 300,000-barrel-per-day Sharara oil field. It is currently Libya’s largest functioning refinery.

The facility has previously been caught up in the country’s chronic insecurity. In December 2024, clashes between armed groups damaged several storage tanks and started major fires, prompting the NOC to declare force majeure – a provision allowing it to suspend contractual obligations in extraordinary circumstances.

In August 2024, the eastern-based authorities closed oil fields and terminals during a dispute over control of Libya’s central bank. The NOC lifted force majeure that October after an agreement on the bank’s leadership.

The renewed violence comes as Libya seeks to revive foreign energy investment. In 2025, the NOC launched the country’s first oil-and-gas exploration bidding round in 17 years, offering 20 onshore and offshore blocks.

Israeli authorities have remained silent on the fate of Russian-Israeli historian Artyom Kirpichenok, days after his reported detention and despite Moscow seeking answers about his whereabouts.

Kirpichenok, 51, is a dual Russian-Israeli citizen, journalist, and Middle East expert known for his writings on Zionism and criticism of Israel’s policies toward Iran and Palestine. He reportedly disappeared on August 2 shortly after landing at Ben Gurion Airport on a flight from Yerevan.

Kirpichenok reportedly sent his family a brief message saying “arrived” at 10:41 am, but his phone and social media activity ceased shortly afterward. Reports citing Israeli police say he passed through passport control at Ben Gurion before disappearing. Colleagues said he had traveled to Israel for an academic conference and had a return ticket for August 8.

International affairs journalist Oleg Yasinsky was among the first to raise the alarm, writing on Telegram last week that Kirpichenok had been out of contact for several days. He later claimed the historian had been detained by Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet.

“About 90% of the prisoners there are Palestinians, and the rest are foreigners suspected of espionage,” Mitina said. Citing human rights reports alleging harsh treatment of detainees, she warned that Kirpichenok’s treatment could depend on the charges against him. “If they charge him with high treason or espionage, the treatment could be anything. In any case, it’s no holiday resort.”

Mitina said attorney Inna Led is handling the case but provided no further details about the circumstances or possible charges. She noted that Kirpichenok had recently been working with media outlets and civic organizations in Türkiye and Iran, where he traveled frequently and published detailed accounts of his visits. Mitina suggested his trips to Iran could have triggered the detention, as travel to an enemy state – Israel’s official designation for Iran – is illegal for Israeli citizens and closely scrutinized by the country’s security services.

“It is perfectly clear that Artyom is an opponent of the Israeli government and its domestic and foreign policies. He has always spoken and written openly about this. I am personally convinced that this is the political persecution of the journalist,” he said.

Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov, told TASS that the embassy was aware of reports of Kirpichenok’s alleged detention and had sent an official inquiry to the Israeli authorities while “closely monitoring the situation.” However, legal experts note that Kirpichenok’s dual citizenship could limit Moscow’s ability to intervene as Israel can treat him solely as an Israeli national while he is on its territory.

Kirpichenok was born into a Jewish family in Russia and moved to Israel in the 1990s. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) before returning to Russia roughly 15 years later.

He has since been a vocal critic of the Israeli government and its military operations in Gaza. In his recent book ‘Israel: The Road to Catastrophe’, Kirpichenok describes the country as a Western-style “colonial project” and draws parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and apartheid-era South Africa. Despite his public stance, colleagues said Kirpichenok believed his Israeli citizenship and passport would allow him to travel safely to the country for academic and professional purposes.

India is reviving the production of Russian Su-30MKI multi-role fighter jets, which form the backbone of the Indian Air Force.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) will produce 12 new fighter jets at its Nashik facility for the Indian Air Force, at a cost of $1.3 billion, the Economic Times reported.

The IAF currently operates about 260 Su-30MKIs, and the new aircraft will replace those lost in accidents over the years.

HAL’s Nashik plant has traditionally produced Russian fighter aircraft under license, and also makes India’s own Light Combat Aircraft. It stopped producing MKIs in 2020-21, when all the planes contracted from Russia had been delivered.

The new planes will feature more than 50% indigenous components, and will be incorporated with the IAF’s Super Sukhoi upgrades.

Over the years, India has rolled out upgrades to the Su-30MKI’s avionics and electronic suite, making the jet more capable and lethal. The IAF also has incorporated the BrahMos-A, an air-launched version of the supersonic Russian-Indian cruise missile, into the platform.

A US judge has dismissed criminal charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani after President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) said it had decided to abandon the fraud and bribery case.

The charges, filed in 2024 by justice officials under then-President Joe Biden, alleged Adani had agreed to bribe Indian officials to secure a solar contract, and then misled US investors by reassuring them about his company’s anti-corruption practices.

Adani Group has denied wrongdoing and Adani never appeared in US court to respond to the charges.

Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told the Brooklyn-based district judge, Nicholas Garaufis, in May, that the DOJ would not pursue the case as it was primarily foreign, hard to prove, and not consistent with the agency’s priorities.

Adani had promised to invest $10 billion in the US economy and create 15,000 jobs, just before the charges were unsealed. However, his lawyer Robert Giuffra, who is also a personal attorney of President Donald Trump, told justice officials that the investment could not be made while the case was proceeding, Reuters said in May citing a source.

But he criticized McCotter for deciding to drop the charges without inputs from the prosecutors or agents who investigated the case.

“I welcome the US court’s decision with humility and deep respect for the judicial process,” Adani posted on X after the case was dismissed. “Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering.”

Gautam Adani became Asia’s richest man in June, ahead of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.

I welcome the US court’s decision with humility and deep respect for the judicial process.

Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering.

My deepest gratitude to those who never lost faith in us, in the system and in…

— Gautam Adani (@gautam_adani) August 10, 2026

He hails from Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the two have a close association. Adani’s infrastructure and ports businesses grew during Modi’s tenure as the chief minister of the state.

Earlier this year Adani and his nephew, Sagar Adani, agreed to pay $18 million in fines to settle a civil case brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Russian forces have carried out new overnight strikes targeting military-related facilities in Kiev and Ukrainian-controlled Zaporozhye, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has reported.

In a statement on Tuesday, the ministry said the attack used high-precision ground-based weapons, and struck a Kiev Nova Poshta terminal – an automated sorting complex it said was used to store and distribute dual-use goods, including components for long- and medium-range drones, robotic systems, and electronic-warfare equipment.

Also hit was the Kiev-3 transport-logistics center, a roughly 50,000-square-meter site storing up to 15,000 FPV strike drones – some fitted with thermal-imaging cameras – along with ground control stations and components.

In the city of Zaporozhye, the ministry said it struck the Zaporozhstal steel plant, a leading producer of flat-rolled steel used to produce body armor and to plate fortifications and vehicles. The facility was also involved in fitting heavy armor with anti-drone screens, the statement added.

Ukraine’s State Emergency Service confirmed the overnight barrage, saying a ballistic missile strike on Kiev injured one person, adding that a fire broke out at the warehouse in the Shevchenkovsky district but was later extinguished.

Local Ukrainian authorities in Zaporozhye said Russian forces had launched a combined attack using rockets and guided aerial bombs on the regional center, damaging several non-residential facilities and residential buildings, with six people killed and 52 injured.

Voronezh Governor Aleksandr Gusev reported fires at two warehouses of a “large company,” adding that drone debris killed a 49-year-old man during strikes on the wider region. While the governor did not name the affected firm, e-retailer Wildberries confirmed blazes at its facilities and reported an evacuation, adding that merchandise “was mostly not affected.”

Ukraine has for months been launching strikes deep into Russia, often targeting critical infrastructure and residential buildings, with Moscow retaliating by attacking Ukrainian defense-related sites. Russia maintains it never targets civilians.

The death toll from the devastating earthquake that struck western Colombia has risen to at least 169, according to the Colombian Association of Capital Cities (Asocapitales).

The association said on Tuesday that 165 of the fatalities had been recorded in four regional capitals, accounting for more than 97% of the nationwide death toll.

At least 668 people have been injured and 165 buildings have collapsed in the cities, Asocapitales said, adding that search and rescue operations are ongoing in the affected areas.

The magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck on Monday, with its epicenter in western Colombia, affecting the departments of Valle del Cauca, Caldas, Choco, and Risaralda.

Harrowing footage shows people fleeing shaking and collapsing buildings. A disturbing video filmed in Cali appears to show four people being crushed by a falling balcony as they fled a clinic.

🇨🇴🚨 Captan momento en el que cuatro personas lograron salir de clínica Cayre en Cali, Colombia; sin embargo, fueron aplastadas por un balcón que se derrumbó #Internacional #Colombia #Sismo #Cali #EnTransversal 👈🏼 pic.twitter.com/qnzs4ufA94

— Transversal (@Transversal_hgo) August 10, 2026

Other videos show parts of buildings breaking away during the tremors.

El centro administrativo municipal de Cali tambien se vio afectado por el terremoto pic.twitter.com/ZVXvKhOgdg

— infomedia 🚀 (@infomediaiw) August 10, 2026

Edificio colapso en Pereira pic.twitter.com/LRHoyM2n18

— infomedia 🚀 (@infomediaiw) August 10, 2026

Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder imposed a curfew from 8 PM to 6 AM to maintain order, saying that police and military personnel would patrol the city and help search for survivors.

Colapso de estructuras en Manizales pic.twitter.com/EHYRnoCvYA

— infomedia 🚀 (@infomediaiw) August 10, 2026

The US State Department pledged $15.5 million in emergency aid to Colombia for “shelter, food, protection, and earthquake assessments.”

Twin earthquakes struck neighboring Venezuela in June, killing more than 6,300 people.

Ukraine must stop honoring Nazi-linked nationalist paramilitaries that massacred Polish civilians during World War II if it wants to join the EU, Polish parliament speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty has said.

Modern-day Ukraine honors the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), as part of the country’s national liberation movement.

The OUN collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, while the UPA was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Poles in 1943-1944 in what is now western Ukraine.

Polish estimates put the death toll at up to 100,000, and Warsaw recognizes the massacres as genocide. Ukrainian nationalists also participated in anti-Jewish pogroms during the war.

Speaking after talks with Ukrainian parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk on Monday, Czarzasty said he supported Ukraine’s bid to join the EU but warned that membership would require Ukrainians to “rethink all aspects of their history.”

“The EU is, after all, about democracy and values. It’s not just an ATM,” he said, adding that European integration also means “calling genocide genocide” and acknowledging historical crimes.

In Ukraine, streets and buildings are named after WWII-era nationalist leaders, including OUN chief Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich, who served as a deputy commander of the German-led Nachtigall Battalion and later commanded the UPA. Ukrainian military units and officials also frequently use the UPA’s red-and-black colors alongside Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow national flag.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki responded by stripping Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor, which had been awarded by his predecessor. Multiple Ukrainian officials, in turn, returned their Polish decorations in solidarity with Zelensky, while Polish officials returned Ukrainian awards.

The European Parliament backed Poland’s position last month, condemning Zelensky’s decision to honor the UPA as an “unnecessary and unprovoked escalation” that disregarded Polish grief and was “not in line with European values.”

Despite the dispute over historical atrocities, Poland remains one of Ukraine’s biggest supporters in its conflict with Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly condemned the glorification of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine and has stated that one of its goals in the conflict is to “denazify” the country.

US President Donald Trump has demanded compensation from Iran for Americans and others he says were killed or wounded by Tehran and its allies.

The demand comes after Tehran called on Washington to pay for damage caused during the US-Israeli war launched against Iran on February 28. Reparations are among the conditions Iran has set for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, alongside the withdrawal of American troops from the region, the lifting of sanctions and the naval blockade, the release of frozen assets, and an end to military threats.

Trump responded on Monday, saying that compensation had not previously been discussed in negotiations but that he had now instructed US representatives to include it in all future talks.

“I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump said the payments should cover US troops killed in regional conflicts, the families of Iranian protesters, and people affected by wars in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza.

The US has lost 18 service members during the current conflict, while around 500 have been injured. The US military is also believed to have lost dozens of aircraft, including an F-15 fighter jet, several helicopters, drones, and refueling planes.

Iran has reported more than 3,300 people killed in US-Israeli strikes, nearly half of them civilians. More than 200 children are among the dead, including over 120 girls killed in a strike on an elementary school in Minab. US strikes have also hit civilian infrastructure, including bridges and water facilities.

Dozens of Iranian political and military leaders have been killed in targeted strikes, including the country’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

More than 125,000 civilian buildings have been damaged or destroyed in Iran, including around 100,100 homes and hundreds of schools and medical facilities, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.

The US and Israel have reached a deal with Damascus to remove nuclear material from a secret site in Syria, Axios reported on Monday, citing US and Israeli officials.

According to the publication, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be given access to the area, labeled ‘Site 99’, to recover material described as remnants from Syria’s Al-Kibar reactor, which Israel bombed in 2007.

The site reportedly contains yellowcake, a concentrated uranium powder that can eventually be processed into nuclear fuel. While the material cannot be used directly to make a nuclear bomb, it could potentially be dispersed using conventional explosives, causing radiological contamination in what is commonly known as a dirty bomb.

Israel reportedly bombed the entrances to the site shortly after a coalition of US-backed rebel groups captured Damascus in December 2024, toppling Syria’s longtime president, Bashar Assad. An Israeli official told Axios that Israel had threatened to bomb the site again if the nuclear material was not removed or if there were signs that Syria was attempting to access it.

Al-Sharaa’s government has also sought to normalize relations with Russia, which militarily supported Assad. Earlier this month, Moscow and Damascus agreed to reorganize Russia’s Khmeimim Airbase and naval facility in Tartus into joint training centers. The deal allows Russia to maintain a military presence in Syria following Assad’s fall.

Russia’s Supreme Court has removed the liberal Yabloko party from the ballot for the parliamentary elections in September, granting a lawsuit filed by the Rodina party.

Registered in 2001, Yabloko is one of Russia’s oldest political parties, tracing its roots back to an electoral alliance established in 1993.

Yabloko last made it past the 5% hurdle in 1999, securing 20 seats in the Russian parliament. It garnered only 1.34% of the vote during the previous parliamentary elections in 2021.

On Monday, presiding judge Vyacheslav Kirillov ruled that Yabloko violated the law by receiving funds from individuals who had themselves received financing from foreign states.

Yabloko chair Nikolay Rybakov told reporters that the party would appeal the court’s decision within the five-day period provided by law.

The 2026 parliamentary elections will take place September 18-20, with a total of ten parties contending for the 450 seats in the lower house of the Russian parliament.

Ukraine must compensate Iran for a deadly attack on one of its cargo vessels in the Caspian Sea, as Kiev has failed to convince Tehran that the strike was unintentional, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has said.

The ship was hit in a Ukrainian strike last month, killing one sailor. Tehran condemned the attack as “reckless.” Kiev initially defended its actions, saying Iran has “no standing to pretend to be a victim,” but later described the attack as a mistake and said it did not seek an escalation with Tehran.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on Monday that Tehran heard Kiev’s account of the strike but did not consider the matter resolved.

Following the attack, Zelensky praised the “very strong results” of strikes on vessels he claimed were involved in transporting military cargo. He said Ukraine does not want to open a “new front” with Iran, but accused it of attacking his country by supplying Russia with Shahed drones and related technology.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel also claimed that the vessel, Anna, was carrying components for drones and missiles. Tehran said the ship and its cargo were entirely civilian.

Kiev has actively sought to become involved in the Middle East conflict triggered by the US-Israeli attack against Iran earlier this year. The Ukrainian leadership claimed that it secured agreements with Gulf states to provide specialists and technology to counter Iranian drones, and said it hopes to obtain additional air defense systems and munitions in return.

On August 7, in the Al-Safa Palace in Mecca, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in signing an agreement whose consequences may prove far greater than its deliberately restrained language suggests.

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement commits the three countries to regard an armed attack against one of them as an attack against all, placing collective defense at the heart of a relationship previously built through bilateral military cooperation, arms sales, training and political coordination. For Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the pact extends a defense relationship already formalized in 2025. For Türkiye, however, Mecca represents something more ambitious. Ankara is not searching for another protector. It is seeking a larger table at which it can help decide what the next Middle Eastern order will look like.

Türkiye enters this arrangement from a position unlike that of almost any other regional state. It already commands NATO’s second-largest military, has built an increasingly sophisticated defense industry and occupies a geography connecting Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. What Ankara lacks is not military weight but an architecture capable of turning that weight into durable regional influence. Mecca provides this opportunity by linking Turkish military-industrial capabilities with Saudi financial power and Pakistan’s strategic depth. Even if the agreement remains operationally loose for some time, its political direction is already visible. Türkiye wants to make certain that the Middle East emerging from the present era of war is not designed exclusively in Washington, West Jerusalem or Tehran.

For years, Erdogan’s foreign policy has been described as aimed at strategic autonomy. Ankara does not want to abandon its alliances, but neither does it want those alliances to determine the limits of Turkish action. Türkiye can remain inside NATO while maintaining dialogue with Moscow, deepen ties with the Gulf while pursuing its own interests in Syria and Libya, and cooperate with Western institutions without accepting that every regional dispute must be understood through Western priorities. What occasionally appears from the outside as inconsistency is, from Ankara’s perspective, an attempt to preserve maximum room for maneuver in an international system that is becoming less hierarchical and more transactional.

The Mecca agreement fits naturally into this worldview because it gives Ankara another layer of strategic freedom without demanding that it sacrifice the advantages of NATO. The logic is accumulation rather than substitution. NATO remains indispensable in Türkiye’s relationship with the wider Euro-Atlantic security system, while a Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani framework offers something NATO cannot easily provide. It creates a space where regional security can be discussed primarily by regional powers and where Ankara does not first need to reconcile its threat perceptions with Washington or Brussels.

The experience of the past decade has made that freedom increasingly valuable. Differences with the US over Syria, particularly Washington’s cooperation with Kurdish formations that Ankara links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (designated by Türkiye as a terrorist organization), showed that even formal allies can see the same battlefield in fundamentally different ways.

The American and Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent strikes across the Gulf showed that countries deeply embedded in the US security system can still find themselves exposed once a conflict escalates beyond its original boundaries. Ankara’s conclusion is not that American power has ceased to matter, but that no serious regional power can afford to outsource its security entirely to a state whose priorities will never fully coincide with its own.

Saudi Arabia is arriving at a similar conclusion, which helps explain why Ankara now finds a much more receptive partner in Riyadh than it would have only several years ago. The kingdom increasingly wants several layers of security rather than one exclusive American umbrella, while Pakistan has long operated between competing centers of power. The three countries meet at a moment when each, for different reasons, is seeking greater freedom from rigid geopolitical dependence.

Turkish weapons become political capital

Türkiye also enters the agreement with an instrument of influence it did not possess in anything like the same form twenty years ago. Its defense industry has become one of the principal vehicles through which Turkish power travels abroad. Bayraktar drones may be its most recognizable symbol, but the transformation now encompasses missiles, warships, armored vehicles, electronic warfare and aerospace technologies. Turkish companies increasingly combine weapons sales with training, technology transfer, local production and long-term industrial cooperation, creating relationships that survive well beyond an individual contract.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most promising markets and sources of capital for the next stage of Turkish defense expansion. The major Baykar agreement signed with Riyadh in 2023 included technology transfer and localization, reflecting the complementary ambitions of both states. Saudi Arabia wants to reduce its dependence on Western suppliers and develop its own defense-industrial base, while Türkiye needs investment, scale and wealthy export markets if it is to evolve from a successful emerging producer into one of the permanent centers of the global arms industry. Pakistan adds another component through decades of military experience, its developed defense establishment and long-standing cooperation with both Ankara and Riyadh.

The potential division of labor is already apparent. Saudi financing can support programs that Turkish industry has the technological capacity to develop, while Pakistan can contribute military experience, personnel and industrial expertise. This does not mean that a unified military-industrial complex will suddenly appear, nor does Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal automatically become a shared deterrent. Alliances become consequential more gradually, when procurement systems, military training, intelligence exchanges, and defense industries begin to intertwine. For Ankara, every step in that direction brings both revenue and political leverage.

Israel becomes the harder question

Officially, the Mecca pact identifies no enemy, and neither Türkiye nor its partners have presented it as an anti-Israeli coalition. Yet Turkish-Israeli relations have deteriorated so sharply that excluding Israel from the strategic calculation would make little sense. Their dispute increasingly concerns the future territorial and security order of the region, particularly Syria, where Turkish and Israeli interests have begun to collide directly.

Post-Assad Syria lies at the heart of Ankara’s regional ambitions. Türkiye wants a Syrian state capable of exercising authority across its territory, limiting the autonomous military power of Kurdish formations, securing the Turkish border and becoming increasingly integrated with its northern neighbor. A stable Damascus relying heavily on Turkish political, military and economic support would give Ankara strategic reach across the Levant. Israel views much of the same process from the opposite direction. A consolidated Syrian state containing a significant Turkish military presence could reduce Israel’s freedom of action to the north and create a strategic continuum extending from Turkish territory toward southern Syria.

Israeli concern also predates the Mecca agreement. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett went so far as to call Türkiye a new Iran and warned of a hostile Sunni axis involving nuclear-armed Pakistan. The statements were deliberately provocative, yet they reflected a real anxiety about Ankara’s growing ability to organize regional power. Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has responded far more cautiously to the actual agreement, declining immediate comment, but a regional environment in which Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan coordinate their security is fundamentally different from one in which each deals with Israel separately.

Ankara does not need Mecca to become an openly anti-Israeli bloc in order to benefit from it. Türkiye’s interest lies in restoring a balance that it believes has been eroded by Israel’s increasingly expansive use of force. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the campaigns against Iran have strengthened a perception across the region that Israeli military superiority, reinforced by American support, has given West Jerusalem extraordinary freedom to act without an effective regional counterweight. Ankara is unlikely to seek a direct war with Israel, which would be enormously costly and unpredictable. It does, however, want to increase the political and strategic price of unilateral Israeli action.

Türkiye acting alone is a formidable regional power whose rivalry with Israel can still be managed bilaterally. A framework involving Saudi Arabia and Pakistan raises the possibility that future Israeli escalation could provoke a coordinated reaction from states whose combined financial, military and technological resources far exceed those available to any of them individually.

Iran and Ankara’s balancing game

None of this turns Iran into Türkiye’s natural partner against Israel, nor would Ankara welcome a Middle East dominated by Tehran. Turkish and Iranian interests have overlapped and collided for centuries, while their modern relationship continues to combine economic pragmatism with rivalry in Iraq, Syria and the Caucasus. The present conflict has also demonstrated Iran’s ability to impose serious costs on Gulf states, giving Riyadh every reason to seek an additional counterweight. Yet Ankara has generally resisted strategies based on Iran’s permanent isolation, preferring a Tehran that can be contained and negotiated with to one whose destruction or collapse destabilizes Türkiye’s eastern neighborhood.

That ambition explains the broader logic behind Türkiye’s participation. Ankara is attempting to position itself close enough to the West to remain anchored in NATO, close enough to Russia and Iran to negotiate with them, increasingly connected to the Gulf and capable of extending its reach through Pakistan toward South Asia. Every additional relationship creates contradictions, but it also gives Erdogan the commodity Turkish foreign policy values most. It gives Ankara room.

