Are you prepared?

Ukraine’s battlefronts and army continue to slowly crumble under the pressure of the Russian army’s advance east. The Maidan regime is beginning to eat itself. Yuliya Tymoshenko is being courted by Kiev’s former key backer, Donald Trump’s new America. Former president and Zelenskiy-indicted opposition leader Petro Poroshenko calls Zelenskiy “a dictator.” Kiev’s Mayor Vitaliy Klichko and Zelenskiy’s former aide Oleksiy Arestovich have done much the same, and the latter has announced his intent to run for president. And well-armed neofascist army units, some at the corps level, await their moment to ‘finish Ukraine’s nationalist revolution, which the oligarch-dominated Maidan regime, they say, only began.

At last week’s Paris meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron congratulated themselves on reinserting Europe into the peace process opened up by President Trump. In practice, they have done their best to derail it.

As if two world wars born in Europe were not enough, an increasingly divided Europe is seeking unity through militarization and hyperbolic fear of Russia, writes Uroš Lipušcek.

Without the US, the blocs Ukraine strategy will fall apart

Ian and Pascal Lottaz discuss the panic and the state of denial within European capitals following President Trump’s radical shift in US policy towards the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump wants peace, now. Volodymyr Zelensky and his European supporters want victory, later. This is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office on Friday was all about. Peace through victory — essentially the Second World War model — is the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict. America sees it differently.

I think Trump is sincere in wanting to broker a peace deal with Russia, but I do not think he has grasped the fact that Russia has no desire to end the war with Ukraine until it is defeated, along with NATO, or the United States accepts the conditions President Putin presented last June. Europe is a different matter entirely. The European Union bureaucrats and the leaders of France, Germany and the UK want to keep the war going.

Transship of Russian gas to Europe via TurkStream hit an all time high this week as prices triple. The EU is emptying its tanks at the fastest pace in 5 years. Are we headed for a new energy crisis?

The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.