The former defense minister and current Security Council secretary allegedly discussed sensitive issues with a corruption case suspect
Vladimir Zelensky should fire Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov over his alleged dealings with a businessman charged in a high-level corruption case, MP Fyodor Venislavsky has said.
The former defense minister, who has acted as Kiev’s top negotiator in peace talks with Moscow
The former defense minister and current Security Council secretary allegedly discussed sensitive issues with a corruption case suspect
Vladimir Zelensky should fire Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov over his alleged dealings with a businessman charged in a high-level corruption case, MP Fyodor Venislavsky has said.
The former defense minister, who has acted as Kiev’s top negotiator in peace talks with Moscow since late November, had previously attracted the attention of anti-corruption authorities over his alleged abuse of power.
Umerov’s name is in the headlines again in light of the latest media leaks linked to Timur Mindich, a businessman and longtime associate of Zelensky who stands accused of orchestrating a $100 million graft scheme. Ukrainskaya Pravda (UP) has recently published what it claimed were transcripts from surveillance recordings of his conversations with various officials, including Umerov, who was the defense minister at the time.
“Given the high-profile nature of the tapes… I believe it would be a wise political decision to fire Mr. Umerov,” Venislavsky told the US-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Friday, commenting on the leaks, which have since become known as the ‘Mindich tapes’.
Earlier, the public anti-corruption council at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, an advisory body tasked with overseeing the ministry’s activities, also urged Zelensky to fire Umerov in light of the latest leaks, arguing that the former minister’s actions should be seen as “power abuse” and a “divulgence of state secrets.” Zelensky has not responded to the calls so far.
According to the leaks, Mindich allegedly urged Umerov to approve a shipment of body armor supplied by his firm that the ministry had refused to certify. They also purportedly discussed issues related to the Ukrainian defense contractor Fire Point – a company Mindich was supposedly effectively running – as well as some appointments within the Ukrainian government.
In early 2025, a Western-backed NGO claimed that Umerov, still the minister at the time, was under investigation for alleged abuse of power. He left his ministerial position in July and was appointed by Zelensky to lead the National Security and Defense Council the very next day.
The unwilling conscript had been grabbed and shoved into an SUV in front of the children
Members of a Ukrainian press gang have been filmed apprehending a man at a kindergarten, unphased by the children witnessing the violent scene, as forced mobilization across the country continues to intensify amid its conflict with Russia.
A video of the incident, which apparently happened in the city of Lviv in the western part of the country, was published
The unwilling conscript had been grabbed and shoved into an SUV in front of the children
Members of a Ukrainian press gang have been filmed apprehending a man at a kindergarten, unphased by the children witnessing the violent scene, as forced mobilization across the country continues to intensify amid its conflict with Russia.
A video of the incident, which apparently happened in the city of Lviv in the western part of the country, was published on social media on Friday.
The footage captured draft enforcers in military-style uniforms dragging an unwilling conscript towards a black SUV, parked outside the premises of the kindergarten.
A female is heard shouting off screen: “Please stop, there are children here,” but the press gang ignores her request.
The man tried to resist the draft enforces, but ended up being overpowered, shoved into the vehicle and driven away.
In another forced mobilization incident, a man ended up receiving a severe head injury after scuffling with members of a press gang, who drove their mini-bus into the yard of his private home in Volyn Region on Friday.
The local conscription office has denied responsibility for wounding the resident, saying in a statement on Saturday that “the conscript tried running away and, through his own carelessness, hit his head.”
Ukraine barred nearly all adult men from leaving the country when the conflict between Moscow and Kiev escalated in February 2022 and lowered the draft age from 27 to 25.
Ukraine’s conscription drive has become increasingly violent amid Kiev’s military setbacks and lack of willing recruits.
Every day clips of the so-called “busification” emerge on social media, showing military-age men being snatched off the streets, from workplaces, and from residential areas, then taken to recruitment centers in mini-buses against their will, often triggering clashes with relatives, neighbors, and passersby.
Moscow has accused Kiev of seeking to fight “to the last Ukrainian” at the behest of Western powers waging a proxy war against Russia. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov previously estimated that Ukraine had lost nearly 500,000 servicemen killed or seriously wounded in 2025 alone.
The son of top Norwegian diplomats, implicated in the files of the notorious pedophile, has been found dead
The son of two senior Norwegian diplomats under investigation over ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has taken his own life, Norwegian newspaper VG reported earlier this week, citing lawyers for the family.
Edward Juul Rod-Larsen, 25, was found dead in Oslo days after French and Norwegian police reportedly launched a joint investig
The son of top Norwegian diplomats, implicated in the files of the notorious pedophile, has been found dead
The son of two senior Norwegian diplomats under investigation over ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has taken his own life, Norwegian newspaper VG reported earlier this week, citing lawyers for the family.