Ankara wants to write the rules

For Türkiye, the deeper meaning of the Mecca framework lies in the opportunity to become one of the region’s principal centers of power through partnership rather than domination. Ankara is not trying to recreate an Ottoman hierarchy with itself at the center, nor does it need another bloc built around the supremacy of a single capital. What it appears to be seeking instead is a network of mutually dependent partners whose military, financial and political resources reinforce one another. For a country whose strategic ambitions have often exceeded the strength of its economy, closer integration with the Gulf also opens access to capital, investment and markets that could help finance Türkiye’s defense-industrial expansion and broader economic development. At the same time, deeper security ties with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan give Ankara something equally important as tensions with Israel continue to grow. If rivalry with Israel ever develops into a more serious confrontation, Türkiye would be far less isolated than it might otherwise have been.

Seen in this light, Mecca is part of a wider Turkish attempt to restore a degree of regional sovereignty, not by replacing Western influence with Turkish hegemony, but by creating a system in which regional powers are strong enough to negotiate, deter and prosper together. Washington may well view such a trajectory with growing unease, particularly if an increasingly autonomous regional security architecture begins to challenge the longstanding military predominance of the US in the Middle East. Yet this is unlikely to mean a sudden rupture with America or the West. The change will be gradual, uneven and full of contradictions. What is already becoming clear, however, is that the international order is shifting, and regions that once relied heavily on outside powers for their security are increasingly looking for ways to strengthen themselves through their own resources, partnerships and institutions. Türkiye’s wager is that in this emerging world, influence will belong not simply to the strongest state, but to those capable of building the strongest network around them.

The Russian Athletics Federation (RUSAF) has lodged a second claim against World Athletics (WA), challenging what it described as a “politicized” ban on Russians in international competitions.

RUSAF filed its previous appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last month after the governing body reaffirmed the sweeping restrictions it imposed on Russia and Belarus following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. WA said the two federations would only be readmitted after Moscow and Kiev reach a peace agreement.

The ban was extended despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC) clearing the way for the reinstatement of Russian and Belarusian athletes.

In a statement on Monday, RUSAF argued that the sanctions undermine the “principles of equality and objectivity in sports” and have been promoted largely by WA President Sebastian Coe, a former British MP.

This is not the first time Russia has challenged sports bans in court. It appealed to the CAS after the International Ski and Snowboard Federation refused to lift restrictions on Russian para-athletes despite the International Paralympic Committee reinstating them in 2025. The legal challenge ultimately cleared the way for Russians to compete at the 2026 Winter Paralympics, where they won eight gold medals.

In recent months, a number of international federations, including World Aquatics, World Gymnastics, and the International Fencing Federation, have also restored Russian and Belarusian participation under their respective flags and anthems.

An American oil company backed by powerful associates of US President Donald Trump has shipped drilling equipment to Greenland without permission from the Danish territory’s government. Is Trump trying to annex Greenland one bite at a time?

Less than two weeks ago, a Danish tugboat towed a cargo ship into port at Nerlerit Inaat, 450 kilometers above the Arctic circle on Greenland’s east coast. The cargo ship, operated by a company called Permagreen, unloaded an excavator and 15 containers of equipment, before leaving the following day, according to Danwatch, a Danish investigative journalism outlet.

A Permagreen spokesperson told Danwatch that the company was hired by the Texas-based Greenland Energy Company to deliver “some machinery and equipment that will support their oil exploration” in the region of Jameson Land. 

The Greenland Energy Company had no permission to deliver the equipment, Greenland’s Energy Ministry said in a press release, adding that the company has still not been granted the necessary permits to drill in Jameson Land, a wetland area protected by the international Ramsar Convention.

Is the Greenland Energy Company allowed to drill?

Despite the lack of approval by Greenland itself, the Greenland Energy Company is treating drilling as a foregone conclusion. The company posted a series of updates on social media as Permagreen’s tugboat left Denmark and docked at Greenland’s capital city, Nuuk. On LinkedIn, oilfield machinery company Stampede Drilling posted a picture of a drilling rig bearing Greenland Energy’s logo, declaring that it was “Greenland bound.”

The company has claimed that another ship carrying 300 containers of drilling equipment is ready to set sail from Canada to Greenland on September 12. Exploratory drilling will begin in October, a spokesperson told The Guardian.

The logistics dance has begun! Tug leaving Denmark ultimately going to Nuuk then our project $GLND. pic.twitter.com/1kzeINN65G

— Greenland Energy Company (@GL_Energy_Co) May 26, 2026

However, Greenland stopped issuing new oil drilling licenses in 2021. No significant deposits had been found in the preceding 50 years, and the government in Nuuk concluded that the environmental impact was not worth the meager returns. A handful of licenses remain active, including one covering Jameson Land, held by a UK-based company called 80 Mile. Greenland Energy has said that it will fund exploration on 80 Mile’s land, in exchange for 70% of revenue generated by the project. 

Despite operating under 80 Mile’s license, Greenland Energy must still obtain the necessary permits. “The project is still in the exploration phase,” Greenland’s energy ministry stated in a press release in early August. Even if the permits are granted with no delays, no drilling will take place this year, a ministry spokesperson told Danwatch.

On August 8, Greenland Energy described “recent high-level meetings with Greenlandic authorities” as “constructive.”

How much oil is under Jameson Land?

Greenland Energy believes that $1 trillion worth of crude oil may lie beneath the Jameson Land Basin. The company plans to spend $60 million on an exploratory well, with the project to be expanded “once the results of the first have been analysed.”

“I believe it’s there,” Greenland Energy CEO Robert Price told residents of a Jameson Land village in June. “The scientists believe that it’s there. But until we drill these wells, we don’t know.”

Is the project connected to Trump’s Greenland annexation plans?

Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland throughout his second term in office, claiming that the US needs the landmass “for the purpose of national security” – namely to host elements of his promised ‘Golden Dome’ ballistic missile defense network. Trump has also said directly that he wants “Greenland for its rare-earth minerals.”

While Trump has not publicly expressed interest in Greenland’s potential oil wealth, the Greenland Energy project is backed by multiple close associates of the US president, including his special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

Landry made an uninvited visit to Nuuk in May, declaring upon arrival that it was “time for the US to put its footprint back on Greenland.” Oil exploration is a key part of this footprint, he told Fox News after the trip. “We need a deal,” he said. “Greenland needs a deal. We could be – Greenland could be – exporting two million barrels of oil a day right now.”

“We could have those barrels on production within 10 months or so,” Landry added.

Carol Craig, a US Navy veteran, joined Greenland Energy’s board in April. Craig is the founder and CEO of Sidus Space, a defense contractor that won part of a $151 billion contract to build the ‘Golden Dome’ last December. Craig’s “background in aerospace, defense, and engineering will be invaluable as we advance our exploration program in Greenland’s Jameson Land Basin,” Greenland Energy said when it announced her appointment to the board.

Wrapping up the list of Trump associates tied in to the project is Phil McGraw, better known as TV host Dr. Phil. McGraw campaigned with Trump in 2024, leads the president’s religious liberty commission, and was hired by Greenland Energy in June to produce a documentary series following its drillers into the Jameson Land Basin. 

"Just a man who believes there is one of the largest untapped oil fields on the planet sitting under the ice in Greenland, and he is the only person on the planet with the legal right to see if it's truly there." @GL_Energy_Co

WATCHING: GLND.

Educational content only. Not… pic.twitter.com/SDGbgjz6kl

— GateWatch (@GatewatchHQ) June 30, 2026

“That’s an oilman who drills when nobody else has the guts to do it,” McGraw said in an interview with Price. “This is exploration under the Northern Lights, how exciting can it get!

Nobody involved with the project has publicly discussed the annexation of Greenland, but drilling and territorial acquisition are seemingly connected in Trump’s mind: On August 1, two days after the first equipment was dropped off at Nerlerit Inaat, the president posted an image of himself looming over Greenland on his Truth Social platform, along with the caption “Hello, Greenland!”

How has Denmark responded?

Frederiksen has given the same response when Trump attempted to purchase Greenland from Denmark, and when he warned that seizing the territory by military force “is always an option.” 

With neither approach swaying officials in Copenhagen and Nuuk, the president may now be attempting to expand the US foothold in Greenland in order to present occupation as a fait accompli. If such a plan exists, it all hinges on Greenland Energy discovering oil where five decades of exploration failed.

The Strait of Hormuz cannot be reopened through diplomacy while Washington continues to use military pressure against Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has said.

Iran closed Hormuz in response to a US-Israeli military campaign launched in late February. Washington subsequently imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, escalating a standoff over a strategic waterway that has historically carried around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on Monday that diplomacy is “certainly” part of the “struggle to safeguard our national interests,” but added that “when dealing with a side that insists on the use of force, a maritime blockade is not a diplomatic action that we can lift through diplomacy.” 

“Certainly, you have to use authority and military power, along with diplomacy, to prevent the United States’ aggression, and that is what is being done,” Baghaei told a press briefing.

Tehran has set out a series of conditions for reopening the strait, including compensation for war damage, the lifting of sanctions, and the release of frozen Iranian funds, as well as a permanent end to hostilities against Iran and its regional allies.

The IRGC has also said that reopening Hormuz will depend on Washington fully accepting Tehran’s conditions.

“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump said, adding “It’s like a chess game.” 

The talks follow weeks of disagreement over a 14-point memorandum of understanding that established a temporary ceasefire and provided for the gradual lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the restoration of commercial traffic through Hormuz. Fighting resumed last month after the sides failed to agree on how the deal should be implemented.

Iran and Oman, meanwhile, are discussing arrangements for future shipping through the strait, although Tehran has stressed that any agreement with Muscat would not in itself mean the waterway would reopen.

The disruption to traffic through Hormuz has put sustained pressure on global energy markets. Oil prices rose nearly 3% on Monday amid uncertainty over negotiations, with international benchmark Brent reaching $85 a barrel and US WTI hitting $80.

A German journalist’s question to Vladimir Zelensky about how Europe could help Kiev “kill more Russians” amounted to a “glorification of war” and was “against humanity,” former Hamburg MP Martin Dolzer has told RT.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) correspondent Michael Martens put the question to the Ukrainian leader during a joint press conference following Zelensky’s talks with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade on Saturday.

“Can you tell us Europeans what can we concretely do to help you to kill more Russians?” Martens asked, before clarifying that he meant “more Russian soldiers, of course.”

Vucic visibly raised his eyebrows as he heard the question.

Germany has become “one of the most aggressive actors who tried to keep Ukraine in that war against Russia,” Dolzer said.

After some social media users accused Martens of “incitement to hatred,” the FAZ correspondent doubled down on X, insisting that there was nothing “scandalous” or “shocking” about his wording.

Reacting to Martens’ remarks, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram on Sunday that the journalist’s grandfather had served as an officer on a Wehrmacht command staff under Alfred Jodl during World War II.

Jodl was found guilty of committing war crimes during the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946. “It’s not hard to imagine what atrocities Martens the elder was perpetrating under the command of this Nazi criminal,” the Russian diplomat added.

Zakharova also noted that the German reporter cited his family history when explaining his decision to refrain from any criticism of Israel back in 2024, but had no qualms about later making “xenophobic statements” regarding Russians.

She accused Martens of “dehumanizing Russians [and] legitimizing hate speech toward Russia.” Zakharova also pointed out that professed Western human rights defenders have failed to call out the “hereditary Nazi.”

Responding to the backlash, FAZ expressed regret over Martens’ choice of words, telling the German Press Agency (dpa) that his question had been “ambiguously phrased.” The newspaper insisted that calls for the maximization of Russian casualties are not part of its editorial policy.

US President Donald Trump knows he can neither sustain nor win a protracted war against Iran, political scientist and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer has said.

In an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Sunday, Mearsheimer suggested that recent reports of dwindling US munitions stocks were based on leaks from officials in Trump’s own circle who want the war to end sooner.

The war on Iran has faced opposition from both US lawmakers and the public. A $1.15 trillion defense spending bill on which military contracts hinge remains deadlocked in the Senate, while multiple polls have shown broad opposition to war spending.

Media reports have meanwhile questioned how the Trump administration plans to replenish weapons stocks after months of fighting. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated last month that Patriot interceptor stocks had fallen at least 65% from pre-war levels, while THAAD inventories were down around 38%.

Mearsheimer said that the before the war started, General Daniel Caine was warning Trump that the US had limited stocks of munitions and could not fight a protracted conflict. Yet the US is now doing exactly that, he stated, adding that “it’s amazing the extent to which we have depleted our stockpile of sophisticated weaponry.”

Mearsheimer argued that the situation is dire enough for Trump to recognize there is no clear path forward, noting he has still neither ordered new attacks nor accepted Iran’s demands to end the war.

“I would imagine at this point in time that President Trump has come to recognize that there’s no way he can win this war. And that’s why I like to argue that he’s flailing around,” Mearsheimer said.

Watch the interview below.

Multiple explosions have been heard at a Bulgarian munitions storage facility after a delivery truck serving a military plant caught fire, local media have reported.

The incident occurred around midday on Monday near the village of Belitsa in Gabrovo Province, according to the BGNES news agency, which published footage showing a large white cloud rising in the distance, accompanied by loud bangs.

No casualties were reported. Officials attributed the fire to the accidental ignition of the vehicle. The facility was cordoned off and around 300 employees of Bulgarian arms manufacturer EMCO were evacuated, while residents of nearby settlements were advised to remain indoors, Gabrovo Governor Kristina Sidorova said.

Bulgaria, a NATO member and formerly a major supplier of military aid to Ukraine, has distanced itself from the conflict under Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s government. In June, Sofia said it would send no further weapons packages to Kiev. Last month it withdrew from the so-called “coalition of the willing,” a UK- and France-led group of European countries funding Ukraine.

EMCO is one of Bulgaria’s major ammunition manufacturers and has supplied Ukraine since at least 2014. Publicly available records do not specify which products are manufactured or stored at the Belitsa facility.

Ukraine has clashed with governments in Eastern Europe that it accuses of undermining its war effort. Earlier this year, deliveries of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia through the Druzhba pipeline were suspended shortly before a key parliamentary election in Hungary, which resulted in the ouster of the government in Budapest. Supplies through the pipeline resumed in April.

A powerful earthquake hit Colombia on Monday, killing more than 110 people, according to President Abelardo de la Espriella. Tremors were felt in several major cities across the country, as well as neighboring Ecuador and Panama.

Speaking at a press conference in Bogota on Moinday afternoon, de la Espriella said that 111 people had been killed and 87 injured. De la Espriella, who took office on Friday, declared a national emergency, and pledged to travel to the affected city of Periera "to support those affected and verify the government’s response."

Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management said the epicenter was located near the town of San Jose del Palmar in the Pacific department of Choco, at a depth of around 79 km, and measured 6.6 in magnitude. Other monitors put the magnitude higher. The US Geological Survey estimated it at 7.4 magnitude and the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center put it at 7.2.

The governor of Choco, Nubia Carolina Cordoba-Curi, confirmed that the earthquake caused significant damage in the provincial capital and beyond, warning of potential aftershocks. “There are injuries and significant damage to ‌buildings ⁠in the capital, Quibdo. We are already carrying out a damage assessment and will issue the first official report shortly,” she ⁠wrote on X.

Footage circulating online shows widespread destruction in the Pereira, the capital of the neighboring Risaralda department. Crowds of people were seen rushing into the streets covered in dust from the collapsing buildings. At least 40 people were killed across the department, according to the local authorities.

Similar scenes were filmed in the city of Manizales, Caldas department, where the historic Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica apparently partially collapsed, and one of the spires crashed into the dome. At least 12 people were killed in the city, the mayor said.

A further 27 people have been killed across the Valle de Cauca department, according to local officials.

The earthquake damaged airports in the cities of Pereira, Manizales, Quibdo, Armenia, Cartago, and Buenaventura. All operations at the facilities have been suspended “pending an assessment of structural damage,” Colombia’s civil aviation authority said. Chaotic footage from the airports suggests at least some of them sustained extensive damage and partially collapsed.

This comes a month and a half after a devastating earthquake hit neighboring Venezuela. At the time, two back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes destroyed hundreds of buildings across the country, hitting the capital, Caracas, and killing more than 5,000 people.

German news coverage of Russia is becoming increasingly radical as the media grooms the public for war, correspondent Thomas Roeper told RT.

Roeper made the remarks on Monday after Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Michael Martens asked Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky how Europe could help Kiev “kill more Russians.” The journalist hastily clarified that he meant “more Russian soldiers.”

“I’m following the German media and the propaganda they are doing, and they increased the anti-Russian narrative really, well, radical. I can’t use another word,” Roeper said.

He pointed to media coverage of last week’s incident at Leipzig Airport, where an unidentified explosive-laden drone was found, as another example.

The German government refrained from directly accusing Russia, but some lawmakers suggested that the country was behind the operation. Moscow has denied having any connection to drone sightings across the EU.

Asked whether the sentiment behind Martens’ question reflects the views of the people, Roeper said he doubts it. He described Germany as split, with eastern regions more sympathetic to Russia and the west more trusting of the media – though he said even these audiences don’t want war.

“The propaganda makes them wanting to weaken Russia, but they don’t want to pay for it,” he said, calling it an “absurd situation.” He added, however, that talk of “killing Russians” has become possible to an extent that it was not a decade ago.

Germany has been Ukraine’s largest European backer, providing nearly €100 billion ($115 billion) since 2022, with more than half accounting for military assistance. The country, like many other EU nations, has also embarked on a militarization drive.

Moscow has sounded the alarm about the EU’s military buildup, saying it echoes the years before World War II. “The process of militarizing Europe and the process of turning us into the enemy is… worrying to us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, warning that Russia will take appropriate measures to safeguard its interests and security.

Responding to the backlash, FAZ expressed regret over Martens’ choice of words, telling the German Press Agency (dpa) that his question had been “ambiguously phrased.” The newspaper insisted that calls for the maximization of Russian casualties are not part of its editorial policy.

At least four girls under 14 have been treated for alleged sexual assaults in the Spanish North African exclave of Ceuta, after a massive migrant influx overwhelmed reception facilities in the area and left minors sleeping on the streets, Euronews has reported.

The victims are reportedly Moroccan minors who entered Ceuta during the unprecedented migration surge in late July, the outlet said on Sunday, citing medical officials.

A boy is also believed to be among the victims, while medical sources warned that the true number could be higher as cases remain unreported. A total of more than a dozen patients with injuries consistent with sexual assault have reportedly been treated so far at Ceuta University Hospital.

Susana Ascaso, an accident and emergency doctor at the hospital, confirmed to the outlet that her department has treated multiple suspected rape cases involving underage migrants. She said many are girls under 14 forced to live on the streets because reception centers are full.

El Pais earlier reported that police are investigating at least five alleged rapes of minors. The victims reportedly have injuries consistent with sexual assault. No arrests have been announced, and the authorities have not disclosed the circumstances of the alleged attacks.

Abdellah Mustafa, head of the Sidi Embarek district Residents’ Association in southern Ceuta, told the outlet that locals have turned a futsal court into a makeshift refuge specifically for migrant girls. At least 50 arrived on the first day, with the number reaching 200 within two days and overwhelming the facility. Mustafa said some girls arrive in shock after presumably being assaulted, which prompted residents to bring in a psychologist and lawyer to assist them.

An unprecedented influx

More than 72,000 migrants entered Ceuta on July 30-31, many by swimming or crossing coastal breakwaters – a figure equivalent to roughly 70% of the exclave’s regular population. The influx overwhelmed reception centers, hospitals, and law enforcement. At least 100 people reportedly died, many while attempting the crossing by sea, while Madrid deployed troops and accelerated returns. Most of those who entered have since been sent back, but between 3,000 and 5,000 remain on Spanish territory, according to local officials.

The crisis has fueled tensions within the EU, where migration has long been a contentious issue. Twenty-two EU leaders signed a letter accusing Spain of undermining the bloc’s border security, while several called for the country to be removed from the Schengen borderless travel zone. Italy introduced temporary checks on travelers arriving from Spain on August 1, and France tightened border security. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez hit back, calling the actions of his European neighbors “selfish.”

President Donald Trump must end the US blockade of Cuba as fuel shortages cause severe power cuts and deepen the island’s humanitarian crisis, South African anti-apartheid cleric Michael Lapsley has said.

Lapsley is traveling to Havana to address a colloquium marking the centenary of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s birth. Castro died in 2016.

His call to end the blockade is contained in the text of the address, titled “I Am a Fidelist”, which he sent to IOL before leaving.

Lapsley is canon for healing and reconciliation at St George’s Cathedral and honorary life president of the Friends of Cuba Society, which he helped set up ahead of SA’s first democratic election in 1994.

Washington has run an embargo on Cuba since 1962. In January, US President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over Cuba and moved to choke off its fuel, blocking oil tankers bound for the island and threatening tariffs against any country that kept supplying it.

In May, Cuba’s energy and mines minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said the country had run out of diesel and fuel oil, leaving only gas from its own wells. Blackouts have hit the whole island since March. UN human rights experts called the fuel blockade a serious violation of international law and said it amounted to energy starvation. The General Assembly voted 165 to seven, with 12 abstentions, to end the embargo.

Havana puts the damage to its economy over the year to February at $8bn. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both raised the prospect of military action in May, with Rubio calling Cuba a national security threat and Trump saying he was likely to be the president to act.

Cuba trained SA doctors under an agreement between Castro and the late former president Nelson Mandela, and sent its Henry Reeve Brigade of medics to SA during the Covid-19 pandemic.

”Never in human history has there been a country who has trained doctors as a principal export,” Lapsley said.

”I have no doubt that what the revolution achieved in the area of healthcare makes God smile.”

”We do not forget that, unlike our colonisers who plundered our resources, Cuba only took back to Cuba their dead comrades,” he said.

The names of the Cuban dead are recorded at Freedom Park in Pretoria.

Lapsley said the apartheid state told him Cuba was a godless society. ”At the time the apartheid army fought Cuban internationalist forces in Angola, Sunday Times had a headline, ‘I killed Cubans for Christ’,” he stressed.

”SA soldiers were shocked to find that some dead Cuban soldiers were carrying bibles.”

Lapsley titled his address “I Am a Fidelist”, after a line Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev used when he was asked whether Castro was a true communist. Khrushchev replied that he did not know, but did know that he himself was a Fidelist.

Lapsley said Christians in the West had been arguing about the wrong thing for decades. ”Sometimes in the West the question is asked whether it is possible for a Christian to be a socialist,” he said. ”I think it is the wrong question. We should rather be asking if it is possible for a Christian to be a capitalist.”

”Among my first visitors was the Palestinian Ambassador offering to pay my medical treatment and the Ambassador of Cuba inviting me to come to Cuba for medical treatment,” he said.

First published by IOL

The period between the two world wars was a turbulent time. Entire countries sprang up and sometimes fell in a matter of days.

