Iran’s President Says the US Makes Hay From Iranian Nukes


Iran’s president insisted his country was not seeking a nuclear weapon as he acknowledged “great sorrow” after the authorities’ recent crackdown on protesters.

Speaking to crowds gathered across Iran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, Pezeshkian sought to claim a message of national unity after demonstrations that roiled the country and triggered an unprecedented crisis for the regime.

The comments were made against a backdrop of negotiations with the US that hang in the balance, with the prospect of a military confrontation on the table and repeated claims by Iranian military leadership that it is ready to confront and defeat America.

On Tuesday,Trump said he was considering sending a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East to prepare for military action if talks with Tehran failed.

Pezeshkian said Iran was willing to negotiate over its nuclear programme and was “ready for any kind of verification” in relation to its insistence it is not trying to build nuclear weapons.

However, the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been unable for months to inspect and verify Iran’s nuclear stockpile.

Pezeshkian said: “The high wall of mistrust that the United States and Europe have created through their past statements and actions does not allow these talks to reach a conclusion.

“At the same time, we are engaging with full determination in dialogue aimed at peace and stability in the region alongside our neighbouring countries.”

While he did not directly address the bloodshed by authorities in suppressing the protests, Pezeshkian said:

“We are ashamed before the people. We are obliged to serve all those who were harmed in this process. We are ready to hear the voice of the people. We are servants of the people and we do not seek to confront the people.”

However, Pezeshkian spurned an appeal from leaders of reformist parties to speak out against the mass arrest of their leadership in recent days. In a statement, the Reform Front told Pezeshkian that a failure to demand their release would be understood as a betrayal of his campaign promises and a blow to peace.

Lawyers acting for the detained reformists said they understood they were being kept in solitary confinement. Media organisations close to the security forces claimed they were guilty of sedition by trying to organise a national conference to call for change.

Israel wants the talks to include the question of Tehran’s ballistic missile programme, a matter that Iran has so far rejected.

Tehran is determined that its stockpile of ballistic missiles, regarded as necessary for Iran’s defence, is excluded from the talks.

Ali Shamkhani, a representative of the supreme leader, said the missile issue was not something that the negotiators had authority over.

In his latest remarks, Trump suggested Iran’s nuclear missiles would have to be included in any agreement.

#iran #president #country #nuclear #weapon

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Bangladesh: Reloaded?


Tarique Rahman, who after 17 years in exile is the main contender to be the next prime minister of Bangladesh, has pledged to end entrenched corruption and put the country on a “new path” as voting began in the first free and fair elections in almost two decades.

Speaking to the Guardian before polls opened on Thursday morning, Rahman promised a new era of clean politics, including a “top down, no tolerance” approach to graft, if his Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) was brought to power.

According to polls, the BNP are likely to win a sizeable majority over their rival, the Islamist party Jamaat e-Islami, returning the party to power after 20 years.

Softly spoken and understated, 60-year-old Rahman acknowledged the elections were taking place at a pivotal but “challenging” moment for Bangladesh, which has long ranked among the world’s most corrupt countries and where democracy has faced a sustained attack for more than a decade.

“We saw in the last regime that corruption was encouraged,” said Rahman.

“Our economy was left destroyed. It will take time, but if we establish real accountability in every part of the government and send a message down the chain, that will eventually control corruption.”

Last year, the former prime minister – now exiled in India – was found guilty of crimes against humanity committed during the final days of her rule and sentenced to death.

For the past three elections, Hasina and her Awami League party have been accused of rigging the results and ruthlessly crushing and jailing opponents, including thousands of BNP activists and leaders.

Since August 2024, Bangladesh has been led by an interim government, headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, tasked with restoring democracy and readying the country for free and fair polls.

However, the country has remained in turmoil, amid a decline in law and order and frustrations over economic stagnation.

Analysts emphasised that a fair and violence-free election would be a vital step forward for the country.