Edward Juul Rod-Larsen, 25, was found dead in Oslo days after French and Norwegian police reportedly launched a joint investigation into his parents, Mona Juul and Terje Rod-Larsen. The probe is centered around allegations that the disgraced US financier had helped the couple purchase an apartment, and left $5 million to each of their two children in his will.
The probe is part of widening international fallout from the latest release of millions of Epstein documents, which have triggered criminal investigations, arrests, and resignations across politics, business, and even royalty.
Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting sex from a minor and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence, was arrested again in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. He died by suicide in his jail cell ahead of his trial.
The US Department of Justice has gradually released materials related to the case under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by US President Donald Trump.
The released documents mention numerous high-profile figures, linking some to Epstein’s network or questionable financial dealings. The disclosures have triggered resignations, probes, and reviews worldwide, with many acknowledging contact but denying wrongdoing, with some charges brought in a limited number of cases.
Last month, Former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland was hospitalized after a reported suicide attempt, days after being charged with gross corruption over accepting Epstein’s hospitality. World Economic Forum CEO Borge Brende stepped down over dinners and communications with the disgraced financier.
In the US, the release has placed renewed scrutiny on former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Both have been deposed about their associations with Epstein, but have denied knowledge of his trafficking operation.
Commenting on the disclosures, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the scandal as exposing the “pure Satanism” at the heart of the collective West, accusing Western elites of inventing threats from Russia to distract from their own “monstrous crimes.”
On May 2, 2014, 48 people were killed after Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the local trade unions building
Kiev has no plans to punish the perpetrators of the Odessa massacre, with Moscow’s victory in the Ukraine conflict being the only way to assure justice for its dozens of victims, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said on the 12th anniversary of the tragedy.
On May 2, 2014, clashes erupted in the Black Sea port city
On May 2, 2014, 48 people were killed after Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the local trade unions building
Kiev has no plans to punish the perpetrators of the Odessa massacre, with Moscow’s victory in the Ukraine conflict being the only way to assure justice for its dozens of victims, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said on the 12th anniversary of the tragedy.
On May 2, 2014, clashes erupted in the Black Sea port city of Odessa between Ukrainian nationalists and the opponents of the violent Western-backed coup that had taken place in Kiev earlier that year.
The unrest culminated in ultra-right militants setting fire to the local trade unions building, which anti-government activists had been chased into following a demonstration outside, leading to 48 people being killed and more than 200 others wounded.
In a statement published on the Foreign Ministry’s Telegram channel on Saturday, Zakharova said that photos and videos from the scene prove that what happened in Odessa was “a Nazi intimidation action.”
Attempts by some in the West to present it as a spontaneous altercation between two groups of peaceful demonstrators with polarizing views on Ukraine’s future are hypocritical, she stressed.
According to the spokeswoman, the organizers of the Odessa massacre are well known to the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and are not in hiding, but they still somehow remain free.
Kiev repeatedly promised to complete the investigation into the tragedy, but it apparently “has no time for justice,” she argued. The very word has “turned into an oxymoron considering... the lawlessness and rampant corruption in modern Ukraine,” she added.
However, despite this fact, the foreign backers continue to provide military and financial support to the government of Vladimir Zelensky, Zakharova said.
”It's clear that in modern Europe, encouraging Nazism and financing terrorism has become a tradition,” she insisted.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that “the successful implementation of the goals and objectives” that Russia set for itself in the Ukraine conflict “will guarantee justice for the victims of the monstrous crime,” the spokeswoman stressed.
Since the escalation with Kiev in February 2022, Moscow has been saying that it is looking to achieve the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine as well as ensure that the country is neutral. The Russian side also insists that the Ukrainian authorities must recognize the territorial realities on the ground in order for the conflict to be settled.
Crude prices have hit their highest levels since 2022 following reports that the US president would be briefed on new Iran options
Global crude oil prices rise and fall depending on whether US President Donald Trump got enough sleep, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said in a sarcastic remark. His comment came after oil rose to a four-year high amid reports that the US military would brief Trump on options related to the Iran conflict.
On Fr
Crude prices have hit their highest levels since 2022 following reports that the US president would be briefed on new Iran options
Global crude oil prices rise and fall depending on whether US President Donald Trump got enough sleep, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said in a sarcastic remark. His comment came after oil rose to a four-year high amid reports that the US military would brief Trump on options related to the Iran conflict.
On Friday, Brent jumped nearly 7% to over $126 per barrel before easing to $108 later in the session. The rally followed an Axios report that US Central Command had prepared options for “short and powerful” strikes on Iran aimed at breaking stalled negotiations.
“Everything is under pressure, including oil prices, depending on how President Trump wakes up,” Fico said on Friday speaking with journalists in Bratislava. “If he wakes up in a good mood, oil goes down, if he wakes up in a bad mood and makes some statement, oil automatically goes up.”