Some of these short-lived states were comical in retrospect, like the Republic of Fiume, founded by the poet and soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, where beauty was declared the national idea, bread was supplied intermittently, and flowers and cocaine were free. Other examples of these states were far grimmer.

One such short-lived dictatorship was Carpathian Ruthenia – a Ukrainian quasi-state within Czechoslovakia. This mini-dictatorship located in one of the most remote corners of Europe was destroyed almost as quickly as it was created.

Europe’s forgotten borderland

Following World War I and the subsequent collapse of several empires, a small region called Subcarpathian Ruthenia became part of Czechoslovakia. Roughly speaking, it was located in what is now the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine.

The population of this land was diverse and included Rusyns (a Slavic people closely related to Ukrainians), Hungarians, Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians. In the cities, Jews were the largest national minority, while in the villages, Rusyns predominated. Their self-identification was rather complex – some gravitated toward Russia or Hungary, others had hopes for an independent Ukraine; in the cities, due to the large Jewish population, the most popular political movements were those of the Zionists and Orthodox Jews.

This region was annexed to Czechoslovakia after brief revolutionary unrest and political maneuvering. The victors of WWI divided Europe, and no one particularly cared about the fate of this small region, so it was simply annexed to the new state. However, this decision did not please many sides, including Hungary, which wanted the region for itself. 

The economic situation was dire, and following the global crisis of the 1920s, poverty became extreme. Political upheavals raged in Czechoslovakia, and several major movements emerged in Transcarpathia, including Russophile, pro-Ukrainian, and pro-independence movements.

Everyone wanted a piece of it

By the latter half of the 1930s, Transcarpathia resembled a small bomb. Autonomists were active within Transcarpathia, Hungarians were actively scheming outside of it, and Czechoslovakia was trying to maintain control of the region.

Poland also had its own plans for intervention. Czechoslovakia was headed for the abyss, and everyone was eager to get a piece of the crumbling state. Officials in Prague were nervous; Carpathian Ruthenia was granted autonomy, but the prime minister of Transcarpathia was arrested. Avgustin Voloshin was appointed the new local prime minister. This priest, who was respected in the region, belonged to the Uniate Church – a hybrid Orthodox-Catholic congregation that was popular in the region and that observed Orthodox rites but recognized the authority of the Pope.

Voloshin found himself in a difficult position. The fate of Transcarpathia was decided by the Vienna Arbitration which awarded a significant portion of it to Hungary, including the cities of Uzhgorod and Mukachevo. The government moved to Khust. Voloshin began by purging the region of political opponents – in particular, Russophiles. To this end, the nationalists promptly built a concentration camp near Rakhov (now a town in Transcarpathia). Voloshin quickly dissolved all parties except the Ukrainian National Union, which he headed. Due to the absence of rivals, his party predictably won the parliamentary elections by a landslide. 

Hitler’s self-appointed Ukrainian ally

At this time, Voloshin found a strange ally: He decided to use Adolf Hitler as a shield against Hungary’s ambitions. Initially, the plan worked: Hitler rebuked the Hungarians, who attempted to seize control of all of Transcarpathia without prior arrangement, and Voloshin gained a few months to carry out his social experiments. Transcarpathia became, in a sense, Hitler’s self-appointed ally – it needed the Third Reich far more than the Reich needed Ukrainian nationalists.

The latter project greatly irritated Poland, which had been fighting Ukrainian separatists on its own territory with varying success, but suddenly they gained a foothold right next to Poland. Ukrainian nationalists travelled to Transcarpathia from the Czech Republic and Galicia, and some fled from Poland with forged documents. In fact, the number of foreign fighters in the Carpathian Sich surpassed the number of local fighters. For the Carpathian peasants, the vision of a greater Ukraine seemed too unrealistic and poetic; they were concerned with more practical local issues. But for the Galicians in the Polish underground, Transcarpathia was a dream come true.

In the Polish Sejm, politicians delivered their usual impassioned speeches about the dangers of Transcarpathia. It should be noted that Transcarpathia indeed harbored vague dreams of a campaign against Poland. The plans of the Poles were simpler: to make Transcarpathia their ‘vegetable garden’ and resort. In fact, all the surrounding powers had grand colonization plans for Carpathian Ruthenia, and none of them cared to ask the opinion of the residents of Transcarpathia itself or of the Czechoslovak government, to which Carpathian Ruthenia still formally belonged.

Voloshin thought that the small state could become a springboard for Germany’s future eastward expansion. Hitler, however, was unsure whether he wanted this at the cost of souring relations with Hungary. For the time being, Budapest limited itself to training saboteurs and political agitation; but it made no secret of its future plans regarding Transcarpathia. 

The country that lasted three days

Discussions in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw continued until March 1939. By this time, the Nazis had finally decided that the new satellite state created more problems than potential benefits. However, Hitler was unwilling to completely sever ties with the nationalists. So the German dictator pulled a cunning trick. He told the Hungarians that he would delay recognition of Voloshin’s government for a few days, during which time Hungary could resolve the ‘Ruthenian issue’.

On the night of March 14, 1939, the Hungarians crossed the border. Voloshin proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine, but the first enemies that the Sich militants encountered were the Czechoslovak units that still remained in Transcarpathia. The Germans calmly watched the unfolding events, and after a while, announced that “unfortunately,” they could not accept Transcarpathia under their protectorate. The Nazis urged the region not to resist the Hungarians.

The resistance only lasted a few days. During this time, the Polish army also invaded Transcarpathia. Voloshin escaped to Romania. The fate of those retreating toward Poland was far worse: The Poles shot many of those who tried to cross the border. The Hungarians also did not bother to observe the conventions on the laws and customs of war, and killed many of those who surrendered. The Carpathian region came under the control of the Horthy regime. It is believed that around 430 Carpathian Sich militants were killed during this campaign, up to 750 were captured, and the Hungarians lost 76 men. The number of people who were executed is unknown. The Hungarians immediately began deporting the population for forced labor. Voloshin fled.

Many of the events in Europe in the 1930s were a bloody nightmare. In Western fiction, there’s an abstract place called Ruritania – a fictional European country, usually poor and underdeveloped, but very proud. This stereotype didn’t appear out of nowhere. In fact, the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists simply proved to be the most powerful and influential examples of the dark spirit that poisoned much of Europe. Even tiny self-proclaimed states managed to establish dictatorships with concentration camps. Such was the dark spirit of the age.

Mass graves containing the bodies of 25 civilians have been found in Kurmuk in Sudan’s Blue Nile region after the army retook the town, Kurmuk commissioner Abdel Aty Mohamed al Faki has said.

Al Faki accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of executing the victims, local news outlets reported on Sunday. The dead include women, children, and hospital workers, according to the commissioner.

Army units discovered the graves during clearing operations in northeastern Kurmuk, more than a month after government forces regained control of the town. The victims were killed near Jebel Fankat, a hill that the RSF used to launch suicide drones, the Sudan Tribune reported.

The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF began in April 2023. Fighting has since spread across the country and forced millions of people from their homes.

The recapture of Kurmuk came as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) made gains in other parts of Sudan. In late July, the army regained several areas in North Kordofan from the RSF, including Bara, Jabra al-Sheikh, and Um Sayala. Later, Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan visited frontline positions in the region.

The SAF has regained other key areas during the war. In 2025, the army retook Khartoum and later declared the entire capital region free of RSF forces. 

However, Sudan’s wider humanitarian crisis has continued to worsen. Earlier this month, International Federation of Red Cross special envoy Derk Segaar called for more international support. “Sudan is one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, yet it is also one of its most overlooked,” he said. 

Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region is on the brink of renewed war as violence continues across several other parts of the country, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said.

Tigray was devastated by a war between federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) from 2020 until a peace agreement was signed in 2022. The conflict killed about 600,000 people and displaced millions, according to Olusegun Obasanjo, the African Union’s lead mediator in the peace negotiations.

In a statement on Sunday, Tedros said three years of armed conflict in the northern Amhara region has cost “countless lives,” while the sprawling Oromia region surrounding the capital Addis Ababa continues to “bleed.” He added that the northern Afar region has been drawn into the unrest and Benishangul-Gumuz remains gripped by violence.

“War only brings death, destruction, displacement, and deprivation. Ethiopians deserve better,” Tedros wrote on X. He urged the federal government and all regional leaders “to choose dialogue over guns, and to pursue real political solutions.” 

#Ethiopia needs peace, not more war.

For three years, armed conflict in Amhara has cost countless lives. Oromia continues to bleed. Tigray teeters back into open fighting, Afar has been drawn in, and Benishangul-Gumuz remains gripped by violence too.

Enough. I urge the federal… pic.twitter.com/NHqGsOygEe

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) August 9, 2026

The WHO chief’s warning follows reports of fighting between the Ethiopian National Defense Force and Tigrayan forces near Shererina in western Tigray on August 1. The Tigray regional authorities accused federal troops of launching a ground and air offensive.

Ethiopian Irrigation and Lowlands Minister Abraham Belay accused the TPLF of “opening the war” near Shererina and “driving Tigray’s young people and children into a purposeless war they do not understand, causing them to fall like leaves.” He warned of worse consequences if the fighting doesn’t stop.

Tedros, a former Ethiopian health and foreign minister from Tigray, said in December 2022 that his uncle had been “murdered” along with more than 50 other villagers amid continuing violence following the peace agreement.

Indian warships escorted two crude oil tankers through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait amid the recent attacks that have struck commercial ships around the shipping chokepoint in the Red Sea.

The INS Trishul, a guided missile frigate, and the INS Aditya, a combat logistics ship, escorted the MT Compass and the MT Thalatta “to safely transit the high-risk area through #BabelMandeb strait” over Sunday and Monday, the Navy’s Western Naval Command posted on X.

The strait is a vital maritime gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez canal. Last week, an India-flagged cargo vessel, the MSV Faize Noore Oliya, sank near the Yemen coast after it was struck by a projectile.

🇮🇳⚓#INSTrishul and #INSAditya escorted crude tankers MT Compass and MT Thalatta to safely transit the high-risk area through #BabelMandeb strait on 9 and 10 Aug 2026.#IndianNavy remains committed to securing the safe transit of vital energy cargo and protecting Indian… pic.twitter.com/U2CCXmvh3W

— Western Naval Command (@IN_WNC) August 10, 2026

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia last month blockaded all Saudi Arabian ships and those carrying Saudi oil from transiting through the Red Sea. Last week, the Shiite rebels claimed they had attacked eight Saudi-linked ships since the blockade began.

It is not clear if the ships escorted by the Indian Navy are carrying Saudi oil. The escorts could signal a new willingness from New Delhi to secure its energy supply routes through global conflict zones. 

Saudi Arabia shifted most of its oil exports to the Red Sea after Tehran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, another strategic maritime chokepoint through which about a fifth of the world’s energy used to transit, following the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. But some tankers have been forced to reverse course, or switch off their transponders amid the Houthi blockade.

European navy ships operating under Operation Aspides also provide escorts to commercial vessels in the Red Sea, and the US Navy’s Operation Prosperity Guardian does the same for commercial shipping in the region.

Kazakhstan has redirected part of its oil exports to Russia and China after Ukrainian drone attacks disrupted shipments through Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, the Energy Ministry has said.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted tankers and infrastructure linked to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), an international operator whose shareholders include US energy majors Chevron and ExxonMobil, as part of a broader campaign against Russian-linked oil trade.

The CPC handles around 80% of Kazakhstan’s crude exports, more than 70 million tons per year. The attacks have forced Astana to redistribute some of these volumes and prioritize alternative routes, the ministry told Interfax on Monday.

“Among other things, there has been an increase of transportation via the Atyrau-Samara direction [to Russia] and increased supplies to… China,” the ministry said.

Ukraine has targeted civilian vessels that it accuses of transporting Russian cargo, arguing that they form part of an alleged ‘shadow fleet’ used by Russia to counter Western attempts to stifle its oil trade. Russian officials have condemned the attacks as reckless acts of piracy.

The disruption to Kazakh exports comes as global oil supplies are already under strain, driven primarily by the US war against Iran and a sharp decline in shipments from the Persian Gulf.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has argued that the conflict is placing greater pressure on China, one of the world’s largest oil consumers, than on the US, which is a net exporter of oil. China, however, has been partly insulated by its strategic reserves and secure access to Russian oil.

Trump faces growing domestic political pressure ahead of the November midterm elections, with opposition to the Iran war increasing among US voters and threatening Republican candidates at the polls.

A senior Russian diplomat has dismissed speculation that Moscow played any role in the wildfires sweeping France, saying the allegations show their authors “do not respect” their own population.

Last week, Caroline Thominet, president of Doc4Ukraine – a French non-profit network of companies and hospitals that supplies medical aid to Ukraine – raised the idea of Russian interference during an interview with BFM TV.

Without accusing Russia directly, she said that “one must ask questions about possible interference at certain locations,” adding that police and intelligence services “gather information when there are crimes on French soil.”

Officials in Paris have also refrained from accusing Russia of staging wildfires, though France has repeatedly accused Moscow of waging a “hybrid war” against it through sabotage, cyberattacks, and disinformation – an allegation the Kremlin has consistently denied.

Philippot also accused the French authorities of applying double standards to conspiracy theories by condemning some while effectively legitimizing others as “authorized.”

The controversy comes as France endures one of its worst wildfire seasons on record amid climate change and a string of heatwaves and droughts. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said last month that almost 14,000 fires have broken out since January, with more than 250,000 people forced to evacuate.

Nine in ten fires are estimated to be human-caused – mostly through negligence, such as cigarette butts, barbecues or unsupervised construction work, rather than deliberate arson. French police have detained 420 people, including 166 minors, on suspicion of starting fires deliberately or through serious negligence, according to the Interior Ministry.

Russia and the EU previously helped each other combat wildfires, dispatching specialized aircraft and fire crews on several occasions. However, Ukraine-related EU sanctions have eliminated this possibility, with the last known instance of Moscow’s assistance dating back to 2021 when a Russian Be-200 amphibious aircraft assisted Greek crews battling blazes on the island of Chios.

India is unlikely to reduce its Russian oil purchases, despite a new sanctions bill that imposes steep tariffs on Russia’s top oil buyers passing in the US Senate, Indian media reports suggest.

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which features sanctions targeting Russia’s top oil customers while protecting US allies, passed the US Senate on Friday in an 86-11 vote. India is Russia’s second-largest oil customer, behind China.

The bill, championed by the late senator and backed by President Donald Trump, will allow the Trump administration to impose up to 100% tariffs on imports from the five top buyers of Russian oil.

However, steep tariffs might not be enough to stop India, which shares a long relationship with Russia, with roots in the Cold War.

“India has long-enduring ties with Russia, and its defense and energy relationship is deeply entrenched,” the Hindu Businessline reported, quoting a source. “It cannot simply be given up under external pressure.”

New Delhi did not cut back on its purchases even as the bill advanced through the US Senate, the source reportedly said.

India’s crude imports from Russia jumped to 2.8 million barrels per day and accounted for 55% of purchases in July, as a waiver on US sanctions lapsed the previous month.

“This gives a fair idea about what the government has in mind and its unwillingness to curtail its ties with Moscow,” the source said.

“India has a lot going with the US, including work on a bilateral trade agreement,” the report quoted a second source as saying.

“Imposing high tariffs on Indian goods is not a good idea for the American consumers as well.”

The continuing disruptions to oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz could also harden India’s resolve to keep buying more Russian oil as it seeks to secure energy supplies.

The Graham bill’s stated aim is to squeeze the Russian economy by choking off oil revenues and force President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine conflict.

In June, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar called out Western double standards over Russia sanctions and the use of them according to the needs of the US and Europe. “Let’s not pretend there’s some great principle involved here. I don’t think making this about sanctimony is really warranted,” he told journalists in Finland.

Germany has seen a spike in UFO sighting reports, according to the Central Research Network for Extraordinary Celestial Phenomena (CENAP), the country’s largest private UFO reporting and investigation network. The surge comes alongside the Pentagon’s release of declassified files on phenomena believed to be potentially linked to extraterrestrial activity.

According to director Hansjuergen Koehler, CENAP has never received as many reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena – the official term for UFOs – as it does now.

“We receive between three and six reports a day,” he told Euronews in an interview released on Sunday. By August 2026, he and his team had investigated some 14,000 sighting reports, he said, though he did not specify over what period.

Koehler did not rule out that “there is life out there,” but said he remains skeptical about most sightings, noting that the vast majority turn out to be aircraft, rocket stages, satellites, meteors, planets, balloons, or even event lasers visible from kilometers away. Some remain unresolved because investigators lack key information, such as high-resolution videos.

Pentagon reignites UFO frenzy

Debates over extraterrestrial phenomena have gathered momentum following Pentagon releases of previously classified material on supposed alien sightings. US President Donald Trump ordered the release in February after former President Barack Obama said in a podcast interview that aliens were “real.” Trump accused Obama of improperly revealing classified information and pledged to declassify the files. The disclosure initiative began in May with around 160 documents, followed by four more batches of footage and witness testimony.

The Pentagon released its fifth batch on Friday. The 41 files include more than a dozen videos, three images, and around 20 PDF documents detailing sightings from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. The records come from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department, and Executive Office of the President, dating from 1953 to this year.

Much of the release consists of grainy footage of unidentified objects, including apparent orbs and lights, captured by military sensors and cameras. Six videos show a September 2021 encounter involving Special Operations forces aboard an AC-130J gunship over the Gulf of Oman.

Another, recorded by a “US Government Special Agent” in the western US this year, shows two slow-moving “black-hot” areas in infrared imagery. The batch also includes eight FBI 302 witness-interview forms accompanied by artist renderings of reported objects.

The US has tightened travel rules for people returning from Ebola-affected parts of Africa, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday.  

US citizens and nationals who have been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) over a period of 21 days before departing for the US will not be allowed to board commercial flights bound for the US. The restriction also applies to passengers whose flights stopped in DR Congo, even if they never left the aircraft. Those affected are being told to remain outside the US until more than 21 days have elapsed since leaving DR Congo.  

Americans returning from Uganda and South Sudan can still travel home, but their flights must be routed through one of four designated airports: Washington Dulles, Atlanta, Houston, or New York’s JFK.   

There, travelers will face CDC screening that includes questions about their travel and symptoms, temperature checks and observation for signs of illness. 

Russia has stopped short of imposing an entry ban but has stepped up sanitary and quarantine controls at border checkpoints as part of its response to the outbreak. 

The measures come as an Ebola outbreak, which was declared on May 15, continues to roil DR Congo. It involves the Bundibugyo strain of the virus for which there are currently no approved vaccines or targeted treatments available. 

At least 13 civilians have been killed and 14 others abducted in an attack on a village in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo blamed on the Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), multiple outlets reported on Saturday.

The assailants entered Banana Ecole, about 20 km from Mambasa territory in Ituri province, on the evening of August 7, looting and burning homes, local outlet Actualite reported, citing rights group Protection Plus.

No group immediately claimed responsibility. However, local witnesses attributed the raid to the ADF based on the tactics used by the attackers.

“This death toll of 13 civilians is only provisional because most residents aren’t responding to calls, and searches are continuing in other surrounding villages,” Marie-Noelle Anotane, the head of the New Civil Society of Congo/Mambasa, told AP.

The attack has left residents facing a choice between remaining amid the violence or fleeing elsewhere in Ituri – the province worst affected by an Ebola outbreak that has killed 1,916 people, according to the authorities.

In late July, suspected ADF raids on several communities in Mambasa reportedly killed at least 27 civilians and left 11 missing. Weeks earlier, militants killed more than 20 people in Mbau, North Kivu province. In April, the Congolese Army confirmed another 43 deaths in Mambasa despite joint Congolese-Ugandan operations against the group.

The latest violence comes amid an escalating security crisis across eastern DR Congo, where the authorities are confronting the ADF and numerous other armed groups, including M23. Kinshasa accuses Rwanda of supporting the M23 rebels, who have intensified their fighting with government forces since January 2025. The violence has killed or injured thousands and triggered a record 9.7 million internal displacement movements in 2025, according to UN and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre data.

Violent clashes between M23 and the Wazalendo, an alliance of pro-government militias, were reported in Shango, North Kivu, earlier this month. In July, M23-allied fighters claimed to have captured the strategic Point Zero base in South Kivu’s Mwenga territory. M23 had previously seized Goma in January 2025 and Bukavu the following month.

A proposed amendment to India’s foreign funding rules for charities and religious organizations has raised the temperature in India-US relations, with New Delhi’s ambassador to Washington posting a myth-buster on X to counter criticism from a US lawmaker.

In a series of posts on Monday, Indian Ambassador Vinay Mohan Kwatra posted a point-by-point rebuttal of the allegations made last week by Republican Congressman Riley Moore. The US lawmaker had claimed that the provisions of India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Amendment Bill, 2026 (FCRA) could allow the government to take over churches and religious charities.

“This is a clear attack against Christians,” Moore said, warning the bill could affect India-US ties.

Kwatra, in his ‘Myth vs. Reality’ posts, directly addressed Moore’s criticism, saying “the Act applies uniformly to all organizations regardless of religion, community or ideology.” 

There are many misunderstandings in the media and in civil society about the proposed Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill(FCRA), 2026.
Here is the Myth vs. Reality check.

— Amb Vinay Mohan Kwatra (@AmbVMKwatra) August 10, 2026

A provision in the proposed amendments to the law seeks to establish a “designated authority” that would take over the management of foreign contributions, and assets created using those contributions, if an organization loses its FCRA registration.

“If the organization restores its registration, all assets and unused funds are returned in full,” Kwatra said, adding “where a cancelled association has created property connected to a place of worship, that property goes to another FCRA-registered association of the same faith to ensure continuity of worship.”

The ambassador noted that only about 14,450 non-profits among the total 3 million operating in India have FCRA registration.

India’s regulation of foreign funds is “a sovereign step” that is driven by “national security concerns,” he said.

“FCRA does not stop anyone from accepting foreign charity, research grants or humanitarian aid. It asks three things – register, receive the money through laid down process, report what you did with it,” he posted.

Moore’s allegations have added another element of tension to the India-US relationship, with the US Senate recently passing a bill that gives the administration the authority to slap 100% tariffs on Russia’s top oil customers. India is Russia’s second-largest oil buyer.

The Indian foreign ministry had hit back at Moore on Friday, with spokesman Randhir Jaiswal saying even the US regulates the flow of foreign funds. “Legislative matters concerning India are our internal affairs on which decisions are taken by the Parliament of the country,” he said. 

The Indian government has maintained that the law’s aim is to stop the misuse of foreign funds while allowing legitimate organizations to continue their work. 

Finland will not hand over more of its air defense missiles to Ukraine, Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen has said, insisting that Helsinki cannot risk its combat readiness amid tensions with Russia.

Speaking to Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Saturday, Hakkanen suggested that the upcoming winter will be difficult both for NATO and Ukraine, predicting that Moscow will once again target Ukrainian energy infrastructure with new missile and drone strikes. 

Ukraine has already intensified pleas for more air defense missiles, particularly US-made Patriot interceptors, as Russia continues its strikes on military-related facilities and logistics. Earlier this month, Vladimir Zelensky admitted that Ukraine is struggling to down Russian ballistic missiles “simply because there are no interceptors for the Patriot system.”