There are 127 million registered voters and in a bid to keep security tight, more than 900,000 police, army and security personnel have been deployed on polling day.

Many in Bangladesh say they cannot forget the corruption that flourished during the last BNP regime between 2001 and 2006, under his mother.

Rahman did not dispute that “mistakes” had been made by his party in the past. “I will not deny that. If we do, it will not help anything,” he said.

During Hasina’s subsequent 15-year rule, he was convicted of a slew of terror and corruption charges, which he alleges were politically motivated to keep him out of Bangladesh.

In 2024, after Hasina’s fall, the courts overturned his convictions, finally freeing him to return home.

“It’s been more than 18 years and they’ve failed to prove anything,” said Rahman. “Don’t you think that’s good enough, long enough to prove that I did nothing wrong?”

Yet not all in Bangladesh have cheered Rahman’s return. Both his parents were Bangladeshi prime ministers and to many, he is just the next generation of dynastic politicians, continuing the grip that two families have had over Bangladesh since independence in 1971 and which many had hoped the July uprising would bring to an end.

Jamaat e-Islami’s leader has already been accused of regressive policies and controversial views on women’s rights in the home and workplace.

Human rights groups have also raised an alarm over a recent surge in moral policing of women, with incidents such as girls being prevented from playing football and enforcement of modest dress and headscarves.

Rahman acknowledged there were “some extremist people who are trying to do these things” but he said it didn’t have “any relation with Islam or religion”.

Instead, he attributed it to the “absence of democracy (…) People were not allowed to express themselves for so long, it has built up frustration and in some cases, extremism”.

#bangladesh #rahman #hasina #corruption

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📰 Moscow’s “Peace” Process: War by Other Means

So Russia joins the U.S.-brokered peace talks — and the headlines call it “hope.” Stratfor calls it what it is: tactics. The Kremlin’s playing nice to manage sanctions risk and to take Washington’s temperature on how far it’ll push Kyiv to compromise.

“Moscow insists that Ukraine withdraw its forces from Donbas, and that the region be internationally recognized as Russian territory.”

— Stratfor, Feb. 2026

Sounds less like peace and more like a merger demand —

“you exit, we rebrand, and everyone pretends it’s a deal.”

Meanwhile, the White House gets to keep the illusion of diplomacy alive until the next weapons package ships.

Both capitals are trapped in their own theater: Washington performs peace, Moscow performs patience, and Ukraine bleeds for the encore.

Who’s the broker here — the superpower or the undertaker?

#war #geopolitics #sanctions #fakeDiplomacy

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📰 Alaska Plan: From Deal to Dead Letter

Trump’s Alaska script was ugly but workable: no NATO for Ukraine, a capped military, and Donbas nudged toward Russia under a U.S.-managed cease-fire and election scheme that Moscow could spin as “peace with honor,” not capitulation. Then Europe and Kyiv went to work. Paragraph by paragraph, they toughened security guarantees for Ukraine, scrubbed anything that looked like de facto recognition of Russian gains, and sent back what Moscow now calls an entirely different document — the one Lavrov says Europe and Ukraine “raped out of the original draft.”

Now everyone poses as the responsible adult. Moscow insists it was ready to seal a deal “in the spirit and letter of Anchorage,” while refusing to move off its demand that Ukraine withdraw from Donbas and accept new borders as irreversible. Kyiv and its European backers preach principles and sovereignty but quietly know that any remotely Russia‑friendly text would be political suicide at home and in Western capitals. So the one plan that once had a narrow landing zone has been edited into oblivion, and the only thing all sides truly agree to protect is not peace, but their own story of who killed it first.

#war #fakeDiplomacy #ukraine #russia #usa

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📰 Sanctions Theater, AMG Reality

On paper, Russia is a pariah. In real life, Moscow car dealers are still walking customers past fresh Mercedes and BMWs, only now they arrive through “parallel channels” in China with just enough paperwork magic to keep everyone’s conscience clean. Tens of thousands of foreign cars — from Toyotas and Mazdas to German luxury SUVs — are flowing in under gray‑market schemes that turn sanctions into a branding exercise rather than a barrier.