Prices saw extreme volatility and a sharp surge after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign on Iran on February 28. Iran responded by barring “enemy ships” from the Strait of Hormuz, which handles about one-fifth of global energy trade. In addition, Tehran conducted retaliatory strikes on US military bases in several countries across the Middle East.
Gas prices have also surged amid concerns over disruptions to global energy supply chains, with volatility spreading across European and Asian markets. Broader financial markets saw sharp swings due to escalation risks. Analysts have noted that global markets remain highly sensitive to political signals and policy decisions by the Trump administration.
Fico also recalled US interventions in Iraq and Venezuela and expressed concern about possible aggression toward Cuba, as well as Trump’s unresolved claims on Greenland, where Washington could “continue to assert its interests.”
Russia, China, America and the myth of a new grand bargain
There will be much talk this May about the so-called “strategic triangle” of Russia, China and the United States.
US President Donald Trump is expected in Beijing first, followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Whenever the leaders of the three most influential powers meet, speculation inevitably follows. What if they strike some grand ba
Russia, China, America and the myth of a new grand bargain
There will be much talk this May about the so-called “strategic triangle” of Russia, China and the United States.
US President Donald Trump is expected in Beijing first, followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Whenever the leaders of the three most influential powers meet, speculation inevitably follows. What if they strike some grand bargain? What if the world suddenly becomes more orderly?
Such expectations are misplaced. The restructuring of the global system is already under way, and it isn’t a process that can be halted or reversed by summit diplomacy. Even so, turning points in history can unfold in different ways; carefully managed, or recklessly accelerated. That’s what makes the coming meetings significant.
Both Russia and the United States are now deeply involved in large-scale military confrontations. The importance of these conflicts lies not only in their scope, but in their broader consequences for the international system. China, by contrast, has historically kept its distance from such entanglements. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear in Beijing that it can’t remain insulated from their effects. Discussions at the recent Valdai Club conference in Shanghai suggested that China is reassessing its position.
At the center of this reassessment is a simple question: what, if anything, is still possible in relations with Washington?
For decades, China’s rise was closely tied to its economic relationship with the United States. The arrangement sometimes described as “Chimerica,” American capital and technology combined with Chinese labor and manufacturing, formed the backbone of globalization. It wasn’t an equal partnership, but it was mutually beneficial. For a long time, it seemed that basic economic self-interest would prevent either side from undermining it.
That assumption has now collapsed.
By the late 2000s, dissatisfaction in Washington was already evident. The United States increasingly viewed the arrangement not as a source of shared gains, but as a structural imbalance. Over time, the accumulation of tensions, economic and strategic, reached a point where incremental adjustments were no longer sufficient. What followed was a qualitative shift in the system itself.
For several decades, the global order operated largely in the interests of the United States as the leader of the Western bloc. Its gradual erosion now threatens those advantages. Washington’s response has been to use the current period of transition to secure as much of a head start as possible for the future.
Donald Trump has become the most visible embodiment of this approach. His rhetoric, openly transactional and even boastful, may appear unconventional, but the underlying logic predates him. The objective is clear: maximize immediate gains and build up national capacity as quickly as possible. Then use that accumulated strength to dominate the next phase of global competition.
This represents a sharp departure from the earlier American strategy, which prioritized long-term investments in the international system. Those investments didn’t always produce immediate returns, but they reinforced a framework that ultimately benefited the United States more than anyone else. Today, the emphasis has shifted toward short-term advantage, even at the risk of longer-term instability.
Whether this strategy will succeed remains uncertain. The initial phase has already produced setbacks. But the broader direction is unlikely to change. Future administrations may adopt a different tone, but they will operate within the same constraints. The liberal international order won’t return, not because of Trump’s personality, but because the conditions that sustained it no longer exist.
For other major powers, including China, this has profound implications. The idea of a comprehensive “big deal” with the United States, one that stabilizes the global system for years to come, has effectively become unrealistic.
Trump’s frequent use of the word “deal” is revealing. In his vocabulary, it’s more than a mere strategic concept but a commercial one. A deal is “big” not because it is durable or all-encompassing, but because of the scale of immediate gain it delivers. And like any commercial transaction, it can be abandoned if a more desirable opportunity presents itself.
Under such conditions, long-term agreements on the structure of world order are impossible. Washington is unlikely to commit to any arrangement that limits its flexibility before it has secured what it considers a sufficient advantage.
This is not necessarily a product of malice or arrogance. It is, in its own way, a rational response to a period of extreme uncertainty. The United States is seeking to preserve the foundations of its future dominance by acting decisively in the present.
But rationality on one side forces adaptation on the other.
If key players conclude that stable agreements with Washington are unattainable, their behavior changes. Military capability becomes more important as a safeguard against pressure. At the same time, interest grows in alternative forms of cooperation. That is, frameworks that operate independently of the United States and are insulated from its influence.
