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Full text of the paywalled article:

During a recent visit to Washington – the most high-level by a Russian official since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev heaped praise on Donald Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war.

“President Trump's administration has made tremendous progress” toward peace, Dmitriev said, and moreover, has “stopped World War III from happening.”

In response, an indignant Michael McFaul, the hawkish former US ambassador to Russia, chided what he called “hyperbolic threats about World War III,” which he dismissed as “complete nonsense.”

While Dmitriev’s claim of Trump’s “tremendous progress” on peace in Ukraine may be premature, his invocation of World War III does not seem so objectionable in light of new revelations about how Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, escalated the conflict.

According to a lengthy account in the New York Times, sourced to top US, Ukrainian, and NATO officials, the US military under Biden effectively ran the Ukrainian military’s fight against Russian forces.

The US “partnership” with Ukraine, the Times’ Adam Entous reports, “was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” At a U.S. military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, US military officer planned Ukraine’s battlefield operations, selected Ukrainian targets, and fed Ukrainian soldiers the “precise targeting information” to carry out strikes. As one European intelligence chief put it, the US was “part of the kill chain.”

Under the kill chain’s modus operandi, “the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.” Yet with the US directly involved in killing Russian soldiers, a “fraught linguistic debate” emerged: “was it unduly provocative to call targets ‘targets’”? A US military commander, Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, “solved” the debate:

The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.” “If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.

With this semantic ploy, the US continued targeting Russians. And contrary to Michael McFaul’s semantic objection to the Kremlin envoy’s warning of World War III, the Biden administration harbored the same fears. To make the case for HIMARS missile systems, US General Christopher Cavoli argued that “with HIMARS, they can fight like we can, and that’s how they will start to beat the Russians.” Entous describes the ensuing deliberation in Washington:

At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?”

In other words, the Biden administration took escalatory steps in its remote war against Russian forces despite being aware that they might trigger World War III. And on the escalation ladder, HIMARS were far from the only step.

Initially, to “blunt the risk of Russian retaliation against N.A.T.O. partners,” US targets were confined to areas inside Ukraine. As one senior US official explained: “Our message to the Russians was, ‘This war should be fought inside Ukraine.’” But after a Ukrainian counteroffensive faltered and the Russians continued to advance in 2024, the Biden team was “forced to keep crossing its own red lines simply to keep the Ukrainians afloat.” This includes deploying US military advisers close to the front lines, providing Ukraine with long-range ATACMs missiles, and then letting Ukraine use those ATACMs for strikes deep into Russian territory.

“The unthinkable had become real,” Entous writes. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.” And with the Kremlin undoubtedly aware that the US was crossing its own red lines to help kill Russian soldiers, the Biden administration placed all its bets on the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond with restraint, and not carry out reciprocal action.

Entous also newly confirms that Biden’s last-minute decision to authorize ATACMs strikes into Russia was motivated by political considerations, not military reality. After “Trump won ... the fear came rushing in” at the White House, Entous writes. “In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project.”

As part of that bid to “shore up” Biden’s pet proxy war, US officials repeatedly pressured Kyiv to send younger Ukrainians off to fight. Before the Ukrainian draft age was lowered from 27 to 25, Cavoli implored his Ukrainian military chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi to “get your 18-year-olds in the game.” Driving through Kyiv, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin “was struck ... by the sight of so many men in their 20s, almost none of them in uniform.” Accordingly, in early 2025, “Austin pressed [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky to take the bigger, bolder step and begin drafting 18-year-olds.” Entous captures the ensuing exchange:

To which Mr. Zelensky shot back, according to an official who was present, “Why would I draft more people? We don’t have any equipment to give them.” “And your generals are reporting that your units are undermanned,” the official recalled Mr. Austin responding. “They don’t have enough soldiers for the equipment they have.”

That was the perennial standoff:

In the Ukrainians’ view, the Americans weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help them prevail. In the Americans’ view, the Ukrainians weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help themselves prevail.