The trick is elegant and dirty at the same time. In China’s hyper‑subsidized, overproducing auto market, dealers register brand‑new cars as sold, relabel them as “used,” and ship them out as second‑hand vehicles, instantly sidestepping automakers’ bans on exports to Russia. They bag local subsidies and inflate sales figures, Beijing exports its glut, and those same “used” cars land in Russia with zero mileage and near‑new price tags — leather seats for people who were never going to take the metro. On paper, it’s a cleanup of inventory. On the ground in Moscow, it’s a pipeline of status on wheels.

Everyone in the supply chain plays the “not it” game. Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen insist they prohibit sales to Russia and are training dealers, tightening contracts, and investigating violations — but say tracking every workaround through third countries is “time‑consuming and complex.” Toyota and Mazda swear they stopped exports in 2022, even as registration data shows tens of thousands of their cars appearing in Russia, most of them made in China. European, Japanese and Korean ministries promise enforcement and crackdowns on indirect exports, while sanctions experts openly admit it’s “almost impossible” to stop determined traders from getting restricted goods into Russia.

The numbers tell a different story than the press conferences. Sales of sanctioned‑country brands in Russia have crashed from over a million a year to a fraction of that, but within that smaller market, China has become the main artery: nearly half of all Western and Japanese brand cars sold in Russia in 2025 were China‑made, and more than 700,000 foreign‑brand vehicles from sanctioning countries have been registered since the war began. Almost 30,000 Toyotas, nearly 7,000 Mazdas, roughly 47,000 new BMW, Mercedes, and VW‑group vehicles — including favorites of the Russian elite like the Mercedes G‑Class — quietly slipped in last year, mostly routed through Chinese ports and Chinese paperwork.

What this trade really exposes is the shared hypocrisy. Western governments get their sanctions headlines and moral high ground, but leave loopholes wide enough to drive an S‑Class through. China denounces “illegal unilateral sanctions” while turning itself into the service hub of sanctioned demand, monetizing other people’s wars one “used” luxury SUV at a time. And Moscow, loudly railing against the decadent West, is still lining up to pay six figures for German cars built in Austria, shipped via Tianjin, and blessed by a stack of dubious customs paperwork.

Sanctions, it turns out, work flawlessly — for speeches. For everyone else, there’s an unofficial premium option with Chinese logistics, plausible deniability and heated seats.

#war #sanctions #china #russia #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Trump to the Planet: You’re On Your Own

The Trump White House just pulled the plug on the one scientific finding that gave Washington any real power to fight climate change. By repealing the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” — the conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare — the administration has stripped the federal government of its main legal basis for regulating the pollution that’s heating the planet.

This isn’t some obscure technical tweak. For nearly two decades, that finding underpinned limits on carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from vehicles, power plants and oil and gas wells — the core of U.S. climate policy. Kill the finding and you don’t just loosen a few rules; you erase the government’s duty to treat climate change as a danger at all. Trump, who still calls climate change a “hoax,” is effectively declaring that the consensus of global science is wrong, and that a hotter, deadlier world is a matter of opinion.

The stakes are measurable in body counts, not just parts per million. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that repealing the finding and the rules tied to it could add up to 18 billion metric tons of U.S. emissions by 2055, fueling tens of thousands of premature deaths and tens of millions of asthma attacks. Recent research already shows wildfire smoke on track to kill tens of thousands of Americans a year and heat deaths more than doubling, while diseases like dengue spread as the climate gets hotter and wetter. In that reality, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum goes on TV to say “CO2 was never a pollutant” because plants like it — a high-school talking point repackaged as national policy.