This logic isn’t new, but it’s gaining urgency. Russia has been advocating for such arrangements for several years. China, by contrast, has approached the idea with caution, hoping instead to preserve some form of mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. That hope now appears to be fading.
The upcoming visits to Beijing will provide a useful indication of how far this shift has progressed.
The meeting between Trump and Xi will likely define the limits of a temporary accommodation between two powers that remain economically intertwined, yet increasingly distrustful of one another. The question is no longer whether a comprehensive agreement is possible, but what narrow, short-term arrangements can be reached, and how long they will last.
Putin’s subsequent talks with Xi will address a different issue: the extent to which Russia and China are prepared to develop mechanisms of cooperation that bypass the United States altogether. Moscow has been moving in this direction for some time. Beijing now appears to be considering whether it must follow.
May will not produce a grand bargain. But it may show, more clearly than before, how the world is adjusting to the absence of one.
Anthropic, which the US Department of War designated a “supply-chain risk” earlier this year, was not part of the agreement
The Pentagon has said that it has reached deals with major artificial intelligence firms to integrate their advanced AI capabilities into the agency's classified networks.
The US Department of War has been actively negotiating with the industry’s leaders since the start of the year as it is trying to expand the application o
Anthropic, which the US Department of War designated a “supply-chain risk” earlier this year, was not part of the agreement
The Pentagon has said that it has reached deals with major artificial intelligence firms to integrate their advanced AI capabilities into the agency's classified networks.
The US Department of War has been actively negotiating with the industry’s leaders since the start of the year as it is trying to expand the application of AI in military operations and diversify the range of companies that provide the technology.
It is going ahead with the push despite concerns among experts regarding the ability of the AI to reliably operate within the existing laws of war and its possible use to invade the privacy of civilians in peacetime.
Agreements have been struck with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle to deploy their AI systems for “lawful operational use,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday.
Artificial intelligence will be integrated into the Department of War’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 networks to “streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the statement read.
The US Department of War’s official AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million personnel in the last five months, “generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents,” it said. According to the Pentagon, the technology has allowed the execution of certain tasks to be sped up “from months to days.”
Notably, the statement excluded another major AI startup, Anthropic, which had a falling out with the Pentagon earlier this year after it refused to loosen safeguards for its technology. The company argued that its AI could be used for domestic surveillance or the deployment of automatic weapons without human oversight.
The Department of War responded by designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a rare label typically reserved for entities linked to Washington’s foreign adversaries, effectively sidelining the firm from any future contracts.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” during a US Senate hearing earlier this week. Hegseth compared the company’s reluctance to agree to Pentagon’s terms to “Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at.”
The same machinery of manufactured war that shattered Iraq and Libya is now being recalibrated for Iran
History confirms that major Western-instigated conflicts are cultivated rather than spontaneous. From 19th-century colonial pretexts in North Africa to modern digital campaigns, the manufactured lie remains the primary propellant for the war machine. Over the last 50 years, this pattern reached a lethal zenith. Almost every intervention across
The same machinery of manufactured war that shattered Iraq and Libya is now being recalibrated for Iran
History confirms that major Western-instigated conflicts are cultivated rather than spontaneous. From 19th-century colonial pretexts in North Africa to modern digital campaigns, the manufactured lie remains the primary propellant for the war machine. Over the last 50 years, this pattern reached a lethal zenith. Almost every intervention across the Middle East and Africa traces back to a specific fabrication – packaged and sold to the public by a compliant mainstream media.
These are structural deceptions. In this system, dominant Western media functions as a psychological vanguard, sanitizing illegal aggression as a moral imperative. By the time a fraud is exposed, states are decapitated, and economies looted. The toll is never borne by politicians in Washington, London, or Paris, but by millions whose lives are treated as collateral for a geopolitical agenda.
The system of engineered permission was drafted in 2003. Iraq remains the archetype for how a fabricated casus belli dismantles a sovereign state. It was a multi-layered campaign of deception – from phantom WMDs to invented ties between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda. When leaders presented unverified intelligence as truth, mainstream media transitioned from investigative journalism to institutional transcription. By validating discredited sources and creating a ‘feedback loop’ of fear, they framed dissent as a delusion.
The consequence was the calculated annihilation of a civilization’s stability. By the time quiet mea culpas appeared in Western newspapers years later, the damage was irreversible. The human cost is staggering: Opinion Research Business (ORB) data indicates over 1 million Iraqi lives lost – a demographic erasure that birthed regional extremism. The media’s eventual admission was a postscript to a tragedy that achieved its primary objective: the permanent removal of a regional power under a false banner of liberation that never intended to arrive.
While Iraq relied on manufactured fear, the 2011 dismantling of Libya was blatant moral coercion. The ‘Architecture of Consent’ repurposed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), transforming a safeguard for civilians into a weapon for regime change. The foundational lie rested on uncorroborated reports of an impending massacre in Benghazi. This narrative, broadcast by regional satellite channels and adopted without scrutiny by Western governments, was used to bypass the African Union’s diplomatic peace initiatives.