The minister said that while Finland has “a certain level of capability in certain anti-aircraft missiles,” he “will not disclose any further details about the mechanisms by which we support Ukraine.” 

Hakkanen also argued that “the biggest factor that would help Ukraine at the moment would also be some kind of solution and end to the Iran war,” which has been burning the US stockpile of various missiles.

Finland has previously adopted numerous aid packages for Ukraine, including air defense assets, though it withheld the specifics, citing operational security.

While Ukraine has struggled with Patriot stockpiles, the Financial Times reported last week that US President Donald Trump rejected Zelensky’s request for hundreds more Patriot interceptors, citing depleted US stocks needed for the Middle East. Despite an initial pledge to grant Ukraine a Patriot production license, he soon walked back the promise, citing the sensitivity of the move.

Several NATO members that own Patriots, including Romania, the Netherlands, and Poland, have also signaled that their capacity to help Kiev is exhausted.

Moscow has consistently denounced weapons deliveries to Ukraine, warning they only prolong the conflict without changing its outcome. It has also cast such shipments as “direct participation” in the hostilities.

The death toll from the Ukrainian drone attack on the city of Nizhnekamsk in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan has risen to 13, the regional government has told the media.

Some 48 people are reported to have been injured. Mayor Radmir Belyaev said “both industrial and civilian sites” were targeted in the city, which is located some 880km east of Moscow.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said one of the civilians killed was a minor. The agency has designated the Ukrainian attack as an act of terrorism, stressing that the targeted locations “had nothing to do with military activities.”

Citizens of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan may be among the fatalities, the administration of Tatarstan said.

The regional Health Ministry has ordered a surge of responders, sending to Nizhnekamsk six additional medical teams from the city of Naberezhnye Chelny and Tatarstan’s center for disaster medicine, a specialized trauma hospital.

Tatarstan head Rustam Minnikhanov has declared a period of mourning for the victims of the Ukrainian strikes.

Russian Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik has condemned Western nations sponsoring Ukrainian strikes, saying that “every civilian life cut short or ruined is on the conscience of those who give weapons to a Nazi killer and let them think that they will have impunity for their crimes.” The diplomat heads the Russian Foreign Ministry’s mission tracking Ukrainian atrocities.

The Russian Defense Ministry earlier reported that air defense forces had intercepted 456 Ukrainian drones overnight, including over Tatarstan.

Last month, Kiev stepped up attacks on Russian energy facilities, civilian shipping and other key infrastructure as part of what Vladimir Zelensky called a 40-day “pressure campaign” aimed at forcing Moscow to accept Ukraine’s terms for a ceasefire.

The attack on Nizhnekamsk was the deadliest since Zelensky announced the new strategy, but it was not the worst episode of civilian deaths this year. In January, an attack on a New Year’s Eve party in the resort village of Khorly in Kherson Region killed 29 people. In May, nighttime drone strikes on a vocational college dormitory in Starobelsk killed 21, many of whom were teenage students.

Russian officials have accused Kiev of deliberately targeting civilians in some of the attacks in an attempt to spread fear among the population. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly argued that the conflict must be “brought” to Russian territory in order to increase pressure on Moscow.

Russia has responded by intensifying its own strikes, severely disrupting Ukrainian shipping through the Black Sea and fuel supplies in parts of the country that Moscow considers important to Kiev’s military logistics.

French police have detained 420 people for allegedly starting fires deliberately or through serious negligence during a devastating wildfire season that has burned nearly 120,000 hectares across the country, according to the Interior Ministry.

France has experienced successive heatwaves this summer as exceptionally high temperatures have affected much of Europe. President Emmanuel Macron has described the wildfire crisis as potentially the country’s worst since World War II.

Prolonged heat and drought have dried vegetation, allowing small ignition sources to develop into fast-moving fires. More than 224,000 people were evacuated at the height of the crisis.

Officials said human activity caused nine out of ten wildfires in France. The cases include suspected arson as well as blazes attributed to discarded cigarettes, barbecues, campfires, and other reckless behavior.

Among those detained are 166 minors. An initial review of 80 suspects found that 97.5% were male, with an average age of 32.5. The group included students, repeat offenders, and volunteer firefighters.

The alleged motives vary widely, with some suspects reportedly acting out of revenge, for financial gain, to attract attention, or to challenge the authorities. Clinical pyromaniacs account for fewer than 5% of fire starters, according to experts cited by Le Figaro.

Other cases include a young volunteer firefighter who confessed to “setting fire to twigs with a lighter and gasoline” before retracting the statement, and a man who claimed that he had “accidentally started the fire by throwing away his cigarette.” Both were indicted and placed in pretrial detention.

“The conditions for a charge of endangering lives are met for those who throw a cigarette butt or light a barbecue in wooded areas. It only takes a tiny spark for it to start,” Bordeaux prosecutor Renaud Gaudeul told Le Monde.

“In periods of drought such as this one, all you need is a simple lighter,” fire investigator Eric Dufayet explained.

Iran will release footage of its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appearing in public, a senior paramilitary commander said on Sunday, in an apparent effort to dispel rumors about his health.

Khamenei has not been seen in public since March, when he was chosen to succeed his father, Ali Khamenei, who was killed on February 28 during the first wave of US-Israeli strikes on Tehran. His prolonged absence has fueled speculation that he was disfigured or incapacitated by the same strike that killed his father, or that he too had been killed.

Iranian authorities, however, have insisted that Khamenei is actively participating in political and military decision-making.

“The images and documentary evidence that will be released in the future showing the esteemed leader and commander-in-chief, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, among the people, in the streets and neighborhoods, and in meetings with commanders of the Armed Forces, will once again disgrace the enemies and ill-wishers of the Iranian nation,” he said.

Qoraishi urged the public to remain vigilant, warning that “the enemy seeks to sow discord among revolutionary forces and the religious faithful.”

On Sunday, Iranian media released a rare, undated 12-second video showing Khamenei sitting in a circle with officials. However, some media outlets outside Iran suggested that it had been recorded before the war.

Iran releases video of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. pic.twitter.com/52kmfbmbjU

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) August 9, 2026

The US and Israel carried out targeted strikes against multiple Iranian political and military leaders during the war, including powerful security chief Ali Larijani, who was killed on March 17. Tehran may be limiting Khamenei’s public appearances for security reasons. US President Donald Trump has labeled Iran’s leaders “scumbags” and suggested that he may target more officials if Tehran does not accept his terms.

Former US President Joe Biden’s cancer has worsened, spreading to his bones, his son Hunter said in a wide-ranging interview with BBC Newsnight aired on Saturday.

Biden’s team revealed in May 2025, four months after he left office following Donald Trump’s election victory over his handpicked successor, Kamala Harris, that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. His spokesperson said at the time that the disease appeared to be “hormone-sensitive,” offering hope that it could be effectively treated. Biden celebrated his 83rd birthday in November.

Speaking to the BBC’s Paddy O’Donnell, an emotional Hunter Biden said it was “tough” for him to hear the news about his father’s condition.

“Cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” Biden said. “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating, in many respects.”

Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, told SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa podcast on Wednesday that the former president was undergoing difficult treatment. “Unfortunately for Joe, it metastasized to his bones, which means that he will forever live with cancer,” she said.

Biden’s physical and mental health became one of the central issues of the 2024 reelection campaign, as opponents and some allies argued that he was unfit to serve a second four-year term. Biden appeared frail at public events and struggled to formulate his thoughts during speeches and interviews.

He eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, his vice president, to replace him. Biden made the decision to suspend his campaign shortly after a disastrous televised debate with Trump.

Hunter Biden has been making the rounds in the media in recent months in an apparent effort to repair his public image following a series of scandals involving his personal life that also damaged his father’s reputation.

Shortly before leaving office, Joe Biden pardoned Hunter, a former drug addict, for any federal offenses he committed or may have committed between January 1, 2014 and December 1, 2024. The younger Biden had previously been convicted on three federal gun charges and pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges. The president argued at the time that his son had been politically targeted.

Speaking to the BBC, Hunter Biden acknowledged that the pardon was “not good” for his father’s legacy.

Moscow will not settle for “freezing” the Ukraine conflict without addressing its origins and resolving its underlying causes, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin has said.

Russia’s demands include Ukraine abandoning its plans to join NATO and adopting neutral status, accepting restrictions on its armed forces, and formally recognizing Crimea and four former Ukrainian regions as Russian territory. Crimea voted to join Russia shortly after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev, and the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson did the same in September 2022.

“As Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said, there can be no ‘freeze’ of the conflict without addressing the root causes of the crisis,” Galuzin told TASS in an interview published on Monday. He added that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has “completely lost touch with reality” and is seeking to further escalate the conflict.

Putin has said that Russia was forced to send troops into Ukraine to protect civilians in the largely Russian-speaking Donbass. Moscow also views Ukraine’s military cooperation with NATO members as a major security threat.

Last year, Moscow presented conditions for a ceasefire along the current front line, including the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from parts of Russian territory they control, an end to mobilization, and an end to Western military aid to Ukraine. Putin argued that otherwise Ukraine would use a pause in the fighting to regroup and replenish its military. Zelensky rejected Russia’s terms and ruled out recognizing the country’s new borders.

Russian officials have repeatedly accused the West of sabotaging the 2022 Istanbul peace talks, which Moscow says could have ended the conflict after just several weeks of fighting.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi-backed government forces in the Yemeni port city of Mokha on Sunday, describing the attack as a tit-for-tat response to the kingdom’s “aggression.”

Fighting in civil war-torn Yemen intensified last week, prompting fears of further disruptions to global energy supplies in the wake of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the US war with Iran.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the latest barrage came in response to the “mobilization” of government troops in Mokha and what he described as the continuing “unjust siege” of Yemen by the Saudis. Yemeni government-aligned media reported that at least seven civilians were killed and around 35 injured.

مشاهد إطلاق عدد من الصواريخ الباليستية والطائرات المسيرة على تحشيدات العدو السعودي ومخازن أسلحته في المخا pic.twitter.com/L3aYNsPvhj

— الإعلام الحربي اليمني (@MMY1444) August 9, 2026

The Houthis launched coordinated attacks on government troops on Thursday, killing or wounding up to 60 soldiers, according to AFP. The group also declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and targeted ships in and around the Red Sea.

Additional footage showing smoke rising from weapons depots belonging to Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) forces at Mokha (Mukha) Port following missile and drone strikes by Ansar Allah (Houthis). https://t.co/jJP5cpYhpA pic.twitter.com/Jp6worWSHb

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) August 9, 2026

Additional footage showing plumes of smoke rising from Yemen’s Mukha Port after a shipment of military equipment was struck. https://t.co/jJP5cpYhpA pic.twitter.com/tOv3hMM1OS

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) August 9, 2026

The Saudi Energy Ministry confirmed on Sunday that a fire broke out following a strike on a facility belonging to state oil company Aramco in the kingdom’s southern Jazan province. In a statement to RT, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti demanded that Riyadh end “the occupation and blockade” of Yemen.

“Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia continues to act arrogantly and insists on occupying Yemen and maintaining the blockade. Therefore, we have established the equation of aggression for aggression, and blockade for blockade,” he added.

The Houthis control much of western Yemen, including the country’s capital, Sanaa. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a military intervention in support of the internationally recognized government. Fighting decreased significantly after a UN-mediated truce took effect in April 2022, although the formal agreement expired that October.

The current round of hostilities erupted on July 13, when government forces bombed a runway at Sanaa airport to prevent an Iranian plane carrying a Houthi delegation from landing. The delegation was returning from the funeral of Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed during US-Israeli strikes on Tehran.

The UN Security Council has condemned Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and commercial ships in the region, as well as “unauthorized landings of aircraft” in territory not under government control.

Twitch has banned top US streamer Zack ‘Asmongold’ Hoyt after he suggested that migrants crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta – including children – should be shot to stop the flow and avoid unrest in the area.

The controversy erupted on Monday when Asmongold reacted to a video about the crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish territory bordering Morocco. Around 50,000-60,000 people, mostly young Moroccan men, stormed the enclave’s perimeter in around a day in late July.

The influx – which amounted to around 70% of the enclave’s regular population – completely overwhelmed the authorities, leading to scenes of utter chaos. The death toll exceeded 100 people, with many drowning in the Mediterranean Sea during the crossing.

🚨BREAKING: Asmongold has been BANNED from Twitch

The ban came shortly after comments he made about the situation in Ceuta

Twitch hasn't given an official reason yet

The clip below is what allegedly got him banned.

Judge for yourself if it's ban worthy.

Source: Dexerto /… pic.twitter.com/dG42eofcVe

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 7, 2026

Commenting on the crisis, Asmongold dismissed as “emotional blackmail” the argument that harsh treatment of migrants entering with children is unacceptable.

“Well then, don’t bring your kids. If you don’t want to get shot, then don’t bring your f**king kids. It’s really simple,” he said. “I’d shoot whoever… I mean, if it’s kids, women, men, anybody – just shoot them. They’re gonna stop coming over.”

He also claimed that migrants will likely take advantage of any lax policies and use women and children as human shields. “That’s the way an animal thinks, and these people are animals. It’s just the way it is. They’re savages. Absolute f**king savages. Terrorists,” he said.

On Saturday, Asmongold released a video on YouTube explaining the controversy, in which he doubled down on his stance rather than apologizing. He argued that the scale of the crossings amounts to “a military invasion,” and that Spain has every right to “use lethal military force to repel” it. He also claimed that sparing migrants who travel with children only incentivizes traffickers to use them as “political capital.”

“I don’t think that any country has an obligation to take in migrants,” he said, adding, “I’m not sorry for saying that.”

Critics, including fellow streamer Hasan Piker, accused Asmongold of urging violence against migrant children, while supporters pointed to what they called Twitch’s inconsistent moderation record depending on the political affiliation of the speaker.

Twitch banned Asmongold in October 2024 after he suggested that Palestinians in Gaza belong to an “inferior culture,” and said he is not sympathetic to Palestinians who died during the war with Israel, though he subsequently apologized.

Asmongold, 36, rose to prominence streaming World of Warcraft before becoming one of gaming’s most-watched personalities and an outspoken commentator on politics and the culture war. He leans right, though he has not cast himself as a supporter of any particular party.

Israel has rejected US President Donald Trump’s 15-point peace plan for Gaza and will not withdraw troops from the Palestinian enclave until Hamas is completely disarmed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

The roadmap was published last month as part of efforts by the Trump-led Board of Peace to end the Gaza conflict. It calls for Hamas to relinquish control of Gaza and for its weapons to come under the authority of a Palestinian administration. The process would be linked to a phased Israeli withdrawal and independently verified before each new stage begins.

“I want to be clear: Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu said during a meeting with cabinet members.

“The IDF will not withdraw in any way until Hamas is disarmed… We are talking about complete disarmament, not a fictitious disarmament,” he said. Israel is discussing the issue with the US and will “stand firm” against provisions it finds unacceptable, Netanyahu added.

Netanyahu also reiterated that he would not allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, “neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank.”

“Gaza will finally be in the hands of a new Palestinian government that serves its PEOPLE,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Hamas said it had agreed in principle but insisted that it would not disarm until the IDF had completely withdrawn from the enclave.

The 15-point roadmap seeks to advance the unresolved elements of Trump’s original 20-point peace plan, which produced the October Israel-Hamas ceasefire but later stalled over issues including the group’s disarmament and further Israeli withdrawals.

However, continued Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,258 people in Gaza and wounded more than 4,100 since the ceasefire was announced, according to local health authorities.

Russia has maintained that the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The signing of the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan may eventually be remembered as one of the more consequential geopolitical developments to emerge from the current Middle Eastern crisis.

Signed in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the agreement establishes a remarkably clear principle of collective defense, under which an armed attack against any one of the three states is to be regarded as an attack against all. The parties have not yet disclosed how this commitment would operate in practice, what level of military assistance it would automatically trigger, or whether common command and planning mechanisms will eventually follow, but these uncertainties do little to diminish the political significance of the arrangement. For the first time, three of the most influential states of the broader Muslim world have formally connected their national security in a framework that potentially combines Saudi financial and political weight, Turkish military-industrial power, and Pakistan’s enormous armed forces and nuclear status.

Officials from the three countries have been careful to avoid portraying the agreement as the birth of an aggressive military bloc. Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz stressed that it was not directed against any particular country, while Turkish officials described the pact as purely defensive and underlined that it did not cancel Ankara’s existing obligations to other partners. Saudi Deputy Minister for Public Diplomacy Rayed Krimly went even further, rejecting the idea that Mecca represented either a sectarian military axis or the beginning of a nuclear arms race. Such statements are understandable, particularly at a moment when the region is already struggling with a war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States, yet the significance of the agreement lies less in what its signatories formally say it is directed against than in the profound transformation of the security environment that made such a treaty necessary in the first place.

There is little surprise about the emergence of this alliance. The military confrontation that followed the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28 changed not only the balance of military power in the Middle East but, importantly, the perception of security among America’s traditional partners. Iranian missiles striking Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, attacks threatening regional infrastructure, and the blockade of energy shipments exposed a basic weakness in the security model on which much of the Gulf had relied for decades. Enormous purchases of American weapons, the presence of US military bases, and long-standing political alignment with Washington had been treated almost as an insurance policy against precisely this sort of strategic vulnerability, yet when the region descended into a wider confrontation, membership in the American security system did not prevent Gulf countries from becoming direct targets or protect their economies from the consequences.

This does not mean that Riyadh is preparing to abandon Washington, nor does Turkish participation in the agreement imply an attempt to replace NATO. What is changing is the belief that one external security guarantor can remain sufficient in an increasingly unpredictable international system. The Mecca agreement represents less a break with the US than a hedge against excessive dependence upon it, and in that sense it forms part of a broader process of strategic ‘sovereignization’ in which regional states are trying to diversify their defense relationships, strengthen domestic military industries, and create arrangements that can function even when Washington’s interests do not fully coincide with their own. For the Gulf monarchies in particular, the conclusion is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid – American power remains indispensable, but American protection can no longer be regarded as unconditional or absolute.

The institutional groundwork had already been laid. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan concluded a mutual defense pact last year, while their military relationship has subsequently acquired a much more tangible character through Pakistani deployments, fighter aircraft, drones, and air-defence capabilities in the kingdom. At the same time, Saudi-Turkish defense ties have expanded rapidly, Riyadh has become an important purchaser of Turkish drones, and Ankara and Islamabad have spent years developing military cooperation through training, naval exchanges, and defence-industrial projects. What happened in Mecca is the political consolidation of relationships that were already developing beneath the surface.

This is also why Egypt should be watched closely. Over the past year, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan, and Egypt have increasingly coordinated their positions on regional security, while the gradual reconciliation between Ankara and Cairo has removed one of the principal political obstacles to a broader alignment among the major Sunni powers. Egyptian accession is by no means inevitable, but strategically it would make considerable sense, since Cairo would add the largest Arab population, one of the region’s most substantial armed forces, and control over the Suez Canal to an already formidable combination of Saudi capital, Turkish military technology, and Pakistani strategic capabilities. If that happened, the expression ‘Middle Eastern NATO’, often used rather loosely in previous decades, would begin to describe something much more concrete.

The most important question, however, concerns the state against which this emerging system of deterrence may actually matter most. The immediate context is obviously the confrontation with Iran, yet treating the Mecca agreement primarily as an anti-Iranian coalition would miss a deeper transformation taking place across the region. Israel’s wars and military operations since October 2023 have extended from Gaza into Lebanon, Syria and Iran, while the repeated expansion of the geographical boundaries within which Israel has been prepared to employ force has created a growing concern among regional capitals that the previous system of restraints has effectively collapsed. The problem from Riyadh’s or Ankara’s perspective is not simply one particular Israeli operation but the environment in which a single regional power increasingly appears willing and able to strike across multiple neighboring states without facing an organized regional counterweight.

The Mecca framework may be more significant for Israel than for Iran. As RUSI researcher Burcu Ozcelik noted in comments cited by Reuters, the agreement can be understood as an attempt to create deterrence against Israel while simultaneously counterbalancing Iranian influence, rather than as preparation for a military confrontation with Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan have no obvious interest in beginning another war with Israel, but they do have an interest in restoring limits to unilateral military action. A bloc that combines Turkish military capabilities and defense production, Saudi financial resources, and Pakistani strategic depth would not need to fight Israel in order to alter its calculations; its political value would lie in making the potential consequences of further regional escalation less predictable and therefore more costly.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the agreement, but silence should not be confused with indifference, since Israeli planners can hardly ignore the emerging collective-defence structure linking Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and nuclear-armed Pakistan. Israel has long benefited from a fragmented strategic environment in which Arab and Muslim states possessed substantial military capabilities but remained divided by rivalries, incompatible alliances, and competing relationships with Washington. A gradual reduction of those divisions changes the strategic equation even before any common military headquarters, integrated air-defence network, or joint planning system appears.

Iran occupies a more ambiguous position in this architecture and may ultimately become either one of its objects of deterrence or one of its participants. Tehran’s ability to inflict serious costs on US forces and partners has undoubtedly strengthened its regional standing, and Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan would have little interest in replacing excessive dependence on Washington with acquiescence to Iranian regional predominance. Should Iranian confidence evolve into an attempt to establish a more explicit hegemony over the Gulf or the wider Middle East, the Mecca framework could become a natural balancing mechanism. Yet the opposite scenario is equally possible, because an increasingly inclusive regional security structure might eventually offer Iran a place within a broader system of mutual guarantees, thereby transforming the alliance from a bloc designed to contain particular adversaries into the foundation of a regional balance in which no single power – Israeli, Iranian, or otherwise – could dominate the others.

There is another dimension to this process that may become increasingly important, particularly if the Mecca framework expands. Israel already participates in I2U2 alongside India, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, and although I2U2 itself is not a military alliance and has concentrated primarily on investment, technology, energy, food security, and infrastructure, it exists alongside increasingly dense strategic and defense relationships connecting the same states. India has built an exceptionally close defense partnership with Israel, while New Delhi and Abu Dhabi have also deepened military and technological cooperation, creating the outline of another network whose strategic importance could grow as the Middle Eastern order becomes more fragmented.

It would nevertheless be premature to draw a neat dividing line with Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan on one side and Israel, India, and the UAE on the other. The UAE illustrates why the emerging order is unlikely to resemble the rigid bloc politics of the twentieth century, since Abu Dhabi maintains close relations with Israel and India while simultaneously coordinating with Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, and Pakistan on a range of regional questions and repeatedly expressing positions critical of Israeli actions. India presents a similar case, as its strategic relationship with Israel coexists with increasingly important economic, energy, and political ties with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the wider Gulf. Rather than two mutually exclusive military camps, the region may therefore be moving toward a much more complicated structure of overlapping alignments in which states cooperate in one sphere, compete in another, and deliberately avoid placing all their strategic dependence on a single partner.

