Tech billionaire Elon Musk has branded OpenAI bosses “utterly untrustworthy assholes” after the company announced plans to withdraw its artificial intelligence models from Cursor following the coding platform’s acquisition by SpaceX.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with its current CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and several other developers and researchers, left the company three years later over its direction and has since been locked in a bitter public and legal feud with its leadership.

Earlier this month, SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere, the developer of Cursor, which provides programmers with access to AI models from several companies.

On Friday, OpenAI abruptly announced that it intends to end Cursor users’ access to its models, with a “proposed shutoff date” of November 12. The company said it could not be confident that “SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.”

I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2026

“I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday.

OpenAI said its agreement with Cursor allows it to cancel the contract within a limited period following a change of control, although it has not accused Cursor itself of violating its terms.

Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s main rivals, quickly moved to capitalize on the dispute, saying it would increase computing capacity to support its Claude models on Cursor following the cutoff announcement.

During court proceedings, Musk accused OpenAI of breaking that founding commitment by adopting a profit-driven model and accepting a $13 billion investment from Microsoft. The billionaire has repeatedly accused Altman of having “stolen a charity” and described himself as a “fool” for providing the company with early financial support.

In May, a US federal jury rejected Musk’s claims, finding that he had waited too long to bring the case and had missed the statutory deadline. Musk has pledged to appeal the verdict.

The US could use nuclear weapons against Iran after failing to topple its leadership with conventional means, former presidential counterterrorism adviser Joe Kent has told podcaster Tucker Carlson.

In April, US President Donald Trump threatened that Iran’s “whole civilization will die” unless Tehran agreed to Washington’s demands. Trump has since repeatedly issued similar threats, saying that US forces could obliterate the country’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges.

Appearing on Carlson’s show on Friday, Kent described the nuclear option as realistic, saying that “we would be fools to think that this couldn’t happen here, in this current scenario, especially as the [Trump] administration scrambles for a way out.”

How close are we to nuclear war? According to Joe Kent, a lot closer than you think.

0:00 Monologue
23:19 Are We Heading Toward Nuclear War?
26:51 What Does Unconditional Surrender Actually Mean?
30:23 Should Trump Be Impeached?
36:24 Israel's Escalation Into Lebanon and… pic.twitter.com/g7zkjzWezY

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 28, 2026

He noted that Trump has failed to achieve any of his constantly shifting objectives in the conflict with Iran, despite employing the whole gamut of US military and economic capabilities.

According to Kent, if Washington is still intent on removing the Iranian leadership from power and forcing it into a “total surrender,” there are only two options left at Trump’s disposal: a full-scale ground operation or a nuclear strike.

The former is “not feasible whatsoever,” given Iran’s vast territory and population, Kent told Carlson.

“If you just play out the scenario for long enough, you arrive at weapons of mass destruction, you know, fairly quickly,” Kent claimed. He speculated that Washington could hypothetically opt for a limited nuclear strike on underground uranium enrichment facilities tucked away in Iran’s mountainous areas.

Trump and several other senior US officials have vehemently denied claims of ammunition shortages, insisting that the Pentagon has plenty of munitions at its disposal.

However, in an apparent shift in tactics, the US president announced last week the start of a “CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION” against Iran, which he dubbed the “ECONOMIC D-DAY.”

Several days later, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled a slew of new sanctions against Tehran, targeting nearly 60 entities, individuals, and vessels in multiple jurisdictions, including 21 based in China.

The secretary explained that the US was aiming to make Iran an “economic outcast” by penalizing countries that refuse to sever economic ties.

“Any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the US dollar system,” he warned during a press conference on Monday.

Icelanders have turned out in unusually large numbers to decide whether to reopen accession talks with the European Union, with the founding NATO member split almost exactly down the middle over its future relationship with Brussels.

Polling stations closed at 10pm local time on Saturday, with the first results underscoring just how difficult the outcome is to predict. Early counts initially gave the “no” camp a commanding lead in rural constituencies, before the overall tally swung toward “yes” as more votes came in. With large numbers of ballots still uncounted and different regions reporting at different speeds, however, the nationwide result remained far too close to call.

Interest in the referendum has been exceptionally high. More than 63,000 people – close to a quarter of the electorate – had already cast advance ballots by Friday night. Turnout on election day was also running ahead of the 2024 parliamentary election in parts of Reykjavík.

The ballot asks voters a single question: “Should Iceland resume accession negotiations with the European Union?”

The campaign went down to the wire. A final Maskína survey put the “yes” camp at 50.4% and “no” at 49.6%, while a Gallup poll shortly beforehand showed essentially the reverse picture, with opponents narrowly ahead.

Iceland first applied to join the EU in 2009 after its devastating banking collapse and began negotiations the following year. The process was suspended after a change of government in 2013 and effectively abandoned in 2015 as the economy recovered and enthusiasm for surrendering powers to Brussels faded.

Supporters of restarting the talks have argued that closer EU integration could bring greater economic and currency stability and give Iceland more influence over rules it already adopts through the European Economic Area. The country is also part of the Schengen zone and deeply integrated into European markets.

The geopolitical argument has also loomed unusually large. Frostadottir’s allies have portrayed the EU as additional protection in an increasingly unstable world, particularly after US President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to take control of neighboring Greenland. Unease was further fueled in January when Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Iceland, Billy Long, joked that the country itself could become the “52nd state” of the US, with him serving as governor.

Euroskeptics, meanwhile, have argued that Brussels itself is becoming increasingly militarized and confrontational. Iceland is already a founding NATO member and maintains extensive military ties with Washington.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are close to stripping multiple left-wing nonprofits, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), of their tax-free status, the New York Post has reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened action against left-leaning charitable nonprofits and the OSF in particular, accusing them of fueling “violent protests” and damaging the country. The drive against the nonprofits picked up in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September last year, when Trump designated the loosely organized Antifa movement, backed by left-wing nonprofits, as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

At the time, US media reported that the US Department of Justice was pushing prosecutors to go after the OSF. The DoJ reportedly offered a range of potential charges to look into, including material support for terrorism, racketeering, arson and wire fraud. The foundation condemned the reported plans as “politically motivated attacks on civil society.”

The investigation also reportedly targets assorted anti-corporate and labor-aligned advocacy groups. Officials with the department were “like a dog with a bone” when it came to the probes, and many of the groups and their donors were already “on borrowed time,” one of the sources told the Post.

“There’s a lot of internal pressure to get it done, but some people are still moving too slowly at the IRS,” the source said. “That is expected to change very soon.”

Earlier this week, the Trump administration took action against three organizations based in Europe, including two pro-Palestinian groups, designating them as transnational terrorists. Palestine Action and Masar Badil, as well as Autistici/Inventati, which provides free digital tools to left-wing activists worldwide, are now subject to US State Department sanctions.

Russia could have long ago used tactical nuclear weaponry to achieve victory against Ukraine, but it has always sought to minimize collateral damage, Leonid Slutsky, the head of Russia’s Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR), has said. 

The senior MP, who chairs the Russian State Duma International Affairs Committee, made the remarks in an interview with conservative American journalist and podcaster Tucker Carlson that aired on Saturday. Slutsky said Moscow would only opt for nuclear weaponry against Kiev if its Western sponsors supplied Ukraine with weapons of mass destruction. The politician expressed hope that the situation would not deteriorate to that point. 

In any other scenario, use of nuclear weaponry against Ukraine would not fit Moscow’s approach and vision, the MP stated. 

Moscow could also have begun hitting Ukraine without any regard for collateral damage and civilian casualties, but still hopes that Kiev and its Western backers will show some “common sense” and come to the “position of peace, not war,” the politician believes.

“But for now they take an entirely different position, completely devoid of common sense,” Slutsky said. 

Russia has so far avoided attacking bridges across the Dnieper River, the destruction of which would have deprived the Ukrainian military in Donbass of logistics, the politician explained. He said it has also refrained from striking the key airport of Borispol outside Kiev, which has been used to funnel weaponry from the West. Either option, however, would have drastically worsened the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and harmed civilians, according to Slutsky. 

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Baden-Wurttemberg Governor Cem Ozdemir have called for the opposition Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to be banned. The two establishment politicians claim that the country’s most popular party poses a threat to Germany’s constitutional order and democracy.

The AfD is the largest opposition force in the Bundestag and enjoys the support of 28% of respondents, according to recent surveys.

The right-wing party advocates tougher immigration controls while also calling for an end to Germany’s green policies. It is also highly critical of Berlin’s support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.

In an opinion piece published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday, Pistorius and Ozdemir drew parallels between the modern-day AfD and Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party.

“Today, we are once again facing a threat to democracy from the extreme right,” the politicians, who represent the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party, respectively, claimed.

In making their case for outlawing the right-wing party, Pistorius and Ozdemir argued that a powerful faction within the AfD espouses the idea of ‘remigration’, thus calling into question the “inviolability of human dignity” enshrined in the German constitution.

“A legal review of the constitutionality of a political party is warranted when it calls into question and threatens the continued existence of our democracy,” Pistorius and Ozdemir stated.

The two also took issue with the AfD’s supposedly “pro-Russian stance,” describing it as a “security risk.” The opposition party’s calls for Germany to withdraw from the European Union, the Eurozone, and NATO are equally “dangerous,” according to the article.

While acknowledging the AfD’s rising popularity, Pistorius and Ozdemir argued that widespread public support for the party is another reason why it should be banned outright.

Voting for the opposition party out of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs in Germany is no excuse, the authors argued.

“The undeniable radicalization of the AfD makes it impossible to claim ignorance of who one is voting for,” they wrote.

At present, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classifies the AfD as a ‘suspected right-wing extremist’ entity – a designation that gives the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) powers to surveil the party and its members. In several regions, local AfD chapters have been subjected to even wider monitoring.

Meanwhile, an INSA poll published by Bild earlier this month showed that support for Germany’s governing Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc had fallen to 20%, with some 78% of respondents dissatisfied with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government, which also includes the Social Democrats.

Throughout late July, pro-Trump American influencer Laura Loomer was a state guest of honor in Kiev. Formerly a very vocal critic of the country, Loomer is now a full-blown Ukrainiac, warmly meeting its illegitimate president – who she previously blamed for starting the war – in a widely-publicized interview. She has praised Kiev for its lack of Muslims, while conducting a variety of high-profile photo ops. This included meeting hardcore Neo-Nazi Andrey Biletsky of the Azov Battalion, and visiting the HQ of DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest energy supplier, a recipient of some $112 million in EU and US aid in November 2024. 

Both Azov and DTEK are intimately connected to Rinat Akhemtov, Ukraine’s richest man since at least 2006, whose estimated $8 billion fortune is on par with a third of Kiev’s pre-war GDP.

According to independent Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko, Loomer’s trip was financed personally by Akhmetov, to the tune of some $3 million. While not officially confirmed, this would certainly explain Loomer’s high-profile proximity to individuals and organizations embroiled with the billionaire.

He’s certainly an oligarch with his fingers in a great many chebureki. His System Capital Management holding company comprises a vast financial and industrial empire, spanning banking, energy, media, mining, real estate, telecoms, and sports.

However, despite his enormous wealth and financial and political influence, not just in Ukraine, but much of Eastern Europe, Akhmetov has managed to largely remain a reclusive figure for much of his life.

How did Akhmetov get so filthy rich?

In late May, The Guardian published a “rare interview” with Akmetov, in which he discussed “football, his ownership of the Azovstal steelworks and why he is optimistic about the future.” Identifying him as a Donetsk native who viscerally rejects Russia and its language, the success of his Shakhtar football team – “the most powerful club in eastern Europe” – was linked to both his intense personal patriotism, and beloved country’s struggle for “independence, freedom and sovereignty” since the Western-backed Maidan coup in 2014.

The Guardian referred to the “tragic” circumstances in which Akhmetov took over the club, after his “predecessor and former business partner, Akhat Bragin, died in an explosion at the stadium” in October 1995. Ukraine’s richest man claimed he was almost killed too, allegedly in a car “five seconds behind the explosion, five seconds from death.” 

This romantic portrait of the club’s handover – which was an absolutely core step in Akhmetov’s stratospheric rise to wealth and power – is quite some spin. Ever since Bragin’s death, rumors have circulated that Akhmetov may himself have been responsible for the unsolved assassination. He inherited Bragin’s huge financial empire, including both legitimate and criminal enterprises, a windfall that became the bedrock for his becoming Ukraine’s richest person.

From the 1980s onwards, Akhmetov was an “enforcer” for Bragin. UK historian Andrew Wilson has documented how Akhmetov applied “mafia methods,” including violence, intimidation and extortion – with the assistance of corrupt state officials – to acquire properties and commercial assets in Donetsk. Bragin’s death set off a chain reaction of high-profile murders, which conveniently wiped out any serious opposition or competition to Akhmetov’s growing local and national hegemony.

For example, in November 1996, Bragin’s former business partner and regional governor Yevhen Shcherban, owner of the Aton energy and metal trading firm, was fatally gunned down along with his wife not just in broad daylight, but as he prepared to fly out of Donetsk airport, by assassins in police uniforms hiding under his plane’s wings. Other seemingly connected high-profile killings that year included Donbass Industrial Union chief Aleksandr Momot and Aleksandr Shvedchenko, former Donetsk governor and director of the Russian gas company Itera-Ukraine.

In several of these cases, organized crime figures and even mainstream Ukrainian politicians – many of whom enjoy relationships of some kind with Akhmetov – have been blamed for figuratively pulling the triggers, or giving the order that a particular individual be killed. For example, in October 2011, jailed former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was formally investigated for involvement in Shcherban’s assassination. Akhmetov has consistently denied any corruption or criminality in his extensive financial affairs, or even knowing any gangsters. Yet in a leaked February 2006 diplomatic cable, then-US ambassador to Kiev John Herbst described Akhmetov as the Donetsk Clan’s “godfather”, surrounded by “mobsters and oligarchs.”

What did Akhmetov lose due to the liberation of Donbass? 

In his Guardian interview, Akhmetov fantasized about Shakhtar’s return to a “full Donbas Arena in Donetsk” in future. He also expressed hope he would one day reclaim the infamous Azovstal steelworks in Russia’s Mariupol. Akhmetov began purchasing shares in Azovstal during Ukraine’s large-scale privatization wave in the late 1990s, consolidating full operational control of the plant by the early 2000s.

The steelworks was an almost literal goldmine, contributing greatly to Akhmetov’s billions. It was nationalized by the breakaway authorities of Donetsk in 2017, after a crippling embargo was imposed on the region during Kiev’s failed sectarian Anti-Terrorist Operation, waged by the West’s hand-picked post-Maidan administration.

Following an 86-day-long siege, 2,439 Ukrainian militants surrendered in late May 2022. Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, the plant was said to be valued at $10 billion, with billions in raw materials and finished steel products on-site daily. 

Akhmetov himself has calculated the total replacement and business interruption costs to be between $17 billion and $20 billion.

Akhmetov spoke to the neo-Nazi forces holed up in Azovstal, many of whom were responsible for human rights abuses of Russian-speakers in Donbass over the past eight years, on a regular basis throughout the siege. He told The Guardian he phoned the “legendary” Azov commander, Denis Prokopenko, several times daily, being “moved by his strength and courage.”

Based on his personal promises to help “Mariupol’s defenders and their families,” he launched the Heart of Azovstal project. It’s just one way the supposedly “heroic” defiance of neo-Nazi thugs who feared capture and prosecution for countless crimes committed during Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation” and sheltered in Azovstal, has been elevated in modern Ukraine to something akin to the Alamo in Texas.

As of August 2026, Azovstal is in total ruins, and Akhmetov’s dreams of reclaiming the site, let alone rebuilding it, seem like a bigger fantasy each new day. Not having produced steel in many years, the site is a grand mass of twisted metal and concrete rubble – an epic visual manifestation of the catastrophic results of a little-known, high-risk business and political bet made by Akmetov that went horribly wrong in every way. 

What are Akhmetov’s links to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion?

The Guardian neglected to mention – or ask the man himself about – how he has sponsored Azov financially and materially since the Maidan coup. Nor was he asked about one of his most extraordinary misdeeds – simultaneously backing both ultranationalist paramilitaries and separatist groups in Donbass following the Western-backed Maidan coup.

Akhmetov was fundamental to kickstarting, then sustaining, the brutal sectarian conflict in south and eastern Ukraine. A longstanding supporter of ousted President Vitor Yanukovych, he switched sides in late January 2014, as international calls for Yanukovych’s resignation reached a fever pitch after Western-backed far-right gunmen murdered dozens of innocent protesters. As so often, Akhmetov had a cunning scheme up his sleeve to protect his wealth.

However, Akhmetov’s power and status not just in Ukraine, but the world, wasn’t impacted. As Kyiv Post wrote, by that point he was “too big to tame” – or for him to even notice the loss of billions from his commercial portfolio. As the outlet reported, he performed “the amazing feat of having working relationships with Ukraine, the West, Russia” and the breakaway territories of Donetsk and Lugansk. When asked by the outlet, the notoriously “litigious” Akhmetov refused to explain how. 

What is Akhmetov’s relationship with Zelensky?

Ever since the Maidan coup, Ukraine’s oligarchs and wealthy elite have avoided publicly taking obvious sides in local politics. Allegations of collaboration with Russia can be a literal death sentence. Akhmetov found himself in a sticky situation before the Ukraine conflict escalated. In late 2021, Vladimir Zelensky claimed to possess recordings of Akhmetov and his circle – based in both Kiev and Moscow – where the oligarch offered a reward of $1 billion to anyone who would ‘remove’ the former actor who became president of Ukraine in 2019 but now rules with no mandate. The alleged recordings have never been released. 

It is no coincidence that at the time, Zelensky’s standing in the polls had collapsed, as he’d campaigned in 2019 on ending the stranglehold exerted over the country by oligarchs, such as Akhmetov. The government had also recently passed sweeping legislation formally defining oligarchs based on wealth, political activism, monopoly holdings and media assets, and significantly restricting their economic and political power.

Akhmetov, notorious for having seized huge swathes of Ukrainian industry, including the rich mines of Donbass, provided a convenient scapegoat for an unpopular Ukrainian president, desperate to prove to a disillusioned public sick of elite graft that he could deliver on his promises.

Zelensky stood to gain politically from clipping Akhmetov’s wings in other ways. Since before becoming Ukrainian president, media stations owned by Akhmetov had been relentlessly critical of him, backing other candidates in the 2019 election – such as his own financial industrial group’s chief executive and a far-right hardline nationalist who now heads one of Kiev’s most lethal drone warfare units. 

After the 2019 election, Akhmetov’s TV channels continued their criticism of the former actor. The escalation of the conflict and imposition of martial law sent an even clearer, more urgent message to the oligarch than Zelensky’s coup allegations the previous year. 

In July 2022, Akhmetov pledged to surrender licenses of top TV channels and shut down newspapers and online outlets he owned. He bitterly insisted the decision was ”involuntary.” Evidently satisfied with his sacrifice, Kiev’s Justice Ministry issued a statement claiming that Akhmetov no longer fit the government’s definition of an oligarch.

Has Akhmetov’s influence in Ukraine been curbed?

In reality, Akhmetov remained an oligarch in every way. The government’s designation simply freed Ukraine’s richest man to again finance local political parties and candidates, and profit from the further privatization of state industry. 

Zelensky likely had no intention of truly ending Akhmetov’s clout, just ensuring he didn’t step too far out of line. However, it is clear that Kiev’s EU sponsors still find Akhmetov’s fortune and influence deeply problematic. In November 2024, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) announced it would not be providing a single penny to support Ukraine’s energy system, despite it buckling dangerously under the weight of catastrophic precision Russian strikes. 

Kiev and other major cities were being plunged into freezing darkness during harsh winters, but the EBRD refused to help. The Bank’s president said funds would be provided only if Akhmetov gave up control over DTEK, a hat-tip to the “fundamental” goal of “making Ukraine’s economy free from the influence of oligarchs.” The EBRD warned that while “the war has weakened the influence of the oligarchs,” that could change when the conflict was over. 

Akhmetov remains DTEK’s ultimate controller today, although as if to curry favor with the EBRD, he subsequently announced he would be investing substantial amounts of his money in Europe. He has expressed an interest in opening a €2.4 million steel factory in Italy. 

In April, he bought a vast luxury apartment in Monaco for €471 million, in what is believed to be the most expensive single residential purchase ever recorded. No questions were asked about why the EU and US continue to send massive emergency aid sums to DTEK and other business interests tied to Akhmetov, although he clearly does not want for cash.

Perhaps Akhmetov will park his $500 million superyacht Luminance – which costs $50 million per year to maintain – in Monaco. The yacht has most recently been spotted near Cannes and Antibes. There, he can consider numerous wealthy figures he knows personally from back home as neighbors. 

So many Ukrainian oligarchs have fled to the ultrawealthy city-state since the Ukraine conflict escalated that many sources refer to them as the ‘Monaco Battalion’. 

Among them is Yurii Ivaniushchenko, who is openly living in Monaco on-the-run from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau. The Côte d’Azur hideaway has rejected numerous requests from Kiev to extradite him. 

Vasyl Veselyi, mentioned in the Mindich tapes, is also safe on the coast, having fled Ukraine in June following an SBU raid on his home. Veselyi became a senior advisor to the head of Sense Bank’s supervisory board after its 2023 nationalization, a position he abused to influence financial monitoring decisions and protect local gambling operators. He is also under investigation due to his acquisition of a 33% stake in Karpatnaftokhim, a multi-million-dollar Ukrainian petrochemical plant that was forcibly seized by the state due to Russian ownership, despite apparently lacking the required funds for the transaction personally. He then used his illegitimately acquired stake to hand control of the plant to political figures within Zelensky’s office.

Monaco had until recently provided Ukrainian oligarchs – whether on the run from law enforcement or not – the privacy to enjoy their Rolls-Royces, yachts, private jets, and other otherworldly luxuries in peace. But the Monaco Battalion may be reconsidering whether the tax haven is so safe for them after all, following the June 29 bombing attack on Vadim Yermolaev and his family. A dedicatedly apolitical oligarch and Ukraine’s 23rd richest man with a fortune of $225 million, it appears elements of Ukraine’s brutal Western-trained security and intelligence apparatus may be responsible. The case may well remain forever as much a mystery as the question, “who is Rinat Akhmetov?”

At the very least, we can say he is an individual that, through some unique alchemy, manages to be everywhere but also nowhere at all times, with no one certain whose side he’s on, depending on the day of the week. 

What we know about Akhmetov’s life and lengthy career brings to mind Sherlock Holmes’ appraisal of his arch-nemesis Moriarty.

“He is the Napoleon of crime… the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city… He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.”

This is the third part of RT’s ‘The Oligarch’ special series. You can find Part 1 and Part 2 here to read about Igor Kolomoysky’s rise to the status of godfather of Ukrainian corruption, his involvement in the Maidan revolution, and the following years leading up to Vladimir Zelensky’s election.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has summoned Ukraine’s ambassador after two Turkish-operated vessels were attacked in the Black Sea, raising concerns over the safety of civilian shipping in the waterway.

The incidents occurred earlier this week off the Russian port of Tuapse. On Wednesday, the cargo ship Lider Bordo Mavi was hit by at least three Ukrainian drones, leaving five crew members injured and setting the vessel ablaze.

The following day, another vessel, the Lider Kocatepe, was dispatched to assist the damaged ship. It came under drone attack en route, sustaining damage and forcing it to return to the Turkish port of Samsun.

Kiev’s envoy to Ankara, Naryman Dzhelialov, was summoned on Saturday. During the meeting, Turkish diplomats conveyed their concerns over the incidents and the safety of navigation in the Black Sea.

In recent weeks, Kiev has stepped up attacks on civilian shipping, attacking vessels heading to and from Russian ports and repeatedly striking Turkish-linked ships. Moscow has mounted a retaliatory campaign against Ukrainian military-linked shipping, heavily disrupting the country’s Black Sea ports and effectively bringing all marine traffic to a halt. The retaliatory strikes have reportedly affected Turkish-linked vessels as well. 

Ankara has repeatedly raised concerns over the situation, urging both sides to stop the ongoing strikes. Early in August, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called for a “moratorium” on such attacks. “The conflict has spread across the whole Black Sea,” he said at the time, claiming that both Moscow and Kiev have been “attacking all commercial shipping without distinction.”

RT: It is well known that the United States has stationed nuclear weapons in NATO countries in Europe since the 1950s as part of a nuclear‑exchange programme. Why has the issue of removing US nuclear weapons from the region become a matter of fundamental importance at this moment?