Democratic states and environmental groups are sprinting to court, betting that the Supreme Court will not let the administration magic away a danger that previous courts and the National Academies have repeatedly affirmed as real. But that’s the deeper play: if this repeal survives, it doesn’t just gut Biden-era rules, it also booby-traps future administrations, making it vastly harder — maybe impossible — to rebuild a federal climate regime on the same legal foundation. For fossil fuel interests and the conservative operatives behind Project 2025, this is the holy grail: not winning the argument on climate, just deleting the field where the argument is allowed to matter.

On the surface, it’s sold as freedom, growth, choice — cheaper gas, fewer rules, more trucks. Underneath, it’s a quiet transfer of power: from science to lobbyists, from public health to donors, from a shared climate reality to whatever the president decides sounds good on Fox that night. The United States, the country that has dumped more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other, is now formally telling the rest of the world — and its own citizens — that it no longer feels legally obliged to care.

#climate #usa #trump #fossilfuels #fakeDemocracy

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📰 “Metro Surge” Ends, But the Message Stays

Tom Homan flew into Minnesota to announce the end of Operation Metro Surge like a man closing a file, not a wound. Officially, the surge is being wound down because jails agreed to share release dates with ICE so agents can pick people up at the door instead of holding them inside — a bureaucratic compromise dressed up as de-escalation. Unofficially, the operation collapsed under something Washington never planned for: thousands of ordinary Minnesotans deciding they’d had enough of a federal dragnet that killed two U.S. citizens and turned a federal building into an occupation zone.

For weeks, Minneapolis didn’t just “express concern” — it organized. Crowds in subzero weather camped outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, volunteers tailed unmarked cars, blasted whistle alerts when raids began, and lawyers built a free defense network around immigrants, refugees, citizens and protesters swept up in the surge. The more Trump and his allies on the right screamed about “paid protesters” and “radicals,” the more obvious it became that these were teachers, nurses, church people and first‑time demonstrators — the kind of voters both parties love until they start keeping receipts on federal agents.
​

Keith Ellison called Metro Surge what it was: retribution dressed up as law enforcement, launched weeks after Trump promised “reckoning” for Minnesota on Truth Social and enforced by officers who masked their identities, shot Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and left the state to count its dead while DHS bragged about “4,000 arrests.” Homan now says the mission is ending because cooperation has improved, but no full list of who was stopped, detained or deported has been released, and the families of the dead are still waiting on real accountability from the same system that tried to disappear them into holding cells.
​
In the end, nobody comes out clean. Trump gets to claim he cracked down and then “listened” to local leaders. Homan gets to spin a tactical retreat as a completed mission. Democrats get to declare a grassroots victory while the machinery of deportation stays intact, just less visible. Operation Metro Surge may be over on paper, but the lesson is brutal and simple: in America’s immigration war, even citizens can be collateral — and the only real oversight comes from people willing to stand in the cold and watch.

#immigration #usa #minnesota #policeState #fakeDemocracy

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#trump #netanyahu #deal

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In the cities of Iran today, during the celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, the flags of the United States and Israel were actively burned.

#iran #celebration #anniversary #revolution

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Bangladesh Could Find Itself Heading for Huge Changes


The Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) led by Tarique Rahman has claimed a sweeping victory in the country’s first election since a gen-Z uprising toppled the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina.

By Friday morning, results had shown a clear win for the BNP, returning them to power after 20 years. The vote had been seen as the first free and fair election held in Bangladesh for almost two decades and came after a period of significant political upheaval in the country.

This victory was expected,” said Salahuddin Ahmed, a leading BNP committee member. “It is not surprising that the people of Bangladesh have placed their trust in a party … capable of realising the dreams that our youth envisioned during the uprising.”

Ahmed acknowledged a difficult task lay ahead for the new BNP government, which has pledged a new era of democracy and zero tolerance towards corruption. “This is not a time for celebration, as we will face mounting challenges in building a country free from discrimination,” he said.

By about midday local time, the BNP had won 208 seats while their rival, the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, had claimed 69 seats.