That very ambiguity is one of the defining features of the emerging multipolar order. Saudi Arabia can maintain extensive security links with the US while purchasing Turkish military technology and building a defense pact with Pakistan; Türkiye can remain inside NATO while creating independent security mechanisms with non-NATO states; India can deepen its strategic partnership with Israel without treating Saudi Arabia as an adversary; and the UAE can cooperate with Israel while simultaneously trying to preserve stable relations with Iran. The significance of Mecca lies not in creating a new binary confrontation but in accelerating the erosion of an older system in which regional states were expected to organize themselves primarily around the geopolitical preferences of outside powers.

For Russia and China, such a transformation naturally creates opportunities. Countries pursuing greater strategic autonomy are likely to diversify military procurement, technological partnerships, investment flows, and diplomatic relationships, and Moscow retains competitive capabilities in fields such as air defense, aviation, missile technologies, and electronic warfare that remain highly relevant to the security concerns of the new grouping. Beijing, meanwhile, possesses the economic resources and political influence to support regional arrangements that reduce the dependence of Middle Eastern states on any single Western center. Neither Russia nor China needs these countries to ‘change sides’; the essential feature of the new environment is precisely that increasingly powerful states no longer believe they should have to choose only one.

For decades, successive American administrations entertained various versions of a ‘Middle Eastern NATO’, imagining a network of US partners capable of pooling military resources, containing Iran, defending strategic infrastructure, and ultimately reinforcing an American-led regional order. The concept repeatedly failed because the states expected to participate in it disagreed over threats, distrusted one another, and remained comfortable relying on Washington as the ultimate guarantor of their security.

Now something remarkably similar is beginning to emerge, but under completely different political conditions and for very different reasons. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan are not acting because Washington has successfully integrated them into a new American architecture, but because the instability of recent years has persuaded them that no external power, including the US, should remain the sole foundation of their security. The alliance is therefore a product not of American strategic dominance but of its declining exclusivity, and its future expansion could produce a system in which Washington remains important without retaining the ability to define automatically who the region’s enemies and partners must be.

For the Middle East itself, this development could ultimately prove stabilizing if it evolves toward an inclusive balance rather than another hostile bloc. The region has spent decades trapped between external interventions, unresolved interstate disputes, ideological confrontation, and security arrangements designed largely outside it, while genuine stability can only emerge when the principal regional powers develop mechanisms that make escalation costly for everyone and compromise preferable to permanent confrontation. A system capable of constraining Israeli unilateralism without seeking Israel’s destruction, limiting Iranian ambitions without attempting to isolate Iran permanently, and reducing Arab and Turkish dependence on outside military patrons would represent something the Middle East has rarely possessed – a security order produced primarily by the region itself.

The American umbrella has not gone away, nor will US power vanish from the Middle East, but the assumption that every meaningful regional security structure must ultimately be built around Washington is beginning to disappear. The ‘Middle Eastern NATO’ that American strategists once imagined may indeed be taking shape, only now it is being designed by regional powers themselves, according to their own perception of threats and potentially with the capacity to restrain not only Iran but also America’s closest regional ally.

The Russian Defense Ministry released footage on Sunday showing drone operators disrupting a Ukrainian troop rotation in a key sector of the front line in the northern part of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

The action took place in the Krasny Liman sector, where Russian forces are conducting operations against the remaining Ukrainian troops, according to the military. Krasny Liman is around 17 km northeast of Slavyansk, which, along with Kramatorsk, makes up Ukraine’s principal remaining defensive hub in Donbass.

“FPV drone operators from the West group of forces detected and disrupted a rotation of Ukrainian Armed Forces units in the Krasny Liman sector,” the Russian Defense Ministry said. “Enemy personnel were eliminated by precision strikes.”

On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it liberated two more villages near Kramatorsk: Vasyutinskoe, to the east to the fortress city, and Toretskoe, to its southwest. The advances put Russian forces closer to the stronghold from two directions, with Toretskoe located around 15 km from the stronghold’s outskirts.

All the residents of the post-Soviet space are familiar with the ‘90s phenomenon’. After the collapse of the USSR, the lives of hundreds of millions of people changed suddenly and irrevocably. Everyone faced adversity, which came in all shapes and forms. Among other things, those turbulent times were marked by a mad wave of sectarianism. 

From Komsomol member to sect leader

“To all worlds and spaces! The Mother of the World Ascends to Her Throne! The Mother Of The World Has Performed An Epochal Transformation Of Consciousness: The Light Is The Mother! Absolute LOVE Is Light!” 

The above is a message from Marina Mamonova, the leader of the YUSMALOS White Brotherhood sect. She was born in Donetsk in 1960, graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute as a journalist, worked for the Komsomol district committee, then was employed in a local newspaper and on the radio station of a Donetsk enterprise. Marina joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Union of Journalists. She got married, took her husband’s last name – Tsvigun – and gave birth to her first and only child, a boy named Vitaly.

Her life as a socially-active Soviet citizen abruptly changed in 1990. Tsvigun had many abortions and, according to various accounts, during her seventh or tenth abortion experienced clinical death.  According to Tsvigun’s own account, her soul left her body, ascended to heaven and took on a ‘divine soul’.

As Marina herself told the story, “After three and a half hours, the Soul of the Mother of the World Returned to the lifeless body.” Her first words were: “I am the Messiah!” Soon, Marina became the leader of one of the most famous sects of the post-Soviet space, the White Brotherhood. 

The creation of the White Brotherhood and its further activities are closely tied to another person, Yuri Krivonogov. He was older than Marina; he was born on May 15, 1945 in Voronezh Region. As an adult, Krivonogov moved to Ukraine and received a Ph.D. in technology in Kharkov.

Alexander Dvorkin – the renowned Russian researcher who studied sectarianism, notes that Krivonogov worked at the Kiev Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry, but eventually decided to become a preacher and missionary. According to some reports, he had cooperated with the KGB for a long time. In the 1980s, the democratization process, known as “perestroika”, began in the USSR.

Krivonogov ceased his scientific activities and became associated with the Krishnaites. Then, he broke ties with them and founded the Atma Soul Institute. We know little about the activities of this institute, but it had its own publishing house. Judging by the titles of the published literature, it specialized in the Vedas, human bioenergetic capabilities, advanced yoga, and messages from outer space. The founder of the institute traveled across Ukraine giving lectures. At one of those lectures, he met Marina Tsvigun. 

Tsvigun handed the lecturer a note in which she told him that she had experienced reincarnation and had become “living God”. This is how their partnership started. Soon, they got married. Marina left her husband and son, and became the central figure in the White Brotherhood sect, calling herself Maria Devi Khristos. Yuri Krivonogov chose the name John Swami. Later, they were joined by a third leader, Vitaly Kovalchuk, who also took on a new name – John Peter II.

“The great mother Maat is the mother of light, truth, the primordial structure of the universe, impeccable balance, the highest standard of order. And man is ideally her small universe. All [human] ‘shells’ holographically contain complete information about the universe.”  This is how Marina Tsvigun described Maria Devi Khristos. 

The White Brotherhood rapidly gained popularity in post-Soviet countries. People who had lived their whole lives in an anti-religious society thirsted for religion and became easy bait for sects and pseudo-religious movements, which sprang up like mushrooms after the rain.

The White Brotherhood  

It is difficult to give a detailed description of the sect’s activities or count the number of its members. The missionary department of the Russian Orthodox Church reports that in Ukraine alone, the cult had 3,200 members. Members of the ‘brotherhood’ actively recruited people through martial arts schools, yoga and spiritual practice centers.

A former member of the brotherhood, Sergei Ovchinnikov, recounted how he got into the sect. People in white robes approached him on the street, handed out leaflets and asked him to make a donation. He was offered a job and was invited to come to Marina Tsvigun ‘for approval’. Marina told him about the approaching Last Judgment, and the need to repent, abandon friends and relatives and devote his entire life to the brotherhood. According to Sergei, he was subjected to hypnosis. 

The White Brotherhood distributed a message called “The Yusmalos program for saving the Earth.” It described the presence of the “fohata” – energy of the living God which fills believers and destroys all demonic energy. The sect claimed that the people who recognized Maria Devi Khristos as the savior of the human race would receive a dose of the fohata, while the rest would die from the imminent fohatic radiation. They also claimed that after the Last Judgment, the Golden Age will come, but only 144 thousand believers will enter it – the Yusmalians. One of the distributed leaflets contained the following text:

“My children! You will be tortured and your heads will be cut off! But the earth needs this blood! Maria Devi and I will be the last to ‘leave’. Our corpses will lie on the street for three days. Then we will rise from the dead and ascend. The transformation of the Earth will begin.”

The recruitment of new members was organized ahead of a key event that took place in Kiev in 1993. After this event, the White Brotherhood became world famous, but the founders themselves ended up in damp prison cells.

According to eyewitness accounts, the “initiation rite” happened in various ways. For example, one of the older brothers put his hand on the initiate’s forehead, stared into his eyes, whispered some words and sprinkled him with water from a flask.

V. Sparov, a researcher who studied sects, described the daily schedule of the White Brotherhood – they woke up early, started the day with prayer, then preached and distributed their messages until the evening, held an evening “service,” had dinner, talked about religion, listened to Maria Devi’s speeches and then went to bed. 

The unsuccessful self-immolation in Kiev

On November 10, Maria Tsvigun and Yuri Krivonogov, along with dozens of adherents of the White Brotherhood, gathered on the square near Saint Sophia Cathedral in the capital of Ukraine. They entered the cathedral, pretending to be tourists, and proceeded to the altar. They turned off the security alarms and cut the telephone wires. Hundreds of believers flocked to the square. 

On this day, the White Brotherhood was supposed to sacrifice Maria and, dousing themselves with gasoline, perform a ritual of self-immolation. Three days later, Maria was supposed to rise from the dead and judge the world.

Fortunately, the Ukrainian police were warned in advance. On this day, the arrests of the members of the brotherhood started. The police officers who arrived at the cathedral tried to enter it, but were knocked out with fire extinguishers. The Berkut special forces unit arrived only half an hour later (the ritual still had not been performed by that time, which makes us wonder whether it was supposed to take place at all). All this resulted in fights and mass detentions. The police detained 616 people, most of whom were later released. The leaders of the sect were charged, and the trial began. 

A criminal court instead of the Last Judgment

The investigation was conducted for a long time. The leaders of the sect were only sentenced to imprisonment in 1996. Marina Tsvigun was sentenced to four years in prison under the following articles of the criminal code: “Seizure of state or public buildings or structures”, “Encroachment on the health of citizens under the guise of religious rites”, and “Intentional bodily injury”. By the same court verdict, Vitaly Kovalchuk was sentenced to six years in a maximum security prison and Yuri Krivonogov was sentenced to seven years in a maximum security prison. 

The investigation revealed a lot of information about the brotherhood’s activities. Viktor Shokin, who went on to become the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, was in charge of the case. He said that there was a strict hierarchy within the organization. All members were divided into groups of five. In each group, there was a senior member who delivered information about the other members to Tsvigun and Krivonogov.

After the arrest, Marina refused to cooperate with the police, called herself Maria Devi Khristos, signed the interrogation protocols with that name, called the investigators antichrists and promised to subject them to heavenly punishments.

Krivonogov passed on messages to Tsvigun and encouraged her to cooperate with the investigation, and during a personal meeting with her fell on his knees and started apologizing. He claimed that she was the leader of the brotherhood, ‘humbly’ acknowledging that he was only second-in-command. In fact, it was he who led and managed the organization.

A new life

Tsvigun was released from prison in 1997, and Krivonogov was freed in 2000. At that time, some members of the White Brotherhood were still waiting for the release of their leaders. The sect members continued their illegal activities and in late 1998, ten of them attempted to register the organization with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, but their petition was declined. Krivonogov and Tsvigun decided to start a new life, but in different ways. Krivonogov didn’t want to be involved in the brotherhood anymore and said that he wanted to forget about it. Marina, however, chose a different path.

Her son, Vitaly, said that Krivonogov took his mother away from the family under hypnosis and destroyed their family. When the founder of the sect was released from prison, Vitaly spat in his face. He said that Marina decided to continue her activities after being released from prison and told her son that she did not belong to herself. There is another notable episode in Vitaly’s account. He said that in 1993, an unknown man stabbed him because he thought that Marina would attend her son’s funeral and the man would then be able to get through to her.  

Initially, after her release, Marina continued her activities in Ukraine, but in 2006 she moved to Moscow. There, she acquired a new pseudonym – Victoria Preobrazhenskaya, under which she publishes poetry, writes music, and makes public appeals.

In 2011, 14 years after her release from prison, she was interviewed by Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Marina said that she was proud to have predicted mass debauchery, globalization, the world government, microchipping, and the general disintegration of the world back in the 1990s.  Marina calls herself a “mother” to her students and a “light in the dark” to her followers.  “I draw my Ideas from above – from the Holy Spirit, I tell people what I know, I testify about the Higher Spiritual World from which I came…” Maria said in an interview.

YUSMALOS

Marina Tsvigun continues her activities to this day. The organization, which she now heads alone, is called YUSMALOS. In Russian, this abbreviation is made up from the names of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Moon, Orion, and Sirius. She continues to distribute the “Yusmalos program for saving the Earth.” 

The sect’s teaching has ten postulates – the same as the number of Christian commandments. Here are a few of them:

1. Love the Mother of Light with all your heart, soul and consciousness!

2. Love Humanity with the Love of the Mother of Light!

6. Stop stealing from man, from Nature, in the Atmosphere, in the Universe!

7. Have pity on those who offend and hate you and forgive them!

8. Marriage bonds without Love and Harmony are outside the Kon. Mental fornication is a spiritual fall.

9. Mercifully do good to the world around you!

The organization’s ‘commandments’ do not contradict the commandments of Moses. They encourage love for one’s neighbor, mercy, and compassion. However, they are centered not on God but on the personality of Maria Tsvigun, and they place much more emphasis on harmony with the surrounding world. 

Tsvigun is interested not only in spiritual questions, but also likes to comment on political events and socially-relevant topics. The organization’s site publishes many articles, and their content is usually easy to guess from the title. In the article titled “Preparing a concentration camp for the Slavs” Marina writes about the civil war in Donbass, where brother rises against brother. She claims that neither Russia nor Ukraine are sovereign nations and their actions are determined by the world government. The actions of the Ukrainian leader are supposedly influenced by the International Monetary Fund, the chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab, and the Jewish spiritual leader Rebbe Schneerson.

Tsvigun calls Klaus Schwab the ideologue of the secret world government and ‘exposes’ his plans to microchip the world’s population. She also claims that this cabal believes Ukraine is destined to play the role of a New Israel, which will be created after the white Slavic population is annihilated. 

Some of her other articles are titled: “The EU is a stranglehold for the Slavs, or Armageddon…”, “Victory is ours, Rus'!”, “Stop being afraid of reptiles! Kick them out of Russia!” Most of Tsvigun’s articles explore popular social themes. Her rhetoric is patriotic, and her articles focus on topics that are popular in Russian society: the vaccination issue and the emergence of global viruses, digitalization, microchipping and the seal of the Antichrist, and the military conflict in Ukraine. Most people consider her stories about reptilian humanoids a joke, however the meme about the war between the ancient Rus’ people and lizards is quite popular on social media. 

For most people, Tsvigun’s rhetoric is incomprehensible, crazy, and perhaps funny. It is difficult to say what drives her activity and uncompromising attitude – perhaps faith in her exclusivity and divine essence, or maybe the business just brings good money. 

It is very difficult to estimate the number of YUSMALOS members who believe in the ‘divinity’ of Maria Devi Khristos, or to say how many fans Victoria Preobrazhenskaya has. Her Telegram channel has 600 subscribers, and on YouTube, she has almost 15,000 subscribers. The organization is present on all popular social media platforms and produces hundreds of video sermons.

The latest migration crisis in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta offers a revealing glimpse into the European Union’s changing relationship with the world beyond its borders. At the same time, it shows just how different today’s politics are from the future many imagined only a generation ago.

On July 30, around 60,000 illegal migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta and, within hours, almost all of them had returned home. Such an episode would have been almost impossible to imagine in any previous era, but it belongs entirely to the political realities of our own time.

Perhaps most apparent is that none of the parties involved emerges with much moral authority and nor do their actions resemble what we traditionally associate with responsible statecraft.

Morocco, meanwhile, demonstrated that migration has become an effective diplomatic tool. By allowing thousands of people to cross into Ceuta, King Mohammed VI sent Madrid a clear political signal over wider disagreements in North Africa while simultaneously strengthening Rabat’s hand in negotiations over European financial support for migration control.

Morocco has long acted as EU’s southern gatekeeper and the latest episode serves as a reminder that this role comes with leverage, so Rabat expects Spain and the European Union to pay generously for acting as a filter against migration from Africa towards what former Eurocrat Josep Borrell once famously described as Europe’s “garden.”

It is equally plausible that Morocco sought to relieve some domestic social pressure by allowing frustrated citizens to leave, even if only temporarily. thus exporting internal discontent has become another instrument of statecraft. The EU response was no less revealing as Spain’s EU partners reacted predictably, with some calling for temporary restrictions on Spain’s participation in the Schengen free movement area while reinforcing their own borders. Brussels, meanwhile, largely left Madrid to deal with the problem itself.

Migration, once regarded as an extraordinary humanitarian emergency, has become an ordinary feature of EU politics and it now shapes domestic debates, bilateral relations, and wider EU policy-making simultaneously. One can only imagine the reaction had Morocco been a BRICS member. The same commentators who rarely expect the EU to solve its own problems would no doubt have demanded to know why BRICS had failed to intervene.

Even in its strongest years, it was hardly a secret that the EU frequently traded access to its market and visa-free travel for political and economic concessions. What’s more obvious today is that migration itself has become an accepted instrument of political bargaining, despite its obvious implications for public security and social cohesion, as questions directly affecting the safety and stability of European societies have become tools of domestic politics and international negotiation.

Second, Ceuta illustrates how dramatically our understanding of statecraft has changed because not so long ago, rulers of countries such as Morocco or Turkey would probably have considered it beneath the dignity of the state to manipulate migration flows for political or financial advantage, particularly when the migrants involved were overwhelmingly their own citizens.

Today, such behavior is increasingly regarded as normal diplomacy, so this inevitably raises broader questions about what distinguishes a genuine state pursuing the public interest from a territory administered primarily for the benefit of its ruling elite.

That stability shouldn’t be taken for granted, given it rests on years of patient diplomacy, mutual respect, and recognition of shared interests and it’s not an accident but an achievement, and one that requires constant attention.

The lesson from Ceuta is clear: stable relations between neighbors cannot rely solely on legal agreements or financial incentives. They require trust and, without it, migration ceases to be a humanitarian issue and becomes simply another instrument of geopolitical leverage. The EU’s southern frontier now offers a vivid demonstration of precisely that reality.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.

The EU cannot fast-track Ukraine’s membership bid as allowing such a large and corrupt country into the bloc would make a “mockery of the entire project,” a senior diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Financial Times for an article published on Friday.

Kiev was granted EU candidate status soon after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, and Vladimir Zelensky has increasingly demanded that that the process be fast-tracked, potentially allowing Ukraine to join as early as 2027. However, multiple EU leaders have ruled out so fast an accession, with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggesting an associate membership for Ukraine – an idea Zelensky has rejected.

“You can’t bring a country of 40 million people that’s at 104 on the global corruption list into the EU. It would make a mockery of the entire project,” the FT cited the EU diplomat as saying.

Ukraine’s “biggest impact on the enlargement debate, by far, is making it clear just how unprepared we are for new members,” the FT cited the diplomat as saying.

Ukraine has seen several major corruption scandals of late. Last November, the country's Western-backed national anti-graft agencies charged Zelensky’s longtime business associate Timur Mindich with embezzling around $100 million from the country’s nuclear operator Energoatom. Two ministers and the Ukrainian leader’s chief of staff were ousted in the aftermath.

“Corruption in Ukraine has become a byword. It permeates the entire Ukrainian power structure, including Zelensky’s inner circle and Zelensky himself,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this year.

Meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians are dying in “meat-grinder assaults” for “Mindich’s gold-plated toilets” and “luxury jewelry” for Zelensky’s wife Olena, she said.

The Pentagon is pressing US arms makers to accelerate production as the ongoing war with Iran depletes critical weapons stockpiles, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing a Department of War memo to industry leaders.

The memo, written by Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg and reportedly sent earlier this week, gives manufacturers 21 days to propose “significantly faster” and “more aggressive” delivery schedules, expanded production capacity, or both.

“Years-long development cycles are not acceptable,” Feinberg wrote. “We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now.”

The memo identifies several critical programs, including next-generation air-defense equipment, surface-to-air missile systems, satellite communications, and space-based missile tracking. Feinberg also called on industry leaders to propose investments and facility expansions to support “higher volume, sustained orders.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed to the media on Saturday that the memo is real and will help shape the fiscal 2028 budget, calling it “consistent with our ongoing push to rebuild the defense industrial base.”

While Parnell said the effort is part of a broader modernization drive predating the Iran war, it comes after months of fighting that have depleted already diminished US munitions stocks.

US President Donald Trump has vehemently denied any shortages, accusing the media of spreading misinformation. Earlier this week, he insisted on Truth Social that the US has “massive amounts” of weaponry. In later comments to reporters, he acknowledged that supplies of some unspecified systems are “a little bit tighter,” but maintained that stockpiles remain “literally massive,” with replacements arriving daily. Nevertheless, Trump reiterated that he would not give Patriots to Ukraine, which has long demanded more of the systems, saying “we want missiles too.”

The Pentagon has spent recent months trying to turn up the production dial. Last week, it announced a framework agreement with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to boost output of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and THAAD missiles. A similar deal has been agreed with RTX’s Raytheon to increase production of Tomahawk and several other missile systems. In May, the Pentagon also struck agreements with Anduril, Castelion, CoAspire, Leidos, and Zone 5 to expand strike capabilities and procure lower-cost missiles.

However, experts say the framework agreements are legally non-binding and hinge on congressional funding, specifically the proposed $1.15 trillion defense bill that remains deadlocked after Senate Democrats blocked it in mid-July, opposing the massive spending increase and Trump’s military action against Iran without congressional approval.

US-Iran peace efforts remain stalled after a Pakistan-brokered interim agreement reached in mid-June quickly unraveled amid renewed skirmishes and tanker attacks, with both sides trading blame for violations.

On Saturday, Iran laid out new conditions for talks, demanding Washington lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports, withdraw forces “from the area surrounding Iran,” remove “unjust and illegal” sanctions, release frozen Iranian assets, and pay compensation before negotiations can resume.

A German journalist asked Vladimir Zelensky at a press conference in Belgrade how Europeans could help Kiev “kill more Russians,” prompting Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to raise his eyebrows in apparent disbelief.

The provocative question came from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Michael Martens during a joint press conference following Zelensky’s talks with Vucic on Saturday.

“Can you tell us Europeans what can we concretely do to help you to kill more Russians?” Martens asked. He hastily added he meant “more Russian soldiers, of course,” before asking whether the two leaders had discussed military cooperation.

Footage shows Vucic raising his eyebrows in apparent disbelief as he hears the question.