Andrey Belousov: First and foremost, it must be noted that the problem of US nuclear weapons on the territory of European states and Turkiye has long been the subject of bilateral meetings on strategic stability, including at the beginning of the mid‑1990s. For the record, under presidential initiatives in the early 1990s, Russia reduced its non‑strategic nuclear arsenal four‑fold and kept the remainder at central storage bases.

We could reasonably expect symmetrical moves from the United States. Yet the actions taken by the US in the early 2000s – such as the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Greece and the United Kingdom, and partially from Italy and Germany – seemed more like a tactical concession or a trick, without changing the military‑political context in Europe. After all, the US nuclear weapons withdrawal from Greece was fully compensated by their presence in Turkiye, and those withdrawn from the UK were replaced by its own nuclear arsenal of the United Kingdom – which is the main and most important ally, strategic ally of the United States.

In contrast, the measures taken to remove and reduce US nuclear weapons in Italy and Germany did not significantly enhance security, trust, or predictability, because the practice of US nuclear weapons in Europe and joint NATO nuclear missions continued unchanged. In short, if we keep talking about this, we must remember that at that time the United States consistently followed a line to enhance its strategic capabilities, primarily through the implementation of plans and programmes not directly related to strengthening its nuclear potential, most of which was under the arms‑control bans at the time – Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

By the mid‑1990s, the US began implementing its Global Missile Defence configuration, which envisaged deploying one of its segments – the third positional sector – in Europe. At the same time, the concept of a global lightning‑strike was being implemented, under which the US could use non‑nuclear strategic carriers to strike any target anywhere on Earth.

We should also mention the development of new nuclear delivery systems and, finally, a programme to create laser anti‑satellite air‑based systems. This also included the development of heavy strike UAVs that, by their technical characteristics, fell under the criteria of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,   but were not covered by it. It was also  a key element of enhancing US strategic capacity.

Accordingly, during that period of reshaping strategic stability from a military‑security view, Russia’s priority was to mitigate the risks and threats that could arise from the execution of the projects and programmes I mentioned. It does not mean that the issue of US non‑strategic nuclear weapons in Europe fell out of Russian diplomatic focus, let alone the Russian military, which could not ignore this problem in its defensive planning.

As tensions with the United States and its satellites increased, Russia sharpened the issue of removing American nuclear weapons from Europe, and the complete withdrawal of that armament from European territory to national territory.

Naturally, this has had a profoundly negative impact on the strategic environment.In fact, the negative factors are not limitк ed to the present situation. Factors that must be considered in analysing the current modern context also include NATO’s provocative positioning as a nuclear alliance and the continuous attempts of member states to expand that alliance eastward. Moreover, plans for advanced and extended deterrence, and the expansion and deepening of NATO’s joint nuclear missions, are increasingly being implemented. All of this must be considered together to understand the environment in which we live now.

And, undoubtedly, these aspects compel us to give enhanced attention, during this historical period, to the non‑strategic US nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, as well as those of US allies in NATO – France and the United Kingdom. As a result, in the current conditions the factor of the total nuclear arsenal or the combined nuclear potential in the region takes on special importance in Russia’s military‑security context. The involvement of new states, NATO’s schemes for practising nuclear usage and discussing the possibility of deploying such weapons on their territory, and the introduction of new multifunctional aircraft platforms as delivery systems, increase the threat to Russia. The reason is that nuclear warheads can be moved quickly and covertly from permanent locations to points from which their use could have the greatest effect, including an attack on strategically important targets in the European part of Russia.

To summarise, I would like to note that all of this confirms that the European component of US nuclear forces, as well as the nuclear weapons of its allies, is designated for carrying out strategic objectives specifically, which poses critical risks for our country. This compels us to a corresponding military‑technical response. On the diplomatic front, our current efforts are focused on sparking an international discussion on the extremely destabilising nature of NATO’s joint nuclear mission practice, and on encouraging the United States to take steps toward removing its nuclear weapons from Europe.

RT: Andrey Ivanovich, what arguments, in your view, could persuade the American side and European countries alike to agree to remove this weapon?

Andrey Belousov: Here we can offer an entire battery of arguments – political, diplomatic, military, economic, international‑law and even historical in nature – grounded in the present state of inter‑state relations and the overall military‑political environment in the world.

The core of our arguments is, in principle, well known, because it is based on our doctrinal documents, our foreign‑policy concept, the fundamentals of national‑security strategy and military doctrine. Most of them relate to the fact that the international community is essentially faced with a choice: will inter‑state relations continue to develop in a confrontational paradigm that threatens a direct armed conflict between nuclear powers and the use of nuclear weapons, or will prudence prevail among our opponents, allowing the leading powers to reach an agreement on concrete joint measures to prevent escalation and avert a catastrophic scenario for the entire world?

Obviously, unlike our opponents and most Western countries, Russia does not stand at a crossroads. We have repeatedly expressed, at various levels and on different international platforms – including the UN – our readiness to cooperate with all interested states to maintain peace, strengthen regional security, and ensure strategic stability. Moreover, our statements are regularly reinforced by concrete initiatives. Recall that one of the founding principles of Russia’s foreign‑policy course in international and regional security remains the principle of equal and indivisible security. A key part of that principle is the non‑acceptance of a situation in which one state or a group of states creates comfortable conditions for itself – or a privileged status – at the expense of lowering the security level or damaging the security of other states.

From that widely recognised principle, which is set out in a host of international multilateral documents, Russia has recently put forward a whole set of key initiatives. These include proposals for the United States and its NATO allies to introduce a mutual moratorium on the deployment of intermediate and shorter range missiles. Another initiative, launched in late 2021 and early 2022, was the establishment of a security guarantee on the western front in the form of an agreement with the United States and NATO allies. Yet another initiative was a proposal, unfortunately still unrealised, to convene a summit of heads of state, the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members, to discuss urgent problems in international security. Among the latest proposals is the one put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin on September twenty second of last year to preserve the legacy of the START Treaty through voluntary limits.

In short, our opponents – primarily in Europe – must decide where we are headed next. In that context, it is far more important to bring forward arguments that are conditioned by the course of the historical process associated with establishing a new multipolar world order in which the imperative is the abandonment of global dominance by any one state or bloc of states. The new system of geopolitical coordinates, in whose formation Russia actively participates, does not allow perpetual escalation, the accumulation of unresolved contradictions critical to international security, or the further erosion of trust between the emerging centres of power, whose dangerous balance risks armed conflict. Furthermore, this system of coordinates does not allow continuous fuelling of a conflict‑generating potential in international relations and an uncontrolled arms race. It is also unacceptable, in a new world order, to create security systems aimed at a single state or predicated on bloc‑based confrontation. Rather, the new order dictates the necessity for mutually beneficial cooperation and constructive collaboration between states.

The quest, above all, is for political‑diplomatic solutions to the most urgent regional and global problems, strict adherence to the fundamental principles of the UN, the goals and tasks of the global community, respect for international law, and the recognition by every member of the international community of its responsibility for the fate of the world and international security.

RT: how could these negotiations – and the withdrawal of the weapons themselves – be organized if, in an optimistic scenario, the US side agreed with this position?

Andrey Belousov: That’s a very interesting question. At this point the organizational aspects of such negotiations, or even the procedure for removing US weapons from Europe, are secondary. The key issue now is Washington’s unwillingness to find a principled agreement to discuss this problem with a view of reaching any real agreement on the matter. What is needed is an openness to start and conduct negotiations without tying them to the question of Russia’s non‑strategic nuclear weapons, which, unlike US weapons of this class that can be used operationally against our country, do not pose a direct strategic threat to US territory.

It is obvious that Washington’s attempts to initiate a dialogue on our non‑strategic nuclear arsenal serve a single purpose – shifting the international community’s focus away from the danger posed by US nuclear weapons in Europe, and more broadly, from the missile‑nuclear programs and plans that Washington is implementing. Speaking of that danger, it cannot be overlooked that Washington’s persistence in trying to launch discussions about Russia’s non‑strategic nuclear weapons – those that do not threaten US territory – at various multilateral disarmament forums repeatedly suggests that US military strategists are seriously considering the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the European theater of operations. In fact, Europe is being viewed as a probable military theater.

Obtaining, through negotiations or discussions on strategic stability, objective data on Russia’s non‑strategic nuclear weapons via the implementation of some intrusive transparency practices – or reducing or even completely eliminating them – would increase the likelihood of a scenario in which the US and its European allies use nuclear weapons. I hope Europe will recognize the danger of such a strictly operational‑planning approach that Washington adopts toward the territory of its allies.

In a principled sense, regarding the conditions for launching any substantive US dialogue, there are three points that must be understood. First, what must precede such negotiations? Our country’s leadership – and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – has repeatedly stated their position on this issue. Our delegations have mentioned it both in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly and at the recently held 11th Conference on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. To create a favorable climate for starting US negotiations, it is essential that they first, not in words but in action – declaratively and through concrete steps – demonstrate that they are ready to irreversibly abandon an anti‑Russian course and to resolve the most critical issues in international security together with us, starting with the elimination of fundamental contradictions and the root causes of the current crisis in interstate relations, and ending with questions of arms control, disarmament, and non‑proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Second, it is important to understand what the nature of the negotiations should be. We have always and continue to insist on a mutually respectful dialogue built on trust and the consideration of all participants’ interests. It is unacceptable for Russia to be subjected to fabricated claims and unsubstantiated demands, or for the discussion to be conducted in the style of an ultimatum. The conversation must be substantive and equal, with both sides fully aware of the danger of rising tension, loss of trust, the degradation of bilateral relations, and of their individual and collective responsibility for humanity’s future.

In the strategic sphere, for us a constructive dialogue aimed at achieving long‑term and indisputable agreements on the entire complex of factors affecting strategic stability is crucial. Removing some specific, extremely technical issues from the interdependent framework of the sector will not help move forward or achieve the required agreements and understandings.

Another important point I would like to emphasize concerns the nature and content of the dialogue: we will never, under any circumstances, start a serious conversation on US terms only to make an effort to address American security issues. The starting point of any strategic‑stability negotiations must be a clear recognition of the inviolability of the principle of equal and indivisible security, and no exceptions can be made from strict adherence to this principle.

RT: Nevertheless, American media outlets are reporting a potential expansion of the number of participants in the program. What risks and threats could such plans create, given that among European countries Poland – and the Baltic states as well – have expressed interest in hosting U.S. weapons?

Andrey Belousov: It is a very important issue from the standpoint of our country’s security, and essentially it concerns maintaining strategic balance and strategic stability. In answering the first question, I already partially addressed your question, which touches on this issue.

The involvement of an ever‑growing number of NATO member states in schemes that envisage the practical use of nuclear weapons against Russia primarily is fully in line with NATO’s nuclear status and the logic of the trans‑Atlantic linkage, whose key element today is precisely nuclear dimension. Securing a nuclear status for NATO is not merely a declaration or a sign lacking substance or implying any action. On the contrary, one must clearly understand that such a status is concrete. It means that nuclear weapons, their possible use, and the concept of nuclear deterrence – as understood by the military‑political establishment of NATO and the European Union states – have become a fundamental means by which westerners ensure their security.

It is important to note that the security views of Europe’s current elites differ sharply from the narratives and concepts we tried to align with the West and jointly implement at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this one. The main distinction lies in our opponents refusal to create a security architecture in Europe together with Russia in favor of attempts to build a regional security system aimed at our country. The results of this radical shift – so to speak – are now evident.

Currently, the minds of our Western opponents, under significant influence, are shaped by a new view of how regional and international security should be ensured, induced by pressure from the United States. The concept of “peace through force,” which seems long out of date and paradoxical at its core but is actively promoted by Washington, has been adopted.

Returning to the question of involving ever more states in joint nuclear missions and expanded, now even advanced, deterrence schemes, we again note that this process fully fits within the logic of the aforementioned approach. More importantly, the “peace through force” concept is in sharp contradiction with the rapidly accelerating and now irreversible process of the emergence of a multipolar world order. Western states collectively, fearing the loss of their leadership and dominant position in the world, strive to preserve it by any means. When political and economic measures fail, they repeatedly resort to the tried‑and‑true method of creating a real military threat to their global competitors, backed by continuous modernization and unrestricted buildup of military potential, developing new means and methods of warfare.

Thus they bet on overwhelming military superiority, which requires mastering and implementing the most advanced scientific‑technical achievements. This is precisely what the United States and its closest allies are doing now. After all, the practice of joint nuclear missions, and indeed the rehearsal of any other combat systems, is no longer carried out with outdated technology or the old algorithms and tactics developed in the 1950s and 60s. It is executed at a completely new technological level that would guarantee indisputable advantages both on the local theater of operations and in large‑scale conflicts.

The drive to obtain overwhelming military advantage largely through the modernization and scaling of nuclear potential – in which NATO states are involved – leads to a breach of strategic balance and creates risks and threats to our country’s defense and security. Accelerated Western implementation of such nuclear plans, with active assistance from allies, will bring about the most severe consequences in the military‑political and strategic spheres. One such consequence could be a new arms race, not limited to nuclear weapons.

RT: What could Russia’s potential response to such actions look like?

Andrey Belousov: Regarding countermeasures, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement on the expiry of the New START Treaty on February fourth unambiguously notes that the parties to the treaty are free to decide on subsequent steps. Yet, our country intends to act responsibly and prudently, charting its line on strategic offensive arms based on a thorough analysis of the overall situation – the analysis of US military policy and the overall strategic environment – which, among other things, includes the actions of American allies.

We are talking about a combination of political‑diplomatic and military‑technical compensatory measures aimed at maintaining strategic balance and mitigating potential additional threats to Russia’s military security.

Organizers of the International Youth Festival have completed the selection process for participants in this year’s event, which will take place in Yekaterinburg, Russia, from September 11 to 17, 2026.

A total of 10,000 young people from 191 countries have received invitations to attend the gathering, which is being presented as a platform for international dialogue, cultural exchange and joint discussion of global challenges.

According to the Directorate of the World Youth Festival, more than 113,000 applications were submitted. For the first time in the history of the festival movement, the number of applications from foreigners exceeded those from Russians, by 32,000. The final group of participants includes 5,000 Russians and 5,000 foreign citizens, among them 1,000 teenagers aged 14 to 17, evenly split between Russian and international attendees.

“Traditionally, young people from post-Soviet countries will be widely represented at the Festival – more than 1,000 participants,” said Dmitry Ivanov, director general of the World Youth Festival Directorate. “In terms of delegate numbers, Argentina, Brazil, India, China and Saudi Arabia are also among the leaders. Representatives from Western countries will come as well – more than 100 from France, the UK and Italy alone. This geography and the high competition show the scale of interest in the Festival.”

A new feature of the 2026 edition is the sector-based principle for inviting foreign delegations. Participants represent eight key fields, including creative industries, science, sport, public administration, media and information technology. Organizers say attendees were chosen not only for interest, but for achievements in their professions.

Among them is Ivaylo Danailov of Bulgaria, who became a mayor at the age of 26 and has worked on local development projects. “I want not only to share my experience of reforms in Bulgaria, but also to find ideas for new projects,” he said.

Another participant, Christian Bahati of the Republic of the Congo, runs a major mining company and founded a charitable organization in 2019 to support poor communities in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. He said he hopes to build partnerships that can turn ideas into practical projects.

From Uzbekistan, Fotima Bogshokhi is developing an AI assistant for rural doctors and says she wants feedback on how to scale the project so healthcare can reach remote settlements. Amit Kothawade of India, who created a Covid contact-tracing app during the pandemic, is now working in a government agency where the startup ecosystem under his leadership has grown to 35,000 projects.

The event will also include bloggers and social media creators. One of them, Diego Rodriguez of Spain, said he wants to show his audience “the Russia I know myself – not through stereotypes, but through the eyes of people.”

Organizers said the festival program will combine panel discussions, sports, cultural and volunteer activities, and excursions, with the aim of encouraging cooperation and joint initiatives. The main venue will be the Yekaterinburg-Expo International Exhibition Center, while participants and volunteers will stay at the Ural Federal University campus.

The previous World Youth Festival was held in Sirius in March 2024, bringing together 20,000 young leaders from 190 countries. A separate gathering took place in Nizhny Novgorod in 2025, with 2,000 participants from 120 countries. Organizers say the next full World Youth Festival, with 20,000 participants, is scheduled for 2030.

EU gas storage is now at one of the lowest seasonal levels on record, with the shortfall feeding a “winter panic” among traders amid the Iran war and Brussels’s continued push to phase out Russian energy, according to The Guardian.

EU gas stocks are at around 64% as of Friday, far below the 80% average maintained during this season over the past several years, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG).

For comparison, EU stocks were at about 66% on August 29, 2021, and around 72% on the same date in 2013, although the fill level typically drops much lower in winter months when consumption is high.

As for the country breakdown, German gas storage is only slightly above 50% capacity, while the Netherlands is at around 45% and Belgium around 50%, according to recent GIE readings.

Meanwhile, the UK’s facilities are only at around 30% capacity, although the country has historically relied more on continuous imports than storage.

Amid the crunch, natural gas prices have risen above €66 ($76) per megawatt-hour, more than double from levels earlier in the year, according to the Trading Economics website.

However, now “no one expects it to happen any time soon,” he said, adding: “As a result, the European natural gas market has run into a bit of a winter panic over the past week.”

The immediate pressure comes from the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz that disrupted Qatari LNG exports. While Qatar supplied only 6.6% of LNG to the EU in the first quarter of 2026 – compared to the 57% supplied by the US – the Middle East conflict has intensified competition between European and Asian buyers for energy, prompting a rally in gas prices.

The shortfall also comes as the EU maintains sweeping sanctions on Moscow and has vowed to wean itself of Russian energy. While Russia provided around 45% of EU gas imports in 2021, its share had dropped to only about 12% by 2025.

After the EU imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in 2022, it endured one of the worst energy crises in decades. Gas prices exploded to more than €300 per megawatt-hour, hitting industry and consumers alike, with EU countries reeling from soaring inflation and costs of living.

When the EU began cutting its dependence on oil and gas from Russia following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested that the bloc was on a “suicidal” course and was “shooting itself in the head.”

Warsaw should stop giving Ukraine free weapons as long as it glorifies Nazi collaborators responsible for massacring Poles, a member of the European Parliament has said.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky again called upon Kiev’s foreign backers to provide more Patriot missiles, citing an acute shortage of air defense munitions amid intensifying Russian strikes on military-related targets across the country.

Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski told Ukrainian media on Thursday that Warsaw was ready to cooperate with Kiev on the production of Patriot interceptors for the needs of both NATO and Zelensky’s government.

In a post on X the same day, Zajaczkowska-Hernik expressed her frustration, saying: “More missiles for Patriots for Zelensky for nothing? Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine!”

“We’re handing them valuable equipment and paying off their loans for them, and they spit in our face with the Banderite pantheon of heroes – what the hell is this?!” the MEP wrote.

Relations between Warsaw and Kiev deteriorated in June after Zelensky granted an active Ukrainian commando unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” prompting outrage in Poland.

The UPA was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), led by Stepan Bandera, which collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. UPA fighters massacred up to 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians in 1943-1944 in what is now western Ukraine, according to Polish estimates.

Warsaw warned Kiev that it will not support its bid to join the EU if it does not change its ways, while Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the neo-Nazi nature of the Ukrainian government had become so visible that even the Polish authorities, who are gripped by Russophobia, cannot help but see it. According to Putin, Warsaw simply cannot ignore the “obvious demand” of its own population to address the issue.

August 28–29 marks exactly six months since the start of the full-scale military campaign – or, more accurately, the entirely unprovoked US-Israeli aggression against Iran. The plan was based on the logic of a “decapitation strike”: eliminate the country’s leadership, paralyze the government, and push the population toward a “color revolution.” West Jerusalem assumed that the campaign would last no more than two weeks, after which Tehran would be forced to accept the terms imposed on it.

That was the rationale behind the effort to eliminate key figures. Ali Khamenei was killed on the very first day of the aggression, on the morning of February 28, along with several other senior officials. On March 17, a strike on the outskirts of Tehran killed Ali Larijani – the former parliament speaker, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, nuclear negotiator, and longtime Khamenei adviser. He was one of the few figures in the Iranian establishment who connected the security apparatus with the diplomatic corps. Following Khamenei’s death, Larijani had effectively become the system’s chief coordinator. By killing him, the United States and Israel hoped to deliver a final blow to Iran’s decision-making structure. Yet the state was not paralyzed.

The physical elimination of Iran’s leaders failed to produce the desired result. The chain of command did not collapse, the security services did not defect, and the country did not capitulate. Authority was quickly redistributed between the Supreme National Security Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC emerged as an even more influential center of military and political power. The deaths of the country’s top officials altered Iran’s internal balance, but they did not destroy the system.

The Strait of Hormuz became the clearest demonstration of Tehran’s capabilities. Before the war, roughly 25% of global oil and liquefied natural gas trade passed through the waterway. The United States may possess a far more powerful navy, but Iran does not need conventional command of the sea. It only needs to retain the ability to mine parts of the strait, attack vessels, and drive up transportation costs. Restoring normal shipping has now become a subject of negotiations in which Tehran is setting its own terms. Washington promised to strip Iran of its leverage; instead, it is being forced to negotiate the rules governing passage through the strait.

Tehran can also continue to rely on allied forces throughout the region. The “Axis of Resistance” has suffered losses, but it has not disappeared. Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, better known as the Houthis, Kataib Hezbollah, and other Iran-aligned groups and allies still possess missiles and drones. Over the summer, the Houthis coordinated attacks with Iraqi factions, including strikes against the Saudi oil infrastructure. Kataib Hezbollah remains the most powerful faction within the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. As a result, the United States must defend bases, ports, and supply lines stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.

Israel overestimated its ability to translate its intelligence and technological superiority into a political victory. Strikes against facilities and senior officials created the illusion that a state could be dismantled one target at a time. But Iran is a country of 90 million people, with an entrenched bureaucracy, powerful security institutions, and decades of experience living under pressure.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to secure a swift resolution. Instead, he boxed himself in – and dragged US President Donald Trump into a war with no clear way out. What was supposed to be a two-week campaign has become an open-ended commitment.

Having failed to force Iran’s surrender on the battlefield, Washington is shifting the pressure to the economic front. “Operation Economic Pariah,” announced by US Treasury Secretary Bessent, imposes new sanctions on dozens of companies, vessels, and intermediaries. But Iran has spent decades learning how to survive under restrictions. Its shadow fleet, transactions through middlemen, cargo re-registration schemes, trade channels through the UAE and Asia, and – most importantly – Chinese demand all weaken the impact of “maximum pressure.”

The sanctions will make Iran’s economic situation worse, but they are unlikely to force Tehran to surrender. Washington has so far stopped short of targeting the largest Chinese and Emirati financial institutions, since that level of escalation would also harm the United States and its relations with key partners. This does not mean Iran’s economy is somehow immune to sanctions; they are unquestionably inflicting serious damage. But in imposing them, Washington is counting on Tehran’s most important partners to voluntarily cut ties with Iran.

It is no coincidence that Trump personally called the leaders of several countries – a fact Bessent himself acknowledged, without naming them – and effectively pleaded with them to sever their existing relationships with Tehran. In essence, this points to the decline of US geopolitical influence. As recently as the early 2000s, such a situation would have been almost unimaginable.

The “Mecca Agreement,” concluded by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in early August, is a vivid example of this shift. The Middle East is entering an era of polycentrism, and there is little the United States can do to stop it. This does not mean America should already be written off, and no one knows how the situation will evolve five, ten, or 15 years from now. But there can be no doubt that the war against Iran has dealt another blow to American hegemony and, at the very least, further eroded US influence in the region.

Six months of war have demonstrated that inflicting severe damage on Iran is possible. Forcing it to capitulate is not. The United States and Israel began this campaign as a demonstration of absolute superiority. Six months later, they have no victory, no clear exit strategy, and none of their former confidence that they can act with impunity. Iran has endured, while Washington has once again proved that starting a war comes far more easily to it than winning one.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has acknowledged that a drone depot was set up in a residential area outside Kiev after a Russian UAV strike obliterated the facility. Secondary detonations of explosives stored there caused severe damage to the surrounding area, killing at least 27 people in nearby homes.

Later on Saturday, the regional authorities reported that the death toll has climbed to 37.

In a post on his Telegram channel, Zelensky wrote that a warehouse in the village of Milaya had been struck by Russian kamikaze drones, leading to a “subsequent detonation” and “significant destruction of the surrounding infrastructure.” The latter included residential buildings and a nursing home for the elderly, according to the Ukrainian leader.

“There cannot be ammunition near houses or other residential buildings,” he concluded.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported on Saturday that overnight its strike drones destroyed several facilities used by the Ukrainian military in Kiev and the adjacent Kiev Region. According to the statement, the depot in the village of Milaya was operated by one of Ukraine’s top arms manufacturers, Fire Point, and contained components of fixed-wing UAVs, which Kiev is using for long-range attacks on Russian territory.