The American account is disingenuous. As Austin, Biden, Jake Sullivan and other administration officials made clear, their aim was not to help Ukraine prevail, but to use Ukraine for a “strategic defeat” of Russia that would “weaken” its “national power,” or even force Vladimir Putin’s ouster.

An honest appraisal of Biden’s Ukraine policy was recently offered by David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist close to Biden’s inner circle and supportive of their proxy war. The war in Ukraine, Ignatius wrote, “was a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill.”

Ignatius’ assessment requires a qualification. As the Times account newly underscores, the Biden administration was “cold-blooded” not only for letting Ukraine pay the “butcher’s bill” in the form of hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was also cold-blooded toward the entire planet: from afar, running a kill chain that took the lives of many Russians, and risked World War III in the process.

JWZ previously:

• https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/08/signal/
• https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/03/signal-leaks-your-phone-number-to-everyone-in-your-contacts/

See also: Why not Signal?

No one has yet updated Wikipedia to reflect this new information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Hungary

CIA was completely surprised by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Right, the CIA was completely surprised by a fascist counterrevolution of their own device 🙄

• Operation Gladio
• Operation Condor
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discreetly Internationalized It
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Foucault, Anti-Communism & the Global Theory Industry: A Reply to Critics

Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints aka Natalie Clinton seems very worried about "The Left" always losing and "The Left" criticising her. She can't stop talking about this in her videos which come out three times per decade. Why does she do this, and why do others like her do the same?

Glenn Diesen interview.

Micheal Hudson is a renowned economist, addresses why Europe has set itself on a path to economic crisis and collapse
https://michael-hudson.com/

Found through an American Prestige podcast interview, “The Constitutional Order Leading to Trump w/ Aziz Rana” (paywalled). 🏴‍☠️ version: https://files.catbox.moe/cir0in.mp3

To understand what is unfolding, it is necessary to grasp the content of the US constitutional order. This includes a series of ideological and institutional components, in line with what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 famously labelled the ‘American creed’ – the idea that the United States stood for the promise of equal liberty for all. At a time of global rivalry with the Soviet Union over a decolonizing world, national elites explicitly rallied to this creedal constitutional frame. Its constitutive elements encompassed a reading of the Constitution as committed to the steady amelioration of racial inequality grounded in principles of anti-discrimination; an anti-totalitarian account of civil liberty and speech rights; a defence of market capitalism, partially hedged by a constitutionally entrenched regulatory and social welfare state; an embrace of institutional checks and balances, with the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, as the ultimate arbiter of the law; and a commitment to US global primacy organized through robust presidential power.

This iteration of American constitutionalism had both a domestic and international face. Domestically, it created a set of shared institutional and cultural practices. Republicans and Democrats understood themselves as jointly stewarding an American hegemonic project against the Soviet Union. Officials could toast their electoral foes across the partisan aisle, because whatever their internal differences, politicians and judges both had drunk deeply from the well of American exceptionalism. Whatever the election outcome, both sides were bound, above all, by a common national narrative. This narrative – deepened by suffering and victory during World War II and tested through ongoing rivalry with the Soviets – assumed the genius of the constitutional founders, the near-ideal quality of American institutions, and the unfolding internal progress of American society.

Internationally, this narrative also allowed the US to project authority on the global stage – propagating the mythology that its constitutional commitments to equal liberty were interests shared by everyone around the world. The result was an American postwar order marked by two interconnected features – a focus on rules-based legality, alongside the continual American defection from those rules, whether in Vietnam or Gaza today. National elites saw US-generated multilateral institutions as an expression of underlying American constitutional values, and therefore critical to uphold. But they also viewed global security as requiring the US to serve as an international backstop. In effect, this created an endless balancing act between promoting the rule of law and disobeying it through military actions and interventions, covert and overt. Resulting violations were justified as necessary to preserve collective stability – no matter that things looked very different for those in the crosshairs, especially in the previously colonized world.