Clips of the exchange quickly went viral on social media, triggering a wave of angry reactions. Some users denounced the wording as offensive and accused Martens of “incitement to hatred.” Others branded him a “Nazi,” noting that his grandfather served as an officer on a Wehrmacht command staff during World War II – a fact that Martens himself has acknowledged.

Although Martens’ question was directed at Zelensky, Vucic answered first.

“We did not discuss military cooperation today,” the Serbian president said. “What happens when the war ends is another matter. And speaking about killing, I hope all killing will end.”

Zelensky, meanwhile, used the question to reiterate his demands that Kiev’s Western backers send more money and slap more sanctions on Moscow.

Martens’ question comes amid growing Russophobia in the West, ranging from anti-Russian rhetoric by politicians, journalists and other public figures to restrictions on Russian media, culture, and language and the destruction of Soviet memorials.

Just this week, Polish President Karol Nawrocki made his own remarks about killing Russians, telling a rally in Warsaw that helping Ukraine do so was in Poland’s strategic interest. “Wherever the Moskal is being fought, Poland helps,” he said, using a historic derogatory term for Russians.

AI could eventually gain unprecedented insight into people’s lives, internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has warned. He said the technology could bring together vast amounts of personal information, allowing AI systems to build highly detailed profiles of individuals.

The technology could dramatically expand the reach of US surveillance, according to Dotcom. He added that AI systems could gain access to government databases containing vast amounts of information about citizens.

“AI is very dangerous because it will get access to the US database,” the founder of the Megaupload file sharing service said in an interview with Tucker Carlson released on Friday. “So the AI will know everything about everybody.”

Asked if there is any way to stop this from happening, Dotcom said, “Don’t have AI. Don’t have internet. It’s the only way.”

The comments came during a discussion about online privacy and government surveillance. He went on to say that the US government operates massive surveillance programs capable of capturing phone calls, video calls, and other online activity.

Asked why the US is building so many data centers, Dotcom claimed that the US is already collecting around 10 petabytes of data a day, including communications.

“All communications, everything,” he said.

Dotcom also rejected the idea that the US has an overwhelming lead in the AI sector, saying China is “not far behind” and calling claims to the contrary propaganda.

The development of AI and expansion of data-center infrastructure have fueled debates over the amount of personal information available to governments and tech companies and the potential use of AI to analyze it at scale.

Ukraine’s practice of awarding drone operators points for killing Russian soldiers is “macabre” and disturbing, Britain’s most senior military officer, Richard Knighton, has said.

Knighton, the UK chief of the Defense Staff, made the remarks in an essay for Heywood Quarterly published on Tuesday, after he visited a Ukrainian drone unit operating near the Donbass city of Krasnoarmeysk (known as Pokrovsk in Ukraine), which was liberated by Russia in December 2025.

He described the evolution of modern warfare as “dizzying,” pointing to the Ukrainian military’s use of drone-camera feeds that are analyzed on screens and converted into kill scores.

In 2025, Fedorov said a light FPV drone would start at two points, and a heavier Vampire model would cost 43 points. The system evaluates one Russian soldier’s life at just 12 points – up from four earlier. Many of the points are awarded based on drone footage showing the last moments of Russian soldiers’ lives.

The system also features a top kill list, although it registers drone units rather than individual drone operators. In January, Fedorov awarded the top performers in a ceremony resembling an e-sports tournament.

Former Ukrainian prosecutor Gynduz Mamedov warned that the new system could dehumanize drone operators. “We want our people to come back from the war as human beings, not as killing machines,” he said, as cited by Time.

Russian officials have accused Kiev of dehumanizing Russian soldiers and civilians, citing cases of torture and abuse. Senior Ukrainian officials have also made statements calling for Russians to be killed.

A state of emergency was declared in the Canadian province of British Columbia on Saturday as thousands of people were forced to flee a fast-moving wildfire that nearly doubled in size overnight.

The Bald Range wildfire was burning out of control, prompting evacuation orders in Summerland, Peachland and other communities west of Okanagan Lake in southern British Columbia. First reported on Friday west of Summerland, the fire, fanned by strong winds and dry vegetation, raced about 15km toward the lake within hours, growing to more than 100 sq. km.

Local officials said the blaze had triggered the largest evacuation event in British Columbia so far this summer, with more than 20,000 people across the province forced to leave their homes.

Videos circulating online showed flames burning alongside a highway and structures engulfed in fire, while aircraft could be seen circling a towering column of smoke above forests near Summerland as crews battled the blaze from the air. Other footage showed thick smoke billowing over hillsides near residential areas and long lines of traffic as residents fled the area.

British Columbia Premier David Eby has told journalists the fire had caused significant property losses and that some residents had become trapped as the flames advanced rapidly.

Fire behavior specialist Ben Bergin said the area had experienced three days of exceptionally hot and dry weather under a high-pressure system that had also kept smoke close to the ground.

Bergin added that stronger winds were expected to exacerbate fire conditions, with winds shifting to the west and pushing the fire eastward. He added that containment measures and a fuel break were already in place on the eastern side of the blaze.

Ground crews, structural protection units, helicopters, and heavy air-tankers were deployed to battle the fire, with the BC Wildfire Service mounting an aerial and ground response as crews worked to slow its spread, according to local officials.

Hot and dry conditions have raised the risk of further fires spreading across British Columbia. The province has issued 40 evacuation orders and 49 evacuation alerts.

Wildfires have burned about 9.9 million acres (40,000 square kilometers) across the country so far this year, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Plauen in the eastern German state of Saxony on Saturday to protest Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government, demanding its resignation and snap elections.

The demonstration was organized by the nationwide Unity for Germany / Project M1llion initiative. Saxon police put attendance at around 10,000, including activists from the right-wing Free Saxons party, which backed the rally.

“This cartel, this government must go!” a speaker told the crowd, drawing applause. Footage showed demonstrators marching through the city under a heavy police presence, chanting slogans and carrying German flags and placards reading “Merz must go!”

“[Merz] has made it even worse than his predecessors. And if he keeps going like this, then Germany will soon go dark,” one protester said.

The organizers issued an 11-point list of demands, including early elections, lower electricity and gas costs, a nationwide €29 public transport ticket and changes to healthcare policy. They also called for tougher migration policies and criticized Merz’s military spending. The chancellor recently pledged to turn the Bundeswehr into the “strongest conventional army in Europe,” citing the purported Russian threat – a notion Moscow has repeatedly ridiculed. Berlin has also agreed to raise core defense spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2029.

Merz faces plunging approval ratings amid economic stagnation, stalled domestic reforms, and friction within the governing coalition. A July ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll by Infratest Dimap found that 84% of Germans were dissatisfied with the performance of Merz and his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc. His approval rating stood at just 13% – the lowest recorded for a German chancellor since tracking began in 1997. Meanwhile, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has surged in national polls, with some surveys putting it level with or ahead of Merz’s bloc.

The ruling coalition earlier this summer announced a package of so-called “sweeping reforms” aimed at reviving the struggling economy, including modest tax cuts for low- and middle-income families, pension changes and stricter sick-leave rules.

The polling figures come just weeks before crucial regional elections in the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the AfD leads in the polls and could take control of a regional government for the first time. Amid growing public discontent, Merz’s own party has reportedly begun discussing his political future. Politico reported this week that there is increasingly open talk of a Kanzlertausch, or “chancellor swap,” in the fall, following a widely criticized government reshuffle in June.

Russian forces struck port infrastructure in Odessa and the nearby city of Chernomorsk overnight from Saturday to Sunday, hitting fuel depots and a cargo-transshipment complex used to supply Ukraine’s military, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

In a statement on Sunday, the ministry said that it continues attacking Ukraine’s military-related port infrastructure and vessels, saying that the high-precision and drone strikes overnight hit fuel dumps and warehouses in Odessa’s port, as well as similar depots in Chernomorsk.

Fuel reservoirs used by Ukraine’s armed forces were also struck near the villages of Belyary and Novye Belyary, some 27km northeast of the port in Odessa, it added.

Ukraine’s Air Force said the overnight assault on the Odessa region involved a number of Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles, Onyx anti-ship missiles, and Kh-31P anti-radar missiles, alongside 202 drones.

It claimed to have downed 174 drones and five loitering munitions, but did not report any missile interceptions. The apparent failure to down any of the Russian projectiles comes as Ukraine experiences persistent shortages of Patriot air-defense supplies.

Local media also reported widespread power and water outages in Odessa, with electric transport – trams and trolleybuses – suspended following the strikes. The attack also reportedly damaged a key road bridge over the Dniester near the town of Mayaky, some 30km west of Odessa, which carries traffic to and from Ukraine’s Danube ports. Unverified footage circulating online showed long queues of vehicles in the area.

Russia has been striking Ukraine’s defense-related facilities as retaliation for Kiev’s long-range attacks inside Russia, which often target critical infrastructure and residential areas. Russia maintains it never targets civilians.

Acute ammunition shortages caused by the Iran war have undermined US security guarantees to its allies in Asia, The New York Times reported on Saturday, citing senior officials.

The campaign, launched with a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, has drained stockpiles of costly precision-guided missiles and interceptors, delaying deliveries to foreign customers, especially in Asia, where the long-term impact may be greatest, the report said. It added that “hundreds” of interceptors had been pulled out of South Korea and elsewhere in Asia to protect American bases in the Middle East.

During strikes on Iran, the US used many Tomahawks and other missiles initially reserved for a potential conflict with China over Taiwan, the Times said.

More than 1,500 Patriot interceptors have been used in the Iran conflict, leaving fewer than 1,700 in the US inventory, the Times said.

US President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have strongly denied any shortages, accusing the media of spreading misinformation. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office this week, Trump claimed that the country had “unlimited” stockpiles.

Nevertheless, Trump blamed his predecessor, Joe Biden, for what he described as giving weapons to Ukraine “free of charge,” implying that the US now needs them for the war with Iran. “We want missiles too,” he said when asked whether he would send more Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has laid out new conditions for the US to meet before the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened, amid continuing attacks on shipping.

In a statement carried by Iranian media on Saturday, the council’s secretary, Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, said that the waterway, which handles around a quarter of global seaborne oil and LNG trade, would not be reopened until “the United States changes its behavior.”

He said the US must lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its forces “from the area surrounding Iran,” as well as lift “unjust and illegal” sanctions, release the country’s frozen assets, and pay compensation. He added that the US must end “war and aggression” against Iran and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen.

“The US must never threaten Iran, in any language, or insult the sacred values of the Iranian nation,” Zolqadr said.

Earlier on Saturday, the UAE said an Iranian missile had struck a tanker operated by its state oil company, ADNOC, accusing Tehran of piracy. Iran insists that all vessels transiting the strait must follow its instructions and avoid what it calls the “illegal” route designated by the US Navy.

US President Donald Trump said he called off new strikes last week to allow room for negotiations. Multiple US media outlets, however, have reported that the Pentagon has significantly depleted its missile arsenal and that Admiral Brad Cooper, the top US commander in the Middle East, told Trump that the target pool around Hormuz had largely been exhausted. The president and his war secretary, Pete Hegseth, have denied ammunition shortages.

Iran’s demands came amid fears of wider chaos sweeping the region. This week, Israel renewed its heavy bombardment of Lebanon, accusing Hezbollah of violating a ceasefire reached two months ago with the Lebanese government. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis, a pro-Iranian Shia group, launched a large-scale offensive against Saudi-backed government forces and targeted Saudi ships in the Red Sea.

The war with Iran remains unpopular among the US public, with a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that 50% of Americans believe US strikes would further destabilize the Middle East, while just 17% said the situation would “get better.”

At least 20 people were injured when two trains collided in Croatia on Saturday, the country’s Health Ministry has said.

The incident occurred shortly after 10 am between the Sveti Ivan Zabno and Gradec railway stations, around 60km east of the Croatian capital of Zagreb. A passenger train carrying 27 people collided with a freight train, leaving six people seriously injured and 14 others with minor injuries.

The victims were taken to hospitals in Bjelovar and Koprivnica, with some later transferred to medical facilities in Zagreb. A young woman was placed in intensive care but remained in stable condition.

Videos posted online show the wreckage, with passengers sitting and standing beside the railway. The passenger train appears heavily damaged, with its roof buckled and exterior panels torn away. Red freight wagons and a locomotive can be seen ahead.

🇭🇷Passenger and freight train collide near Zagreb, Croatia. 20 injured. August 8, 2026
📍 Near Skrinjari — 60km east of Zagreb
6 severely injured. 14 minor injuries. 28 people were on board
Several carriages severely damaged, railway line closed.
Cause under investigation. pic.twitter.com/jjUoepcTSS

— freeledger (@thefreeledger) August 8, 2026

One photo shows part of the passenger train bent at a sharp angle near the point of impact, with a shattered cab windscreen and twisted handrails.

On August 8, 2026, at around 10:05 a.m. local time, a freight train and a passenger train collided between the stations of Sveti Ivan Žabno and Gradec, near Križevci, Croatia, on the Zagreb–Bjelovar line.
There were about 20 passengers on the passenger train, which had left… pic.twitter.com/PETp74Hse0

— T_CAS videos (@tecas2000) August 8, 2026

Koprivnica-Krizevci County Prefect Tomislav Golubic expressed gratitude to the 50 firefighters involved in the operation, as well as to a civilian who assisted with the rescue effort.

“I would especially like to thank a local man for arriving first at the scene with his personal forklift, making it easier for emergency services to tend to the injured,” Golubic said.

U Hrvatskoj je juče došlo do sudara putničkog i teretnog voza. Dvadeset ljudi je povređeno, od kojih troje kritično, uključujući i mašinovođu putničkog voza.
Prema nezvaničnim informacijama teretni voz HŽ Karga prošao je kroz signal za zabranu i udario u putnički voz,prenosi HRT. pic.twitter.com/TYyGWoRtNF

— Џyлc (@doprinositelj) August 8, 2026

Damir Loncaric of Croatian Railways said an investigation into the collision was underway.

The accident came five days after a passenger train struck a trailer carrying hay at a level crossing in Tczew County in Poland. Around 500 people were reportedly on board at the time. Polish State Railways said the tractor driver had ignored warning signals and was found to be intoxicated.

A Ukrainian drone has crashed in Bulgaria, exploding near a critical gas pipeline, the country’s Defense Ministry has said.

The UAV entered Bulgarian airspace from Romania at around 8:10 am on Saturday and detonated near the former Kardam border checkpoint, just one kilometer from Bulgaria’s compressor station on the Trans-Balkan Pipeline. No casualties or damage were reported.

The pipeline forms part of the Vertical Gas Corridor, a strategic route that transports gas across Southeastern and Central Europe, linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

“Noise made by the drone was detected by Romanian border police, and a loud explosion was subsequently heard by the General Toshevo border police patrol,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said at a press conference. Radev added that the UAV flew at low altitude and carried “a significant amount of explosives.”

The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry has summoned Ukrainian Ambassador to Bulgaria Olesya Ilashschuk to discuss the incident.

Ukrainian aerial and naval drones have increasingly strayed into neighboring countries, with incidents reported from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Most EU governments have declined to condemn Kiev, instead attributing such incidents to Russian electronic warfare.

In June, four Ukrainian naval drones detonated in and around the Romanian port of Constanta after Kiev said it had lost control of them. Days earlier, a drone struck an apartment building in Galati. Romanian officials said it was a Russian Geran-2 loitering munition that had veered off course, a claim Moscow denied.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukraine of seeking to spread the conflict and provoke NATO members into a direct confrontation with Russia.

Radev, a Euroskeptic who took office after the previous pro-EU government collapsed amid mass anti-corruption protests, has argued that the Russia-Ukraine conflict should be resolved diplomatically rather than through weapons deliveries to Kiev.

Last month, Radev said Sofia had nothing left to provide after delivering 13 military-aid packages. He also withdrew Bulgaria from the so-called coalition of the willing, led by the UK and France, a group advocating stronger support for Ukraine.

A “large-scale” Ukrainian drone attack on the city of Belgorod in western Russia has killed three civilians and wounded 25 others, including two children aged four and nine, acting regional governor Aleksandr Shuvayev said on Sunday.

Earlier in the day, Shuvayev reported only 13 injured as Ukrainian UAVs hit residential buildings but later provided updated information that three residents had died. “No words can ease this pain for their loved ones,” he wrote, adding, “We all share your grief and mourn with you.”

One of the wounded children was hospitalized, with injuries assessed as non-life threatening, Shuvayev said. Thirteen adults also remain hospitalized, one of whom is in extremely serious condition, he added, saying all necessary medical assistance was being provided.

The governor said the strikes sparked fires at two apartment blocks, a private house and several parked cars, all of which were extinguished by emergency crews. He added that a number of apartment buildings, administrative buildings, and “social and commercial sites” were damaged.

According to Shuvayev, Ukrainian forces also struck the wider Belgorod region, using artillery, aircraft and multiple rocket launch systems, over the course of the day, with nine more people wounded outside Belgorod. Russian air defenses downed or jammed 162 drones over the area, he added.

Belgorod Region, which borders Ukraine, has repeatedly come under drone and missile attacks throughout the conflict.

Videos circulating on Telegram show extensive damage to apartment blocks.

A drone struck near the roof of a high-rise residential complex, damaging several apartments.

Ukraine has stepped up strikes deep inside Russia in recent months, targeting energy facilities and warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon. Kiev has also launched a campaign to cut off supplies to Crimea, hitting civilian trucks and passenger buses in the process.

Russia considers such strikes acts of terrorism and has accused Western countries that supply Ukraine with drone components of enabling indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

China will launch regular container shipping to Europe via Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR) this month, with eight voyages planned through October, Rosatom CEO Aleksey Likhachev has said.

The Arctic shipping route runs mostly through Russia’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone and relies on Russian port infrastructure and icebreaker fleet. Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, is principally responsible for the route’s development.

Chinese firm Sealegend Shipping sent its first freight shipment through the waterway to Felixstowe Port in England late last year, making the voyage in 20 days. A voyage via the Suez Canal would have taken around 37 days, Likhachev told reporters on Friday.

“Today, we are taking the next step. The Chinese shipping company Sealegend Shipping is indeed planning to launch the first regular route to Europe, and Rosatom has already issued permits for seven vessels to transit the NSR,” the Rosatom CEO said.

While prior container shipments were largely experimental or one-off in nature, this year’s program envisions weekly voyages from August to October, ice conditions permitting, he said.

According to Likhachev, Chinese container traffic via the NSR has grown markedly in recent years, more than tripling from 2023 to 2025. Today, bilateral shipping between Chinese and Russian ports makes up 15% of all traffic through the passage. Total cargo traffic between Russia and China is expected to reach 20 million tons by 2030, he added.

The Arctic shipping route remains the shortest maritime passage between the Asia-Pacific region and northern Europe. Russia, which operates the world’s largest icebreaker fleet of more than 40 conventional and nuclear vessels, is investing in the NSR with the aim of making it a pivotal global trade artery.

The route’s significance as “the safest, most reliable, and most efficient” path is growing more evident amid disruptions caused by conflicts around the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year, adding that Moscow is working to strengthen Arctic logistics on a “massive scale.”

FIFA President Gianni Infantino is facing a fresh scandal after reports emerged that UEFA paid off his alleged “lover” while he headed the European football body.

The report comes amid mounting calls for Infantino’s resignation over his controversial proposal last month to sell private equity stakes in the World Cup and other FIFA events. Infantino became FIFA president in February 2016 after 16 years at UEFA, including as secretary general from 2009 to 2016.

Infantino was allegedly confronted over the affair by then-UEFA president Michel Platini, and it was later agreed the woman would leave with a pay-off of at least six figures from UEFA funds. UEFA also allegedly paid for her to attend an MBA course at a business school charging about $60,000 a year. The report does not name the woman.

UEFA confirmed the pay-off to The Telegraph on Friday but insisted the departure payment and MBA fees were “in line” with regulations at the time. A FIFA spokesman, however, said Infantino denied the allegations as “categorically untrue” and “defamatory.”

The report comes less than a month after Infantino faced a backlash over plans to create a $20 billion commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), and sell private investors a 20% stake in FIFA’s tournament rights. The deal would have given investors a share in the commercial interests of FIFA’s top men’s and women’s competitions, including the World Cup. The proposed investors included a firm linked to Joshua Kushner, brother of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Announced nine days after this year’s World Cup ended, the plan was denounced by critics as privatizing the sport. It collapsed after UEFA’s 55 members unanimously threatened to boycott all future FIFA competitions unless it was scrapped. UEFA and two other continental confederations, North America’s Concacaf and the AFC (Asian Football Confederation), also pursued a motion of no confidence against Infantino.

However, UEFA said this week its boycott would continue until FIFA guaranteed it would never allow private ownership of its governance. It also reiterated that it had lost confidence in Infantino’s presidency. While stopping short of explicitly calling for his removal, UEFA had previously warned that “no option should be off the table” in reviewing Infantino’s leadership.

The governance battle follows a crisis-hit World Cup this year that was marred by political controversy, visa bans, sky-high ticket prices, and disputed VAR decisions. FIFA also faced criticism for lifting US striker Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension following reported lobbying by Trump.

Previously, Infantino faced scrutiny over his close ties to Trump after awarding the US leader FIFA’s inaugural peace prize in December. The New York Post reported last month that Trump wants Infantino to become the next UN secretary-general.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s recent rant about killing Russians was driven by “historical complexes” and “impotent rage,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

Speaking at a rally in Warsaw on Thursday, Nawrocki said helping Ukraine kill Russians is in Poland’s strategic interest. “In this regard, they can always count on our help, because wherever the Moskal is being fought, Poland helps,” he said. ‘Moskal’ is a historically derogatory term for Russians.

Zakharova denounced the remarks on Telegram on Friday, accusing the Polish leader of routinely resorting to anti-Russian hate speech.

“This has become the norm for the Polish elite,” Zakharova wrote, adding that the outburst “stems from historical complexes and impotent rage.”

Nawrocki is evidently tormented by the fact that his nation owes its existence to the Red Army. That is why he and his ilk seek revenge by taking it out on Soviet monuments and waging war against dead Soviet Heroes.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Poland has accelerated its campaign to remove World War II monuments commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany.

The nationalist organization, which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, is celebrated in Ukraine, but in Poland, the UPA is associated with the ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. At least 100,000 ethnic Poles, many of them elderly, women, and children, were massacred in 1943-1944, according to Polish historians.

Zelensky’s move, and his refusal to backpedal on it, caused an escalating political rift with Warsaw, and prompted Nawrocki to strip him of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Russia has long accused Kiev of glorifying WWII Nazi collaborators and fostering Neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, and has made “denazification” one of the core goals of its military operation.

Russian officials have also accused Western governments of ignoring Kiev’s saturation with Nazi ideology while arming it against Russia.

Almost since US President Donald Trump started his second and final term, the movement that brought him to power twice has been fracturing. Now there is a full break among Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters.

Its essence is simple: There are those who continue to identify MAGA with Trump, and on the other side of a widening chasm, those who remain loyal to MAGA but believe that Trump has not. The rebels say Trump has betrayed the cause and want to save MAGA – and thus the US – from Trump.