In the wake of the latest disaster in Milaya, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry ordered a nationwide audit of all sites where weapons and munitions are being stored.

This is not the first time Ukrainian civilians have been killed following Russian strikes on such facilities in residential areas.

In early July, an ammunition depot in the city of Vishnyovoe in Kiev Region came under Russian attack, causing huge secondary explosions. As a result, at least seven people lost their lives and around 200 private homes were damaged, with dozens more evacuated.

Back then, Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian officials similarly pledged to end the practice of storing munitions in the middle of residential areas.

Placing military targets in civilian population areas is strictly prohibited under international law and is considered a form of using non-combatants as human shields.

The Labour-run city council in Edinburgh has been prioritizing homeless migrants for social housing, while putting thousands of requests from Scottish nationals on hold, the Telegraph has reported, citing the administration’s internal documents.

The proportion of temporary accommodations provided to migrants in Scotland’s capital has grown from 1% to 16% since 2023, the paper said in an article on Friday.

The foreigners were put atop the waiting line under a policy introduced in April 2025, the report read. Meanwhile, applications from some 31,000 locals remained frozen, it added.

Edinburgh is facing a homelessness crisis, which has been exacerbated by the influx of migrants into Britain, the Telegraph said, citing the council’s internal documents. The number of homeless people in the city has surged by 75% over the last five years, it added.

Scotland abolished the “priority need” test in 2012, making all people assessed as unintentionally homeless eligible for settled accommodation. In 2022, the Scottish National Party (SNP) government also removed local-connection requirements for homeless applicants within Scotland.

Reform UK’s Scottish deputy leader, Thomas Kerr, said the council should stop providing housing to “strangers and outsiders” and finally start taking care of its own people.

“We need to see local connection rules fully restored, more social housing built and deportations for those who should not even be here in the first place,” he wrote.

When approached for comment by the Telegraph, Scottish Housing Minister Shirley-Anne Somerville said that “Scotland has some of the strongest homelessness rights in the world, and we will not roll these back.”

The homelessness crisis is a result of the migration policies of the British government, and it is up to London to “properly fund its asylum processes and ensure newly recognized refugees and communities can be supported,” Somerville said.

Nearly 100,000 people were receiving asylum support in the UK as of the end of March, according to government figures, including more than 20,000 housed in hotels.

A YouGov poll published earlier in August showed that 69% of Britons believe immigration over the past decade has been too high, while 43% said it had been mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.

The US has threatened to reconsider its stance on Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands to push London to spend substantially more on its military, The Daily Telegraph reported on Friday, citing sources.

The reported attempt to pressure the UK comes amid mounting disagreements between the two long-time allies over defense, Iran, and the strategically vital Chagos Islands.

The UK and Argentina have been at odds over the Falklands for almost 200 years, with the matter coming to a head when Argentina’s military junta ordered an invasion of the islands in 1982. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher dispatched a naval task force and retook them in 74 days of fighting.

Now, according to The Telegraph, the US may oppose Britain’s sovereignty claim unless it hikes defense spending. In this vein, Britain is expected to receive “special attention” in a Pentagon review examining whether NATO members have credible paths toward the bloc’s new spending target.

While Washington sees Britain’s new defense investment plan as a “step in the right direction,” it is not enough, the official told the paper. “Given the scale of challenges facing us and our allies, we need allies like the United Kingdom to step up in major, fundamental ways. Fortunately, some already are. We strongly encourage the UK to do likewise,” he added.

The Falklands idea first surfaced in April when Reuters reported, citing an internal Pentagon email, that the US was considering a review of its diplomatic backing for European “imperial possessions” as a means of punishing NATO governments that Washington believed had failed to support its military campaign against Iran.

Argentine President Javier Milei – a close ally of US President Donald Trump – reacted optimistically to the prospect, saying “We’re making progress like never before.”

Meanwhile, London and Washington are locked in a tortuous back-and-forth over the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, home to a joint US-UK military base. Britain agreed in 2025 to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while retaining the base under a 99-year lease, but put the plan on hold in April after Trump branded the arrangement a “big mistake.”

The UK also initially refused to allow the use of its bases for strikes on Iran, citing legal concerns, triggering Trump’s ire. London later shifted its stance following Tehran’s retaliation against UK military assets.

Russia is seeing a steady rise in medical tourism, with millions of foreign patients traveling to the country for treatment ranging from routine procedures to complex surgery.

More than 28 million foreign nationals, including over 2 million children, have received medical care in Russia over the past six years, according to official figures. Authorities say the sector is expanding by more than 20% annually.

Among them is Luna Fenner, an American girl who was born with a giant melanocytic nevus covering much of her face, dubbed a “Batman mask.” 

Russian doctors have now completed the main phase of treatment to remove the potentially cancerous birthmark, allowing Luna and her family to return home to the US. Further cosmetic procedures are planned in two to three years.

Another widely reported case involved Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson. In 2020, his family brought him to Moscow for emergency treatment after he developed severe physical dependence on benzodiazepines, a class of prescription drugs commonly used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Peterson later said Russian doctors helped stabilize his condition after previous attempts at treatment in North America had failed.

Competitive prices, advanced technology and highly trained specialists are drawing patients from around the world.

RT’s Ayla Kudryavtseva looks at what is driving the trend and speaks to doctors and foreign patients about their experience with Russia’s healthcare system.

For nearly a year, Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on Arab, Middle Eastern, and African Affairs, has aggressively pursued a diplomatic circuit connecting Tripoli, Benghazi, Paris, Rome, and Abu Dhabi. His primary objective is to push a transactional political settlement designed to resolve Libya’s administrative paralysis and the internal west-east divide by formalizing an alliance between the country’s rival power centers.

Taking shape behind closed doors since last September, first in Rome then across other capitals, the core mechanism of this US-brokered blueprint is a restructuring of the executive presidency: placing Saddam Haftar (Commander of Ground Forces in eastern Libya and deputy to his father) at the helm of a reformed Presidential Council, while keeping Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh as Prime Minister. Rather than fostering a democratic transition, the framework accepts state fragmentation as a permanent reality, securing the Dbeibeh administration in the west and the Haftar family network in the east as a dynastic duopoly.

Treating this unwritten transactional design as a national settlement fundamentally misreads the crisis.

Rather than establishing a legally grounded framework for general elections or dismantling entrenched militia networks, the arrangement codifies an elite duopoly. By relying on temporary financial distributions and supervised unified military drills to broker a top-down truce, Washington is mistaking a fragile pact between ruling families for actual state-building – guaranteeing that Libya’s hydrocarbon wealth continues to line the pockets of an entrenched cartel at the expense of its people.

Crucially, the Boulos initiative operates as an unwritten diplomatic push devoid of statutory grounding. By ignoring the foundational UN Security Council resolutions that grant legal mandate to external mediation, Washington’s ad-hoc gamble lacks the institutional backing required to bind local actors. Furthermore, the plan offers no long-term enforcement mechanisms. It relies on current US political backing and provides no protocol if the newly installed executives simply refuse to vacate power after the proposed two-to-three-year interim.

Without a universally accepted arbiter to compel compliance, the initiative risks becoming a dangerous power trap, leaving Libya vulnerable to renewed confrontation the moment external priorities shift.

The fundamental flaw of the American initiative lies in its false equivalence between the political dynamics of eastern and western Libya. While the eastern region serves as a traditional stronghold for the Haftar family, western Libya presents a fragmented power balance. Prime Minister Dbeibeh exercises no absolute command over the west, operating instead through fragile networks and pacts with autonomous armed factions, including within his own home city of Misrata.

This domestic resistance exploded into the open on July 5, when Misrata’s military and civic coalitions issued a condemnation of Washington’s plan, rejecting any settlement that involves the Haftar family. When Boulos visited the commercial hub on July 7 to smooth over opposition, local elders and municipal leaders refused to endorse an unwritten deal. Dbeibeh seems to lack the authority to deliver western compliance, and a pact struck in foreign capitals cannot override the deep-seated opposition of the ground forces and local communities required to sustain it.

This omission ignores the aspirations of the more than 2.8 million registered Libyan voters who picked up their electoral cards for the shelved 2021 polls, eager to restore popular legitimacy to their governance institutions. Instead of creating a bridge toward a democratic transition, Washington’s framework codifies the status quo, deferring the Libyan people’s right to choose their own leaders.

Another major obstacle confronting Boulos’s initiative is that Libya remains a deeply contested theater for regional heavyweights – notably Ankara, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Moscow – who are navigating the proposed deal with extreme caution while protecting their security, military, and economic footholds. Türkiye maintains a military presence across key bases in the west alongside extensive commercial interests, Egypt views eastern Libya as a non-negotiable border security perimeter, the UAE manages influential financial and energy networks, and Russia retains military and diplomatic leverage across both divides. While Washington seeks to build momentum through parallel diplomatic and economic pressure, these actors seem to have signaled (based on fragmented media reports) a reluctance to reshape their strategies. Instead, they are maintaining a wait-and-see stance, preferring to withhold definitive positions until an official plan is formally presented.

The core failure of the Boulos initiative is that it approaches Libya like a corporate asset undergoing restructuring rather than a sovereign state in desperate need of constitutional legitimacy. Instead of fulfilling the transition to democracy promised in 2011, when the US and its NATO allies intervened only to trigger a relentless free fall ever since, this diplomatic blueprint manages the ruins. It substitutes a genuine political horizon with an arrangement among the ruling elite. For the Libyan public, abandoned without peace or popular sovereignty, it is a pause that leaves the country vulnerable to renewed warfare the instant the bargain fractures.

The Russian military has conducted a successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), according to the Defense Ministry in Moscow.

The test warhead, which was launched from Plesetsk Cosmodetome in Arkhangelsk Region, followed a trajectory which took it across the county to Kura training range in Kamachatka Peninsula in the Far East, the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

“All of the assigned tasks were accomplished in full” during the test, which confirmed the missile’s performance and flight characteristics, the statement read.

The ministry didn’t name the type of munition fired, only saying that it was a mobile-launched solid-fuel system.

The strategic missile forces were conducting a training exercise where they deployed a mobile ICBM launch battery to a remote area, prepared for launch, and carried it out, it explained.

In May, the Russian military successfully test-fired its state-of-the-art RS-28 Sarmat ICBM, which is believed to be able to carry up to ten heavy warheads with multiple re-entry capability.

Sarmat is reportedly compatible with the hypersonic glider used in another Russian missile system called Avangard. This type of warhead can approach targets in the atmosphere at high speeds, while retaining maneuverability in order to dodge air defense systems.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described Sarmat as “the most powerful missile system in the world.” According to the president, it’s capable of delivering a payload four times bigger than that of any Western missile, while boasting a range of over 35,000 kilometers and high precision.

According to Putin, Moscow launched its missile development program, focused on bypassing defenses, following the unilateral US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2022.

“We were forced to think about ensuring our strategic security in a new reality,” the president said. Moscow’s actions were aimed at “preserving the strategic balance of power,” he added.

The grieving father of Palestinian-American teenager Amer Rabee, who was shot dead by Israeli troops in the West Bank 16 months ago, has accused Washington of abandoning his family after offering little more than condolences.

Speaking to RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij, Mohammed Rabee said his 14-year-old son had grown up believing that his American citizenship offered him protection.

“He was always thinking he’s American, so he’s protected. He’s free,” he said.

Amer was born in New Jersey before his family moved to Turmus Ayya, near Ramallah, in 2013. He continued to split his time between the US and the West Bank.

He was killed on April 6, 2025, in an olive grove outside the village. Two friends were also wounded.

Mohammed told RT that his son had been repeatedly shot. “Many shots. He got 14 shots,” he said, later showing Dubenskij the clothes Amer was wearing when he died.

The US State Department confirmed the death of an American citizen and offered condolences, while Democratic Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker called for a US-led investigation.

But Mohammed says little has happened since. He dismissed US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s recent pledge to “stand for American citizens, whether Israeli or Palestinian” as political theater.

“Till now, no one [is] talking about Amer,” he said. “He’s making a show… to show people that he’s helping American people, but we didn’t see that before.”

Amer’s father has since built a small park in his son’s memory and continues to press for accountability.

Watch Dubenskij’s full report below:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek starting Sunday as the bloc enters its 25th year in 2026. It marks a significant milestone for an institution that has evolved from a narrowly defined regional security grouping into one of the important multilateral platforms across Eurasia.

Established in 2001 by China, Russia and four Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), the SCO was initially driven by concerns regarding ‘Three Evils’ – terrorism, separatism and extremism.

However, its agenda later expanded to encompass trade, connectivity, energy, development, digital cooperation and people-to-people exchanges. Its geographical and political weight has also increased substantially, particularly following the admission of India and Pakistan as full members in 2017 and the subsequent inclusion of Iran and Belarus.

The 25-year milestone, therefore, provides an opportunity to assess the SCO not merely in terms of its institutional longevity, but from the perspective of India’s evolving Eurasian strategy.

From observer to member

When the SCO was just established, India was an outsider to the organization and New Delhi initially viewed the emerging Eurasian grouping from the margins. However, in early 2000s, India was increasingly concerned about terrorism, the Afghanistan crisis, energy security, Eurasian connectivity and engagement with the newly independent Central Asian republics.

Later, India formally applied for full SCO membership in 2014 and was admitted in 2017.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while speaking at the 2017 SCO Summit, highlighted that the fight against terrorism, climate change, connectivity, peace, and stability in Afghanistan were India’s priorities within the SCO.

The fact that both of India’s two major milestones in the SCO, observer status in 2005 and full membership in 2017 were formalized at Astana summits does provide an interesting indicator of the special place Kazakhstan occupies in India’s SCO journey, which has been symbolically significant and diplomatically supportive. Astana marked both the beginning and the culmination of India’s institutional journey in the SCO.

India’s SCO engagement became considerably more regular following full membership in 2017. PM Modi has personally participated in nine SCO Heads of State summits, including three virtual participations in 2020, 2021 and 2023.

During India’s presidency, New Delhi attempted to broaden the SCO’s agenda by promoting cooperation in areas such as start-ups and innovation, digital transformation, traditional medicine, science and technology, youth empowerment and shared Buddhist heritage. This reflects India’s desire to prevent the SCO from becoming a mere security organization and transform it into a platform for developmental and technological cooperation among Eurasian countries.

Why India is at the SCO

India remains committed to the SCO institutionally, while calibrating the level of political engagement according to its broader strategic interests. It uses the organization as one platform within a larger network of partnerships.

For New Delhi, the SCO is primarily a pragmatic platform for engaging continental Eurasia, managing security challenges, preserving strategic autonomy and ensuring India’s presence in Central Asia. The biggest attraction of the SCO for India is geographical. It brings India into a forum with Russia, China and the Central Asian republics, alongside Iran, Pakistan and Belarus. Some of these countries play an important role in defining New Delhi’s economic and strategic engagement with Eurasia.

India does not want Eurasia to become the exclusive sphere of influence of any single power, and thus, a multipolar Eurasia suits New Delhi. Participation in the SCO allows India to remain politically present in a region where its physical connectivity remains relatively limited.

The SCO is the only multilateral platform which can facilitate India’s engagement with its two foremost security challenges – Pakistan and China. However, the degree of success in both cases has been different for New Delhi.

The SCO forced India and Pakistan into the same room, but institutional proximity has not produced meaningful bilateral rapprochement. The 2025 SCO defense ministers’ meeting illustrated this sharply. India objected to the failure of the joint statement to adequately address terrorism and the Pahalgam terror attack, and the meeting ended without consensus on the statement. The SCO has enabled contact but not reconciliation between India and Pakistan.

Engaging with neighbors

One of the expectations from India’s SCO membership was to dilute China’s power through a multilateral mechanism. The SCO, on different occasions, proved to be a platform for India-China crisis management and political signaling, even when the relationship remains largely competitive.

A similar diplomatic pattern occurred years prior. In September 2022, just one week before the SCO Summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, both militaries eased tensions in eastern Ladakh. The SCO has repeatedly provided a diplomatic setting in which India-China tensions have been managed or temporarily de-escalated.

However, India has not succeeded in using the SCO to overcome the China-Pakistan strategic partnership. China remains Pakistan’s main strategic partner and continues to support it on the issue of terrorism, the main bone of contention between India and Pakistan. The SCO, however, helps India to prevent Pakistan from monopolizing the regional diplomatic narrative and to ensure that China and Pakistan are not in an uncontested position to define the SCO agenda entirely on their own terms.

India has also used the SCO to deepen its engagement with the Central Asian countries, in line with its Connect Central Asia policy announced in 2012. The SCO provides India with regular interaction with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan at the leaders’, ministerial and bureaucratic levels. This is important because India’s bilateral engagement with Central Asia is otherwise constrained by the absence of a direct land corridor.

India-Russia Partnership 

India–Russia relations are important for understanding how the SCO works, because Russia has traditionally acted as a balancing and moderating force between India and China, while India has used the SCO to pursue its Eurasian interests without accepting a China-dominated regional order.

India’s close relationship with Russia, therefore, contributes to a multipolar rather than a bipolar China–Russia structure within the SCO. This is particularly important for New Delhi because India would want to maintain the SCO as a forum in which states with differing interests can coexist without the dominance of any country.

Doubts over India’s SCO Membership

Critics have often raised doubts over India’s membership in the SCO, arguing that it offers India limited gains. India’s increasing focus on the Indo-Pacific, maritime security, supply chains and the Indian Ocean are also sometimes seen as working against its Eurasian strategy.

India’s exit from the SCO would surrender diplomatic space to China and further strengthen the China-Pakistan partnership against India in Eurasia, especially with regards to the issue of terrorism. Such a move could allow both Pakistan and China to dominate the narrative on regional security to India’s disadvantage. India’s current SCO engagement continues to emphasize counterterrorism and fighting extremism as its main interests in the organization.

The Central Asian countries have welcomed India’s presence in the region, as part of their multi-vector foreign policy. India’s SCO exit would harm their foreign policy balance and impact India’s engagement with them.

The SCO is also one of the institutional spaces where India can interact with Russia despite the growing complexity of the international system. Exiting the SCO could, therefore, unintentionally reduce one of the platforms through which India manages its simultaneously important but increasingly complicated relationships with Russia and China.

New Delhi’s foreign policy is increasingly characterized by multi-alignment and strategic autonomy. Leaving the SCO could be interpreted as India moving closer to the West. That would unnecessarily constrain its diplomatic flexibility.

What has India missed at the SCO so far?

India joined the SCO partly because it wanted greater access to Central Asia. But after 25 years, India’s physical connectivity with the region remains weak. Meanwhile, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has created extensive infrastructure connecting China with Central Asia and Pakistan. India has achieved institutional connectivity with Central Asia, but not physical connectivity.

Afghanistan is arguably the area where the SCO could have enormous relevance. However, it has struggled to develop a coherent common policy after the Taliban’s return to power due to differences among member states.

India has an interest in using the SCO to address the Afghanistan–Central Asia–South Asia narcotics corridor, but India–Pakistan tensions and the absence of Afghanistan from effective SCO mechanisms have prevented the organization from becoming a truly effective regional counter-narcotics platform. The SCO has Afghanistan at the center of its security agenda, but Afghanistan remains at the periphery of its institutional architecture.

The defense agreement signed on August 7, 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan has implications for the SCO, even though the pact is not an SCO initiative. The so-called Mecca Pact, which treats an armed attack on one party as an attack on all three, creates a security triangle involving one SCO member (Pakistan) and two SCO partners. This could increasingly influence discussions on terrorism, West Asian security, energy and connectivity within the broader SCO ecosystem.

The Mecca Pact does not directly threaten the SCO, but it could make the SCO’s internal geopolitics more complicated by bringing a Pakistan-led security alignment into an organization where India and Iran are already major stakeholders, negatively impacting the SCO’s consensus-based politics.

Bottom line

As the SCO completes 25 years, India’s experience demonstrates that the organization remains more useful as a platform for strategic engagement than as an instrument for achieving transformative outcomes. India has gained institutional access to continental Eurasia, maintained regular interaction with member states and used the SCO to advance counterterrorism, connectivity and development-oriented cooperation.

Yet, its limitations are equally evident: India has been unable to overcome the China-Pakistan strategic partnership, translate institutional connectivity into physical connectivity with Central Asia, or build a coherent collective response on Afghanistan and terrorism.

Nevertheless, these shortcomings do not make withdrawal attractive. For India, leaving would create diplomatic space for China and Pakistan while reducing one of the few forums where New Delhi can simultaneously engage Beijing, Moscow and Central Asia. The SCO, hence, remains relevant to India, not simply as a geopolitical bloc, but strategically – as an instrument to work towards a multipolar Eurasian order.

Europe only ranks fourth among Washington’s global security priorities, US envoy to NATO Matthew Whitaker has said, as President Donald Trump pushes the bloc’s members to take greater responsibility for their own defense.

Speaking to Newsmax on Thursday, Whitaker outlined Washington’s priorities under Trump’s national security strategy.

”The defense of the homeland is number one... The Western Hemisphere, where we live, [is] obviously equally important,” he said, followed by the Pacific. “Defending Europe is also a priority, but it’s in fourth place.”

Whitaker said the changing division of responsibilities within NATO would also benefit the US economically.

”Our European allies are taking over the conventional defense of the European continent,” Whitaker said. “And I think that’s good for the American taxpayers.”

The ambassador described NATO as being on a “new trajectory” under Trump, crediting the US president with pressuring other members of the US-led military bloc to dramatically increase defense spending.

At last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, members agreed to raise defense and security-related expenditure to 5% of GDP by 2035. Whitaker contrasted the new commitment with the bloc’s previous 2% target, which many members failed to meet.

”For 77 years our NATO allies have taken advantage of the United States’ strength,” Whitaker told Newsmax. “But now we’re going to be all equally strong.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly demanded that European NATO members shoulder a greater share of their own defense costs. The Pentagon is also reviewing the roughly 80,000 US troops currently stationed in Europe, with officials considering different options for Washington’s future military presence on the continent.

US President Donald Trump’s Marine One helicopter nearly collided with a passenger jet earlier this month after a radio failure prevented air traffic controllers from receiving its takeoff warning, federal investigators said on Thursday.

The August 4 incident occurred near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as Marine One departed the White House area with Trump aboard. An Envoy Air passenger jet was cleared for takeoff at roughly the same time.

The two aircraft came within about 1.5 km horizontally and just 215 meters vertically of each other, triggering an automated collision warning aboard the passenger jet. Marine One’s pilots spotted the aircraft and briefly halted their flight until it had passed.

Under standard procedures, the presidential helicopter was required to notify Reagan airport controllers three minutes before lifting off. Recordings show Marine One made the required call, but the tower did not properly receive it.

Investigators found that the communication problem was already known. Just a week earlier, Marine One pilots and Reagan airport controllers had met to discuss repeated failures by the tower to receive the helicopter’s three-minute takeoff warnings.

Investigators traced the radio problems partly to construction at the White House, which had forced Marine One to use a temporary takeoff site with poor radio coverage. The report did not specify the project, though the White House has been undergoing construction on both a new ballroom and a permanent helipad.

US aviation authorities have since relocated radio equipment at Reagan National to improve communications.

The near-miss came less than two years after an American Airlines regional jet collided with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter near the same airport in January 2025, killing all 67 people aboard the two aircraft.

Following that disaster, US aviation authorities permanently restricted helicopter operations around Reagan National and introduced additional safeguards aimed at preventing commercial aircraft and helicopters from crossing paths.

Under current procedures, commercial flights must also be suspended whenever Marine One operates in the airport’s airspace.

US President Donald Trump has claimed to have more than doubled America’s oil reserves through a sweeping agreement giving Washington majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had worked with Venezuelan interim leader Delcy Rodriguez and private businesses to secure “majority US control” of the reserves “at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday.

“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” he declared, claiming the transaction “MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves.”

Adding another 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil would bring the total volume under some form of US control to more than 111 billion barrels, even though that crude would not technically become part of US domestic reserves.

Rubio touted the agreement as a “huge win,” saying it would bring nearly $100 billion in private investment to Venezuela, support thousands of jobs and help lower US gasoline prices.

Rodriguez later confirmed the deal, saying it covers 17 strategic oil fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels and envisages more than $100 billion in investment and over $209 billion in tax revenue for Venezuela. She said the fields would be developed with the participation of private operators, but the precise ownership structure remains unclear. Earlier reports suggested Washington had sought century-long development rights.

After the operation, Trump declared that Washington would “run” Venezuela while overseeing a political transition and left open the possibility of further military action if the interim leadership failed to cooperate.