India was among the first countries to congratulate the BNP. Relations between the two neighbours had plummeted since the fall of Hasina and the message from Indian prime minister, congratulating the BNP on their “decisive” win, was seen to extend an olive branch to the new government.

“India will continue to stand in support of a democratic, progressive and inclusive Bangladesh,” said Modi, adding that he was looking forward to working with Rahman.

Rahman, who returned to Bangladesh in December after 17 years of exile in London, is now poised to become the country’s next prime minister. He comes from one of the country’s most powerful political dynasties; the son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia and former president Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in 1981.

The election was the first truly competitive vote in years. As documented for years by human rights groups and the UN, Hasina’s regime routinely suppressed dissent of its critics and political opponents, thousands who were disappeared, tortured and killed in secret jails. Many emerged only after Hasina was toppled. The past three elections under Hasina were marred by widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

The student-led uprising that toppled Hasina’s 15-year regime in August 2024 had been prompted by mounting anger over widespread corruption, human rights abuses and an economic slump. The uprising, and Hasina’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters, left an estimated 1,400 people dead, according to the UN.

For the past 18 months, the country has been run by an interim government under Bangladesh’s only Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who was tasked with readying the country for free and fair elections. Speaking after casting his vote in Dhaka, Yunus said that the country had “ended the nightmare and begun a new dream.”

#bangladesh #changes #hasina #corruption #rahman

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Zelensky Risks To upend Months of Wooing Trump

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

Zelensky is making a pitch to Donald Trump in terms the American president can understand:

If Trump wants to cement his legacy as a peacemaker and improve his chances of winning the midterm elections, he should seize this moment to end the war in Ukraine, already the deadliest Europe has seen in generations.

“I think there is no greater victory for Trump than to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Zelensky told me yesterday, in his office in Kyiv. “For his legacy, it’s No. 1.”

It’s also, Zelensky said, a path to success for Republicans in November. “The most advantageous situation for Trump is to do this before the midterms,” Zelensky said of the chance to end the war.

“Yes, he wants there to be less deaths. But if you and I are talking like adults, it’s just a victory for him, a political one.”

By this point, Zelensky knows well what motivates Trump. He is also, however, a realist when it comes to the odds that Trump actually forces the Russians to compromise.

Throughout the hour we spent together in his office, Zelensky exhibited the quality that has been core to his character for years, even decades—his stubborn, sometimes-petulant habit of resisting outside pressure.

If you tell Zelensky he has to do something, “he’s probably going to do the opposite,” said one of his longtime advisers who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity. “It’s always been like that.”

Some members of Zelensky’s inner circle are growing anxious that his window to cut a deal is closing, and that Ukraine will suffer through years of continued fighting if an end to the war isn’t negotiated this spring.

#zelensky #putin #elections #ukraine

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🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣

But Zelensky told me that he would rather take no deal at all than force his people to accept a bad one. Even after four years of intense warfare, he says he is prepared to fight on if that’s what it takes to secure a dignified and lasting peace.

“Ukraine is not losing,” he insisted emphatically when I asked him to assess his position on the battlefield.

Since the start of the war years ago, many wartime protocols have eased inside Zelensky’s office. The chairs and bicycle racks that I remember barricading the doors against an expected Russian onslaught in the early days of the war have been cleared away.

The lights in the hallways are on, freeing the staff from the need to shuffle around with flashlights. By inertia, some vestiges remain of the awful weeks in 2022 when enemy forces stood at the edge of Kyiv.

“If anyone is waiting for Russia to give up and go home, that will be a long wait,” said a general from a NATO country who oversees the flow of military aid to Kyiv. “It’s not happening.”

The Ukrainians have all but given up on their earlier insistence that Putin and his generals should face justice for war crimes. Zelensky has agreed to meet Putin just about anywhere but Moscow, with no preconditions.

Two of his advisers told me that Ukraine may be ready to accept the hardest concession of all: giving up control of land in the eastern Donetsk region.