Rather than analyzing a complex civil conflict, Western media functioned as psychological support for the intervention. They reduced a sovereign crisis to a simplistic fable pitting ‘pro-democracy’ forces against a singular ‘villain’. Once the ‘no-fly zone’ served as a gateway for a sustained NATO bombing campaign, the trap was sprung. The ‘liberation’ celebrated in European capitals resulted in an immediate centerless, fractured wasteland.
The human and economic toll of this narrative was predicated on staggering fabrications. In the 2011 uprising, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini claimed 1,000 people were killed in the first days by Gaddafi’s forces. Media reports aggressively inflated this to 10,000 within weeks. However, investigative post-mortems reveal a different reality: Human Rights Watch documented that the actual death toll across Libya during those initial four days was 233 – a tragic number, but a fraction of the ‘onslaught’ marketed to the UN Security Council.
Furthermore, the ‘foreign mercenaries’ narrative used to justify R2P remains a successful myth. Despite widespread reporting, organizations such as Amnesty International found no evidence that Gaddafi deployed African mercenary units; many targeted were actually sub-Saharan immigrants or black Libyans in the regular army. This data inflation was essential to building the ‘moral case’ for intervention, propagated by a media machine that prioritized existential threat narratives over reliable intelligence.
The 20-year occupation of Afghanistan was characterized by the absolute refusal to acknowledge it. In this theater, the ‘Architecture of Consent’ functioned through a rigid ultimatum: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” This rhetoric was designed to bypass the fundamental legal requirements of international justice and silence any call for procedural proof or diplomatic mediation.
Historical records, largely suppressed by the Western press, confirm that the Taliban leadership repeatedly attempted a diplomatic resolution. Through their representatives in Pakistan, they requested ‘solid evidence’ linking the suspects to the 9/11 attacks and offered to facilitate a trial in a neutral, third-party Islamic jurisdiction. The response from Washington was a total dismissal of the rule of law, asserting that the accusation itself was sufficient for war. Major media outlets facilitated this by rebranding a legitimate request for due process as an act of hostile ‘defiance’, thereby turning an illegal aggression into a ‘just war’.
The cost of this rejection of evidence is a matter of grim record. According to data from the Brown University Costs of War Project, the conflict resulted in over 176,000 deaths in Afghanistan alone, including roughly 46,000 civilians. By the time the Western forces staged their chaotic exit in 2021, the ‘evidence’ was irrelevant; the country had been reduced to a humanitarian emergency where over 90% of the population now survives below the poverty line. The ‘liberation’ was a 20-year cycle of violence that ended exactly where it began, but with a nation buried under the rubble of a failed narrative.
As we turn toward the current horizon, the machinery of engineered permission is undergoing a recalibration for its most ambitious project yet: the dismantling of Iran. The psychological buildup follows a frequency nearly identical to the 2003 Iraq blueprint, refined for a digital age where narrative control is seamless. Here, the deception is not tethered to a singular phantom weapon, but to an existential demonization that denies a regional power its right to sovereign security. This dehumanization reached its terminal point with Donald Trump’s declarations threatening to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization – a rhetorical war crime – and the dehumanization of its people as ‘animals’ unworthy of existence.
A calculated ‘cognitive quarantine’ is being drawn across Western consciousness. Just as the public was kept in ignorance regarding the diplomatic overtures made prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, today’s audiences are shielded from the nuances of nuclear monitoring and the horrific human toll of ‘maximum pressure’ economic warfare. The narrative framing treats Iran not as a rational state actor with historical grievances, but as an irrational, fanatical entity. This conditioning ensures that when the first strikes occur, the Western public will view them as an unavoidable necessity rather than an illegal act of aggression. The cost of the lie is already being paid in the lives of thousands of Iranian patients who are denied life-saving medicine due to a sanctions regime that the media portrays as ‘peaceful pressure’.
This architecture relies on the phenomenon of moving goalposts. In Afghanistan, a mission to apprehend one individual devolved into a 20-year social engineering project. In Libya, a ‘no-fly zone’ marketed as civilian protection morphed instantly into a regime-change bombing campaign. This fluidity of purpose is the engine of the ‘policy of no return’. That is, by the time the original justification is exposed as a fabrication, the military footprint is permanent, and the target nation is locked into a cycle of chaos. The media validates each new shift without demanding accountability for the failures of the last, ensuring that the resulting blood and ruin are never linked back to the original architects in the public mind.
This truth-laundering system is the structural spine of modern interventionism. From the rigged ultimatums of the early 2000s to the ‘humanitarian’ disguises used in the 2010s, the cycle remains unbroken because the architects are never held to account.