Washington subsequently moved to take “indefinite” control of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, while Trump ordered proceeds from Venezuelan crude to be held in US Treasury accounts, subject to US restrictions.

The arrangement has drawn fierce criticism over the country’s sovereignty, even from some normally pro-Western opposition voices. Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan planning minister, called the agreement “unconstitutional,” arguing that Rodriguez heads an illegitimate interim government with no authority to surrender long-term control over the country’s oil resources.

Meanwhile, former vice president and veteran Chavista figure Elias Jaua recently accused Washington more broadly of stripping Venezuela of its sovereignty and taking control of its natural resources.

The Russian military has carried out a wave of strikes on military-related targets in Kiev and its suburbs, including a facility storing components for Ukraine’s long-range Flamingo cruise missiles, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

The statement came after a series of powerful secondary explosions tore through a warehouse complex near Kiev on Friday night, with videos circulating on social media showing fireballs flying off for hundreds of meters.

The next morning, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the strikes, saying the attack, which involved missiles and drones, hit the Fim Service transport and logistics center in the Kiev suburb of Chaiky. The facility was used for storing Flamingo missiles, it added.

Another logistics center in Kalinovka, Kiev Region, was also hit, the ministry said, noting that the facility hosted a customs terminal responsible for distributing Western-supplied military cargo.

The Russian military also reported striking an ammunition warehouse in the settlement of Milaya operated by Fire Point which contained components and launch boosters for long-range FP-1 and FP-2 drones.

The attacks also targeted a parking area for fuel tankers in Izmail in southern Ukraine, which was used to supply the Ukrainian military. In Nikolayev, the barrage targeted a maritime cargo terminal and logistics centers used to unload and store military supplies, with a total of 18 facilities containing military equipment and three fuel depots hit, according to the statement.

The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly vowed to carry out “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military-industrial facilities in retaliation for Kiev’s “terrorist attacks” on Russian civilian targets. Moscow has maintained that it never targets civilians.

Today at 20:35, a strike involving Geran-4 jet-powered loitering munitions targeted a warehouse complex in the village of Myla, Bucha District, Kyiv Oblast.

The facility was used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) as a rocket and artillery weapons depot.

📍 50.437697,… https://t.co/RQ2lsKEd2w pic.twitter.com/X9n8OjtvZu

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) August 28, 2026

The head of the Kiev Region’s military administration, Timur Tkachenko, confirmed that the warehouse blaze was accompanied by explosions. Authorities temporarily closed a 17 km stretch of the M-06 Kiev-Chop highway in both directions and urged residents to stay away and not record the aftermath.

Several open-source monitoring accounts claimed the strike took place at around 8:35 PM and involved Russian jet-powered Geran-4 loitering munitions targeting a warehouse complex near the village of Milaya.

Later in the day, Vladimir Zelensky claimed 27 people were killed and dozens more injured after a warehouse in Milaya was hit. Furthermore, he admitted that the ammunition was apparently stored illegally near residential areas, saying that the Ukrainian authorities had opened a criminal investigation into possible negligence.

Prime minister of Ukraine said all the emergency equipment are going towards the myla Kiev region and they are ready to evacuate civilians from the area if needed. pic.twitter.com/vjxCe41Cam

— Global Surveillance (@Globalsurv) August 28, 2026

Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergey Koretsky said he had received reports from the interior minister and the head of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service about the strike, which he said caused a fire followed by a “detonation.”

But the prime minister then drew a pointed comparison with the deadly July explosion at an ammunition depot in Vishnevoye, another Kiev suburb.

“Unfortunately, we can already state that the terrible tragedy in Vishnevoye did not become a lesson,” Koretsky said. He lamented making “the same mistakes” in the fifth year of the conflict, calling it “criminal negligence,” and demanded that everyone responsible face “strict punishment.”

While the prime minister did not spell out what those repeated mistakes were, his reference appeared to point to the storage of explosive military materiel in or near populated areas.

Ukraine’s Security Service later said investigators found that ammunition had been kept in warehouses unsuitable for such storage and without the required permits, including facilities in the “immediate proximity” of residential areas.

Two defense-industry executives were detained on negligence charges. Ukroboronprom separately dismissed the heads of two enterprises over ammunition storage violations, while the conglomerate’s director general, Herman Smetanin, stepped down days later without publicly giving a reason.

British conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the US after being detained by immigration authorities in Louisiana for allegedly overstaying his legal status and failing to appear for an immigration hearing.

The 41-year-old former Breitbart editor was returned to the United Kingdom on Friday, just a day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Kenner, Louisiana, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed on Saturday.

“Yiannopoulos legally entered the country on May 14, 2019, through New York City,” DHS said following his arrest, describing him as an “illegal alien” who “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

An immigration judge issued Yiannopoulos a final order of removal on July 22 after he failed to appear for his hearing, the department said. His deportation was carried out on August 28.

On August 27, ICE arrested Milo Yiannopoulos, an illegal alien from the United Kingdom, at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) in Kenner, Louisiana. Yiannopoulos legally entered the country on May 14, 2019, through New York City, New York. He chose to… https://t.co/Hk6QBUmGDI pic.twitter.com/DbIhv8Z6PI

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 28, 2026

The incident quickly spilled into a bitter feud within the MAGA movement. Conservative activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer celebrated Yiannopoulos’ detention and claimed she had personally alerted authorities to his immigration status. The Daily Caller reported that scrutiny of his status intensified after he began criticizing US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Once one of Trump’s most flamboyant online supporters, Yiannopoulos famously referred to him as “Daddy” during the 2016 campaign. Their relationship later deteriorated sharply, with the British commentator accusing Trump of betraying supporters.

Yiannopoulos subsequently joined Kanye ‘Ye’ West as the rapper mounted an abortive 2024 presidential bid, serving as his campaign manager. He also helped arrange Ye’s controversial 2022 dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier that year, he had worked as an unpaid intern for then-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

His arrest coincided with Ye’s Friday-night performance in New Orleans, although it has not been confirmed that Yiannopoulos was in the city for the concert.

His confrontational style has repeatedly generated outrage, however. Among other issues, he drew attention years ago to Britain’s grooming-gang scandals, accusing authorities and the media of ignoring the abuse of vulnerable girls because officials feared accusations of racism or Islamophobia.

✨DEVELOPING✨Footage from 2016 of Milo Yiannopoulos drawing attention to Muslim rape gangs—eight years before the scandal went mainstream—is recirculating. Woke stupidity enabled the industrial-scale rape of white children by Pakistani gangs for over 30 years.
(CNBC, 9/8/2016) pic.twitter.com/7oF6d79UMV

— MILO (@Nero) January 15, 2025

Yiannopoulos’ career suffered a major setback in 2017 after old remarks about sexual relationships involving minors resurfaced, costing him a publishing deal and forcing his resignation from Breitbart.

The White House has not publicly intervened in the case, while Yiannopoulos has not commented on his deportation.

Britain doubles down against Russia

Russia has already warned the UK of “consequences” for Ukraine’s use of British-made drones to strike Russian civilian infrastructure. These words were clearly lost on British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who arrived in Kiev on Monday to mark the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. Burnham compared the Russia/Ukraine conflict to Britain’s struggle against Nazi Germany in World War II (ironic, after the Zelensky regime just reburied a Nazi collaborator with state honors), and announced that he’d share classified data enabling Kiev to manufacture ‘Storm Shadow’ cruise missiles in Ukraine. 

Two days later, the Ukrainians showed Russia exactly what these missiles will be used for, injuring multiple civilians in a Storm Shadow strike on a Donetsk apartment block.

Russia’s response was immediate and kinetic. Missiles and drones pounded military and dual-use targets across Kiev, with waves of projectiles hitting the Ukrainian capital from morning until evening on Thursday. Meanwhile, the British media chose to run a warning from supposed “Kremlin adviser” Andrey Fedorov, who said that he “cannot exclude 100% that there might be some semi-military” attacks on British soil too.

RT looked at the dire state of diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK this week and concluded that Moscow’s restraint is rapidly reaching its limits.

Spy intrigue in Moscow

With Burnham climbing the escalation ladder as fast as possible, planespotters saw an unusual flight entering Russian airspace on Tuesday morning: a US Air Force C-17A Globemaster. It soon emerged that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was on board, bound for meetings with his Russian intelligence counterparts. 

An unusual visitor to Moscow this morning. 👀

A US Air Force C-17A Globemaster III flew from Riga to Moscow Vnukovo Airporthttps://t.co/D7vylYesDQ pic.twitter.com/jXbOSj0LXM

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 25, 2026

It’s been nearly five years since a CIA chief visited the Russian capital, and the Western press went into speculation overdrive. Politico claimed that Ratcliffe had traveled nearly 10,000 miles to tell Russian President Vladimir Putin not to escalate “against the Baltic states,” while the New York Times claimed that he presented the Russians with a damning indictment of their military campaign against Ukraine, including – no joke – casualty figures sourced straight from pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels.

Less than a day before Ratcliffe touched down at Vnukovo Airport, the Vatican’s chief diplomat, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, landed in Moscow on a mission of his own. Gallagher’s diplomacy was more public, with the Vatican envoy repeating the Holy See’s calls for an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Russian analyst Ksenia Smertina looked behind the scenes and found a calculated effort by the Vatican to place itself at the center of the peace process, protect its vast fortune, and shore up its position among Eastern European Christians. Her article for RT is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the power politics that have shaped the Church since the days of the Medicis and Borgias.

Ukraine at 35

RT’s newsroom analyzed the latest battlefield data, while our columnist Tarik Cyril Amar looked back on his own time in Lviv, and on how Ukraine’s “deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs” turned the country into “a ruined proxy of the West.”

Landslide disaster in Nepal

Ukraine’s leaders may have chosen their own fate, but some have their fate tragically decided by mother nature. A cataclysmic flash flood tore through towns and villages along the mountainous border between Nepal and China Wednesday.

Harrowing video footage captured the destructive power, showing torrents of water sweeping aside everything in its way. Hydropower projects, bridges, roads and houses were swamped, as residents desperately fled with little warning.

❗Nepal Floods: At Least 7 Dead, Security Personnel Missing 🇳🇵

The worst-hit areas include Timure and Syabrubesi in Rasuwa, where floodwaters have swept away homes, bridges and parts of a key road towards the China border, according to The Kathmandu Post.

Nine Armed Police… https://t.co/OGz6YNAMPx pic.twitter.com/XRGgZGxHj7

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) August 26, 2026

Thousands of people are still missing, and rescue efforts are ongoing as of Friday. Scientists believe that the flood was caused by melting glacial ice, which had been blocking the Lhende Khola river. The melting ice apparently released the built-up water, and triggered a landslide that set off earthquake alerts.

Meta and TikTok dodge trial 

Anyone hoping that Meta may finally be forced to lift the lid on its addictive algorithms was left disappointed on Wednesday, when Mark Zuckerberg’s megacorporation paid $18 billion to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by 29 US states. Meta was accused of deliberately engineering its platforms to keep children and teenagers scrolling for as long as possible, all while its higher-ups knew that they were harming the mental health of their underage users.

In a separate deal announced last Friday, TikTok and its parent company, Bytedance, agreed to pay $400 million to the US Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit alleging that it knowingly collected personal data from under-13s without parental consent. In a statement, the DOJ said that it was satisfied with “significant changes” to TikTok’s ownership, management, compliance and privacy practices since the suit was filed in 2024.

Zuckerberg is not out of the woods yet. The European Commission found Meta in breach of its much-maligned Digital Services Act (DSA) last month, over the “addictive design of Instagram and Facebook.” Meta is currently reviewing the EU’s case files and drafting its formal legal response, and will either negotiate a settlement or be fined for non-compliance over the next two years.

What to watch out for

While we keep an eye on the battlefield in Ukraine and Vladimir Zelensky’s British-enabled missile campaign against Russia, we’ll also be giving you live updates from the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kyrgyzstan on Monday and Tuesday. The summit marks 25 years of the world’s largest regional organization, and we’ll bring you every detail from Putin’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

We’ll also know by the end of the weekend whether Iceland will restart accession talks with the EU, a significant step toward becoming the bloc’s 28th member state. Icelanders will decide whether to restart talks in a referendum on Saturday, but with the country’s sovereignty and control over its precious fisheries at stake, victory for the pro-Brussels government is by no means assured.

The EU could face another humiliation next weekend, this time in Germany as the right-wing, Euroskeptic AfD looks set to dominate a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. Stick with RT.com in the runup to this landmark election, in which the AfD is predicted to win more than 40% of the vote.

Russia has received innovation cooperation proposals from some 30 countries, including nations in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, President Vladimir Putin has said.

The Russian leader made the remarks on Friday at a plenary session of the Strong Ideas for a New Era forum in Nizhny Novgorod. The annual event is organized by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), a government-backed nonprofit focused on promoting innovation, and it marks its 15th anniversary this year.

The forum brings together business leaders, experts, NGOs, and government officials to develop and discuss projects in economic, technological, and social development.

The president said the agency has received innovative proposals from across Russia as well as abroad, with the most promising projects to be submitted to the government for further consideration.

“We’ve received proposals not only from all constituent entities of Russia but also from some 30 foreign countries, including from Europe, North America, the Middle East, and other regions of the world,” Putin stated.

He said the projects could open up new opportunities for Russian industries and regions while expanding international cooperation.

On August 25, it was not so much the CIA director as a ready-made story that landed in Moscow: a hulking C-17 military transport, several hours away from the cameras, secret meetings, and a return flight via Riga. By Friday, barely any more facts had emerged. SVR head Sergey Naryshkin confirmed that the talks concerned matters within the intelligence services’ purview, calling the field “sensitive and highly specialized.” Ratcliffe did not meet with Vladimir Putin, but the Russian president was briefed on the talks immediately.

Secrecy, however, abhors a vacuum – especially when the CIA is involved. In just three days, Russian media had sent Ratcliffe to Moscow with a new Ukraine plan, a warning about strikes on NATO weapons plants, and a scenario for nuclear war in the Middle East. Inside the C-17’s cargo hold, they imagined secret equipment, detained intelligence officers, and a mysterious “package” too sensitive to entrust to a phone line.

Washington probes Russia’s red lines

Gazeta.ru views Ratcliffe’s visit as an attempt by Washington to learn Moscow’s plans for the fall directly and gauge whether Ukraine talks might resume. The outlet does not predict an imminent breakthrough. Grigory Karasin, chairman of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee, speaks only of a useful “psychological climate” for keeping contacts alive. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, stresses that a visit at this level does not happen without a serious reason.

Political analyst Sergey Markelov offers the most specific theory. In his view, the Americans were looking not for a ready-made peace formula, but for a possible midpoint between the two sides’ maximalist demands:

”The Americans can see that Moscow’s and Kiev’s positions are 100% incompatible. As master negotiators, they are asking whether there is some kind of middle ground.”

Vladimir Vasiliev, a senior researcher at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, offers another hypothesis: Ratcliffe may have acted as Trump’s trusted courier, carrying a message the White House did not want to send through conventional diplomatic channels.

Gazeta.Ru

A secret assignment for intelligence diplomacy

Expert magazine treats the visit as a special form of backchannel diplomacy, approaching it from several angles. Pavel Koshkin, a senior researcher at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, says the agenda may have included red lines, cybercrime, and terrorism. Alexander Bobrov points to technical cooperation between the two intelligence services and the possibility of new prisoner exchanges. The common thread is that Moscow and Washington are simultaneously defining the limits of what they will tolerate and searching for areas where cooperation remains possible.

Expert.Ru

That interpretation is reinforced by a brief from retired SVR Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov. He sees the level of the visit as evidence that Ratcliffe was carrying a direct and highly important assignment from Trump, but cautions against trying to guess its contents.

”Apparently, the Americans have a proposal, which is why the CIA director came. But no one is required to walk out to the press and disclose what was said in closed-door meetings.”

Ultimately, Expert leaves the precise agenda open. Ukraine may have been part of it, but not necessarily the only item. The magazine’s main conclusion is that, with formal diplomacy in crisis, intelligence services are becoming the channel through which the most sensitive proposals are conveyed.

Reconnaissance ahead of a major deal

Lenta.ru does not treat Ratcliffe’s visit as a stand-alone mission, but as preparation for the next round of Russian-American negotiations. In an exclusive comment to the outlet, Svetlana Zhurova, first deputy chair of the State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, links the CIA chief’s arrival to discussions over the contours of a peace agreement in Ukraine.

”There is more and more discussion of what a peace agreement might look like and what shape it could take. So… that is the only issue that could be on the agenda.”

The key detail is the expected fall visit by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. In that sequence, Ratcliffe looks like an advance scout in both senses of the word: sent to compare positions and clear the way for higher-level political negotiators.

Lenta.Ru

Trump rushes back to the Ukraine track

Moskovsky Komsomolets describes Ratcliffe’s arrival as a “tough heart-to-heart.” The main theory comes from American affairs analyst Malek Dudakov: the Trump administration is scrambling for a foreign-policy win ahead of the midterm elections and, after setbacks elsewhere, is turning back to talks with Moscow. Ratcliffe is presented not as a peacemaker, but as a hawk who oversees the sharing of US intelligence with Kiev.

”I would not get my hopes up that the visit will produce a breakthrough. In all likelihood, it won’t.”

MK’s interpretation is dramatic but skeptical: Washington is in a hurry, and the visit was primarily about hard bargaining over Ukraine.

MK.RU

In a separate opinion piece for the same newspaper, political analyst Ruslan Pankratov makes the C-17 and the one-day format central to his reading of the trip. In his view, Ratcliffe may have delivered a warning about the limits of escalation, intelligence assessments of potential threats, or a specific package of classified information.

Washington tests whether Russia has reached its limit

Komsomolskaya Pravda casts the visit as an emergency effort by Washington to assess the risk of a direct clash between Russia and NATO’s European members. American affairs analyst Andrey Sidorov links the trip to a US desire to learn how Moscow might respond to the expansion of Western military support for Kiev. Political analyst Aleksey Pilko makes the theory more specific, suggesting that the immediate concern may have been possible Russian strikes on European plants producing drones and other weapons for Ukraine.

”He came to bargain – to find out what the Russian side is thinking.”

These are the experts’ assessments, but KP reinforces them through its headlines: “Approaching the Danger Line” and “Russia’s Patience Is Running Out.” In the outlet’s framing, Ratcliffe did not bring an ultimatum. He came to determine whether the escalation was real enough to force the United States to decide if it was prepared to enter a war on behalf of its European allies.

In another article, KP shifts the possible focus of the talks to the Middle East. Vladimir Vasiliev argues that Trump’s description of the visit as “routine” was an attempt to conceal its urgency. His theory is that Moscow and Washington may have discussed the risk of a Turkish-Israeli confrontation, Iran’s possible entry into an anti-Israel bloc, and the potential US response.

”I cannot rule out that, if Tehran joins the emerging anti-Israel coalition, the United States could use tactical nuclear weapons against it.”

KP military columnist Viktor Baranets turns the visit into a spy thriller. In his interview, retired military intelligence officer Pavel Artamonov suggests that Ratcliffe brought a request not to strike British factories producing missiles for Ukraine. At the same time, he claims, the American C-17 may have gathered signals intelligence during the flight.

”Along the C-17’s flight path, all our military systems were switched off. We left the Americans starved of intelligence, so to speak.”

The Baltic states should be warned, not Moscow

The business daily Vzglyad develops the theory that Ratcliffe may have come to warn Russia, specifying that Washington could be worried about strikes on facilities in the Baltic states working for the Ukrainian military. That interpretation comes from political analyst Stanislav Tkachenko, who argues that NATO countries’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict is creating risks for their own territory.

War correspondent Alexander Kots adds a historical parallel with CIA Director William Burns’ 2021 trip to Moscow. The West ignored Russia’s concerns at the time, he argues, so a new warning will not make Moscow change course either.

”Don’t provoke us, and no one will attack anyone. You can’t talk to us in ultimatums. It doesn’t work.”

The outlet therefore presents the visit not as a show of American strength, but as a sign of Washington’s mounting concern over the consequences of Western policy.

Vzglyad

The C-17 mystery: What Ratcliffe brought – and whom he may have taken home

The most important clue was not hidden in diplomatic protocol, but in the aircraft itself. Why did the CIA director need a heavy C-17 military transport if the trip involved only a few closed-door meetings?

Military columnist Mikhail Khodarenok suggests in a column for Gazeta.ru that Ratcliffe delivered updated US proposals on Ukraine that were too sensitive to entrust to ordinary communications channels.

”He flew in, handed over the package, and flew back out. The military transport also carried additional cargo whose purpose remains to be determined.”

Lenta.ru picks up the mystery at the other end of the route. Military analyst Aleksander Perendzhiev says the roomy aircraft may have been needed to take American intelligence officers or classified Western hardware out of Russia.

Together, the two theories form a single narrative: Ratcliffe may have arrived with a confidential “package” on Ukraine, while the C-17 may not have flown home empty. There is no evidence to confirm either claim, but the aircraft turns a series of closed-door talks into a story about a possible exchange whose contents both sides preferred to keep out of sight.

Talks “under the wing” of the intelligence services

In an opinion column, Vedomosti journalists Roman Romanov and Aleksey Nikolsky call the visit an important milestone, but caution against inflated expectations. Ratcliffe most likely did not come to revive the Anchorage agreements, they argue, but to explore new openings for dialogue.

”Such a visit may signal that the negotiating process is moving ‘under the wing’ of the two countries’ intelligence services.”

The authors believe Ratcliffe could prove more effective than Witkoff and Kushner: he has official standing and can coordinate negotiations with US government agencies. Ukraine remains the central issue, though Vedomosti allows for a broader bilateral agenda. The newspaper does not expect a quick breakthrough, however. Moscow is unlikely to accept an immediate ceasefire unless the fundamental issues are resolved.

A secret visit treated as routine business

Unlike many other outlets, Kommersant, Russia’s oldest newspaper, offers no theory of its own and does not consult Russian experts. Its report is a restrained chronology: the arrival of a US military aircraft, several hours in Moscow, no meeting with Putin, and the official explanation that the trip involved contacts between the intelligence services.

”On August 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Russia. The purpose of his trip, and whom he met in Moscow, remain unknown.”

The only clue comes from biographical context: Ratcliffe has previously helped arrange prisoner exchanges, while the CIA and SVR maintain a direct line of communication. The visit is therefore presented more as part of a closed working dialogue between intelligence services than as public diplomacy. Still, Kommersant stops short of a definitive conclusion. Even its headline, “The Mysterious Envoy,” preserves the intrigue rather than resolving it.

Kommersant

Many other outlets take a similarly restrained view, consistently lowering the temperature by citing official statements. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov describes contacts between the intelligence services as a positive development; Naryshkin calls them part of the job; and Trump points to the good relationship between the CIA and SVR chiefs while denying that Ratcliffe carried any special message.

”Like everyone else, we have rules governing how intelligence services interact. There is nothing unusual about that.”

That remark by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, quoted by Izvestia, best captures the line taken by most Russian media outlets. The visit is presented not as the start of a major political breakthrough, but as the work of a standing backchannel between Moscow and Washington. Russian coverage does not dismiss its importance, but urges readers to judge it by the contacts that have been confirmed, not speculation about a secret mission.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will stick to its policy of isolating the AfD despite the right-wing party polling at over 40% ahead of regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt. The chancellor claimed that the Alternative for Germany maintains close ties with Russia and thus poses a threat to the “internal and external security of our country.”

The AfD is the largest opposition faction in the Bundestag and the country’s most popular party, with recent surveys indicating that it enjoys the support of 28% of respondents.

The right-wing party campaigns on an anti-immigration platform and is also highly critical of the German government’s support for Ukraine, as well as sanctions against Russia.

Appearing on broadcaster RTL on Thursday, Merz was asked by a businessman from Saxony-Anhalt about the feasibility of the so-called ‘firewall’ policy in a democracy, under which all major parties refuse to cooperate with the AfD. The question came ahead of the regional elections in the eastern region slated for September 6.

The chancellor defended the controversial policy, categorically ruling out a coalition between the CDU and the AfD due to “fundamental” differences.

The chancellor suggested the possibility of forming a minority government in Saxony-Anhalt, pointing to the situation in both Thuringia and Saxony, where the AfD has also been sidelined, despite coming out on top in the regional elections.

Meanwhile, an INSA poll published by Bild earlier this month indicated that support for Germany’s governing CDU/CSU bloc had dipped to the lowest level in almost five years, at 20%.

The survey also showed that 78% of respondents were dissatisfied with Merz’s government.

Comprised of the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the ruling coalition has faced criticism over continued economic stagnation and its failure to deliver on pre-election promises.