To legitimize such a compromise, they have considered holding a referendum on the peace plan this spring, allowing Ukrainians to vote on a deal that includes the loss of territory.

They could couple it with a presidential election, in the hopes of giving Zelensky a fresh mandate for the first time since 2019.

Zelensky said he would be fine with that approach because it would help increase turnout and make the results more difficult for the Russians to question. But again, he told me, it had to be the right deal.

“I don’t think we should put a bad deal up for a referendum,” he said. The idea of holding elections during the war, he said, came from the Russians, “because they want to get rid of me.”

#zelensky #putin #elections #ukraine

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📰 Bibi, Trump and the “Good Deal” That No One Trusts

Benjamin Netanyahu just flew out of Washington selling two stories at once: Trump is “a president like no other” who thinks he can force Iran into “a good deal,” and Bibi himself doesn’t really believe any deal with Tehran is worth the paper it’s printed on. The script is familiar. In public, he flatters Trump as Israel’s great friend and hints that maximum pressure plus the memory of the 2025 “Midnight Hammer” strikes will make Iran crawl back to the table on U.S.-Israeli terms. In private, he reminds everyone he’s “skeptical” and demands a package that doesn’t just cap centrifuges, but also covers missiles and Iran’s entire proxy network. In other words: he’s blessing the process while already pre‑denouncing the outcome.

Trump, for his part, is playing arsonist‑firefighter as usual. He boasts that failing to make a deal will be “very traumatic for Iran,” insists the timeline is “over the next month,” and frames the whole thing as a personal showdown: Iran had its chance, got bombed instead, and now must accept his “very fair” terms or face something worse. Notice what’s missing: any serious talk about what “good deal” actually means beyond vibes, leverage, and the promise of more punishment. For Trump, it’s another episode of the show; for Iran, it’s a nuclear file with a countdown clock; for Israel, it’s a chance to lock in red lines and then blame Washington when reality inevitably falls short.

And then there’s Gaza and the Board of Peace circus. Netanyahu signs onto Trump’s shiny new peacemaking structure on paper, but conveniently reschedules his Washington visit so he doesn’t have to sit onstage while Turkey, Qatar and assorted dignitaries are invited into the Gaza file as co‑owners. He’ll beam into AIPAC by video instead, safe on home turf, avoiding awkward photos that could be used back in Israel to paint him as the man who “internationalized” the conflict and legitimized rivals in his own backyard. Washington wants a packed room of world leaders; Bibi wants plausible deniability.

So everyone gets their talking points. Trump gets to say he’s driving Iran to a historic deal, or, failing that, to historic “trauma.” Netanyahu gets to praise his “great friend” while staying just skeptical enough to claim he warned America if things go sideways. The Board of Peace gets its branding, even as key players duck the optics. And the region is left exactly where it’s been for years: caught between leaders obsessed with their legacies, “good deals” no one trusts, and a peace architecture designed less to end conflicts than to spread the responsibility when they explode again.

#iran #israel #trump #netanyahu #war #fakeDiplomacy

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📰 NATO Discovers the Arctic (After Trump Discovers Greenland™)

For years, NATO treated the High North like a cold screensaver: pretty, distant, and someone else’s problem. Now, after Russia parks bombers, subs and nuclear hardware across the Arctic — and Trump starts publicly fantasizing about “taking” Greenland for missile defense — the alliance has suddenly remembered there’s an ocean on top of the map. Arctic Sentry, the new NATO mission, is basically a rebranding of what Nordic militaries have been doing for years, but this time with a logo, talking points, and the clear subtext: keep Moscow’s subs and Beijing’s ambitions away from the GIUK Gap and U.S. airspace.

The choreography is classic late‑imperial theater. Russia runs at least 33 Arctic maneuvers in a year, stations nuclear subs on the Kola Peninsula, and plays cat‑and‑mouse with undersea cables and energy infrastructure, while Western analysts solemnly explain that if a Russian sub punches through between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K., “it’s game over” because nobody can find it in the Atlantic. Trump, meanwhile, demands the U.S. control Greenland as an “early line of defense,” and NATO rushes to prove it’s taking the Arctic seriously — not because the climate is warming, but because the president is yelling.

