The recent NATO summit in Lithuania has concluded and it has been announced that Ukraine will not be invited to join the alliance. This is obviously not what Ukraine wanted, considering that they have been lobbying hard for an invitation for the past several years. Upon hearing the news, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was clearly upset, and complained that a lack of an invitation was “unprecedented and absurd.” Yet, U.S. President Joe Biden said it was “premature” to let Ukraine into the alliance, and that the war with Russia had to be resolved prior to Ukraine being admitted to NATO.

The NATO Summit in Vilnius (July 11-12) signalled that there is absolutely no possibility of talks to settle the Ukraine war in a foreseeable future. The war will only intensify, as the US and its allies still hope to inflict a military defeat on Russia although that is clearly beyond their capability.

Kiev’s supporters can no longer tell themselves that all reports about disadvantageous developments are either “Russian propaganda” or “psy-ops” designed to deceive their opponent after the New York Times’ latest report confirmed that Zelensky’s damning admission about his side’s unpreparedness is indeed true.

As Ukrainian forces continue their much-hyped counteroffensive to take back contested territories in the country’s eastern and southern regions, we’re faced with conflicting coverage of the campaign.

A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. We’re joined on the show by the author of the investigation, William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has “got its hand in a little bit of everything” in Ukraine.

Over the last seventeen months, it’s become customary for those who disagree with US foreign policy on the Ukraine war to preface every objection to that policy with at least one, possibly two, disclaimers.

After the bipolar world that existed from the end of the Second World War until the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the current conflict on the territory of Ukraine is the point of gravity in the process of transition between two great eras of contemporary history: the old – unipolar – that has lasted for the last 30 years and the new – multipolar – post-hegemonic, that came into being at the end of February 2022.

The prospect of a failed counter-offensive and significant territorial concessions would only embolden Russia and China

Multiple reports are reinvestigating the neo-Nazi fighters and militias involved in the war both in Russia and Ukraine. “You have neo-Nazis on both sides of this conflict,” says Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin, a longtime reporter on the far right in Ukraine and Russia who is critical of the Western media’s normalization of groups like the Azov Battalion. “We are sending a very dangerous message that if you’re the right type of neo-Nazis, we will not only work with you, we will celebrate you,” Golinkin notes.

The proxy war on Russia is the centre piece of Biden’s foreign policy of uniting the world’s ‘democracies’ against ‘autocracies’, particularly China and Russia. He boasts repeatedly of uniting US allies, most in NATO, as never before. Though the real unity is spotty at best, until recently, the rhetoric seemed to work. No longer. At its recent Vilnius Summit, NATO’s disunity bubbled over, though not for the reasons most discussed in the press. The real reasons are rooted in developments that threaten to unravel not only Biden’s strategy, but also NATO.