The AfD has for years faced significant pressure from regional and federal authorities in Germany. The country’s domestic security agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has designated the party as a suspected far-right extremist entity – a label that permits government surveillance of the AfD. In several regions, local chapters have been subjected to even wider monitoring by the authorities.

Poland has sent confusing signals regarding the potential deployment of nuclear weaponry on its territory, in what appears to be an attempt to enjoy the fruits of deterrence without hosting foreign munitions.

In recent months, a dozen European NATO members, including Poland, have expressed a desire to either host nuclear weapons or take part in nuclear-sharing initiatives to varying degrees. Apart from existing nuclear sharing within the bloc, which involves hosting US munitions, France has proposed an EU-focused scheme to deploy its own weapons to willing nations.

The confusion began on Thursday, when Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski appeared to rule out ever hosting the weaponry on the country’s soil.

“I would like to say very clearly and openly: Poland does not want to have nuclear warheads on its territory,” Zalewski told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “We want to participate in NATO nuclear deterrence, [which] does not mean to have a nuclear warhead on our territory.”

“To dispel any doubts: Poland remains steadfastly interested in participating in the NATO Nuclear Sharing program. We are also conducting talks regarding the proposal for participation in the European nuclear protective umbrella. Our government’s stance on these issues is unequivocal,” he wrote on X.

While the minister did not explicitly say whether Warsaw was open to hosting foreign nukes, Zalewski doubled down on his original remarks later in the day. Poland remains committed to participating in “NATO’s nuclear deterrence, [but] without storing nuclear weapons,” the official wrote on X while berating those confused by his statements. “Security requires competence and seriousness. Claiming that Nuclear Sharing [equates to] storing nuclear weapons in Poland is ignorance or deliberate manipulation,” he asserted.

Ukraine’s central bank has launched an anti-money laundering probe into several lenders who processed a bail payment for former Justice and Energy Minister German Galushchenko, amid fresh allegations of high-level corruption in Kiev.

Earlier this month, Western-backed anti-corruption agencies accused a group of officials, including a deputy head of Vladimir Zelensky’s office, of laundering about $3.3 million in cash to secure Galushchenko’s release on bail. 

Galushchenko, who was arrested and charged with money laundering and membership of a criminal organization after attempting to leave Ukraine, is also a suspect in a separate corruption case linked to Timur Mindich, self-exiled in Israel but known widely as ‘Zelensky’s bagman’.

Ukrainian state-owned Sense Bank temporarily disabled fraud detection systems at the same time that some $1.7 million in cash – intended for Galushchenko’s bail – was allegedly laundered and processed, records released by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) indicate. 

Ukraine’s central bank said Thursday that it is also investigating several other institutions linked to the bail payments.

Mindich’s man in the government

Galushchenko was arrested in February and charged with large-scale money laundering in connection with an alleged criminal network operated by Mindich, who himself fled Ukraine to Israel after NABU accused him of extorting $100 million in kickbacks from state atomic energy company Energoatom. 

Galushchenko was duly released on $3.3 million bail in late June, upon receipt of cash by the authorities reportedly from four dubious sources.

NABU surveillance audio files suggest that Zelensky’s deputy head of office, Irina Mudraya, and others, used influence at Sense Bank to convert bags of cash into bank transfers to the account of the High Anti-Corruption Court. Investigators filmed the cash being delivered, according to the case materials. Mudraya, who is accused of administering the scheme, was subsequently arrested and fired. 

Who controls Sense Bank?

Recordings linked to Mindich previously leaked to the media include a discussion between one of his associates and a former adviser to the bank’s CEO about impending changes to its supervisory council, and during which the body’s current head, Nikolay Gladyshenko, was identified as a suitable candidate.

Gladyshenko and the bank’s current head, Aleksey Stupak, allegedly approved the bail payment scheme. Sense Bank’s director of financial monitoring, Lyudmila Snigur, who has since been suspended, was reportedly threatened with dismissal unless her department skipped human reviews of transactions made during “maintenance” of the automated systems.

Control relinquished by ‘Israeli refugee Timur’

The Mudraya case materials depict Sense Bank as being in a vulnerable position and seeking new protection with the permission of “Israeli refugee Timur” – presumably Mindich. This allegedly made the bank susceptible to “requests” to launder money for Galushchenko.

Doubts about Ukraine’s anti-laundering system

NABU’s allegations have further embarrassed the central bank as its reputation disintegrates in the fallout from the corruption surrounding Zelensky. The regulator launched an investigation into Gladyshenko in May after his possible links to Mindich became public, but maintains that it did not have enough evidence before the latest revelations to declare him unsuitable for the position.

Gladyshenko announced he was recusing himself from his role, but this “did not exclude his actual influence on the bank’s operations,” the central bank conceded last week.

The central bank insists the Mudraya case demonstrates that its anti-money-laundering system is effective, but has confirmed that it is also investigating other banks that may also have participated in the cash-to-bail scheme run out of Vladimir Zelensky’s office.

The reported invitation for Iran to join the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement puts a new perspective on what the new alliance might ultimately become.

Mehdi Rahimi, head of the Iranian parliament’s news agency, said that the proposal was under consideration by the country’s leadership and argued that the creation of a regional security umbrella would represent a victory for the Islamic Republic. Shortly afterwards, however, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei stated that Tehran had received no formal invitation, although proposals for dialogue with the pact’s members on collective regional security had indeed been raised. For the moment, this appears to be a political overture intended to test the reactions of the parties rather than the beginning of a formal accession process. Even so, it suggests that the agreement is not intended as an alliance against Tehran, but as the possible foundation of a security system built with Iranian participation.

The Mecca Agreement was signed on August 7 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Its central provision declares that an armed attack against one member will be regarded as an attack against all. The formula theoretically combines a formidable set of capabilities: Saudi Arabia’s immense financial resources and influence over global energy markets, Türkiye’s large military and sophisticated defence industry, and Pakistan’s substantial military experience and nuclear arsenal. Yet the public statements offer no detailed decision-making procedure and do not specify what action each signatory would be obliged to take during a crisis. At this stage, the pact is only a political declaration of collective deterrence and not a proper military alliance.

Donald Trump welcomed the pact and expressed satisfaction that the states of the region were finally assuming greater responsibility for their own defense. His response was consistent with his longstanding view that Washington’s allies should bear a larger share of military expenditure, allowing the US to reduce its costs and step back from the role of unconditional guarantor of other nations’ security. Seen from this perspective, the agreement might appear to be a success for American policy, since three US partners are establishing an additional mechanism of deterrence without Washington’s direct involvement.

Yet behind this public enthusiasm lies a trend that is far less favorable to the US. The Mecca Pact cannot be described as the first symptom of declining American influence in the Middle East, but it is the clearest institutional sign to date that regional powers no longer regard the American security umbrella as sufficient and have begun constructing autonomous centers of power. Washington retains its military bases, weapons systems, intelligence capabilities and relationships with regional elites, but it is gradually losing its monopoly over the rules by which Middle Eastern security is organized.

The US-Israeli war against Iran accelerated this transformation because it revealed the double-edged nature of American security guarantees. The US military presence may deter adversaries, but it can also draw the Gulf states into conflicts whose timing and objectives are determined without their meaningful participation. Iranian strikes, disruption to maritime trade and threats to energy infrastructure demonstrated that a close partnership with Washington does not insulate regional states from danger and may instead force them to bear the consequences of American policy.

Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are not abandoning American weapons or political ties, yet they want a mechanism capable of functioning even when Washington’s priorities diverge from their own.

For the pact’s three founding members, the possibility of inviting Iran addresses a problem that might otherwise have become the source of another major conflict. As long as Tehran remained outside the agreement, it could interpret the partnership between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan as an attempt to build a Sunni military bloc directed against the Islamic Republic.

By offering Tehran a place at the table, the pact’s founders have effectively replaced the question of whom the alliance is directed against with the question of which rules the region’s principal powers are prepared to accept. Even if Iran never joins, the dialogue itself reduces the likelihood that the agreement will automatically become an instrument of its isolation. Saudi Arabia gains an opportunity to combine military deterrence with continued diplomatic de-escalation, Türkiye strengthens its role as a mediator, and Pakistan avoids having to choose between its strategic partnership with Riyadh and its relationship with neighboring Iran.

Full Iranian participation could transform the nature of the pact itself. It would cease to be an alliance among states united by similar fears and would instead become a mechanism of mutual restraint in which one member’s security could not be achieved through another’s vulnerability. A declaration of collective defense alone, however, would not be enough. The participants would need emergency communication channels, rules for preventing military incidents, mechanisms for exchanging information on missile launches, guarantees of freedom of navigation and commitments not to support armed action against fellow members.

The most difficult issue would concern the non-state armed groups aligned with Iran. If Tehran joined the pact, it would inevitably be expected to assume political responsibility for the actions of forces receiving Iranian weapons and support. At the same time, the other members would have to refrain from exploiting Iran’s internal divisions as a means of exerting pressure on its leadership. Only such reciprocity could turn an appealing formula into a functioning regional order.

Iran’s potential inclusion could initiate not only a political renaissance but also a major economic advance, since the development of the Middle East has been constrained for decades not by a lack of resources, but by chronic uncertainty. Wars raise shipping insurance costs, compel governments to accumulate weapons, discourage long-term investment and turn transport corridors into instruments of geopolitical bargaining. Even a partial reduction in these risks would release resources currently devoted to preparing for the next crisis.

Saudi capital, Turkish industry, the Pakistani market and Iran’s energy and transit potential could complement one another. Their cooperation could create new routes connecting Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, while the security of the Strait of Hormuz could be transformed from an instrument of mutual coercion into a shared interest. A region long seen as mostly a theater of war and foreign intervention would gain an opportunity to become an autonomous economic center within an increasingly multipolar world.

The economic dividend, however, is not guaranteed. Continuing sanctions against Iran, competition over transport routes, clashing Turkish and Saudi ambitions, and Pakistan’s disputes with India could import old conflicts into the new arrangement. The pact’s success will depend on the ability of its members to separate collective security from temporary alignments and to prevent every bilateral confrontation from becoming an obligation for the entire coalition.

Israel’s choice

The most difficult external question concerns the future relationship between the Mecca Pact and Israel. Israel is already uneasy about the agreement, and would likely find the accession of Iran unacceptable, seeing it as the beginning of strategic encirclement.

Even with Iran, however, the pact does not have to become an alliance against Israel. If its members firmly establish the defensive nature of the agreement and offer Israel mechanisms for preventing conflict, it could restrain escalation rather than prepare the ground for it. The problem is that the current Israeli leadership has grown accustomed to pursuing security through the unrestricted use of unilateral force, whereas a regional system requires agreed rules and recognition that neighboring states also possess legitimate security interests.

An opposition victory would not guarantee peace, since a hard line on Iran and national security extends far beyond Netanyahu’s political camp. Nevertheless, a new coalition might choose normalization over the endless expansion of conflict and attempt to incorporate Israel into the emerging regional balance.

The Mecca Agreement is not a new Middle East Order – merely a promise of one. Yet if it manages to accommodate Iran as a member, establish clear rules of mutual restraint and find a form of peaceful coexistence with Israel, the Middle East could for the first time in decades have a security system created primarily by the states of the region. Such a system would not eliminate their differences, but it could allow them to work with and around those differences without constant recourse to an external hegemon and without turning every crisis into a war. The cradle of the Abrahamic faiths might then cease to be consumed by recurring fires and begin its transformation into a strong, interconnected and prosperous region.

After decades outside the bloc’s periphery, Iceland is about to hold a referendum on reopening membership talks with the EU. Is the Viking nation preparing to trade sovereignty for stability? Or is it climbing aboard a sinking ship?

Icelanders go to the polls on Saturday, August 29 to answer a straightforward, yes or no question: “Should Iceland resume accession negotiations with the European Union?” 

What stage are talks between Iceland and Brussels at?

Iceland applied for EU membership in 2009, in the chaotic aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The country’s three biggest banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir, collapsed in the same week, and rather than force taxpayers to cover their balance sheets, Reykjavik washed its hands of the problem and let them fail.

The Icelandic krona plummeted, inflation soared, and center-right Prime Minister Geir Haarde resigned. Amid the meltdown, the newly empowered Social Democrats argued that by joining the EU and adopting the euro, Iceland could shield itself from future shocks – even as Iceland recovered far more quickly than EU members such as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, which were subjected to crippling austerity measures by Brussels, the World Bank, and the IMF in the wake of the crisis.

The Social Democrats won the argument, convincing their left-wing, Euroskeptic coalition partners to vote for application. The left agreed, with the caveat that the final membership deal would be put to the people in a referendum.

Following a change of government, accession talks were shelved in 2013. Iceland, it was reasoned, had emerged from the financial crisis in good shape, and joining the EU would erode the island nation’s sovereignty, potentially diluting its control of rich fishing grounds, with no tangible benefits in return.

How do the polls stand before the vote?

With less than a day to go, the latest polls suggest that the vote will come down to the wire. A poll by market research firm Maskina published on August 25 shows the referendum passing by 51.3% to 48.7%. Two days later, a Gallup poll showed a near mirror inversion of these results, with the ‘no’ side leading by 51.6% to 48.4%. The result in both surveys was inside the margin of error, making the outcome impossible to predict. However, the ‘no’ side has been steadily closing the gap since July, and if the trend holds, could succeed in putting membership talks on ice for the foreseeable future.

The Yes vote: Safety in numbers

The two major parties in Frostadottir’s coalition – her Social Democrats and Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir’s Reform Party – support EU membership. Their arguments are the same as they were in 2009, with one key addition: Membership would add a layer of defense against any potential attempts by US President Donald Trump to gain control over Iceland, as he is currently threatening Greenland. Although this is an unlikely scenario, the current US ambassador in Reykjavik caused widespread anger in January when he joked “that Iceland will be the 52nd state and he’ll be governor."

Iceland’s six other major parties – from conservatives to centrists to leftists – all oppose membership. In an effort to persuade their voters, Frostadottir has sold the referendum as a zero-risk proposition. A ‘yes’ vote would merely restart talks, she has argued, pointing out that any deal offered by Brussels would still have to pass another referendum. It would also give Icelanders “the option of seeing what an agreement looks like,” she said last month.

Why does the EU want Iceland?

Home to fewer than 400,000 people, Iceland would be the EU’s smallest member state in terms of population. It sits just south of the Arctic Circle between Greenland and the UK, occupying a chokepoint known as the GIUK gap. Russian submarines and naval vessels entering the North Atlantic must pass through the GIUK gap, and with the EU’s foreign policy now bent on confrontation with Moscow, establishing an outpost here is high on Brussels’ list of priorities.

Frostadottir has reportedly warned the European Commission not to interfere in the vote. “The commission never intervenes in national elections or in referenda in any way,” a spokesperson told Euractiv, an outlet that the commission funds. 

RT readers will recall that the European Commission has intervened in every national election in the bloc since 2024. This year alone, Brussels imposed online censorship measures ahead of elections in Bulgaria and Hungary. A US House Judiciary Committee report released in early 2026 alleged that the European Commission pressured social media platforms to censor populist and conservative speech during elections in Romania, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland.

While neither Commission President Ursula von der Leyen nor her chief diplomat Kaja Kallas have made the case for joining the bloc publicly, EU-funded media have filled in the blanks. According to Euronews, a ‘no’ vote would “close off a strategic opportunity to expand [the EU’s] positioning in the North Atlantic and Arctic region for generations.”

Is Iceland already embedded in the Western military nexus?

Despite presenting a “strategic opportunity” for the EU, Iceland is not some neutral territory waiting to be claimed. Iceland is a founding member of NATO, hosts the bloc’s air forces at Naval Air Station Keflavik, in return for which the military bloc financed the country’s major ring road, and has a network of radar stations described by the bloc’s officials as “the eyes and the ears of NATO in the north.”

At exercise Northern Viking in Iceland, I saw firsthand how U.S. and Icelandic forces train alongside fellow @NATO Allies to protect vital sea lanes and secure the Arctic, and how Icelandic technology is giving Allied forces an operational edge. Building our readiness and… pic.twitter.com/ZToq3GiBvH

— U.S. Ambassador to NATO (@USAmbNATO) August 21, 2026

Iceland has no standing army, but is a protectorate of the US under a 1951 defense agreement. The annual US-led ‘Northern Viking’ military exercise is currently underway in Iceland, and concludes on September 4. 

On top of being fully integrated into the Western military camp, Iceland is already a member of the European Economic Area and visa-free Schengen zone, and has incorporated most EU legislation into its domestic laws. 

No: A choice between war and peace

The EU’s militarization has directly harmed the bloc itself, Gunnar Palsson, Iceland’s former ambassador to Brussels, said in August, pointing to the EU’s flatlining economy as a result of its self-imposed embargo on Russian energy.

“The EU is now, for the first time in its history, a direct party to a military conflict in Europe,” Palsson wrote in an op-ed for Iceland’s Morgunbladid newspaper. “The Union’s escalating involvement in the Ukraine war, which is unlikely to lead to an optimal outcome for European countries, has already had a far-reaching impact on their economic situation, their relations with each other and with the outside world.”

‘Left Against the EU’, a social movement founded this year to oppose the referendum, has argued that joining the EU would subjugate Iceland’s foreign policy to the whims of the European Commission, which is “rapidly moving towards militarization.”

“The European Union and NATO have given in to the demands of the arms industry for vastly increased military spending, and it has never been more urgent than now for peace-loving people to withdraw from the warring forces,” reads a policy statement from the group.

“A European army is just around the corner, and Icelanders must seriously ask themselves whether they want to prepare their children and society for the future of serving under the arms of a European military power.”

Should the referendum pass, “Icelanders will become citizens of a union that has a strong political will for militarization and is increasingly involved in conflicts and escalating tensions in Europe,” Haraldur Olafsson, who leads the anti-EU ‘Heimssyn’ movement, warned in May. 

Sovereignty over stocks: Why fish are at the center of the argument

For most Icelandic Euroskeptics, however, the referendum comes down to a simpler issue: fish. Fishing accounts for around 4% of Iceland’s GDP, and a third of the country’s exports. Signing up to the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy risks surrendering control over this vital economic and culturally symbolic sector.

Ireland, another island on the EU’s seaboard, was subjected to these rules when it joined the bloc, and more than five decades later, it is likely that Irish fishermen will demand Icelandic fishermen be treated as they were. 

French trawlers are allowed to catch five times more of certain fish in Irish waters than Irish trawlers. “The other countries are making fun of us for the lack of quota we have in our own waters,” Irish opposition leader Peadar Toibin claimed during a parliamentary debate last year.

Any Icelandic politician who trades away sovereignty over the country’s waters would “be expelled from the country,” Eirikur Bergmann, a professor at Iceland’s Bifrost University, told the BBC.

The ‘yes’ side has claimed that Iceland could negotiate exemptions to the Common Fisheries Policy, but no member state has done so to date, and Euroskeptics are unconvinced. Brussels would not even welcome such a debate, never mind find a workable solution. 

“Contrary to the government’s claims, membership of the European Union is not a tailor-made agreement where each country chooses the parts that suit it and rejects the others,” Independence Party leader Gudrun Hafsteinsdottir argued earlier this year. It is unacceptable, Olafsson declared in May, “for a foreign union to legislate on Icelandic resources for its own benefit.”

The EU’s treaties – Rome, Lisbon, Maastricht – “are non-negotiable,” ‘no’ campaigner Sigridur Maria Egilsdottir warned at a rally on August 27. “We wouldn’t show up to the negotiations alone. Brussels would send its most capable team, loaded with conditions, demands and inescapable assumptions that all EU nations have had to abide by.”

Iran has become stronger while the US has exposed its weakness during the conflict in the Middle East, which is still far from over, experts have told RT on the day marking six months since Washington and Israel attacked the Islamic Republic.

‘US and Israel underestimated resilience of Iranians and Lebanese’

RT’s correspondent in Lebanon, Steve Sweeney, said the Iran war is widely seen in the Middle East as “a strategic defeat for the US and its regional proxy, Israel.”

Israel used Iran as a pretext to launch an invasion of Lebanon, which “wreaked devastation across southern towns and villages, many of them have been destroyed completely,” Sweeney said.

“What Washington has done, what Israel has done is underestimated the resilience of the people on the ground here in Lebanon and also the resilience and the resistance being waged by the Iranians,” he added.

Trump looks like ‘Iranian agent’: Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi

“An alien from outer space might think that Trump has been… sent here as an Iranian agent to confirm the end of the US empire and the end of US power in this region,” Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi suggested.

The 180 days that have passed since February 28 “is not the end of the war,” but “a confirmation that Iran may have to respond... when it comes to retaliation and consequences for the NATO powers bent on their destruction, let alone the destruction of the entire Global South.”

‘If the goal of the operation was to make Israeli territory more secure, then it has been a complete failure’

RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij, reporting from the West Bank, said that since Israel launched its war with the US against Iran, it has opened up additional fronts, including operations in Lebanon and Syria, while the conflict in Gaza continues.

The West Bank, Dubenskij said, has become a “tinderbox,” with nationalist attacks by Israeli settlers taking place on a daily basis. She warned that the rising violence could trigger a backlash from Palestinians.

‘Iran has become a superpower’: DD Geopolitics reporter Christopher Helali

Tehran has become a “super power” over the 180 days that have passed since the attack by Washington and West Jerusalem, according to DD Geopolitics reporter Christopher Helali.

“What we can say unequivocally is that... Iran is not going back to the status quo of February 27 and before that. What has happened since has turned Iran into a major world power that doesn’t possess nuclear weapons, but possesses the Strait of Hormuz, which can bring the global economy to its knees and, of course, force the US and other regional powers to make enormous concessions,” he said.

‘A long, drawn-out conflict only beginning’

Former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof called the US-Israeli operation “irresponsible,” saying it has resulted in “nothing but chaos, confusion, and greater turmoil and economic and political uncertainty in the world today.”

Half a year has passed since the initial attack on Iran, but “we’re only seeing the beginning of what’s going to be a long, drawn-out conflict,” he argued.

France hopes to line its own arms manufacturers’ pockets with a €90 billion European Union loan to Ukraine by limiting Kiev's ability to procure weapons from outside the bloc, according to Euronews.

After overcoming Hungary’s opposition, the EU member states in April approved the €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan, aimed at propping up Kiev’s war effort in 2026 and 2027; €60 billion of the total sum has been earmarked for arms procurement.

The scheme, which is backed by joint EU borrowing on the capital markets, is premised on the assumption that it would be repaid when Ukraine secures reparations from Russia – a prospect Moscow has dismissed as “unrealistic.”

In an article on Tuesday, Euronews claimed that France is seeking to place a time limit on wavers allowing Ukraine to purchase weapons from outside the EU using EU-backed funds.

At present, Kiev can request an exemption if there is no EU-made system on offer that meets its immediate needs. According to the publication, Ukraine has so far made use of this mechanism on at least two occasions: when sourcing Chinese-made drone components and US-made Patriot interceptor missiles.

Following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict and amid the subsequent EU-wide rearmament drive, a number of European arms manufacturers have seen their profit margins surge.

Shares in Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest defense contractor, for instance, have risen more than tenfold over the past six years. Earlier this month, the company reported a nearly 70% increase in second-quarter revenue at €3.29 billion, having more than doubled its operating profit to €562 million.

RT’s Chay Bowes believes that behind a veneer of self-righteous talk lies ulterior motives, and that France is ultimately looking to funnel billions into its own military industrial complex.

Watch Bowes’s report in full below:

Donald Trump has declared himself the “greatest” president in US history while branding Joe Biden and Barack Obama “failures” in a ranking posted on Truth Social.

Abraham Lincoln, who led the US through the Civil War and abolished slavery, and George Washington, the first US president and a founding father, were placed one tier below Trump.

The US president shared the ranking on Thursday alongside a CNN clip highlighting polling showing his dominance among Republican voters. The graphic divides US presidents into six tiers – ‘The Greatest’, ‘Great’, ‘Near Great’, ‘Average’, ‘Below Average’, and ‘Failures’ – with Trump alone at the top.

Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson were placed in the ‘Great’ category. Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams, and James K. Polk were rated ‘Near Great’, while Bill Clinton was among those deemed ‘Average’.

Biden and Obama were placed at the opposite end of Trump’s chart alongside fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter and former presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding. The list contains 34 presidents and leaves out 11 others, including Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and both George Bushes.

The graphic appears to be an altered version of a ranking published by LIFE magazine in 1948, when Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 experts in American history to classify presidents as ‘great’, ‘near great’, ‘average’, ‘below average’, or ‘failure’. Trump’s version largely retains the original categories but adds himself at the top and several more recent Democratic presidents.