Politicians engineer the pretext, corporate media sanitizes the violence, and millions –predominantly in the Global South – pay with their lives and their heritage. True accountability will never come from quiet corrections issued years after a nation has been pulverized and its wealth looted. It begins by exposing these conflicts as the systematic dismantling of states to ensure a profitable, perpetual chaos that serves the ‘imperial directive’. If we refuse to dismantle the architecture of the lie today, we are simply preparing the ground for the next million victims tomorrow.
Amid the Iran conflict, Israel has avowed it will kill leaders yet unknown – a revolutionary, open-ended warrant for lawless execution.
German schoolmasters of an earlier dispensation indulged the cruel sport of asking pupils in final examinations which disease had carried off Julius Caesar. The trap was designed to expose as a fool the candidate who could not answer, proof enough that Caesar’s assassination remained common knowledge long after a
Amid the Iran conflict, Israel has avowed it will kill leaders yet unknown – a revolutionary, open-ended warrant for lawless execution.
German schoolmasters of an earlier dispensation indulged the cruel sport of asking pupils in final examinations which disease had carried off Julius Caesar. The trap was designed to expose as a fool the candidate who could not answer, proof enough that Caesar’s assassination remained common knowledge long after antiquity itself had vanished.
In the postmodern age of unbounded electronic warfare, extrajudicial killing has assumed a more sinister, revolutionary form: not a mere relapse into barbarism, but a novel, mutant paradigm of violence that exceeds even the egregious transgressions of pagan antiquity.
Ex ante execution: The grammar of a novel transgression
There are pivotal moments in geopolitics when language itself begins to signal a deeper rupture. Israel’s lethal rhetoric emerges as a revealing instance.
Along a fatal arc of escalation, the Jewish State has crossed from killing subordinate commanders to eliminating the very apex of its adversaries’ leadership – first in Lebanon, then in Gaza, and ultimately in Iran, where sovereignty was reduced to a target and the supreme leader to a mark.
More ominous still are the announcements: Jerusalem has signaled that succession itself would not be spared, that even those yet unchosen are already slated for death.
A declaration that a state will kill not merely its enemies, but its enemies-to-be, that is, future officeholders not yet chosen, not yet acting, not yet accountable, inaugurates a moment of disjunction in the form of a stark conceptual shift: from targeting individuals to targeting roles, and the very idea of succession.
At its core, Israel’s posture can be characterized as a doctrine of pre-emptive or anticipatory assassination: Whoever becomes the next leader is treated as a legitimate target, regardless of his identity or individual conduct.
This stance falls within what security analysts more broadly subsume under the rubric of leadership decapitation strategy, the deliberate elimination of command figures to provoke internal succession struggles, disrupt decision-making, and send an unmistakable deterrent signal to adversaries.
Yet the novelty of what may be termed “expectant extrajudicial elite execution” (EEEE) lies not in the removal of senior decision-makers as such, but in the extension of that logic forward in time, rendering the future occupant of the supreme office a present target.
This is where the standard security frameworks start to fray. Because once the threat applies not to a person but to a position, it becomes something more radical: anonymous role-based targeting.
In the case of such proleptic condemnation, violence is no longer justified by what a concrete individual has done, but by what future helmsmen are presumed to become. It is an institutionalized policy of unconstrained assassination and collective punishment transposed to leadership in the abstract, because the threat attaches not to a specific actor, but to the office itself.
From a legal standpoint, especially under human-rights law, such a posture can be categorized as an especially grave form of state-sponsored terrorism, precisely because such extrajudicial killing not only bypasses due process, but also severs punishment from individual culpability.
Supporters, however, invoke a different vocabulary, reducing such depersonalized, role-based assassination to mere deterrence signaling or psychological warfare: an attempt to make supreme authority so hazardous that no aspirant of ordinary prudence would accept it.
On this account, the strategic logic of elite deterrence seeks to magnify the hazards of political ascendancy to the point where succession itself becomes unstable. If holding an office carries an implicit death sentence, potential successors may simply refuse to assume power, and, ultimately, governance may wither.
Even those intrepid enough to accept the targeted office are thought to be diminished: forced into concealment, deprived of personal contact, and unable to project the charismatic presence on which power and influence often depends. Leadership then becomes spectral – formally present, yet politically half-absent – until followers may begin to wonder whether a leader exists at all.
Yet alongside these intended effects lie significant risks, especially if organizations replenish leadership faster and more adeptly than expected: Martyrdom may harden resolve, and successors may prove more formidable and radical than those they replace.
What appears in theory as a sequence of clean decapitations may, in practice, yield a hydra-like reality: like the mythic monster whose severed necks gave rise to new heads, each slain commander may generate successors more numerous, more elusive, and more lethally adept than the one removed.
Classical tyrannicide: The person, not the placeholder
Athens could dedicate an altar to the “unknown god”; it did not designate unknown tyrants for death.