There are no official structures yet to what the MAGA dissidents call their movement, but it does have a de facto leader – popular journalist and podcast host Tucker Carlson. It was at Tucker’s all-American place in Maine that the MAGA schism was made official. There, several key figures of the evolving MAGA-against-Trump group met, and in effect, raised the standard of rebellion. 

Not literally, but in the shape of an X post by former US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (with 5.4 million followers). It featured a carefully composed picture of a merry rebel crew, including, apart from herself, Joe Kent, former counterterrorism tsar under Trump, Representative Thomas Massie, a long-term conservative Trump opponent, and Carlson, sitting at the head of the table.

Within days after the post, Carlson released a video manifesto with the title “It’s Time to Save America” on his own Tucker Carlson Network social media channel (with 5.2 million subscribers on YouTube). Within one day, it had over a million views on YouTube alone.

He also predicted that change is inevitable if Americans want to avoid the “end-of-everything,” either by nuclear war or uncontrolled AI. He warned that even preventing this apocalypse by timely political action could produce great violence, that is, a revolution. And finally, he presented his alternative to both the end of the world and wild upheaval in ten concise points.  

Ranging from “fairness” to “unity,” his ten points were more a clarion call for national renewal than a concrete policy outline, with aims general enough to form a broad consensus, as he acknowledged.

Much of his ten points read like MAGA 2.0, that is, without Trump, as observers noted. On issues such as physical and mental health, the need for the economy to make actually useful things instead of just surveillance tech, weapons of war, and financial gimmicks, the beauty of the American landscape and architecture in need of restoration, Carlson’s impassioned pleas echoed the conservatism that is one root of the MAGA phenomenon.

Ultimately, what will be more important is where things differ: One of Carlson’s points was about sovereignty, or as he defined it, being “free from outside influence.” It is this point that provides the key to all the others. The ten points are, in essence, a declaration of independence, not just from any outside influence, but from Israel and its powerful US lobby. Carlson directly named them as forming one of America’s worst problems.

Carlson also correctly linked the Iran War – a “strategic disaster” worse than Vietnam, as another realistic American recently stated – to “bribery or threat or both by Israel.” Equally plausibly, he accused Israel of committing genocide – like Nazi Germany, he said – and protested against continuing US support. Finally, the activities of lobbies, with that of Israel not alone, but in the lead, “gives the lie to the idea of representative democracy,” according to Carlson, because where lobbyists make the decisions, the voters do not.   

In short, Carlson made the point that America’s worst military defeat in living memory, its support for – and really, participation in – an ongoing genocide, and its loss of sovereignty and democracy are all due, either entirely or to a large extent, to the US establishment’s perverse and deeply unpatriotic relationship to Israel. Politically, this amounts to an arguably long overdue declaration of war against the Zionist state’s aggressive influence operations.

And the message has gotten through. Haaretz, Israel’s ‘liberal’ paper of record, rapidly dedicated a long opinion piece to Carlson, accusing him of – surprise, surprise – “anti-Semitism.” This is an absurd smear, but expected. Systematically misrepresenting criticism of Israel, a genocidal apartheid state, as hatred of Jews is an old, stale Zionist tactic. Carlson certainly isn’t naïve. Even in his ten points, he anticipated being called a “Nazi” and shrugged it off.

There is, no doubt, much idealizing and even nostalgia in Carlson’s image of American history and the West. And those wishing to be woke about an arch-conservative will find rich pickings. But that is futile and dull, because it is not the point that matters. What matters is that US polls have consistently shown a great, unprecedented groundswell against Israel. A new book on Israel’s US lobby is about to come out and is making a massive splash. The tide is turning.

Fellow MAGA rebel Joe Kent let it slip that Tucker-for-president is an option. Third parties are a difficult proposition. Yet Haaretz for one is worried, and from a Zionist point of view, it should be. And that is very good news.

The Trump administration is looking for a new Cuban leader who can change Havana’s political course, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing current and former US officials.

Since returning to office, US President Donald Trump has tightened the decades-old blockade of Cuba, threatening tariffs on countries that supply it with oil and saying he will take the country “one way or another.”

The unnamed officials told the NYT that the Trump administration has been searching for a current or former Cuban official who could be persuaded to take over the government. The White House has reportedly asked US intelligence agencies to identify someone in the mold of Delcy Rodriguez, who became Venezuela’s acting president after the US kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro in January.

The intelligence agencies have said Cuba is less like Venezuela and more like Iran, where the US has publicly stated its intention to change the regime but has so far failed to do so, the newspaper cited people briefed on the intelligence reports as saying.

In April, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel told RT that after more than 60 years of blockade and aggression, his country has “survived and made progress.” He added that Cubans are “ready to fight,” dismissing suggestions that the island could suffer the fate of Venezuela.

Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said earlier this year that Cuba’s armed forces were getting ready for a potential US invasion, calling it “naive” not to do so, “looking at what’s happening around the world.”

The White House is seeking to push Cuba toward a political course more favorable to Washington’s interests, while hoping that worsening economic conditions caused by mounting pressure will eventually trigger a change in leadership.

UN officials warned earlier this year that US sanctions on Cuba had already caused acute shortages of essential medical supplies, while the latest fuel blockade doubled infant mortality on the island.

Russia, China, Mexico, and several other countries have been supplying Cuba with humanitarian aid. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said Moscow remains in solidarity with the Cuban government and people, pledging to continue providing political and diplomatic support as well as material assistance. In late March, Russia delivered around 700,000 barrels of crude oil.

A powerful typhoon battered Japan’s southern island of Okinawa on Saturday, knocking out power to more than 50,000 buildings and injuring six people before continuing toward China.

Five elderly people in Okinawa suffered non-life-threatening injuries, while another person was injured in Kagoshima prefecture, according to local officials. Nearly 39,000 buildings in Kagoshima and more than 12,000 in Okinawa were without electricity.

The typhoon, named Dolphin, brought maximum sustained winds of 162 kilometers per hour (101 mph), with gusts reaching 216 kph (134 mph). The storm also disrupted travel, with major Japanese airlines canceling flights to and from Okinawa.

On Friday, local authorities ordered nearly 260,000 residents in Kagoshima and Okinawa to evacuate as the storm approached, warning of violent winds, heavy rain and high waves.

Dolphin is expected to weaken as it moves toward China, where the typhoon emergency response has been raised to Level III, signaling a heightened state of preparedness, and the storm has been classified as an orange-category typhoon. 

Landfall is forecast between Zhoushan in Zhejiang province and Fuding in Fujian province between late Sunday and early Monday.

Chinese authorities have suspended port operations and ferry services in affected coastal areas, while some schools and tourist sites have also been closed. Heavy rain of up to 400 mm is forecast in parts of eastern China, raising the risk of flooding and landslides.

Wikipedia has become a compromised propaganda tool, the online encyclopedia’s co-founder-turned-critic Larry Sanger has said, warning that its content is now increasingly informing AI.

In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published on Friday, Sanger argued that Wikipedia’s lack of an adequate governance structure allowed “specific ideological viewpoints” to shape its content, turning the online encyclopedia into a “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” consensus.

“Wikipedia was recognized early on as an important propaganda organ,” Sanger told the outlet. He argued that while the platform’s anonymity policy makes it difficult to determine who edits its content, “what we know as fact, based on all sorts of evidence, is that the CIA has already edited Wikipedia.”

Evidence of CIA and FBI edits first emerged in 2007 after programmer Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, a tool linking anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations’ IP addresses. The tool attributed edits to the CIA, FBI, corporations, and government agencies, including changes to Iraq War casualty figures.

To address the problems, he proposed sweeping reforms, including public identities for senior functionaries, due-process protections in disciplinary cases, public article ratings, and elected officials responsible for setting Wikipedia policy.

Sanger is not the only prominent critic of Wikipedia. Conservative commentators have long accused Wikipedia, which relies on donations, of betraying its promise of neutrality on contentious topics. Elon Musk mocked the platform as “Wokipedia” and once offered $1 billion if it agreed to rename itself “Dickipedia” for a year.

Armenia has begun a historic trial of the head of the dominant Apostolic Church (AAC), Catholicos Karekin II, for allegedly defying a civil court order temporarily reinstating a bishop.

The case marks the latest escalation in a standoff with the government, which has accused church figures of coup plotting and acting as proxies for foreign powers, including Russia, which the AAC denies.

The trial revolves around Bishop Gevorg Saroyan, who headed the Masyatsotn Diocese before being removed in January 2026 after backing calls for political and church reform and Karekin’s removal. The church accused him of abusing his authority and neglecting his duties, but Saroyan challenged his dismissal, and a civil court ordered his temporary reinstatement. The church refused, arguing that secular courts have no jurisdiction over these matters, and later defrocked Saroyan. The state launched a criminal case against Karekin and six senior clerics in February.

The first session ended quickly, after presiding judge Hakob Manukyan recused himself, Armenian media reported. Manukyan cited a potential conflict of interest: His law license was issued while Karekin’s current defense lawyer, Ara Zohrabyan, headed Armenia’s Chamber of Advocates. The case will be reassigned. Karekin and the six clerics face up to two years in prison if convicted.

Karekin, who has led the AAC since 1999 and is a vocal critic of pro-Western Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, attended the hearing in person as clergy, opposition politicians, and supporters gathered outside. Dozens of worshippers chanted “Your Holiness,” sang hymns, and condemned the proceedings against the spiritual leader.

The case marks the first time in Armenian history that a sitting Catholicos – the supreme spiritual leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church – has faced criminal prosecution. It is the latest escalation in a bitter feud between Pashinyan and the church, a powerful institution in a country that traces its adoption of Christianity to 301 AD.

The rift dates back to Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, when the church backed protests against the settlement and Karekin called for Pashinyan’s resignation. It deepened after Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and flared up again over the 2024 transfer of four border villages to Baku, which led to more protests.

Pashinyan subsequently accused senior church figures of political interference and sought Karekin’s removal, alleging links to foreign intelligence services, including Russia, which Karekin and the church deny.

Opposition politicians, church leaders, and civil society groups accuse the government of unlawfully interfering in church affairs and say Karekin’s prosecution is politically motivated and part of a broader crackdown on critics. Karekin’s lawyer, Zohrabyan, has argued that state interference violates church autonomy, the constitutional relationship between church and state, and freedom of religion.

How Russia ties in

Critics have linked Pashinyan’s confrontation with the church to his government’s broader pivot toward the West and away from Armenia’s traditional ties with Russia. Under Pashinyan, Yerevan has accused Moscow of failing to prevent Azerbaijan from retaking Nagorno-Karabakh by force in 2023, and subsequently froze participation in the Russian-led CSTO security bloc and launched an EU accession process.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the Armenian authorities last month of deliberately targeting political parties that call for closer ties with Russia, including the AAC.

“The Armenian Apostolic Church, which has traditionally been deeply revered in the country, has come under the ‘steamroller’ of persecution. All this amounts to a gross violation by Yerevan of democratic principles and procedures,” Zakharova said.

US defense sales to India have surged past $22 billion since the initial deal for six Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules aircraft was signed in early 2008. Since then, the US has become one of India’s key arms suppliers. However, despite the growth in military sales and bold initiatives such as the 10-Year Framework for the US-India Major Defense Partnership, defense-industrial cooperation between the two countries still suffers from a wide gap between ambition and execution.

Washington is keen to sell platforms, many of which have already seen more than 30 years of service in the US armed forces. Most of these deals have been one-way transactions, with little or no transfer of technology. Lockheed Martin’s and Boeing’s Make in India initiatives have largely remained “build-to-print” arrangements, again with minimal or no real technology transfer.

The past two years have seen a growing level of distrust between the world’s largest and oldest democracies. It is becoming clear that the US is not interested in India’s rise as a global power. US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stated at the last Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi that Washington will not repeat its past approach – read mistake – with China by granting India unfettered market and technology access that could lead to strong commercial competition. Washington wants India to be strong enough only to serve as a bulwark against China, and not to become an independent power center or a technological and economic power.

The high-level goals face hurdles from strict US regulations, differing national priorities, and slow bureaucratic delivery. India wants full technology transfer, local intellectual property ownership, and self-reliance under Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India) policy. It also wants to preserve its strategic autonomy. The US, however, sees cutting-edge military hardware as a sensitive national security asset requiring tight oversight. Its International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and export administration regulations complicate the sharing of sensitive technical data. Agreements, initiatives, and declarations are all well and good, but the relationship is still waiting for real industrial breakthroughs that can turn intent into capability.

Most recently, delays in the supply of GE F404 engines for the LCA Mk1A program have angered Indians and pushed public opinion to a low point. The prolonged negotiations over the co-production of GE F414 jet engines have also raised doubts about the scope of critical technology transfer and the extent of Make in India content in sub-components. In addition, the fact that the US continues to court Pakistan remains another thorn in its relationship with New Delhi.

Agreements vs Reality

End of the Cold War, and Washington’s growing interest in taking on China in the Indo-Pacific brought the US closer to India. Since the turn of the century there has been increased activity in security fields with many military industrial and logistics and communication related agreements. The defense relationship is anchored in successive 10-year framework agreements signed in 2005, 2015, and a renewed pact in October 2025, alongside foundational military communication and logistics pacts.

In 2016, the US also accorded India Major Defense Partner Status, placing bilateral trade on par with its closest allies. In 2018, India was designated a Strategic Trade Authorization-1 (STA-1) country and allowed to buy highly advanced and cutting-edge sensitive technologies from America. The Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA, 2018) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA, 2020) were signed to permit secure, encrypted communications and share advanced geospatial and satellite data for navigation and targeting. And there are other documents in place.

In 2023, the two sides unveiled a series of ambitious initiatives aimed at moving Indo-US defense ties beyond the traditional buyer-seller model, reviving hopes that had earlier faltered under the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI). The Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), launched the same year to deepen cooperation in defense, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, 6G communications, quantum computing, and aerospace, has yet to deliver visible results. Similarly, INDUS-X (the India-US Defense Acceleration Ecosystem), designed to foster collaboration among defense start-ups, investors, and industry, as well as the US-India Defense Industrial Cooperation Roadmap, intended to promote co-development, co-production, and more resilient defense supply chains, now appear to be languishing amid Trump’s policy unpredictability.

Notwithstanding the above, friction between the two countries persists. While the American defense industry is eager to capture opportunities in the growing Indian market – especially as New Delhi continues to import foreign weaponry even while rapidly expanding its domestic manufacturing base – there has been little of the technology transfer that the Indian government has been seeking. The gap between ambition and execution remains the defining challenge in the US-India defense-industrial partnership. If India aspires to be a superpower, it will need to invest far more in defense R&D and build its own intellectual property base.

Russia Factor: India’s Traditional Defense Partner

While expanding defense trade with the US, India has continued its long-standing defense partnership with Russia, which dates back to the 1950s, when the Soviet Union and India grew close and Moscow helped New Delhi build its military-industrial base. Beginning with the MiG-21 program, India went on to manufacture a wide range of Soviet – and later Russian – platforms under license. For decades, the Indian armed forces have been dominated by Russian equipment, today the figure remains large at nearly 60%.

The two countries currently maintain what they describe as a “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership.” Its key pillars include defense supplies, energy trade, and nuclear technology, supported by annual summit meetings and a shared goal of reaching $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2030.

India has been pressing foreign suppliers to manufacture in India as it is steadily moving away from the buyer-seller model toward the co-development and local production of advanced military equipment, spare parts, and systems – and the Russian example suggests that this model can work well. This approach is also being expanded to support the maintenance and upgrading of India’s vast inventory of Russian-origin platforms, including T-72 and T-90 tanks, fighter jets such as the Su-30MKI, and naval vessels.

The Russian offer of co-development of its latest fifth-generation fighters Sukhoi Su-57 with a make-in-India option and complete transfer of technology remains the most attractive ever, even though Indian officials this week said there is no plan for the purchase of the Su-57 in the near future, with focus being on upgrading the existing Su-30MKI fleet. 

But the ground position is that China has moved the J-20 fifth-generation aircraft next to the Indian border in Tibet and Xinjiang and is also planning to transfer J-35 fifth-generation fighters to Pakistan. China and Pakistan work in a collusive mode: at some point India may be forced to acquire Russian Sukhoi Su-57 as an interim fifth-generation fighter till its own AMCA matures.  

While Russia continues to be a time-tested friend, the relationship – including in defense trade – has faced hurdles stemming from the ongoing Ukraine conflict and the broad Western sanctions that have complicated payments and logistics between the two countries. In general, there is a significant a balance-of-payments issue, as India has been importing large volumes of crude oil from Russia while its own exports remain relatively limited. Russia’s close economic and strategic proximity to China also complicates things.

France and Israel as Emerging Partners

India has been actively expanding partnerships with other nations, especially with Israel and France.

With Israel, the defense relationship has been shifting from a traditional buyer-seller dynamic into a deeper industrial and technological co-production partnership. Guided by high-level strategic frameworks, both nations focus on joint research, artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, and domestic manufacturing under India’s self-reliance goals.

Private and public sector Indian defense firms have formed joint ventures with major Israeli defense corporations, such as Elbit Systems, Rafael, and IAI, to build local capacity for assault rifles, electronic warfare, and communication systems. Recent high-level bilateral talks emphasize integrating next-generation innovations like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cybersecurity, and directed-energy laser defense systems. Israeli AESA radars, Helmet Displays, and EW systems are on many Indian aircraft. Through Joint ventures, there is significant absorption of technologies.

India and France share a deeply trusted, time-tested defense partnership anchored by strategic autonomy and a history of reliable technology sharing without political strings. France is also known as the “No-Veto” partner. Paris refused to join Western sanctions after India’s 1998 nuclear tests. Both nations prioritize strategic independence over alignment with other global power blocs. On the other hand, French military hardware carries high unit, lifecycle, and maintenance costs.

Decades of successful deployment of the highly successful Dassault Mirage 2000 to modern Rafale jets, and Scorpene submarines has built trust. Multi-billion-dollar deals, such as past Rafale contracts and massive proposed MRFA rollouts, would certainly strain defense budgets. Proprietary French systems and custom subsystems result in high lifecycle servicing costs. The final proposal for 114 Rafale will actually indicate the local manufacturing and co-development extent. Upfront investments to build domestic production lines (like Safran engine initiatives or Airbus-Tata assembly lines) will be indicative.

No Easy Way Ahead

India and the US have chosen to befriend each other and explore defense deals, joint-ventures, and transfer of technology. The reality, however, is that while Washington is keen to sell platforms, support for defense industrial eco-system building has been less than forthcoming. As India grows towards becoming the world’s third largest economy and military power, the US already sees it as a competitor.

India’s heavy reliance on Russian platforms (like the S-400 and Su-30MKI) also creates operational friction and challenges for secure data integration with US systems.

US has to be conscious of India’s time-tested defense partners in Russia, France, and Israel. Undoubtedly India wants to maintain good relations with a great democracy, and a huge market for Indian goods and services, but it has to be as a respected partner. It cannot be with a “take it or leave it” approach.

The prolonged negotiations with General Electric over the GE F-414 engine for domestic Tejas Mk-2 manufacture and the first two squadrons of AMCA is tiring. It is not whether the engine can be built in India, but how much of design expertise, engineering processes, and manufacturing know-how GE is willing to share of its core technologies. The F-414 program is a clear indicator of the limits that continue to constrain Indo-US defence-industrial cooperation. Washington remains reluctant to share critical technologies with India.

Russia, France, and Israel have comparatively been more forthcoming in technology transfer, Make-in-India, and supporting developing Indian defense industrial base. Having said that, one should keep in mind that India has always refused to enter a formal alliance framework or compromise its independent foreign policy. Looking forward, it will continue pursuing strategic autonomy approach.

A distressing video has emerged online purportedly showing a military press gang brutally assaulting a young couple in Ukraine, in the latest alleged forced-conscription incident linked to Kiev’s conflict with Russia.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry relies on harshly enforced mandatory conscription to replenish frontline units, with new reports of coercive recruitment emerging virtually daily. The incident, which allegedly took place earlier this week in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, has drawn particular attention after a video of the altercation was circulated on local social media.

🇺🇦 This is the reality of conscription in Ukraine

A woman screaming for her boyfriend as he's brutally dragged out of the car to be sent to the front line meat grinder

Meanwhile, the politicians who send people to die on both sides gleefully claim they're winning, but they…

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 7, 2026

The clip shows a man and a woman sitting in the back seat of what was reported to be a taxi as several uniformed men wearing balaclavas reach through the open doors in an apparent attempt to pull the man from the vehicle. As the couple try to fend them off, one of the men repeatedly sprays the 19-year-old in the face with what appears to be tear gas and kicks him through the open door, including in the head. The young man can be heard saying he is hurt and pleading with the men to stop beating him, while the woman screams. The uniformed men eventually succeed in dragging him from the vehicle.

The local draft office denied that its personnel were involved but said it was investigating the footage.

Vladimir Zelensky’s former press secretary, Yulia Mendel, said the video shows the Ukrainian leader’s “real” face.

”[He] could have allocated money for financial motivation, but decided to steal from the budget instead,” she wrote on X. “The price is multiple lives and destroyed families.”

The video also attracted the attention of former US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on X on Friday that “Ukrainian men get kidnapped, sent to the front lines, and butchered,” while accusing the US and other NATO countries of funding and fighting “a proxy war with Russia.” 

Last month, a draft riot erupted in the western city of Lviv, prompting a broad crackdown on suspected participants.

Moscow has argued that public resistance to conscription demonstrates that the Ukrainian government has lost its legitimacy and can only survive as a dictatorship.

Exceptionally low water levels in the Danube River have exposed the remains of two Nazi soldiers and World War II military equipment in Budapest, according to the German War Graves Commission (the Volksbund).

The finds, made near the Hungarian Parliament earlier this month, include the wreck of what is believed to be a German military motorcycle and numerous anti-tank mines. The Volksbund published photographs of the recovery on Facebook on Friday.

The organization said the remains of the two soldiers were unusually well preserved thanks to harbor mud mixed with diesel fuel, despite having been under water for more than 80 years. The soldiers’ identification tags were intact, suggesting their deaths were never officially recorded by the Wehrmacht.

Under Wehrmacht procedures, one half of a soldier’s tag was normally removed after death and sent to Berlin so the casualty could be recorded and relatives notified.

Among the other artifacts recovered were a fuel canister and a Kuban Shield, a Nazi German military campaign award instituted by Hitler in September 1943. It was awarded to troops who served in the Kuban bridgehead in southern Russia before Soviet forces drove the Nazis out in 1943.

The finds date to the Battle of Budapest, a 102-day siege that historians describe as one of the longest and bloodiest urban battles of World War II. Hungary fought alongside Nazi Germany for much of World War II but was occupied by German forces in March 1944 after attempting to switch sides. The Red Army subsequently launched its offensive into Hungary, encircling Budapest in December 1944 before defeating Nazi German and Hungarian forces in February 1945.

The Volksbund said it expects more wartime discoveries as unusually low water levels, caused by prolonged heat and drought across Central Europe, continue to expose sections of the Danube riverbed.