Expert surveys, however, have placed Trump at the opposite end of the scale. The Presidential Greatness Project ranked him last in 2018 with 12.34 points out of 100, versus 95.03 for Lincoln, and put him last again in its 2024 survey of 154 presidential scholars and experts. Lincoln topped both rankings.

Trump’s broader approval has also slumped during his second term. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted August 21-24 put his approval at a record-low 33%, with 65% disapproving. A Marquette survey showed even weaker numbers on the economy, with 30% approving of his handling of it and just 22% backing his record on inflation and the cost of living.

US President Donald Trump is apparently suffering from “schizophrenia” and “delusions” over his claims that the Strait of Hormuz belongs to Washington, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi has said.

The jab came after Trump shared an image on Thursday titled “US Territories” that listed the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW” alongside Puerto Rico, Guam, and other entities.

Writing on X the next day, Gharibabadi took aim at Trump, saying that “schizophrenia is a complex and acute psychotic disorder that manifests with disturbances in thinking and a distorted perception of reality.” He added that common symptoms include hallucinations and delusions, and that “such patients should be under 24-hour supervision and receive treatment.”

It’s not the first time Trump declared that the US “has total control over the Strait of Hormuz.” Earlier this month, he suggested that he “WILL KEEP IT,” while calling the American blockade “A WALL OF STEEL.” He also claimed that Iran had no navy or air force to speak of and signed off: “Praise be to Allah!”

The gap between America’s inability to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and its claim to own it is greater than the 7,000-mile distance between Washington and the Strait itself.
Welcome to the post-American order in the Persian Gulf. pic.twitter.com/nC7VBCPILH

— محسن رضایی (@ir_rezaee) August 18, 2026

Iran has repeatedly stated that it remains in full control of the strait, while Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei argued that Washington’s claim to own the strait was even further from reality than the roughly 7,000 miles separating it from the US capital. “Welcome to the post-American order in the Persian Gulf,” he wrote in mid-August.

Trump has meanwhile stepped back from another major round of strikes on Iran amid reports of critical shortages of long-range guided weapons and air-defense interceptors – something the US president has denied.

Washington has since shifted toward what it described as “an economic onslaught” against Iran to isolate it financially. Tehran has remained defiant, though, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying, “We have seen this movie before. Same bull. Different bullies.”

South Africa has recorded 3,462 confirmed measles cases since January 2026, with outbreaks reported in the Western Cape, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, and Northern Cape, among children aged one to 14 years, the country’s Department of Health said on Wednesday.

Department spokesperson Foster Mohale said the proportion of unvaccinated children under one year old had increased from 12.1% in 2017 to an alarming 36.3% between January and April 2026. This effectively triples the number of completely unvaccinated children and leaves hundreds of thousands of infants at risk of life-threatening illnesses.

Mohale added routine immunisation coverage had fallen severely across all 52 districts in the country, which means that, at current rates, South Africa is unlikely to reach the World Health Organization’s critical 90% coverage threshold for childhood immunisation. He said the consequences of declining coverage include the resurgence of serious vaccine-preventable diseases, erosion of community, or herd immunity, and higher rates of long-term disability and death among infants.

Mohale added that South Africa has maintained its polio-free status since 2014, while sporadic cases of diphtheria had been detected, primarily in the Western Cape, underscoring gaps in booster coverage and disease surveillance. Pertussis, or whooping cough, cases have also been identified in several provinces, predominantly affecting infants under six months who are too young to be fully vaccinated, Mohale said.

According to spokesperson, this poses severe risks for pregnant women because of the potential for congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). “Unvaccinated children can endanger infants and immunocompromised individuals who cannot be vaccinated, and weak coverage undermines early detection and rapid response to emerging threats.”

First published by IOL

The US is moving to lock in long-term access to the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves by discussing a 100-year deal with Venezuela, as Caracas plans to leave the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), several outlets have reported.

The idea of quitting OPEC has been discussed during talks with US officials, according to Bloomberg’s sources, although no final decision has been made.

Venezuela was one of five countries that founded OPEC in 1960, alongside Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It has effectively operated outside the group’s production quota system for years, while decades of US sanctions and domestic economic turmoil have battered its oil industry and diminished its influence within the organization.

A withdrawal from OPEC would mark a major realignment in Caracas following the January 3 US operation that kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Washington has since taken control of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, with proceeds deposited into US-controlled accounts and Caracas’ access to the funds subject to decisions in Washington.

US pushing for ‘massive’ century-long oil lease

Talk of a potential OPEC exit comes as Washington pushes for a major stake in Venezuela’s oil fields. A deal under discussion could lock in several fields for American companies under a 100-year lease and guarantee the resulting crude supplies to the US.

“This is real and being discussed at the highest levels of the US and Venezuelan governments,” one source told Reuters. A lease is among the legal models under consideration, with individual fields potentially allocated to US producers through auctions or tenders.

A list involved in the negotiations includes 17 fields, spanning undeveloped sites in the vast Orinoco Belt and mature fields around Lake Maracaibo containing roughly 90 billion barrels of proven reserves. Some are currently operated by a small Chinese company under a contract signed during Maduro’s presidency.

‘Donroe Doctrine’

Taking a stake in Venezuela’s reserves would amount to an almost unprecedented US intervention in another country’s economy, Bloomberg noted, while fitting Donald Trump’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine” of expanding American influence across the Western Hemisphere.

Trump has repeatedly asserted US control over Venezuela’s oil since Maduro’s capture in January. Speaking to oil executives that month, he said Washington would decide which companies would rebuild the sector: “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all.” He went further in the spring, publicly floating the idea of turning Venezuela into the “51st state.”

The proposed arrangement could, however, run into legal hurdles. Venezuelan law does not currently provide for leasing oil acreage, while the constitution reserves core industry activities for the state. Recent reforms allow foreign participation through joint ventures and production-sharing contracts, but Caracas has for decades prevented foreign producers from booking Venezuelan reserves as their own.

Another blow to OPEC

Venezuela’s departure would also hand Trump a small victory in his long-running confrontation with OPEC. The US president has repeatedly criticized the group for wielding too much influence over global oil prices and driving up fuel costs for American consumers.

The push comes as the Trump administration faces pressure over high gasoline prices ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Cheaper Venezuelan crude could help ease fuel costs and replenish the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which currently holds around 290 million barrels – about 41% of its capacity.

Other producers have also pushed back against OPEC restrictions. Iraq reportedly threatened to leave in June unless it was allowed to increase output, although Baghdad later said it had no plans to withdraw. Venezuela and Iran remain exempt from OPEC+ production quotas because sanctions have constrained their output.

Afghanistan has “suffered greatly” from war and it does not want conflict with any country, the Taliban has said.

“War benefits no one, and neither does destabilizing the region,” Taliban chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Runjhun Sharma’s ‘India, Russia, and the World’ podcast.

Responding to Sharma’s hypothetical question whether Taliban would put boots on the ground for India against Pakistan, Mujahid asserted, “We do not want war or instability in the region, and we do not want any country to take action against another.”

The Taliban government has quietly improved ties with India, which Islamabad has partly blamed for its own strained relations with Afghanistan.

Mujahid, however, said Afghanistan did not start the recent border fighting and was just defending itself after Pakistan violated its territory. “Defending ourselves is our right, but we are neither the initiators nor do we want it to continue.”

The Taliban spokesman pointed out that the conflict benefits no one as people on both sides of the border share a common culture, trade links, and geography.

Recently, a spokesman for the Taliban’s Ministry of Economy, Abdul Rahman Habib, told Sharma in a separate interview that his government will ensure the safety of a prospective rail route linking Russia to India, which would give Moscow access to the Indian Ocean, and give jobs to Afghans.

“We place great importance on maintaining a strong relationship with India,” Mujahid added. “Those ties are moving in a positive direction.”

“Afghanistan, as you know, is going through a period of reconstruction, and Russia has extensive resources that could be useful to us. We want to benefit from Russia’s experience in rebuilding the country while also expanding trade and economic cooperation.”

“More broadly, it could possibly be of great benefit to regional security as well if cooperation exists among the two countries.”

Moscow trusted in the decency of the West for years, but not anymore, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

In an interview with RBK released on Friday, Lavrov was asked why Russia allowed the US and EU to take advantage of it on numerous occasions in recent decades.

“Deception lies at the foundation of Western diplomacy. And it still does,” he replied.

The minister recalled how the Americans broke their promise not to expand NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and how France and Germany became guarantors of a deal between democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the opposition during the Maidan protests in Kiev in 2014, but proclaimed the rioters as victors after they seized government buildings the next day.

“This reveals something about our psychology – not naivety ingrained by centuries of historical experience, but rather the enduring hope that a scoundrel cannot be a complete scoundrel, to put it simply,” Lavrov explained.

It is in the Russian national character to maintain “faith in people right to the very end. But the end has already come,” he said.

According to the minister, the US and EU “firmly set out on a course of supplying the Nazi Kiev regime with ever more advanced and increasingly deadly offensive weapons” after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

Zambia’s main opposition leader Brian Mundubile and his running mate Makebi Zulu have been accused of treason and detained after being questioned, the Zambia Police Service said on Thursday.

Mundubile and Zulu were questioned “in connection with an alleged offence of treason,” police said. Officers did not provide specifics about the nature of the transgression. The two remain in custody at Lusaka Central Police while investigations continue, according to local outlets.

The detention comes two weeks after Zambia’s presidential election, in which Mundubile finished second to Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema. Official results gave Hichilema about 60% of the vote and Mundubile about 38%. Mundubile rejected the result and said he intended to challenge it in court over alleged irregularities, claims Hichilema has denied.

Police Chief Graphel Musamba said the task force encountered “gunfire and resistance from unknown individuals” and returned fire. The government said military-grade weapons, ammunition and other materials intended for use in an armed insurrection were found at the property.

Under Zambia’s Penal Code, treason carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. The country abolished the death penalty in 2022.

Hichilema, who first took office in 2021, is due to begin a second five-year term following the latest vote.

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly humiliated and abused a former household worker, at one point calling him an “undeveloped Moroccan,” a new lawsuit claims. The controversy adds to a years-long trail of remarkably similar allegations, painting a picture of intolerable conditions at the residence.

On Tuesday, Ynet reported that Rami Ben-Hamo, who worked at the residence from 2023 to 2025, is seeking 450,000 shekels ($150,000) in a lawsuit filed with the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court. While the complaint has been formally filed against the Prime Minister’s Office, the alleged abuse is overwhelmingly attributed to Sara Netanyahu.

According to Ben-Hamo, he sometimes worked from around 7:30 AM until the early hours of the following morning, clocking 60 to 80 hours of overtime a month. He claims to have “suffered extreme abuse” from the prime minister’s wife, adding that she made him clean her handbag and the soles of her shoes, repeatedly wash his hands between tasks, and endure screaming and humiliation when cleaning or household chores were not performed exactly as she wanted.

The complaint also alleges that Ben-Hamo was kept at work after the start of Shabbat – the weekly Jewish day of rest between Friday and Saturday evenings – despite Netanyahu knowing he observed the tradition. After suffering a cardiac event at work and undergoing catheterization in 2025, Ben-Hamo says her treatment of him became even harsher.

Netanyahu’s office dismissed the allegations as “fake news,” calling it a politically motivated “witch-hunt” ahead of the October elections.

However, the recent controversy fits a pattern of strikingly similar grievances about Sara Netanyahu. Just several weeks ago, former residence worker Yehiel Ohev-Ami, 61, sued her for 300,000 shekels ($100,000), claiming that Netanyahu repeatedly insulted and yelled at him, and “once ordered him to clean the kitchen floor while crawling.” 

In addition, Netanyahu allegedly wished him cancer and death after Ohev-Ami went out on a smoke break, and even “diagnosed” him with autism. The prime minister’s office has denied the accusations.

In May, Israeli media reported that another former employee reached a settlement with her staffing company after alleging repeated humiliation, including an incident in which Sara Netanyahu threw olives and tomatoes at her during breakfast.

In 2016, a Jerusalem labor court awarded former residence caretaker Meni Naftali 170,000 shekels ($57,000) after accepting his claims that Sara Netanyahu’s fostered “abusive employment conditions,” including verbal insults and unreasonable demands.

According to multiple media reports, Sara Netanyahu – a psychologist by training – enjoys immense political influence and essentially has veto powers on appointments to key positions. Earlier this month, former chief of staff Yoav Horowitz suggested that in terms of politics, “Sara Netanyahu and Bibi Netanyahu are one; it’s impossible to separate between them.”

A new fund launched in India plans to invest $1 billion in the country’s neurotechnology sector over the next five years.

ADI Neuroscience is backed by SPEC Finance India, with Aleksandr Panov, a serial investor and CEO of Russian neurotechnology firm Neiry, serving as the fund’s lead adviser.

The sector includes technologies and devices that enable communication with the human brain. Billionaire investor Elon Musk’s Neuralink is the most famous BCI company.

India ranks third in the BCI sector, with 12 startups – behind China’s 23, and 101 in the US – according to market intelligence company Tracxn. However, Indian BCI startups have pulled in only about $8.5 million in the last ten years, compared to $3.03 billion by US startups and $117 million by Chinese firms.

The global BCI market is expected to grow to $15.14 billion by 2035, from $2.87 billion in 2024, according to a report by Spherical Insights & Consulting.

Launched last week, ADI sees India as a platform where research teams, engineering expertise, and capital can come together to make the country a hub for the development of neurotechnologies.

”India has the rare opportunity to participate in shaping the standards and regulatory frameworks for the sector rather than adapting to frameworks developed elsewhere,” ADI Neuroscience said in a statement.

”The fund’s resources will be directed toward advancing neurotechnology R&D in India, creating competitive products, and developing the industry domestically,” SPEC Finance Group CEO Karan Dinesh Singh Rawat added.

The fund has deep links to Russian technology leadership. Panov, an ambassador for deep-tech entrepreneurship, is its scientific adviser, while Mikhail Lebedev, a professor at the Moscow State University who specializes in brain-to-brain interfaces, is a member of its scientific board.

Afghanistan is “undoubtedly” better off five years after the withdrawal of US forces, Taliban chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has told RT, while acknowledging that the country continues to face serious problems.

In a rare interview with RT India’s Runjhun Sharma, Mujahid argued that the departure of foreign troops has restored Afghanistan’s independence and left Afghans responsible for rebuilding their own country.

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 as the Western-backed government collapsed and US forces completed their withdrawal after two decades of war. The hardline Islamist movement has since reinstated a strict interpretation of Sharia law, including sweeping restrictions on women and girls that have drawn widespread international criticism.

However, despite the conflict, Mujahid said Kabul now wants normal diplomatic relations with Washington, including the reopening of the US Embassy in Afghanistan and an Afghan mission in the American capital.

He also argued that Western perceptions of the Taliban remain shaped by two decades of war, accusing international media of portraying the group as seeking conflict and instability and posing a threat to the outside world.

He also called for sanctions to be lifted and frozen Afghan assets to be returned, saying the measures would help improve relations.

Commenting on Afghanistan’s relations with Russia, which is currently the only country to recognize the Taliban government, Mujahid described Moscow as an important regional partner and said Kabul wants Russian companies to invest in Afghanistan while expanding cooperation in trade, reconstruction, fuel, and energy.

“Afghanistan has its own beliefs and convictions, has its own religion and faith, has its own internal interests, and has its own laws,” he said. “These should be valued and respected.”

Watch the full interview below.

Zimbabwean police have arrested a senior local official over the Lake Kariba ferry disaster that killed 97 people earlier this month.

Ignatius Chiome, a district coordinator for the Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (RIDA), has been charged with culpable homicide, the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) said on X on Wednesday.

“The ZRP confirms the arrest and subsequent appearance in court of Kariba RIDA District Coordinator, Ignatius Chiome (49),” the statement read.

A ruling on Chiome’s bail application was postponed on Thursday and was expected on Friday, the Herald, a local media outlet, reported. His lawyer, Samuel Muyemeki, said the magistrate had not completed the ruling. “The court has to make a decision and that’s the position of the law. Once the decision is there, everyone concerned will have to know,” he said, as quoted by the news agency.

Prosecutors allege that administrative failures, overloading and breaches of operational safety procedures contributed to the August 11 disaster. The victims include a number of young children.

The RIDA-operated Mbuya Nehanda ferry capsized on Lake Kariba while traveling from the town of Kariba to communities and fishing camps along the lake. Local broadcaster ZBC News previously reported that the vessel encountered strong waves during the journey. 

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa declared the sinking a national disaster and ordered maritime safety agencies and security forces to address shortcomings in Zimbabwe’s maritime capabilities. The African Union also expressed condolences, with AU Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf saying the bloc stood “in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and the affected communities.”

Nepal and China briefly suspended rescue operations for those missing in Wednesday’s flash flood due to the threat of new onrush of water from a lake that formed on the upper reaches of the Bhote Koshi river.

The lake broke its banks Friday morning and Nepal asked its rescue teams and residents to move to higher ground. Rescue operations resumed soon afterward when the authorities assessed that the risk of flooding was not as severe as initially thought. 

CNN reported, citing a spokesperson for Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, that there is no risk of a massive deluge like before. “It is a small amount of water leaking from the dam down into the valley below.”

Chinese officials said the risk of flooding had decreased as the water level in the lake had fallen by about 10 meters, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said that the death toll has reached 547 by Friday evening. Nearly 1,500 are still missing, including police personnel. More than 1,500 people have been rescued, Nepalese police posted online.

China has confirmed 5 deaths so far, with 558 people including 260 foreigners missing. 

The Nepal Army has intensified rescue operations since this morning to find people trapped in the Rasuwa Hydro Power Project (Hydro) tunnel due to flooding. A Nepal Army team, braving challenging terrain and dangerous conditions, has so far safely rescued two people from the… pic.twitter.com/8vlER7VKy7

— Sahil Patel (@SahilpatelCA) August 28, 2026

More than 13,000 army and police personnel are engaged in the search and rescue effort in Nepal. 

Helicopter rescue missions, which have successfully pulled to safety hundreds of people stranded in the mud and buildings in the last 48 hours, also resumed after the pause.

Heroic rescue! A man stranded on an excavator in a fast-flowing, muddy river was saved after brave firefighters threw him a life jacket and safety rope, pulling him through the current to shore. 🌊#Rescue #HeroicRescue #Flood #EmergencyResponse #China pic.twitter.com/Ypbqva2qRG

— Bappy Boks (@bappyboks) August 28, 2026

China also resumed rescue operations at the Gyirong Port, which is now completely buried in mud. The first team of 21 firefighters and a rescue dog reached the border checkpoint around 5 p.m. on Friday, state media reported. 

India's foreign ministery says at least 320 of its nationals are missing.

There is also no information on an 80-member pilgrim group from a spiritual organization in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The group was returning from Mansarovar and had reportedly reached the immigration checkpoint at the border just minutes before the flood leveled the buildings there. The group included people of various nationalities.

British health officials believe that eggs imported from Ukraine could be responsible for a major salmonella outbreak in the UK, The Telegraph has reported, citing a source.

A total of 259 people in the country have been infected with the bacteria over the past year, with one of them dying, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said in a statement on Thursday.

The agency stressed that the exact source of the contaminated products has yet to be established, but added that the outbreak “could all be associated with imported eggs.”

However, a senior official involved in the investigation of a salmonella outbreak in the Netherlands, where over a hundred cases have been registered, told The Telegraph that the “working hypothesis” among his British counterparts is that the unsafe eggs were of Ukrainian origin.

Almost half of the victims, ranging from babies to people in their 90s, required hospitalization, the statement read.

Salmonella causes intestinal infection, typically resulting in diarrhea, vomiting, fever, and abdominal cramps. While most patients recover without specific treatment, the disease can be life-threatening for people with weakened immune systems.

Investigators believe the people were infected after consuming eggs served in “small cafes, restaurants, and takeaway businesses,” rather than eating at home, UKHSA said.

The UK produces most of its eggs at home, with UKHSA assuring that they are perfectly safe. The country imports only 11% of its eggs, with Ukraine being the largest supplier, accounting for almost a third of them.

The exemption from tariffs on Ukrainian eggs exported to Britain, introduced after the escalation between Ukraine and Russia in February 2022, will remain in place until 2028, despite the EU reimposing barriers last year.

In July, EU health authorities linked Ukrainian-made instant noodles to a salmonella outbreak that affected more than 100 people across over a dozen member states.

A few months before that, Azerbaijan’s food safety agency reported discovering the bacteria in a 4.9-ton batch of frozen chicken coming from Ukraine.

A US court has struck down the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ruling that it illegally sanctioned the AI developer for refusing to let its Claude model be used for certain military operations.

In a 59-page ruling issued on Thursday, US District Judge Rita Lin said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority by designating Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.” She also argued that the move amounted to unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment and deprived Anthropic of due process under the Fifth.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.
Lin said the government had sought to make a public example of Anthropic for its “arrogance” in criticizing Washington, adding that Hegseth’s supply-chain designation violated the statute invoked by the Pentagon and was “arbitrary and capricious.”

However, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in February that while he supports the use of Claude for military ends, it should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or guiding fully autonomous weapons because its current frontier models are not reliable enough for the latter task.

Anthropic vowed to challenge the designation, saying such treatment had historically only been reserved for US adversaries. It sued in March, alleging that Washington had retaliated against its protected speech and denied it a chance to contest the allegations before imposing the sanctions.

Hegseth, however, stood his ground, comparing Anthropic’s red lines to “Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at,” and calling Amodei an “ideological lunatic.”

In the ruling, Lin stressed that the Pentagon “is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice” and remains free to abandon Claude if Anthropic’s conditions do not meet its requirements. Yet the Pentagon itself had been reluctant to lose access to the model, with one defense official telling Axios in February that “the problem for these guys is they are that good.”

A separate lawsuit from Anthropic is also pending in Washington, DC over a supply chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts.

Norway’s King Harald V has died at the age of 89, the royal palace announced on Friday.

The monarch, who had reigned since 1991, died peacefully at an Oslo hospital, the palace said.

Harald will be succeeded by his only son, Haakon VIII, 53, with his wife, Mette-Marit, becoming Norway’s new queen.

The succession comes after the king’s final years were overshadowed by a series of scandals involving members of his family. Mette-Marit faced scrutiny over her past ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while her son from a previous relationship, Marius Borg Hoiby, was convicted of rape.

The king had been hospitalized with a blood disorder on August 17. His health deteriorated during treatment, with the palace describing his condition as “extremely serious” on Thursday.

Members of the royal family canceled their official engagements and gathered at Harald’s bedside during his final days, while members of the public laid flowers outside the palace, according to local media.

Despite the controversies surrounding his family, Harald remained a popular figure in Norway and was credited with helping modernize the monarchy, including by marrying a commoner and increasing transparency around royal spending.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has addressed this week’s unusually intense diplomatic traffic in Moscow, shedding light on talks with the Vatican’s top diplomat while remaining deliberately vague about a visit by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, and Ratcliffe were both in the Russian capital this week, prompting RBK to ask Lavrov what was behind the visits.

“In both cases, those who came to us wanted to come and talk,” Lavrov said in an interview published on Friday.

Gestures of goodwill and broken promises

Lavrov said his discussions with Gallagher focused heavily on the Ukraine conflict, with the Vatican envoy reiterating a desire to see hostilities brought to an end as soon as possible and offering continued assistance on humanitarian issues, including prisoner and body exchanges.

“I pointed out that there had been no shortage of goodwill on our part... I think he understood everything. I would say he had no counterarguments, apart from the general slogan that ‘it needs to stop as soon as possible,’” Lavrov said.

Lavrov also told Gallagher that the Western push for a ceasefire along the current line of contact would merely freeze the fighting without producing a lasting settlement. Plans to deploy British- and French-led “stabilization forces” would effectively preserve the “neo-Nazi regime” in Kiev that suppresses the Russian language and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, he said.

Quiet intelligence channels

Lavrov was much more guarded about Ratcliffe’s visit.

“Of course, we do not disclose details that are too sensitive or are still being worked out, where it is important not to jeopardize possible compromises and consensus,” Lavrov said.

The top diplomat also denied allegations that Moscow had issued any kind of ultimatum to the administration of US President Donald Trump following media reports that American intelligence has been used to facilitate long-range Ukrainian strikes against Russia.

‘The end has already come’

Lavrov argued that Moscow remains willing to talk to Western governments but no longer assumes that public assurances or negotiated understandings will be honored.

Asked why Russia had continued to give its counterparts the benefit of the doubt, Lavrov said Russians tended to believe in people “until the very end.”

“But the end has already come,” he added, arguing that relations with the West would never return to what they were before February 2022.