That a distinct twentieth-century US constitutional order emerged in parallel with the Soviet Union is often elided, thanks in part to the peculiar features associated with American institutions and its national narrative. For starters, the US Constitution is notorious for being perhaps the hardest in the world to amend. Constitutional change does not typically occur through formal alterations to the 1787 document, let alone through its wholesale replacement, but through shifts in court-based interpretations of the existing text along with the implementation of landmark pieces of legislation that establish new terms for collective life. Indeed, the present order was consolidated through the passage of key mid-century bills – the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare Act – in conjunction with Supreme Court rulings that upheld their constitutionality. Together, Congress and the courts broke substantially from the preceding racial and economic order. Yet, crucially, this meant that there was no rewritten twentieth-century Constitution separate from an earlier one.

At the same time, the shared story about these legal shifts was that they represented the fulfilment of an inherently liberal national essence. In truth, the consolidation of this order had been a contingent product of domestic and global mid-twentieth-century developments, diverging markedly from the long-established structures of explicit white-settler supremacy in the United States. But that reality did not fit with the emerging national narrative – which presented the US as committed, from its founding, to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, and thus on an ineluctable path to this new model.

The Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) successfully targeted an E-2 command and control aircraft belonging to the US aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, a senior Sanaa government source told Al Mayadeen on Sunday.

According to the source, "The Truman lost command capabilities following the attack, while both the White House and the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) have launched an investigation into the incident."

Details on the targeted E-2 aircraft

The targeted E-2 aircraft is designed to provide critical intelligence on potential threats faced by the warship during military operations. While it does not directly participate in attacks, it plays a crucial role in surveillance and tracking.

The aircraft, operated by a five-member crew—including two pilots and three radar specialists—lost its defensive protection, making it more vulnerable to attacks from Yemeni missiles and drones.

YAF target 'Israel's' Ben Gurion Airport

Earlier today, the Yemeni Armed Forces also announced that they had targeted "Israel's" Ben Gurion Airport in the occupied Yafa (Tel Aviv) area, spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree announced.

Saree stated that the military operation was carried out using a Zulfiqar ballistic missile and successfully achieved its objective, adding that the latest strike was in support of the Palestinian people and their Resistance.

The spokesperson pointed out that the YAF reaffirmed the failure of the US aggression in preventing Yemen from continuing its support for the Palestinian people.

He stressed that "dozens of daily airstrikes [on Yemen] will not deter the armed forces from fulfilling their duties," underscoring that Yemeni operations against "Israel" will persist until the aggression on Gaza ceases and the blockade imposed on the Palestinian enclave is lifted.

Sirens sounded across central "Israel" and al-Quds at midday on Sunday following the launch of a missile from Yemen. Debris was also found in Modi’in and Tel Aviv.

According to "Israel's" Channel 12, two people were injured in Gush Dan. One woman exited her vehicle when the sirens went off and fell into a five-meter-deep pit, while another person sustained a head injury in Tel Aviv while heading to a shelter.

Read more: YAF say engaged with US aircraft carrier Truman 3 times within 24 hrs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye

The Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye is an American all-weather, carrier-capable tactical airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft.

They get into the perverse ways that our pensions & 401(k)s work against our working class interests.

Steve’s guest is Michael McCarthy, author of ‘The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It.’ They explore McCarthy’s analysis of financialization as a deliberate class project to dismantle working-class power and exacerbate inequality.

They look at the historical shift from a robust Social Security system to a privatized, financialized pension system as well as the rise of neoliberal policies post-1970s, facilitated by monetary policy changes (anybody remember the gold standard?) The conversation goes into the failure of both traditional and direct democracies to serve the working class.

The episode also weaves through MMT perspectives and the impact of government policies. They touch on the potential of public banking and democratizing finance to empower the working class as well as the challenges of implementing these ideas.

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). Mike has written for the Boston Review, The Guardian, Jacobin, Noema, and the Washington Post.