Even before the advent of Christian moral thought, Greek and Roman debates on tyrannicide remained tethered to the person of the ruler, whose conduct, however contentiously judged, furnished the grounds for punitive action.
Judgment turned on imputed deeds, not on the office itself. The verdict was often disputed and divisive, yet still anchored in what the ruler had allegedly done and whether it warranted death.
What is at issue now is the radicalization of that logic: The future holder of an office, as yet unknown, is condemned in advance, irrespective of act or accountability. Such a paradigmatic leap, from striking down a tyrant to pre-emptively threatening any successor, would have strained even the comparatively permissive moral horizons of pagan antiquity.
The doctrine of tyrannicide has its roots in classical antiquity, where it was construed, however controversially, as a defense of the political community against unlawful rule.
In the Greek world, the killing of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton in 514 BC in Athens during the Panathenaea – the city’s sacred festival of Athena – was canonically enshrined as the founding myth of tyrannicide.
Casting of Harmodius and Aristogeiton in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
The conspirators’ violent deed came to be hallowed as an act of civic virtue, even as philosophers continued to dispute its moral warrant.
Plato’s Socrates warned that injustice must not be answered by injury, nor the city’s laws overthrown by private violence. Aristotle, less intent on moralizing tyrannicide than on diagnosing tyranny’s self-destruction, observed that the tyrant summons the very conspiracies that undo him, as his unjust treatment of his subjects breeds fear, contempt, anger, hatred, and revenge.
In truth, the deed that immortalized Harmodius and Aristogeiton belonged less to the assembly-ground of politics than to the theatre of passion.
As Thucydides stresses in the History of the Peloponnesian War (6.53–59), the joint deed sprang from private grievance rather than public principle; though premeditated, it was carried out in panic, and claimed not the ruling tyrant, Hippias, but his brother, Hipparchus.
Only later was this act of personal vengeance transfigured into a noble but deceptive legend. The narrative recast an impulsive killing as the iconic archetype of conscientious tyrant-slaying, thereby sanctifying an ignoble deed that sprung from private affront rather than public cause.
As an early illustration of extrajudicial killing’s perverse effects, this pseudo-tyrannicide neither ended the tyranny nor liberated Athens; it merely hardened the regime: Fear drove Hippias to intensify repression by putting many citizens to death.
Murder and memory: From the Peisistratids to the Ides of March
Taken together, the very genealogy of tyrannicide, corrupt before it became canonical, is tainted at the source: disreputable in motive, impious in setting, disastrous in consequence, and mendacious in memory.
Within the economy of the posthumous discourse, the exculpatory and legitimating myth functions as a stark foil, supplying the positive pole of a Manichaean opposition. This interpretive emplotment is ideologically useful precisely because it suppresses ambiguity, turning a muddled act of private violence into a metanarrative morality play of liberty against tyranny. For latter-day liberals in decadent Western circles, the erotic bond between Harmodius and Aristogeiton only deepens the aura of civic sanctity woven around the celebrated Tyrannicides.
With so tainted a pedigree – a private vendetta later ennobled as public virtue – it is small wonder that the progeny of this lineage should bear the marks of their vitiated origin: from further extrajudicial killings in antiquity that only hardened tyranny to Israel’s sacrilegious killing of Iran’s supreme Shiite leader in the age of viral geopolitics, a fatal moment in which the blade again promised liberation while bequeathing a darker future for the world at large.
Against this morally entangled backdrop, Thucydides’ nuanced judgment is all the more striking: The Peisistratid tyranny, he observes, was marked by unusual moderation: It taxed lightly – at a mere five percent, a rate that would make many modern taxpayers wistful – adorned Athens, secured its defense, endowed the temples, and otherwise left the city’s established laws largely intact, save for the dynastic precaution that a member of the Peisistratid family should always hold office.
Posterity schooled in the Whig myth of liberty smiled more readily on the Alcmaeonids, the rival aristocratic house, because democracy claimed them as ancestors.
Yet the record is less moral than memorial, for the Peisistratids were tyrants with achievements, while the Alcmaeonids were retrospectively anointed liberators with a stain: the old Cylonian sacrilege and curse, that is, the miasmatic slaughter of suppliants under the divine protection of Athena after Cylon’s abortive coup, an affair conventionally, though not securely, dated to 632 BC.
From Athens, the historical arc bent next to Rome, where political killing widened from the personal tyrant-slayer’s blow to the bureaucratic terror of proscription and, ultimately, to the most famous assassination of antiquity: the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC.
The death of the dictator perpetuo remains so deeply lodged in cultural memory that German schoolmasters of a bygone age, formed in the venerable humanist tradition, forged ignorance of it into a badge of intellectual disgrace, taking for granted that every pupil – save the irredeemably obtuse – knew Caesar had not died of disease.
The US president said he could consider reducing the number of American forces stationed in Spain and Italy
US President Donald Trump has said he would consider withdrawing some American troops stationed in Italy and Spain, after making a similar threat toward Germany amid a deepening rift with Washington’s European allies over the war with Iran.