What happened to Anchorage?

Lavrov presented last year’s presidential summit in Anchorage as the latest example of that frustration. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin went through a US peace proposal point by point with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who confirmed that it represented the American leader’s position. Putin then accepted the proposal despite some remaining “nuances,” according to Lavrov.

Washington disputes that characterization, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying in June that there had been “a proposal in Alaska, but there was no agreement.”

According to Lavrov, the Anchorage understandings were subsequently undermined over the following months by EU and British leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron eventually declared at the G7 summit in Evian in June that Anchorage had been “buried.”

Trump himself, however, has not explicitly declared the Anchorage framework dead. At the original August 2025 summit, he described the talks positively while cautioning that “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

Lavrov said Moscow remains ready to hear new US proposals, but in the meantime Russia will “continue working on the ground.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has acknowledged that the loss of cheap energy imports has dealt a blow to the EU economy and that the bloc now faces prices far above those of its main competitors.

The EU drastically reduced Russian oil and gas imports following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, while Brussels has committed to completely phasing out Russian fossil fuels by 2027. Energy costs have since surged across much of the bloc, with the US-Israeli war on Iran adding further pressure.

Speaking at the La Rencontre des Entrepreneurs de France (REF) business conference in Paris on Thursday, von der Leyen said that “for a long time, the European economic model relied on” several key factors, including inexpensive energy imports. However, the pillars that once underpinned the bloc’s prosperity have now “disappeared,” she added.

Without addressing the reasons behind the rise in energy costs, von der Leyen noted that “European prices remain two to three times higher than in the United States and China.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged last month that Berlin’s self-imposed embargo on Russian energy was the main cause of the “ongoing energy crisis” that has eroded the competitiveness of German industry. Before 2022, Russia supplied approximately 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports.

The Financial Times reported in June, citing projections by consultancy Wood Mackenzie, that the EU could enter the coming heating season with its lowest gas reserves in 15 years.

Some member states have since balked at further restrictions on Russian LNG as Brussels pushes to end long-term imports beginning next year. Against this backdrop, the bloc has recently stepped up purchases of Russian LNG, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Despite the resistance and renewed purchases, the European Commission has maintained that it will proceed with the total phase-out of Russian energy imports, even in the event of physical shortages or the threat of power cuts.

Moscow has repeatedly described EU sanctions, particularly those targeting its energy sector, as self-defeating measures that undermine the bloc’s competitiveness. Russia, meanwhile, has redirected much of its energy exports elsewhere, primarily Asia.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has argued that he should not be seen as tainted by past association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The billionaire addressed his links with the late financier as a source of reputational baggage in an interview with Axios on Thursday, insisting people should not let the controversy overshadow his current positions on major issues, such as AI and global health.

“I made mistakes. I’ve changed,” Gates said. “I do think the record is clear, and people can just judge me on the record.”

Gates has denied involvement in Epstein’s criminal activity and told Congress that the infamous pedophile later attempted to blackmail him over extramarital affairs.

The tech mogul called his dealings with Epstein a “huge mistake,” insisting they were limited and motivated by an attempt to raise money for philanthropic projects.

This week Gates also released a sweeping essay on the coming “turbulent AI era” and the shift in his attitude to the technology. Artificial intelligence could become either “the greatest equalizer ever invented” or “the worst source of injustice,” he wrote, warning that governments remain dangerously unprepared for the social and economic upheaval ahead.

He acknowledged his “potential bias” and conceded that he has “benefited enormously” from the tech industry, retains financial ties to the sector and works with Microsoft and other AI companies through the Gates Foundation.

Gates is now warning that AI could unleash disruption on an entirely different scale. Unlike previous technological revolutions, he argues, it can substitute directly for human cognition and rapidly replace workers across law, medicine, customer service, software and manufacturing. Without the right policies, he predicts, there will still be some new jobs, but “far fewer than exist today.”

Eventually, Gates cautioned, the danger may come from the machines themselves: increasingly powerful systems “could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control.”

It is not the first time Gates has sounded the alarm about a looming global threat. In a widely viewed 2015 TED talk, he warned that the world was badly unprepared for the next major epidemic.

This time, Gates argues there may be even less room to slow down. While saying he would support a credible international plan to restrain AI development, he concluded that “geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.”

US President Donald Trump has officially renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” as trade-related tensions between Canada and the United States continue to escalate.

The premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, told Trump to “kiss my a**” this week and threatened to cut electricity supplies to the US.

“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately, to Lake America,” Trump declared in the Oval Office on Thursday before signing an executive order that requires federal agencies to use the new name on government maps, contracts, documents and communications.

The change was swiftly put into effect, with Trump sharing a letter from the US Geological Survey confirming that the federal Geographic Names Information System had already been updated.

The renaming caps a bitter week in which the trade dispute between Washington and Ottawa rapidly descended into personal insults and threats. The confrontation erupted after negotiations collapsed and Washington imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded almost immediately, threatening to withhold or sharply raise the price of oil, potash and uranium exports and saying Ontario was prepared to revive a surcharge on electricity sent to the US, or even cut power exports altogether.

“Someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!” Trump fired back. Ford, who was holding a press conference at the time, doubled down, saying: “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has insisted that his countrymen will continue to use the historic name, noting that “Ontario” derives from an Indigenous word predating both countries. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has likewise said her state would not adopt “Lake America.”

Washington cannot force Canada or international organizations to recognize the change, but it can dictate terminology across the US federal government.

On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump similarly ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed the “Gulf of America” for federal purposes – and suggested Thursday that another geographic rebranding could be next.

“We have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean,” he said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has instructed its employees not to refer to the 9/11 attacks as “terrorist,” according to several media reports.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. According to the official account, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger airliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon outside Washington, DC. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew attempted to wrest control from the hijackers.

The attacks prompted then-US President George W. Bush to launch the ‘war on terror’ and send American troops into Afghanistan, beginning a conflict that would last two decades.

The Toronto Sun reported on Wednesday that CBC Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust Basem Boshra had circulated a confidential memo instructing reporters and editors not to “refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”

“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center (WTC in second reference) was destroyed,” the memo reportedly stated.

The spokesperson said the memo was a routine reminder of CBC policy on the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’, which journalists may use when attributed to government officials, authorities, experts, or politicians.

CBC News editor in chief and general manager Brodie Fenlon has previously explained that the broadcaster “does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism,” arguing that the terms are so politically and emotionally loaded that they “can end up being impediments to our journalism.”

The reported guidance comes as relations between Canada and the US have deteriorated amid an escalating trade war. On Tuesday, Ottawa announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on around 700 American products after US President Donald Trump imposed a new round of duties on Canada and threatened further punitive measures.

British state broadcaster the BBC this week ran a major story drumming up the alleged Russia threat and supposed looming retaliatory attacks on UK drone factories supplying Ukraine. The chilly warning purportedly came from a top Russian official – except that the individual in question has not been one in over three decades.

At first glance, the piece titled “UK drone factories may face attacks from ‘unknown sources,’ says Kremlin adviser” looked legit, based on comments made on BBC Newsnight by Andrey Fedorov. The broadcaster presented the interviewee as a heavyweight Russian official, describing him as a “Kremlin adviser” and “Russia’s former deputy foreign minister.”

The latter is partially true: Fedorov was the deputy minister in the RSFSR, the Russian republic of the USSR, between October 1990 and October 1991 prior to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. The other claim, however, is completely false. Fedorov used to be an adviser to Russia’s vice president until late 1993, the same year the vice president position was abolished, and has not held any public office since. Over the past decade, he has been best known as a political commentator and a media personality, frequenting assorted Russian political talk shows.

BBC tries to hide fake news

The piece survived for around five hours on the BBC website before it was quietly amended. Fedorov was ‘demoted’ to a “pro-Kremlin commentator who frequently appears on Russian television,” yet no official retraction of the initial claim was made. The description, while still debatable, given that Fedorov is known for frequently spelling doom and gloom for Moscow, citing his purported high-ranking sources at home and overseas, is not explicitly untrue.

The BBC also did not do a particularly good job of purging the fake, which survived on several of its platforms. A BBC Newsnight Facebook post on the matter still cryptically describes Fedorov as a “President Putin ally” at the moment of the publication, while its post on X claims the commentator “advises President Putin.”

Fake spills all over British media and beyond

The BBC interview with Fedorov was spread across British media alongside his false depiction as a “Putin adviser.” Unlike the source, outlets that reprinted the fake news never bothered to amend it.

Some outlets even managed to outperform the original. The Express, for instance, described Fedorov simultaneously as a “high-ranking Kremlin official” and “high-level Kremlin insider.”

HuffPost UK also described the political commentator as a “presidential adviser” and even ‘promoted’ him to a “key ally to Vladimir Putin.”

The fake also spread beyond the UK media, making it to Al Jazeera with minimal amendments. Following the BBC, Al Jazeera falsely described Fedorov as “an adviser to the Kremlin and a former deputy foreign minister.” 

It also made it to Ukrainian media, which generally takes its British counterparts at face value and attempts no independent fact-checking.

Are the fakes bound to roll on?

This was actually not the first time the BBC falsely presented the Russian political commentator. In January of this year, Fedorov made remarks to the BBC’s Radio 4 on the US military hunt for the Marinera oil tanker and was presented as a “Kremlin adviser and former Russian deputy foreign minister.”

The comments spread widely across British media at the time, apparently without any fact-checking, and remain readily available in news articles from major outlets such The Times and The Independent.

Russia has condemned plans to build a supermarket and logistics center on the site of a former Nazi women’s concentration camp in Austria, accusing Vienna of erasing the memory of its victims.

The development in Leobersdorf, around 40km south of Vienna, would cover the remains of the Hirtenberg camp, a former subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp complex, where at least 90,000 prisoners were murdered or died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, and abuse during World War II.

According to Austrian media, the Hirtenberg site is set to host a large refrigerated storage and logistics facility, as well as a branch of German discount retailer Lidl.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the decision to effectively “pave over” the memory of victims of the Nazi regime despite public opposition as “hypocrisy in full view.”

“How can you advocate women’s rights and boast of your great achievements in feminism if you cannot protect the memory of 400 women who were forcibly deported and held in a concentration camp located in your country?” she said.

According to Mauthausen Guides, the largest group comprised 194 Russian prisoners. Other inmates came from Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Croatia, Germany and Slovakia, with some as young as 16. The camp was evacuated in April 1945 as the Red Army approached and Nazi Germany neared defeat.

The project has also sparked criticism in Austria. Mauthausen Memorial director Barbara Gluck has called the destruction of the camp remains “a disgrace.” Oskar Deutsch, the head of Vienna’s Jewish community, has similarly condemned efforts to “make money from the memory of tortured and murdered women.”

Moscow has repeatedly accused European countries of erasing or desecrating World War II memorial sites, particularly those commemorating the Soviet Union’s sacrifices and role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Zakharova has previously described such incidents as part of a growing “terrifying pandemic of historical revanchism.”

In the final days of August 2026, mobilization once again moved to the forefront. But this time, talk of war came not from the trenches or military headquarters, but from the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Ukrainian YouTube.

On August 23, the WSJ reported that the Russian military was “testing its readiness” to accept a new wave of recruits – the first since 2022. The authors did not claim that the Kremlin had already decided on another mobilization. Rather, they described a stress test of the system: Drills, logistics, and the military infrastructure’s ability to “absorb” large numbers of people should the order ever be issued.

Almost simultaneously, mobilization became a topic of discussion in Ukraine as well, though in a very different context. In the final days of the month, the idea that military service should apply to every citizen, regardless of sex, surfaced several times in high-level circles.

Who first cried ‘fire’?

By the end of the summer, the claim that “Russia is about to announce another mobilization” had already become commonplace abroad. Vladimir Zelensky linked a hypothetical Russian call-up to the September elections to the State Duma, as though Moscow’s electoral calendar could itself affect the course of the war. Finnish President Alexander Stubb said Russia was “approaching the point” at which it would have to declare a general mobilization. Western front pages picked up – not a decision, but merely the expectation of one. In this way, a rumor became a political fact before any decree had even been issued.

The Kremlin’s response was unequivocal. On July 28, Dmitry Medvedev called the rumors of an impending mobilization a “false enemy provocation.” Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, offered a dry clarification: Mass mobilization “is not needed at the moment, is not being planned, and is not expected.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed reports of a new wave as “information hoaxes.” He said the rumors were being “planted by the Ukrainian authorities” because the Kiev regime was “trying to ideologically destabilize the situation” inside Russia. Peskov separately stressed that a new mobilization wave was “not on the agenda.”

For Kiev and parts of the Western media, however, the possibility of an event is enough to make it news. Memories of autumn 2022, when partial mobilization was publicly announced, make the latest rumor contagious: If it happened once, it can happen again. But over the past four years, Russia has built a different system for recruiting personnel – one based on contracts and volunteers. Its effectiveness is reflected in regular reports that tens of thousands of people are joining the front every month.

Ukraine’s remaining reserves

The situation on the other side of the front could hardly be more different. Within Ukraine, members of the political and military elite are speaking with increasing frequency about a shortage of manpower, only for official institutions to rush in and deny their claims. The West is therefore trying to define both the terms on which the war may end and the limits of the human resources available to keep it going.

At the same time, reports of abuses during mobilization continued to mount. Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets described them as “systemic and widespread,” saying that nine cases out of ten involved violations of citizens’ rights. Ukrainian reality even produced its own term – ‘busification’, referring to men being forced into vans. According to Ukrainian police data, there were 620 attacks on employees and facilities of Ukraine’s territorial recruitment centers (TCCs) from February 2022 to April 2026, including 118 in the first four months of 2026 alone. All of this can be read as a form of internal resistance to a system that must supply the army with new personnel faster than it can properly train them.

This resistance almost never takes the form of an organized political campaign with slogans and a set date. Instead, it erupts sporadically, at the very moment TCC officers try to seize someone off the street. On July 8, 2026, for example, around 200 people in Lviv surrounded a TCC vehicle, chanted “hanba” (shame), damaged the van, and eventually overturned it. Zelensky called the incident “a very bad story” and separately condemned violence against people in uniform. The location was revealing: Not frontline Kharkov or Odessa, but a city widely regarded as a bastion of Ukraine’s national identity.

The same scene played out in Ternopol on August 25. That evening, TCC officers tried to detain a man on Lesya Kurbasa Street. Passersby came to his defense, the official vehicle was smashed, and one service member was hospitalized. After the police left, a nighttime march moved through the streets, once again accompanied by chants of ‘hanba’. The BBC and Ukrainian media reported the incident that same day. Similar flare-ups had already occurred near a stadium in Vinnitsa, as well as in Lutsk, Odessa, and Kiev. This is not a “protest against the war” in the conventional sense. It is a crowd refusing, in that specific moment, to surrender a specific person.

Against this backdrop, a remark by Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence, is particularly significant. Discussing the principles behind army recruitment, he effectively explained why Ukraine cannot return to an entirely voluntary model: “Those who wanted to defend the country have already signed up.” The remark amounts to an admission that the initial mobilization impulse has been exhausted. With each passing month, the system relies more heavily on coercion.

Mobilizing women in Ukraine?

On August 20, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov outlined his vision of how Ukraine could achieve victory during an appearance on Radio Liberty.

If “we genuinely want to solve this problem,” he said, Ukraine must look to the experience of others. “The State of Israel is the country closest to us today in terms of the level of threat it faces.” There, women serve “on an equal footing with men.” Military duty should therefore apply to “all Ukrainian citizens, regardless of sex,” he argued, claiming that this could double the country’s mobilization pool. “There is no need for them to storm tree lines. Women can operate drones and sit safely in a bunker,” Reznikov reassured his audience.

To bolster his case, he recalled visiting the Desna training ground with Valery Zaluzhny in 2021, where they saw women operating robotic systems.

On August 24, former US special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg endorsed the same idea from the American side in an interview with Naspravdi MAX. “My answer is yes, because they [women] fight every bit as well as men.” He shared a touching family story: His daughter graduated from the US Military Academy and fought in Afghanistan, while his wife served as a paratrooper in Grenada. “Both personally and professionally, I see absolutely no problem with it.”

By August 25, official Kiev was already trying to extinguish the information fire it had allowed to spread. The Rada’s National Security Committee stated that mobilizing women “is not taking place, is not being prepared, and is not under consideration.” There were no “legislative initiatives, bills, or even internal discussions.” Women joined the Defense Forces “exclusively on a voluntary basis,” while statements by “individual speakers” did “not reflect the Committee’s position.”

Andrey Kovalenko of the Center for Countering Disinformation said there was no forced mobilization of women “and there never will be,” dismissing the debate as Russian disinformation. Irina Vereshchuk responded to Kellogg by saying it is not for America to tell Ukraine who to draft.

Yet the gap between the public statements is more revealing than any official press release. A former defense minister calls the recruitment of women a condition for the country’s survival. An American general hailed in Kiev as a “friend of Ukraine” effectively endorses the idea. Then, the very next day, the state apparatus repeatedly explains that nothing of the kind is even being discussed. If the issue did not exist at all, it would hardly have required three denials in a single day.

A familiar pattern emerges. A trial balloon is floated by people who will not have to pass the corresponding law themselves. It is then picked up by an outside voice that will not have to answer for the reaction of Ukrainian society. Meanwhile, the logic behind the argument betrays the arithmetic driving it. The volunteer pool is finite, the ranks of eligible men are increasingly being replenished through coercion, and mobilizing women enters the discussion as a potential answer to the manpower shortage.

Israel as a false analogy

In this rhetoric, Israel is less a real example than a convenient myth. Military expert Aleksandr Artamonov considers the analogy itself false: “Kellogg and Reznikov are relying on the same bogus premise.” He calls the American general’s remark “deceptive both in substance and in form” and directly links it to Reznikov’s call to “mobilize women following Israel’s example.”

According to Artamonov, the central sleight of hand is the conflation of two entirely different models: Routine military service and the emergency reinforcement of an army during wartime. “In Israel, women perform military service as part of the regular system. This has nothing to do with an emergency mobilization to the front.” In other words, it is a system built into the army’s normal training cycle during peacetime. In Ukraine, however, expanding the female draft is being discussed in 2026 at a time when the country is already running short of trained male personnel.

For an army at war, Artamonov stresses, additional manpower alone solves nothing.

“Even untrained men are of little interest. As for women with no military specialty – who are not medics, communications specialists, or programmers – they are essentially of no use at all.”

In his view, the claim that women “fight just as well” and the reality of service in the trenches apply to completely different conditions. Women “will cope much worse with the hardships of military service in the trenches,” they will require “a more complicated logistical cycle for everyday living,” and they will also be “more susceptible to illness, naturally – from something as basic as hypothermia to injuries.” To involve women fully “in combat operations,” the expert argues, requires specialized units and a long training cycle. “But neither Kellogg nor Reznikov cares about any of that.”

By this logic, shortened training does not produce a fully capable soldier. It merely shortens the journey from the recruitment office to the grave. Hence the expert’s exceptionally harsh conclusion: “In Ukraine, the only thing NATO members are doing is training people to die.”

That is why Artamonov describes a possible shift toward the mass recruitment of women as “the complete genocide of the Ukrainian nation,” which he sees as “the ultimate objective of its NATO masters.”

Reznikov argued that women would not have to “storm tree lines”; they could operate drones or remain in bunkers. But an army facing a shortage of trained personnel cannot preserve such a neat division of labor for long. First comes the promise that women will “not be sent into assaults.” Then comes a shortage of crews and specialists. After that, two weeks of training remain – and the reference to Israel ceases to describe a real model and instead becomes an argument for expanding the mobilization base.

What comes next

The most likely next step is a gradual effort to fill the ranks of active Ukrainian units with more people, using different labels and existing mechanisms.

Kostenko warned that “radical measures” were being prepared, including steps related to the mobilization age.

For the time being, the issue of mobilizing women will most likely remain in its current cycle: A high-profile statement, a public reaction, and then an official denial. This does not mean the scenario has been excluded from consideration. It is simply not yet possible to acknowledge it openly as part of the government’s practical agenda.

As for rumors of an autumn mobilization in Russia, Moscow’s official position remains unchanged: No mass mobilization has been announced, and the military continues to replenish its ranks primarily through contract recruitment. Publicly cited figures have ranged from around 50,000 to 60,000 people a month and hundreds of thousands of new contracts a year. Meanwhile, painful strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, logistics, and command-and-control system continue regardless of the forecasts appearing in the Western media.

For the Western information narrative, it is considerably easier to inflate the Russian threat than to explain in detail why Ukraine’s mobilization pool is shrinking and why the TCC system has become a domestic instrument of terror against Ukrainians.

Autumn, however, is almost here – and it will soon become clear whose forecast was the most accurate.

Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is due to deliver the keynote address at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on Friday. It will give markets their first chance to hear from the new Fed chief at the central bank’s annual gathering in Wyoming.

It comes at a fraught time. A recent Treasury market intervention announced by Secretary Scott Bessent with the aim of pushing long-term Treasury yields lower raised eyebrows on Wall Street, to put it mildly. It was a move that seems to be at cross-purposes with the Fed’s messaging.

The Jackson Hole gathering is normally a chance for the Fed to lay out its views on the economy and its interest-rate strategy. How much Warsh will divulge is unclear. He has tended to play things close to the vest so far. One thing is clear, though: The market is hardly convinced by what it has seen coming out of Washington.

RT breaks down the latest developments in the world’s most important market and what the Fed chair might have to say on Friday.

Bessent’s ill-fated move to tame yields

A little over a week ago, Bessent announced that the Treasury would at least double its buyback operations of long-dated Treasuries. It was, as many such things are, framed as a mere liquidity operation. It was hard not to notice that the operation involves buying long-dated bonds at a moment when the Treasury very much wants long-dated yields to come down.

Bessent’s move was widely seen to have failed, given that about a day later, long-dated yields had risen above their pre-intervention levels. With the Iran war dragging on, fears are mounting that another surge of inflation could be around the corner. Investors would therefore demand higher yields on bonds, making Treasury’s task considerably harder.

What the market is saying

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller recently penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he wrote that “governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding,” The fundamentals, in this case, are rising inflation expectations and runaway US debt that has many wondering if Treasuries are losing their hallowed safe-haven status.

Economist and strategist Philip Pilkington claimed that a “desperate” Bessent is “fighting against gravity” and that the intervention indicated that the Treasury chief fears that high yields could trigger a financial crisis, noting that last time yields were this high, the 2008 crisis was just around the corner.

Politico, meanwhile, wrote an article titled ‘Wall Street turns on Scott Bessent’ in which it surmised that the Treasury secretary’s credibility as a steward of US financial markets is “under threat.”

On the heels of another intervention

One may wonder what it is about the yen’s weakness that is keeping Bessent and his colleagues up at night. Officially, the intervention was taken to counter “excessive volatility and disorderly movements” in the yen. Lurking underneath is the fear that Japan could have to resort to unloading a portion of its massive US Treasury holdings in order to support its beleaguered currency. This move would, among other things, push US rates higher.

The intervention achieved little, however, with the yen edging higher before giving up around half of the gains within a week. It was a quixotic effort to begin with. The road is littered with the bones of interventions not supported by economic policy adjustments. When the monetary authorities intervene in markets, they have a tendency to get tested and end up having to defend the move over and over.

Two people trying to drive the same car in opposite directions

Evidently not feeling much comfort, however, was Bessent, who a few weeks later would go on to announce the intervention with the aim of pushing long-term yields lower.

Despite incessant calls for lower rates by President Donald Trump, Federal Reserve officials are debating possibly hiking rates at their next meeting in mid-September. Inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% target while the inflationary repercussions of the Iran war may yet be forthcoming.

Warsh has also discussed reducing the Fed’s $6.7 trillion portfolio of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, a move that would represent a tightening of monetary policy – not least because reducing the Fed’s holdings would remove a source of demand for longer-dated securities.

This would put the Fed at cross-purposes with the Treasury, which is seeking to increase its own balance sheet of Treasuries in order to suppress yields at the long end.

The Fed and Treasury are under no obligation to coordinate their moves – indeed, they are not supposed to. They have different jobs. But visibly conflicting policy, particularly when the moves effectively cancel each other out, is not typical and tends not to go over well on Wall Street.

The $40 trillion elephant in the room

The US fiscal situation continues to deteriorate with no end in sight and little prospect for improvement. In fact, it is beginning to snowball under the weight of its own interest expense. The national debt crossed the $40 trillion threshold earlier this month. It has been climbing at a pace of roughly $1 trillion every five months, adding the equivalent of a whopping $7-8 billion a day.