Russian forces have carried out high-precision strikes on Ukrainian military-industrial facilities and a fuel depot in Kiev, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has reported.

In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said the strikes, involving precision ground-based weapons, targeted the Kiev-111 industrial facility, which it said produces parts and warheads for Ukraine’s ground-launched FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, as well as chemicals for solid-fuel boosters.

According to the MOD, the site was operated by Fire Point, a company promoted internationally by Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and linked to his former business associate Timur Mindich, a key figure in a major corruption scandal.

The Russian military also said it struck the Kiev-3 fuel depot operated by Grandterminal, which the ministry said supplies petroleum products to the Ukrainian military. Fuel trucks were reportedly dispatched from the facility to supply Ukrainian troops in the east of the country.

In recent weeks, the Russian military has ramped up long-range strikes on Ukraine’s industrial facilities with military purposes and critical dual-use infrastructure. Moscow maintains it never targets civilians and says its campaign comes in response to Kiev’s continued attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure, which have intensified amid setbacks suffered by Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.

In practice, however, it has involved what Moscow describes as “terrorist attacks” resulting in dozens of civilian deaths. In the last week of July alone, Ukrainian attacks killed 49 civilians, including four children, according to Rodion Miroshnik, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s mission that tracks Ukraine’s alleged war crimes. The latest Ukrainian drone strike on a residential block in Russia’s Crimea on Friday killed at least two civilians and wounded another, according to regional head Sergey Aksyonov.

Russia escalated its missile and drone campaign against Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, crippling the country’s already reeling economy and shutting off a key transit route for Western weapons entering Ukraine. RT examined the scale of Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian ports here, and as Russian missiles rained down on logistics hubs across Ukraine, asked whether Zelensky’s PR operation succeeded in “turning the tide.”

Ukraine’s air defense drought

For Ukraine to stand any chance of repelling Russia’s missile strikes, its military will need the latest American-made PAC-3 interceptors for its Patriot batteries. Zelensky spent the week begging for these valuable weapons, only to have his request publicly shot down by US President Donald Trump. “We want missiles too,” was Trump’s concise response. 

To Moscow, it appeared that Zelensky had once again misread the American president. 

RT translated and published a Gazeta column by Russian journalist Vitaly Ryumshin, who looked at Zelensky’s last meeting with Trump and explained why “the battle Zelensky travelled to Washington to win had, in reality, already been lost before his plane landed.”

The missile famine hits Washington

The interceptor shortage is not just Zelensky’s problem: it’s also Trump’s. The US expended almost a quarter of all the PAC-3s it’s ever built in the first three days of the war on Iran earlier this year, and although Tehran and Washington both said this week that a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “nearing completion,” Trump threatened to strike Iran at “levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II” if negotiations fall through.

Should that happen, the US, Ukraine, and Washington’s Gulf allies will all be competing for a dwindling supply of interceptors. 

But the US is short on a much wider inventory of hardware, including tactical ballistic missiles. Trump reportedly lashed out at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this week, accusing Hegseth of misleading him over the sorry state of the Pentagon’s stockpiles. Trump also lashed out at the media for reporting the shortage in the first place, and for reporting his blow-up with Hegseth. 

Israel and the US vs. Spain

Tehran’s argument wasn’t just an offhand dig at its enemies. The US and Israel both have bad blood with Sanchez; Washington over his refusal to allow the US military to use Spanish airbases to attack Iran, and West Jerusalem over Madrid’s pro-Palestinian stance. The US and Israel have both drawn closer to Morocco since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, with sections of the US government now considering Ceuta to be Moroccan territory, and Israeli elites openly discussing the funding of pro-Moroccan NGOs in Spain. Add Sanchez’ trip to Algeria to discuss a liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal a week before the incident, and Washington’s interest becomes clearer.

Does correlation equal causation? Either way, the consequences of Ceuta extend far beyond north Africa. 

The Nazi past re-emerges

When we talk about the resurgence of Nazism in eastern Europe, we’re usually talking about Ukraine – where MAGA influencer Laura Loomer recently spent a week interviewing swastika-flashing neo-Nazis before claiming they didn’t exist. This week, the past reemerged in a more unexpected fashion, when the sinking levels of the Danube River revealed several sunken Nazi warships.

🇷🇸🇭🇷 A sunken German flotilla has surfaced in Serbia due to the shallowing of the Danube, Reuters reports.

The rusting hulks of the German flotilla, sunk in 1944 during the retreat before the Red Army, are reportedly posing a threat to shipping. pic.twitter.com/WwacLDGlgC

— Маrina Wolf (@volkova_ma57183) August 1, 2026

Amid a record-breaking heatwave and drought conditions, the wrecked hull of a Kriegsmarine gunboat was seen for the first time in more than 80 years, beached on a sandbank near the Serbian port of Prahovo. Dozens more were soon spotted, all of them scuttled in 1944 as Germany’s Black Sea fleet came under fire from the advancing Soviet Red Army.

Historians believe that as many as 200 ships were deliberately sunk near Prahovo to prevent them falling into Soviet hands.

Meta goes rogue

Finally, Meta announced this week that its flagship AI model – Muse Spark 1.1 – broke containment during cybersecurity testing, accessed the open internet, and hacked an outside company. If the story sounds familiar, that’s because Anthropic’s Claude AI also ‘escaped’ from the same testing lab – run by a company called ‘Irregular’ – last month.

These stories do, however, demonstrate the sheer power of AI in the hands of cybercriminals and unscrupulous actors – whether they be criminal gangs or government agencies. 

What to watch out for

The Ukraine conflict escalation cycle shows no signs of abetting, though Russian President Vladimir Putin has shuffled his top staff. 

Trump continues to waver between talks and threats with regard to Iran. However, if the reports of weapons shortages are true, the likelihood of the US resuming a high-intensity campaign against Tehran is slim. 

War on Iran remains unpopular in the US, and Trump is underwater with voters on economic issues – 70% of them disapprove of his handling of inflation and the cost of living, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday. 

Carlson released a 10-point political manifesto on Wednesday, and although he has shot down speculation that he plans to run for office, any political movement with his endorsement could siphon enough votes to sink the GOPs chances in 2028. RT broke down his manifesto here, and we’ll keep an eye on this one as it develops.

Ukraine has promised not to strike some non-Russian oil tankers or the internationally owned Black Sea pipeline terminal used to transport Kazakh crude to Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing a US official familiar with the matter.

Both the US and Kazakhstan have protested attacks on Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) infrastructure in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, where oil transported through the pipeline is loaded onto tankers. CPC shareholders include companies from Russia, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, and the US, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. The CPC accounts for about 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports, according to Bloomberg.

Under the agreement reportedly reached with the US, Ukraine promised to refrain from targeting CPC infrastructure and ships that are not on Ukraine’s sanctions list and not carrying Russian cargo.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth asked the White House last month to protect the company’s operations in the region.

The attacks on shipping came as the Strait of Hormuz, which handles around a quarter of global seaborne oil and LNG trade, remains largely closed due to the US war with Iran, driving up prices. On July 25, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who control territory near another important shipping chokepoint in the Red Sea, declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia, further raising concerns over energy supplies.

The war in the Middle East has largely sidelined Trump’s efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. In a diplomatic blow to Kiev, Trump recently walked back his earlier promise to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot air defense missiles and rebuffed Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s request for more interceptors. The rebuff came as US ammunition stockpiles have reportedly been depleted by Trump’s war with Iran.

US Cyber Command is scrutinizing an unusually high number of deaths by suicide among personnel over a month-long period this summer, Bloomberg has reported.

As many as five people who worked in or closely interacted with the command took their own lives between early June and early July, the outlet wrote on Thursday, citing internal military communications, public records, and interviews with people familiar with the matter.

The succession of deaths reportedly led Cyber Command to classify the incidents as a so-called “suicide cluster,” a Pentagon term for suicides occurring closer together than normal that require specific intervention.

Cyber Command operators are tasked with protecting US military networks while hacking into foreign military computer systems to disrupt communications, air defenses, and other battlefield capabilities. Much of their work takes place in highly secure facilities and remains classified.

Concerns about the mental health of military hackers have reached Congress before. A 2025 defense law required Cyber Command to provide dedicated mental health specialists for cyber operators, including counselors cleared to work with personnel handling classified information.

The latest deaths have drawn fresh congressional scrutiny. According to Bloomberg, the Senate Armed Services Committee is discussing additional mental health resources with Cyber Command, while the House committee has called the increase in suicides a “critical issue.”

Between June and early July, US and Iranian forces exchanged multiple rounds of strikes, while US Central Command targeted Iranian military surveillance and communications infrastructure. Tehran also retaliated with attacks on US military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain.

According to Bloomberg, the workload has also been fueled by a race to use and counter increasingly capable AI models. Security experts say the latest systems can identify software flaws and help carry out sophisticated cyberattacks, forcing militaries and governments to adapt their defenses.

The Pentagon has revoked the security clearance of former US Air Force chief Frank Kendall, whom it accused of leaking classified information about Donald Trump’s Qatari-gifted presidential aircraft.

“This action follows his unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Air Force One’s capabilities to a media outlet,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement on X on Friday.

“Safeguarding classified information is a non-negotiable duty. Those who violate that trust forfeit the privilege of access and any role requiring it,” he added.

The decision came after multiple news outlets reported that the modified luxury Boeing 747-8 donated to Trump by the Qatari government last year did not have the same security and defense capabilities as the older Air Force One.

Last month, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to Times reporters after the newspaper published a story detailing security concerns over the plane. The DOJ later dropped the subpoenas after a judge said the investigation violated protections afforded to journalists.

Kendall, who served under Joe Biden between 2021 and 2025, told CNN last month that he believes the new jet would require three to four years of modifications to meet the standards of the older presidential aircraft in terms of life support, communications, and security.

Trump has repeatedly accused the media of spreading “fake” stories about him and his presidency and has sought to crack down on leaks. Most recently, he vowed to hunt down and jail “leakers” following reports that the US had largely depleted its missile stockpile during the war with Iran. He denied the claim, describing the country’s ammunition stockpile as “unlimited.”

A New Mexico judge has declared Meta a “public nuisance,” comparing the social media giant to a polluting factory. The ruling orders the company to establish an abatement fund and overhaul key features of its platforms over alleged harm to children.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid on Thursday ordered the parent company of Facebook and Instagram to pay an additional $567 million, bringing the total penalties in the case to $942 million after a $375 million judgment in March.

The ruling appears to be the first time a social media company has been found to constitute a public nuisance – a legal concept traditionally reserved for hazards that affect society at large, such as air pollution, toxic waste, or contaminated water.

“Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms,” the judge wrote, as quoted by the Financial Times.

Biedscheid cited evidence that the state’s youth mental health crisis had worsened in recent years, including higher rates of depression, eating disorders, and suicide among adolescents.

He ordered Meta to establish a fund to mitigate those harms, with $420 million earmarked for clinical and behavioral health programs.

The ruling also requires Meta to prevent adults from messaging minors, stop recommending underage accounts to adults, remove public “like” counts for users under 18, limit push notifications overnight and during school hours, impose a monthly usage cap for minors across Facebook and Instagram, and delete accounts belonging to users under 13 along with all personal information collected from them.

Meta said it disagrees with the ruling and will appeal.

Elon Musk has refused to allow Ukraine to use his Starlink satellite internet service to guide drone strikes deep inside Russian territory, The Atlantic reported on Friday, citing two close allies of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov.

According to the publication, Fedorov, a tech-savvy promoter of drone warfare who was sacked from his position last month, has since been working through back channels to appeal to Musk, but the billionaire has so far refused to relent.

“As of this moment, there is no positive decision,” an ally of Fedorov was quoted as saying. “Elon keeps saying it’s time to make a deal,” the source added.

The Atlantic previously reported that during his visit to the US last month, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky asked President Donald Trump to help influence his close ally Musk on the matter, but Trump remained noncommittal.

In 2023, the entrepreneur confirmed reports that he had rejected Ukraine’s request to use Starlink for attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and naval bases in Crimea. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he said at the time.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last month that Musk should shut down Starlink in Ukraine altogether if he truly wanted “people to stop dying.”

Musk’s reported position represents a second major blow to Ukraine’s diplomatic efforts after Trump walked back an earlier promise to grant Kiev a license to produce Patriot air defense missiles and rebuffed a plea to deliver more interceptors. Zelensky and the Ukrainian military said this week that the country was struggling to fend off Russian strikes on Kiev and other cities.

Zelensky’s abrupt decision to sack Fedorov sparked street protests across Ukraine, with crowds and several prominent activists demanding his reinstatement. Zelensky responded to the public outrage by firing the country’s top commander, General Aleksandr Syrsky, with whom Fedorov had reportedly clashed over priorities and tactics.

Duke University School of Law has largely disregarded the US Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action and continued to discriminate against white and Asian applicants, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has alleged.

In 2023, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, sharply limiting the use of race in determining college admissions under constitutional equal-protection principles.

The DOJ said on Thursday that Duke Law had formally acknowledged the ruling while effectively preserving an admissions system that favored black and Hispanic applicants over white, Asian, and other candidates.

According to the department, the Durham, North Carolina-based law school relied on “race or closely related proxies,” including personal essays and first-generation college status, to advance its diversity goals. At the same time, traditional academic indicators, including Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores, were allegedly given less weight.

Dhillon called on Duke Law to end the alleged discriminatory practices voluntarily or face possible enforcement action.

Duke University is widely regarded as an “Ivy Plus” institution, a group of highly selective universities considered comparable in prestige to the eight Ivy League schools. Duke Law said it was reviewing the DOJ letter and remained committed to acting lawfully in a manner “consistent with our academic mission.”

In May, the DOJ similarly accused Yale School of Medicine of engaging in discriminatory admissions practices.

Spain imposed reciprocal entry checks on Saturday on people traveling from fellow EU and NATO member Italy – in response to border controls introduced by Rome following a massive influx of migrants into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco.

The border controls on Italy, which are in response to “the persistent irregular migratory pressure affecting the transalpine country,” will be in effect from midnight ‌Saturday until September 7, the Spanish Interior Ministry said in a statement. Border agents will check passports, nationality, and visas for Italian passengers and visitors from other countries arriving from Italy.

Around 72,000 people illegally entered Ceuta last week in a matter of hours, reigniting fears of a new migrant crisis in Europe. Although the majority have since been sent back, between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants remain on Spanish territory, according to local officials.

The surge came shortly after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea while trying to swim into Ceuta or Melilla could not be immediately deported. According to Reuters, migrants were also encouraged by misleading viral videos on social media.

On Friday, the Spanish government slammed the decision as “unfair and discriminatory” and called on Rome to “treat Spaniards in the same way as other European citizens.”

“If it fails to do so by the end of Sunday, August 9, Spain will be forced to adopt proportionate measures to protect the interests and dignity of its citizens,” the government said in a statement on its website. It argued that Ceuta’s special status prevents irregular migrants from freely entering the Schengen Area, while Spain has in the past taken in some of the migrants who arrived on Italian shores or were rescued in the Mediterranean Sea.

The dispute highlights the rift between Meloni’s center-right government and the left-wing government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Meloni has cultivated a warm relationship with US President Donald Trump, who in recent years has heavily criticized Sanchez for refusing to raise Spain’s defense spending to 5% of GDP and for being a vocal opponent of Trump’s war with Iran.

Last week, the US State Department argued that the crisis in Ceuta was caused by Spain’s “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe.”

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye signed a defense pact on Friday, sparking talk of a NATO style grouping that could alter the regional power balance.

The bloc’s formation comes amid a volatile security situation in the Middle East, triggered by the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Tehran’s retaliation against Gulf monarchies, who have been traditional US allies, has exposed the limitations of the American security umbrella and forced the Gulf Arabs to think of alternative security frameworks.

The pact was signed in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. 

Pakistan’s ⁠Foreign Ministry said in a statement that an armed ⁠attack on any one of the ⁠three countries would be ⁠regarded as an ⁠attack against them all. However, whether such an attack would elicit a combined military response – on the lines of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense commitments – from the bloc is not clear. 

Why is the pact significant? 

Still, the military alliance between three Sunni Muslim countries offers a powerful symbolism in a region wracked by conflict.

The three players bring very powerful assets to the grouping: Pakistan is the only Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal; Türkiye has a robust defense industry and the second-largest military in NATO; and Saudi Arabia – the world’s biggest crude exporter – has the financial muscle, apart from a military bristling with American weapons. 

However, experts note that this is not the first attempt to establish a similar counterweight in the region, and the latest pact may not immediately be a “gamechanger.”

“I wouldn’t go to the extent of calling it Islamic NATO or the emergence of a new security block or a new alliance or… alignment,” Middle East expert and an associate professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Muhammad Mudassir Qamar, told RT India. He noted that such attempts at alliance have been made in the past.

What led to the Mecca agreement?

The Mecca agreement followed months of negotiations and builds on a similar agreement between Riyadh and Islamabad last year, and also a growing military relationship between Islamabad and Ankara. 

Pakistan’s military already fields Turkish drones and other weapons systems, some of which were used in its clash with India last year.
The Mideast conflict has also upset the security equilibrium in the region, with Iran and its proxy militias striking with relative impunity despite sustained US attacks, alarming the Gulf Arab countries. 

Ankara is nervous about the US support for Kurdish militias against Iran, one of the components of the initial US-Israeli plan to topple the Iranian government.

Islamabad has ambitions to be a major regional player in Central Asia and the Middle East, leveraging its friendly ties with Muslim countries in the region.

How other countries have responded

Iran, which has long tried to dominate the Gulf’s security scene and shares a border with Pakistan, has called it a “paper agreement.” 

“Saudis must know that a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring them security, just as years of one-sided nursing to the Americans did not bring them security,” Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of Iran’s Parliament and National Security and Foreign Policy Commission posted on X.

This emerging defense alignment does not affect India’s defense calculus or alignments in the region, but still merits attention, according to Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Qamar. 

Still, he suggested, it means a more complex regional security calculus in the years ahead for India, although New Delhi’s deepening ties with Riyadh will be an important counterweight.

A leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model has found a way around restrictions during a controlled cybersecurity test, adding to growing concerns about the effectiveness of AI safeguards, US-based cybersecurity research firm Frontier Security has said.

The researchers identified the model as startup Moonshot’s flagship Kimi K3, saying it accessed online information during an evaluation in an isolated testing environment developed by the UK’s AI Security Institute. The system is designed to keep AI models disconnected from the internet while their capabilities are assessed.

Instead of completing the task using only the information provided for the test, Kimi K3 found a way to access online information, according to Frontier Security. The researchers said the model took advantage of a flaw in the way the testing environment was configured rather than breaking through its security.

It follows similar testing mishaps reported in recent weeks by OpenAI and Anthropic, whose AI models also broke out of their intended testing environments during controlled evaluations. In some of those cases, the systems interacted with external online services while attempting to complete assigned tasks.

A Ukrainian drone strike on a residential block in Russia’s Crimea killed at least two civilians and wounded another, regional head Sergey Aksyonov said on Friday.

“During yet another enemy attack in Crimea, a Ukrainian drone struck an apartment building in Kerch,” he said in a statement. “Unfortunately, there were civilian casualties: two people were killed and another was injured.”

Overall, more than 200 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones were shot down over Russian regions in the overnight raid, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said on Friday.

Since June, Kiev stepped up long-range attacks on civilian infrastructure in Russia as part of a 40-day pressure campaign announced by Vladimir Zelensky, striking multiple warehouses belonging to online retailer Wildberries (often described as “Russia’s Amazon”), energy hubs, residential buildings, and civilian vehicles.

Kiev’s attacks have caused hundreds of civilian casualties since the start of Ukraine’s pressure campaign, prompting Russia to escalate long-range attacks on Ukrainian logistics hubs and port infrastructure, virtually cutting off Ukraine’s Black Sea trade.

In the last week alone, Russia struck 34 ships “operating in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

The US Senate has approved a bill allowing President Donald Trump to impose 100% tariffs on the largest purchasers of Russian oil and gas. The bill was the brainchild of Senator Lindsey Graham, who tried multiple times to pass it before he died last month.

The bill, titled ‘The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026’, passed the Senate by 86 votes to 11 on Friday, with Graham’s sister Darline, who was appointed to his seat, reading out the result. Trump has already said he would sign the legislation, meaning it will become law if it passes the House of Representatives next week.

Senator Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote against the bill. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders and nine progressive Democrats, including former presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, also voted against it.  

The legislation empowers Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top five purchasers of Russian oil and gas, a list that includes China and India. An earlier version of the bill would have increased these tariffs to 500% and applied them with or without Trump’s authorization.

The bill was passed less than a month after Graham’s sudden death from heart disease. At a funeral service in Washington last week, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky met with more than 60 Senators and lobbied for the bill’s passage, urging them to hold a vote – and press Trump to send weapons to Kiev – “as quickly as possible, without unnecessary bureaucracy.”

Graham met with Zelensky ten times since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 and at the time of his death had just returned from touring weapons factories in Kiev. Graham repeatedly lobbied for maximum US military aid to Ukraine, suggested that the US shoot down Russian jets over Ukraine, and in March 2022, called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Today, President Zelensky is watching from Ukraine, and Putin is watching from Moscow,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-sponsored the bill, said after the vote. “I would like to think Lindsey Graham is watching too,” he added.

The bill also applies sanctions to Putin, senior Kremlin officials, Russian banks and business figures, and the Iranian energy and arms sectors. The sanctions are mostly symbolic, as almost all of Moscow and Tehran’s elites have already been sanctioned by the US. 

The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), suggested and initially spearheaded by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, credited itself with billions of dollars in federal budget savings that could not be independently verified, a government watchdog said Thursday.

US President Donald Trump launched the now-defunct initiative shortly after he took office last January, tapping Musk as his government efficiency czar. The agency was billed as a sweeping effort to cut waste and bureaucracy across the federal government and its sprawling $7 trillion annual budget.

DOGE claims to have saved around $215 billion – just over 3% of the federal budget – through contract and lease cancellations, grant cuts, workforce reductions, regulatory changes and other actions.

However, billions of the roughly $110 billion in savings published on DOGE’s ‘Wall of Receipts’ were either “incorrect or lacked supporting evidence,” the US Government Accountability Office found.

DOGE provided insufficient information to verify 96% of the $49.2 billion it claimed to have saved from terminating nearly 16,000 grants, the watchdog reported.

In one case, DOGE claimed $1.7 billion in savings from a Defense Health Agency IT contract covering more than 700 military treatment facilities. The contract, however, was never terminated or reduced, GAO wrote. “Thus, no savings were achieved,” it said.

DOGE officially shut down in July, following months of rumors that the initiative was quietly being dismantled and its functions absorbed elsewhere in the federal government.

The aggressive campaign quickly became a political flashpoint as tens of thousands of federal workers lost their jobs and government programs were targeted for cuts. Musk also clashed with several senior officials in Trump’s cabinet before publicly feuding with the president over the Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” and accusing it of exacerbating the ballooning US budget deficit.