As NATO holds its Summit in Madrid on June 28-30, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: “This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.” Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the February 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.

The west is nostalgically caught up with outdated ‘containment’ policies, this time against Global South integration. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world is moving on, together.

Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid spared no expense to build the sumptuous Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul during 1843 and 1856, which was constructed to impress the world. It had the largest Bohemian crystal chandelier ever installed and fourteen tonnes of gold to gild the ceilings.

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has officially withdrawn Ankara’s objection to the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, with the three countries signing a trilateral memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid.

Outside of the West, criticism of Russia is far more subdued, confirming Putin’s much-vaunted pivot to the East and Russian diplomacy in the Global South.

In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively.

In 1963 when the James Bond spy thriller, “From Russia With Love” came out just a year after the Cuban missile crisis, which pushed us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, if anyone had predicted that one day I’d be taking a boat to Moscow, I’d have said they were crazy.

Russia’s ruble hit 52.3 to the dollar on Wednesday, its strongest level since May 2015. On Thursday afternoon in Moscow, the currency was trading at 54.2 to the greenback, slightly weaker but still near seven-year highs

There’s a John Mearsheimer video clip from 2016 that’s going viral on Twitter right now, as old John Mearsheimer clips tend to do in the year 2022 when his predictions that western actions would lead to the destruction of Ukraine are coming horrifyingly true.

During the period from 28 April to 11 May of 2022, the European Council on Foreign Relations polled 8,172 respondents who were in ten European countries, on the question “Who is mainly responsible for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine?”