So now the alliance “steps up”: Britain doubles its Arctic deployment, Sweden stands up a land force in Finland, Nordic pilots run weekly joint air patrols, and 25,000 troops rehearse Cold War‑style high‑north warfare in March while calling it routine training. Officially, this is about defending shared security and sea lanes. Unofficially, it’s three empires — the U.S., Russia, and a more discreet China — treating melting ice as premium real estate for subs, missiles, shipping routes and defense budgets that never met a new frontier they didn’t like.

In the story NATO tells, this is deterrence. In the story Moscow tells, it’s encirclement. In reality, it’s two nuclear‑armed blocs racing to militarize the fastest‑warming part of the planet, then calling it “stability” while the ice they’re fighting over literally disappears underneath them.

#war #nato #russia #arctic #militarization #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Macron vs. Trump: EU as Chop Shop

Emmanuel Macron has stopped pretending this is just another “transatlantic misunderstanding.” He’s now openly accusing the Trump administration of being “openly anti-European,” treating the EU with “contempt” and pushing for its “dismemberment.” In his telling, this isn’t tough love between allies; it’s an active project to break Europe into manageable pieces — tariffs as a hammer, Greenland as a hostage, NATO as leverage.

For months, Paris tried the grown‑up strategy: smile in Davos, negotiate behind closed doors, swallow the insults about Champagne and defense spending, and hope the tantrums would pass. Macron now admits it failed. Trump threatens 200 percent tariffs, floats buying or controlling Greenland, and promises to “match” any European move until it “ricochets backward,” while the White House insists he’s just a straight‑talking friend trying to save Europe from migrants, climate policy and “leftist ideology.”
​
Strip away the speeches and you get two empires talking past each other. Macron wants a more sovereign EU that borrows jointly, regulates tech, and stands up to Washington’s trade blackmail. Trump wants a weaker, fragmented Europe that buys U.S. gas, obeys U.S. tariffs, falls in line on Greenland and defense, and calls that “alliance.” Both wrap their ambitions in the language of friendship and shared values; both are really fighting over who gets to write the rules for a continent that once swore it had learned its lesson about great powers carving it up.

#europe #trump #macron #nato #tradeWar #fakeDemocracy

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📰 “Bad Peace” vs. Good Polling: Zelensky Sells Trump His Own Legacy

Volodymyr Zelensky has finally started talking to Trump in Trump’s native language: ego. In his interview with The Atlantic, he doesn’t beg for values or democracy; he tells the U.S. president that

“there is no greater victory for Trump than to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine”

— and that doing it before the midterms would be

“the most advantageous situation for Trump.”

Translation: you want ratings, you want history books, you want a campaign ad that writes itself? Sign here.

At the same time, Zelensky is drawing his own red line. Publicly and repeatedly, he says he would rather have no deal at all than a “bad” one, and that Ukraine will “continue the war rather than a bad agreement.” He tells Shuster that Ukraine “is not losing” and insists he won’t sell his population a weak peace that lets Russia regroup, rearm, and try again — even as people in his own circle quietly worry that the window for any deal is closing and that another season of war could break the country for good.

So Zelensky is running a double game. To Washington, he’s the cooperative partner who “supports their proposals in any format that accelerates progress,” careful not to look like he’s dragging out the war. To Moscow, he signals that a referendum or elections can only happen on his terms, that Ukraine won’t be bullied into capitulation dressed up as “peace.” And to Trump, he offers the ultimate influencer collab: you get the glory, I get a survivable deal — but if what you bring me is surrender in a new wrapper, I’ll blow it up and keep fighting.