Trump threatened earlier this week to reduce the number of US troops in Germany, continuing to deride
The US president said he could consider reducing the number of American forces stationed in Spain and Italy
US President Donald Trump has said he would consider withdrawing some American troops stationed in Italy and Spain, after making a similar threat toward Germany amid a deepening rift with Washington’s European allies over the war with Iran.
Trump threatened earlier this week to reduce the number of US troops in Germany, continuing to deride NATO as a “paper tiger” following the refusal of other member states to back the US-Israeli bombing campaign in the Middle East. On Friday, the Pentagon said it would withdraw around 5,000 of the roughly 36,000 active-duty service members from Germany.
Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Friday whether he would consider removing troops from Spain or Italy, Trump replied: “Yeah, probably. Look, why shouldn’t I?”
“Italy has not been of any help to us. And Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Trump said. “It’s one thing if they said nicely, or if they said, ‘Okay, we’ll help,’ but the help is a little slow,” he added.
Spain denied the use of a naval base near Cadiz for attacks on Iran and closed its airspace to US planes involved in the campaign. Italy similarly refused to allow the US to use an air base in Sicily.
Trump reiterated that he considers NATO ungrateful for US military support to Ukraine. “We helped them with Ukraine. You know, they made a mess out of Ukraine, a total mess,” he said.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has strongly criticized the bombing of Iran. “From my point of view, this war is illegal, it is a big mistake,” he said last month. In a recent op-ed in Le Monde diplomatique, Sanchez again condemned “the unilateral attempts by the United States to engineer regime change in Venezuela and now Iran – all without seeking even a veneer of international approval.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said the war with Iran has added to instability in the Middle East and driven up energy prices. She also criticized Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV over his opposition to the conflict as “unacceptable.”
The US president’s approval rating has sunk to record lows, while oil prices have peaked at over $120
US President Donald Trump has joked that American forces are behaving like pirates as he boasted about the capture of tankers and cargo ships attempting to breach the blockade of Iranian ports.
Oil prices surged past $120 a barrel this week for the first time since 2022, while Trump’s approval rating fell to 34%, a record low in Reuters/Ipsos pol
The US president’s approval rating has sunk to record lows, while oil prices have peaked at over $120
US President Donald Trump has joked that American forces are behaving like pirates as he boasted about the capture of tankers and cargo ships attempting to breach the blockade of Iranian ports.
Oil prices surged past $120 a barrel this week for the first time since 2022, while Trump’s approval rating fell to 34%, a record low in Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches dinner in Florida on Friday, Trump recalled how a destroyer fired at the Iranian-flagged cargo vessel Touska near the Strait of Hormuz on April 19 before it was boarded by US Marines.
“We took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates,” Trump said, prompting laughter in the audience.
Iran has condemned the seizure as illegal, with a government source telling Press TV this week that US “piracy and banditry” would be met with an “unprecedented” response.
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly one-fifth of global oil trade, to “enemy ships” shortly after the US and Israel launched their bombing campaign on February 28. The US declared a naval blockade of Iran last month as the countries agreed to a ceasefire.
Trump said on Friday that he was “not satisfied” with Iran’s latest peace proposal and hailed the blockade as “incredible.”
Ali Rida Sbeity reports from the southern Tyre District as the IDF issues new evacuation orders
An RT crew has filmed an airstrike in southern Lebanon as the Israeli military continued to pound targets despite a ceasefire declared last month.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck the town of Habboush on Friday, killing six people, including a woman and a child, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
“This comes just one day after Israel kill
Ali Rida Sbeity reports from the southern Tyre District as the IDF issues new evacuation orders
An RT crew has filmed an airstrike in southern Lebanon as the Israeli military continued to pound targets despite a ceasefire declared last month.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck the town of Habboush on Friday, killing six people, including a woman and a child, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
“This comes just one day after Israel killed eight civilians in south Lebanon. Four of them were women, and two of them were children. All of this is happening during the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel,” RT’s Ali Rida Sbeity said, reporting from Lebanon’s Tyre District.
Sbeity said IDF aircraft and drones were flying at low altitude, and an airstrike was carried out near the area where he was reporting. Israel has previously issued evacuation orders for 24 villages in the area.
IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir said on Wednesday that there was “no ceasefire” with the armed group Hezbollah despite the US-mediated truce between Israel and Lebanon which was reached on April 16.
Under the agreement, Israel promised to halt offensive operations in Lebanon but reserved the right to defend itself against “planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.”
Hezbollah, which boycotted the negotiations last month, has demanded that the IDF halt all troop movements and return to positions it held before early March, when it began firing rockets at Israel in support of Iran.
An Israeli soldier was killed and three others were wounded in a Hezbollah drone attack in southern Lebanon on Thursday.
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