The irony is brutal. Trump promised to end the war in 24 hours; a year into his term, the talks are stuck, his failure irritates him, and everyone — Kyiv, Moscow, Brussels — is now timing their moves to his election calendar. Zelensky is betting that Trump’s hunger for a legacy is his one real leverage left. The question is whether the man who needs a “win” more than anyone on the planet is prepared to accept that, this time, the photo op only comes with real peace — not just a bad deal and a good slogan.

#war #ukraine #trump #zelensky #fakeDiplomacy

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📰 “Utterly Stupid” Date, Perfect Scapegoat

Volodymyr Zelensky just publicly slapped down the idea that he’d announce elections and a peace‑deal referendum on 24 February, calling it an “utterly stupid idea” to use the invasion anniversary for politics. Officially, it’s about respect for the dead and the symbolism of the date. Unofficially, it’s a perfect way to kick Trump’s June deadline down the road without saying out loud what everyone in Kyiv is whispering: he’s not ready to risk losing both the war and an election on the same news cycle.

Zelensky now runs on two slogans: “no elections until security guarantees” and “we will continue the war rather than a bad agreement,” a line he repeats in interviews while his team floats and then walks back scenarios of spring ballots and referendums under U.S. pressure. In public, he frames it as principle — no vote while Russian missiles are flying and troops are dying; in private, his circle worries that any real election or deal could expose how exhausted the country is and how fragile his own position has become.

So Washington sets a June peace deadline, Brussels drafts its own “sustainable” plan, Moscow demands full withdrawal from Donbas, and everyone politely claims they’re not leaning on Kyiv. Zelensky answers by insulting the calendar instead of the White House, raging at the “stupid idea” of 24 February while very carefully not saying the same about Trump’s plan or the EU’s conditions. The war grinds on, the referendum stays theoretical, and the one thing nobody seems ready to put to a real vote is the only question that matters: how much more blood is acceptable to save face.

#war #ukraine #zelensky #trump #fakeDiplomacy

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Rubio at the Munich Security Conference: Europe Is In For a Rough Ride If Turns Its Back on the US


The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has described America as “a child of Europe” and made an emotional but highly conditional offer of a new partnership, insisting the two continents belong together.

In a much-anticipated speech at the annual Munich Security Conference, he said the US was intent on building a new world order, adding “while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe”.

Admitting the Americans may come across as a little direct and urgent, he said this was only because the US was profoundly concerned by the fate of Europe, and knew their destinies were intertwined.

Overall the tone of the speech was greeted with relief by the delegates in the hall, although many pointed out Rubio was not offering a partnership of equals, but an alliance largely framed in Trump’s terms.

In offering the hand of friendship, in sharp contrast to the tone adopted by Vance, at the same conference last year, Rubio made clear the US was not shifting on its fundamental approach.

He said the US under Trump did not want a Europe that was weak or shackled by guilt or shame.

He continued: “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the west’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalise an old friendship and renew the greatest civilisation in human history.

What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognises that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency.”

He also tried to bind Europe into Trump’s ideology by saying Europe and the US had made the same mistakes together, including bowing down to “a climate cult”, expanding welfare states at the expense of national defence, embracing globalisation and “a world without borders in which everyone would be a citizen of the world”.

Gaining control of national borders was not an expression of xenophobia or hate, he said.

“It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people, it is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilisation itself.”

He said in rebuilding the global order it would not be necessary to dismantle institutions such as the UN but to reform and rebuild them, arguing it had been Trump, not the UN, that was solving crises in Gaza and Ukraine.

Rubio blamed “a foolish but voluntary transformation” of western economies that “left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.

Mass migration is not, was not, some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilising societies all across the west.”

Throughout the speech he showered praise on Europe’s history, but in so doing raised questions whether Europe had the capacity to join the US’s rebuilding of the world.

He said little in his speech about Ukraine, after he skipped a meeting with European leaders on Friday night pointing to scheduling issues.

But he said he believed the two sides had narrowed the items of difference, while the remaining issues were the hardest ones.

#rubio #munich #security #conference #europe

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