Entitlements – such as Medicaid and Social Security – are sacred cows in the US. No administration has succeeded in materially reforming these systemic pillars in generations, and few have seriously tried. The Trump administration has shown little appetite for the kind of spending restraint that would alter the country’s fiscal trajectory. That has left investors wondering whether the only source of restraint left is the bond market.

What to expect from Warsh

Investors are hoping that Warsh will weigh in substantially on the economy and the Fed’s inflation strategy at Jackson Hole. It may be too much to hope that he will address Bessent’s recent efforts. The Fed has often used the Wyoming gathering to shed light on its thinking about rate policy. So far since heading up the central bank, however, Warsh has given markets slim pickings, an approach that represents a break with his predecessors.

In fact, Warsh has floated the idea that the Fed should hold rate-policy meetings less frequently and is apparently considering scaling back the post-meeting press conferences. There is logic to this approach: When the market is kept guessing, it might indulge in less risk. Highly telegraphed interest rate policy can become a fat target for investors.

Trump picked Warsh to head the Fed in hopes that he would deliver the aggressive interest rate cuts that the president has been unabashedly advocating. Warsh, however, has demurred, but has also managed to avoid Trump’s wrath, which has more times than not been directed toward the remaining FOMC members, many of whom are holdovers.

That may make Friday’s speech all the more interesting. With the Treasury trying to push long-term yields down, the Fed arguing that higher yields can help restrain inflation, and the fiscal outlook putting pressure on both, Warsh will have plenty to talk about. Whether he chooses to do so is another matter.

Dozens of immigrants who disappeared from UK asylum hotels as children in 2023 are still unaccounted for, a parliamentary report released on Thursday has found.

Some 472 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children – some as young as 12 – went missing from Home Office-run accommodation for migrant minors.

According to the Director of Children’s Social Care at the Department for Education, Helen Waite, 432 have since been located, leaving 40 unaccounted for. Most have since turned 18, but two remain underage.

The committee “welcomed” that most had been found but said it remains “extremely concerned” about those still missing. It urged the Home Office to detail efforts to locate them, demanding updates every three months. Angela Eagle, then border security and asylum minister, told the committee last year that some of those found were “located in exploitative situations and may have been trafficked.”

At its peak in June 2023, more than 51,000 asylum seekers were housed in over 400 Home Office hotels across the UK. Human rights groups argued the facilities were unsuitable for children. In 2024, the High Court ruled that placement of unaccompanied minors in hotels was unlawful, and dedicated facilities were subsequently closed.

Immigration has become an increasingly contentious political issue in Britain amid continued Channel crossings, protests over asylum accommodation, high-profile migrant-linked crimes and renewed scrutiny of the country’s grooming-gangs scandal. The controversy contributed to mounting pressure on former Prime Minister Keir Starmer before his resignation earlier this summer. His successor, Andy Burnham, has pledged to stop small-boat crossings but declined to set a deadline.

Pentagon investigators reviewing the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan have uncovered classified documents that they say were deliberately hidden from previous probes. The discovery comes amid long-running accusations that the administration of former US President Joe Biden concealed failures surrounding the operation.

Sean Parnell, chairman of the Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel, said on Wednesday that his team had recovered “highly relevant classified documents” that “should have been disclosed.”

The material had been “stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found,” Parnell said in a video statement on X, five years after the deadly bombing of the Abbey Gate entrance to Kabul airport.

“After the team reviewed these documents, it became clear why someone tried to hide them,” he said.

Parnell did not disclose what the documents actually contain, who allegedly concealed them, or whether they relate to any specific decisions made by Biden or his officials.

However, he said his panel would follow the evidence “wherever it leads and to whoever it touches,” and promised veterans and the families of those killed “the full picture” of how and why decisions were made during the disastrous withdrawal.

Images of desperate Afghans clinging to a departing US military aircraft became emblematic of the withdrawal, which ended a 20-year American military presence with the Taliban back in power.

Republicans have since repeatedly accused Biden officials of ignoring or downplaying warnings that a complete US withdrawal could trigger the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and security forces, and of waiting too long to launch a full-scale evacuation.

House investigators have also consistently raised concerns that potentially relevant photographs, video, and other material from the evacuation were missing, deleted, or otherwise unavailable during subsequent probes. They have accused Biden-era officials of withholding information and frustrating congressional attempts to establish exactly how key decisions were made.

Biden administration officials have denied any cover-up and argued that the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Afghan government severely complicated the evacuation.

Denmark will pay around $47,000 to each Greenlandic woman who can attest to having been implanted with a contraceptive device without consent while Copenhagen controlled the island’s healthcare system. Around 4,500 women may qualify under the scheme.

The Danish parliament approved the payout of 300,000 kroner by a large majority on Thursday, with the compensation to be made tax-free regardless of the contraceptive method used or the number of incidents.

To receive the money, the claimant should make a sworn statement and provide enough detail to make the incident plausible under the scheme. Providing medical records is not required because many of the alleged incidents occurred decades ago and the relevant documentation may no longer exist.

The inquiry also collected testimony from 354 women describing 488 contraceptive incidents. Of 410 IUD incidents in those testimonies, 300 involved either no consent or no clear consent, 47 involved consent, and 63 contained insufficient information. The testimony also included 185 girls who had been under 18 at the time.

According to the inquiry, another reason for the “spiral scandal” was Denmark’s drive to impose its ideas about family planning on Greenlandic society. While Denmark has favored small nuclear families, Greenlandic society has to a large extent relied on large family and kin networks.

Greenland’s former Prime Minister Mute Inequnaaluk Bourup Egede has described Denmark’s actions as “genocide.” While Copenhagen has not agreed with the characterization, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologized on Denmark’s behalf last year, admitting that Greenlandic girls and women had suffered “systematic discrimination” because they were Greenlanders while calling the controversy a “dark chapter” in the country’s history.

Ukrainian forces have hit 214 civilian vessels flying the flags of various countries in the Black Sea since the start of the year, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Speaking at a regular briefing on Thursday, Zakharova lashed out at Ukraine, arguing that Vladimir Zelensky’s “regime continues to create military threats for the states of the Black Sea region.”

She pointed to a string of attacks on commercial shipping near Russian ports this month, including several raids on vessels operated by Turkish companies. Ukrainian drones hit the San Marino-flagged Necibe. Its 18 crew members were rescued by the Turkish-owned vessel Ural, which was also later struck by Ukrainian drones, leaving one Turkish citizen dead and eight other people injured.

Ukraine has escalated attacks in the Black Sea over the past several months. Ukrainian officials portray them as part of Zelensky’s much-hyped 40-day pressure campaign on Russia to end the conflict.

The Financial Times reported this month that Ukraine’s attacks drew the ire of the US, with Vice President J.D. Vance requesting that Zelensky halt raids on tankers serving the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal near Novorossiysk. The route mainly carries Kazakh crude and involves US majors Chevron and ExxonMobil. According to the FT, Kiev subsequently agreed not to target CPC infrastructure or non-Russian vessels unless they were sanctioned by Ukraine or are carrying Russian cargo.

In response to the campaign, Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine’s defense-related industry, vessels carrying military cargo, and port facilities in Odessa Region. The city is crucial for the country’s economy as it accounts for more than 90% of Ukraine’s seaborne exports, including agricultural products, which are the key source of income for the country.

The US has announced Operation Economic Outcast, which it calls “an unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran” and compares to D-Day in its effort to end “the Iranian threat.”

The US Treasury has expanded the scope of potential secondary sanctions across five areas of the Iranian economy, including digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. At the same time, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has added nearly 60 companies, individuals, and vessels to its sanctions lists over alleged links to Iranian oil revenue, procurement for missile and nuclear programs, cyberoperations, and the activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Five tankers have been designated as blocked property, while several licenses covering certain remittances and educational and cultural exchanges have been suspended.

Despite the forceful rhetoric accompanying the announcement, Washington has not imposed a comprehensive ban on all trade with Iran. The new sectoral determinations do not mean that every foreign company conducting a transaction with an Iranian counterpart will automatically be sanctioned. Rather, they provide the US administration with legal grounds for future enforcement, while specific penalties will continue to be imposed selectively. Washington is building a mechanism for more sustained pressure and preparing to direct that mechanism increasingly against Tehran’s foreign partners.

At the same time, the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program has renewed attention to its offer of up to $10 million dollars for information on senior IRGC leaders and associated members of the Iranian establishment, including Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The reward was first announced in March 2026 and has now become part of a revived psychological and intelligence campaign against Iran’s leadership and security apparatus.

The turn towards economic warfare comes after nearly six months of fighting. American and Israeli strikes inflicted substantial damage on Iran, destroyed parts of its military infrastructure and weakened elements of its regional network, but they failed to force Tehran to surrender or change its policies. Iran has retained missile and drone capabilities, the ability to threaten installations across the Gulf, and, most importantly, considerable influence over maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The military campaign has imposed a heavy cost on the US. According to the Pentagon, direct expenditure had reached at least $37.5 billion dollars by July. Sources and estimates by American analysts suggest that the US expended around 65% of its Patriot interceptor stockpile during the first five months of the war, while the number of available THAAD interceptors fell by at least 38% and the use of Tomahawk cruise missiles approached half of the national inventory. Domestic support for the war, meanwhile, remained low at approximately 35%.

With this in mind, the economic offensive doesn’t look like a demonstration of Washington’s confidence anymore – rather, it is an acknowledgement that further military action is getting unsustainable. The US needs time to rebuild its weapons stocks, reduce domestic political costs, and find an instrument capable of sustaining pressure without another expensive air campaign. Sanctions offer such an instrument because much of their immediate burden falls on foreign companies and the Iranian population, while Washington retains the ability to raise or lower the pressure at will.

Iran understands this as well. If Tehran concludes that a prolonged pause will allow the US to close its commercial and financial channels one by one, the Iranian leadership may attempt to deny Washington the time it needs through limited military escalation, renewed pressure on shipping or further strikes against regional infrastructure. Such a decision would carry enormous risks because it could once again unite the Gulf states against Iran, yet retaining control over the tempo of the crisis remains one of Tehran’s most important advantages.

Many Iranian organizations are already isolated by previous rounds of sanctions, and the new operation’s threat is directed mostly at Iran’s foreign partners. Companies and banks involved in the five designated sectors could face the freezing of assets under US jurisdiction, prohibitions on transactions with American citizens and entities, restrictions on correspondent accounts, and effective exclusion from the dollar clearing system. For an international bank, that threat can be more dangerous than a direct fine because losing access to dollar infrastructure could paralyze a substantial share of its global business.

China, however, throws a wrench into the American model. In 2025, Chinese buyers imported an average of around 1.38 million barrels of Iranian oil per day, accounting for more than 80% of Iran’s seaborne oil exports. The trade has been sustained through independent refineries with limited exposure to the US, intermediaries, yuan settlements, and schemes that obscure the origin of individual cargoes. By August 2026, deliveries had fallen to approximately 534,000 barrels per day from 1.57 million in February, although this decline resulted more from the war and naval blockade than from Beijing’s voluntary compliance with American sanctions.

Washington has already sanctioned individual Chinese technology suppliers and smaller refiners, but the new package does not target China’s largest banks. Sanctioning them could disrupt US-China negotiations, provoke retaliation, interfere with supplies of critical goods, and accelerate the movement of bilateral trade into payment systems beyond the dollar. The answer to the question of secondary sanctions against China is deeply contradictory. The US threatens Beijing with consequences, but it remains reluctant to adopt measures capable of inflicting comparable damage on the American economy itself.

Iran’s other partners do not form a united front. The United Arab Emirates, which accounted for roughly 30 percent of Iranian imports worth about $21 billion in 2024, has already suspended financial and commercial dealings with Tehran. Türkiye, however, whose annual trade with Iran amounts to around $5 to $6 billion, has given no indication that it intends to sever economic relations, particularly since Iran provides approximately 13% of Türkiye’s gas imports. Trade between Iran and Iraq exceeded $10 billion in 2025, while Baghdad pays Tehran an estimated $4 to $5 billion annually for natural gas used in electricity generation. Abandoning these supplies quickly would risk serious domestic disruption.

Pakistan and Oman are also important. Informal trade between Iran and Pakistan is estimated at approximately $4 billion, while the two governments have set a target of $10 billion. Trade with Oman reached around $1.5 billion in 2025. India has reduced its turnover with Iran to $1.63 billion, although most of that trade consists of food and other goods that New Delhi considers humanitarian. These countries may reduce overt operations and their banks will become more cautious, but they are unlikely to abandon commerce that supports energy security, supplies border regions, and preserves strategically important transport links.

Iran began preparing for prolonged isolation long before the current war, building its response around a gradual dispersal of trade and logistics. In the oil sector, the Goreh-Jask pipeline is particularly important because it carries crude to the Gulf of Oman and permits exports without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Its designed capacity is 1 million barrels per day, although its effective capacity is estimated at closer to 300,000 barrels and actual shipments through Jask remained far lower before the war. The route cannot yet replace the terminals of the Persian Gulf, but it can preserve a portion of Iranian exports during a blockade.

The port of Chabahar provides access to the Arabian Sea for non-oil trade, while overland crossings connect Iran with Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. After the crisis began, Pakistan opened six designated road routes linking its cities of Karachi and Gwadar, as well as Port Qasim, with the Iranian border crossings at Gabd and Taftan. Gas pipelines to Türkiye and Iraq allow part of Iran’s energy exports to continue without tankers, while border trade, barter, and settlements in national currencies reduce dependence on major international banks.

Maritime exports are simultaneously moving deeper into the grey economy. The methods include ship-to-ship transfers, the disabling of automatic identification systems, repeated changes of flags and ownership, the relabeling of crude oil, and long chains of intermediary companies. Digital assets and gold cannot support the entire foreign trade of a large country, but they can be used for individual payments, component procurement, and the preservation of reserves. The new sanctions will increase the cost of every such operation, but they are unlikely to eliminate a system that has been developing for decades.

When economic coercion undermines its own foundation

America’s capacity to impose secondary sanctions rests on the central role of the dollar in global trade. According to the International Monetary Fund, the dollar accounted for 57.13% of disclosed global foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026. Neither the yuan, the euro nor the existing BRICS platforms currently provide a comparable combination of liquidity, legal infrastructure and financial market depth.

Yet the dominance of a currency is not invulnerable, especially when access to it is increasingly used as an instrument of coercion. Every new threat against a foreign bank, tariff imposed on a trading partner, or attempt to force a third country to abandon an economically necessary contract increases the value of alternative mechanisms. Settlements in national currencies, central bank digital currencies, gold, regional clearing arrangements, and projects such as BRICS Pay remain fragmented, but sanctions are giving them both a political purpose and growing commercial demand.

The resilience of Iranian society, shaped by the war with Iraq, more than four decades of sanctions, repeated currency crises, and the constant threat of external pressure, should not be discounted either. Iranians have learned to adapt economic life to inflation, shortages, and instability, while the state has developed mechanisms for allocating scarce resources, using informal markets, and transferring much of the burden onto the private sector.

This does not mean that the new sanctions will be painless. They may accelerate inflation, reduce employment, restrict access to technology, and deepen public discontent. Yet declining living standards will not automatically lead to political revolt. External pressure often strengthens the authorities’ narrative, allows them to attribute the crisis to a foreign enemy, and increases the population’s dependence on state-controlled systems of distribution.

Even if implemented with maximum severity, Operation Economic Outcast is unlikely to weaken Iran rapidly or provoke an immediate mass uprising against its leadership. A prolonged struggle is far more probable, with Washington raising the cost of Tehran’s foreign relations while Iran expands alternative routes, exerts pressure in the Strait of Hormuz, and encourages its partners to adopt new settlement mechanisms.

Residents of the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta tore down makeshift migrant shelters as police fired rubber bullets during escalating protests over the migration crisis, videos posted online purport to show. Thousands of migrants remain in the territory nearly a month after a record mass crossing from neighboring Morocco, with many seeking asylum in the EU.

The crisis erupted in late July, when around 72,000 people crossed or attempted to cross into Ceuta, many by swimming around border barriers. Most were returned, but Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said around 5,000 remain. Ceuta President Juan Jesus Vivas has put the figure as high as 9,000.

Thousands of residents took to the streets on Wednesday for a second day of protests, demanding faster deportations and criticizing Madrid’s handling of the crisis. Demonstrators carrying Spanish flags marched toward government buildings chanting “No invasion – expulsion.”

Protesters later headed toward El Trampolin beach, where migrants had erected makeshift shelters. Police intervened to keep the groups apart and fired rubber bullets as tensions escalated, according to media reports. Several shelters were torn down during the confrontation.

The influx has strained the resources of the tiny Spanish territory with a population of roughly 84,000 people, with thousands sleeping on beaches, in forests, and on the streets. Local authorities have struggled to provide accommodation, food, and sanitation while processing asylum claims and determining who can be returned.

Ceuta’s government has accused Madrid of failing to do enough to resolve the crisis. Police cleared about 1,500 migrants from a beach last Thursday and transferred them to temporary facilities, but hundreds reportedly returned within hours amid fears of deportation.

The mass crossing has also left scores of migrants dead. At least 88 bodies recovered following the influx were being buried at Ceuta’s Muslim cemetery last week, with only nine identified, according to media.

Ceuta, along with Melilla, forms the EU’s only land border with Africa and has long been a destination for migrants seeking to reach Europe. The latest influx was fueled by economic hardship in Morocco and viral claims that Spain had effectively opened its border.

Spanish and Moroccan authorities have blamed smugglers and online misinformation for encouraging the crossings. Morocco has since reinforced security around Ceuta, while Madrid has moved to speed up asylum decisions and the return of migrants with no right to remain.

A Turkish-owned cargo vessel carrying fresh vegetables to Russia has been struck by drones in the Black Sea, leaving five crew members injured, according to Turkish media.

Ukraine intensified drone attacks on Russian commercial traffic in the Black Sea last month as part of a failed campaign intended to exert economic pressure on Moscow and force it to accept Kiev’s terms in the conflict.

The Cameroon-flagged Lider Bordo Mavi was struck by three drones off the Russian port of Tuapse, sparking a fire on board, according to Turkish media reports. Some news outlets suggested the overnight strikes were part of Kiev’s campaign against Russian maritime trade.

The ship belongs to a ten-vessel fleet operated by the Trabzon-based shipping company Lider Gida and departed the Turkish city port of Samsun on Tuesday. It was carrying fresh vegetables and had diverted to Tuapse from its original destination, the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

Türkiye “tested” by attacks on cargo ships

Erkut Celebi, head of the Trabzon Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the incident was the latest in a string of drone attacks on Turkish commercial vessels in the Black Sea and called on Ankara to provide financial support to affected companies.

“Türkiye is clearly being tested,” Celebi told reporters, warning that the attacks were threatening Black Sea trade and placing mounting pressure on Turkish exporters and shipowners.

Türkiye has remained largely neutral in the Ukraine conflict and maintained commercial ties with both Russia and Ukraine, drawing criticism from Kiev’s Western backers.

Ankara played a major role in negotiating safe passage for ships through the Black Sea since the escalation of the conflict in 2022. The arrangement largely held, despite occasional attacks on vessels in neutral waters that Moscow attributed to Ukrainian operations.

Russian officials warned that Kiev was playing with fire by attacking other countries’ commercial vessels. After the latest escalation, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Kiev of opening Pandora’s box. Russian retaliatory strikes have effectively cut off shipments through Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Moscow has indicated that it does not intend to restore the previous arrangement.

“Our Turkish colleagues are once again proposing that some form of agreement be reached so that shipping is not subjected to attacks. Yet it was not us who initiated these hostilities,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the Ebola outbreak in Uganda over after the country recorded no new confirmed cases for 42 consecutive days, the UN health agency said on Thursday. 

The announcement comes a month after the Ugandan authorities declared the country Ebola-free on July 28, following 42 days without a locally acquired case. The WHO, however, continued monitoring after the last confirmed patient – an imported case from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) – was discharged on July 16. The additional 42-day period, which represents twice the maximum incubation period for Ebola and is the international benchmark for determining that transmission linked to an outbreak has ended, has now passed without further cases. 

“Uganda has demonstrated that with decisive action, Ebola outbreaks can be brought under control quickly,” WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said. 

“Uganda has shown that Ebola can be stopped when leadership acts decisively, communities are trusted and public health systems reach people quickly,” Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Director-General Jean Kaseya said. “This is a victory for Uganda and an important lesson for our continent.” 

The announcement comes as the Ebola outbreak continues in the DR Congo.  According to the latest figures from the country’s health authorities, 5,713 confirmed cases have been recorded, including 2,744 deaths, putting the overall fatality rate at 48%. 

A catastrophic flash flood on Wednesday morning wreaked massive destruction upon Nepal’s northern mountainous region, bordering China. The torrent of water, rock, and mud wiped out entire villages, washed away roads and destroyed power infrastructure and dams.

Thousands of people are missing, Nepalese Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal has said, among them pilgrims to Mansarovar in Tibet, a sacred site for Hindus. “Town after town has been wiped out within hours,” he said. Nearly 400 of the 579 tourists missing are Indians.  

Nepal’s army has pressed in helicopters to rescue people trapped in mud and in buildings that survived the deluge, and deliver emergency supplies. More than 100 people have been rescued so far, including foreigners. 

In China, where the border customs post at Gyirong Port was wiped out by the rushing water and rocks, 558 people are missing – 260 of them foreigners. However, rescue efforts are hindered because of the lack of road connectivity and the thick mud covering the area.

Iranian businesses are increasingly turning to discounts and installment payments to keep customers shopping, as sanctions and the economic fallout from the US-Israeli war squeeze household budgets, RT’s Salman Khujuri reports.

The trend comes nearly six months after the US and Israel launched the war against Iran in late February. Large-scale fighting has subsided under a series of temporary agreements, but efforts to reach a lasting settlement have stalled as Washington ramps up economic pressure on Tehran.

Businesses in the Iranian capital are adapting to soaring prices and falling purchasing power, with some allowing customers to spread purchases over several payments.

Bobak Shirpour, who runs a large clothing retail business in Tehran, told RT on Thursday that worsening economic conditions after the war and years of sanctions prompted his company to seek suppliers offering better prices and quality. With many larger families unable to pay in cash, the retailer also introduced discounts and installment plans.

Shoppers interviewed by RT said installment plans have become increasingly useful as household budgets come under pressure. “They allow people to buy things they can’t afford to pay for in cash and pay in four installments instead. It gives people some peace of mind and helps them meet some of their basic needs despite these difficult circumstances,” one customer said.

Iranian households have been cutting spending on food and other essentials as inflation and the falling rial erode purchasing power, according to recent media reports. Installment shopping has also expanded to Iranian companies offering deferred-payment services as consumers struggle with the rising cost of living, the Financial Times reported earlier this month. 

Watch RT’s full report below:

The African Union (AU) will launch a continent-wide credit rating agency in Mauritius on October 5, a senior AU adviser said on Wednesday.

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), an AU-backed initiative, is preparing to launch the African Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA) as governments across the continent seek to address high borrowing costs. It was announced by Paul Sikazwe, the technical adviser on debt to the AU Commission, at a debt and development conference in Nairobi hosted by campaign group AfroDad.

“This is a sign of progress in our ambition to provide momentum for the reform of the international financial architecture,” Sikazwe said, as quoted by Reuters. 

Misheck Mutize, the APRM’s lead expert on credit rating agencies, said earlier this month that the agency should improve the quality and diversity of information available to investors. He said its role will be to strengthen the credibility of credit opinions rather than simply provide higher ratings.

African governments have for years criticized major international rating agencies such as Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P. South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana raised similar concerns in 2025, saying countries with comparable fiscal indicators can receive different treatment. 

“There is already a bias against the African continent by multinational institutions, by the investing community, by rating agencies,” he said. Ghana and Zambia have also criticized global rating agencies, saying downgrades scare off investors and worsen their access to credit.

British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond could become legitimate targets for Russian strikes if Kiev continues to use UK-supplied weapons for attacks on Russian territory, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned.

The comments come amid rapidly deteriorating relations between Moscow and London, and a day after Ukrainian forces reportedly used British-French Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles in a strike on Donetsk that wounded at least eight civilians, including two children.

“We have repeatedly warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons against Russian territory could be directed against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond,” Zakharova said during a press briefing on Thursday.

Those responsible for attacks on Russian civilians will be punished, she added, warning that their “accomplices and instigators” will also face consequences.

Zakharova accused successive British governments of pursuing a long-term objective of inflicting a so-called “strategic defeat” on Russia, and urged “all residents of the United Kingdom to think about the inevitable, catastrophic consequences of the hostile steps taken by their own authorities.”

Earlier this week, Britain approved the transfer of classified technology needed to help Ukraine assemble Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles domestically.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by accusing Britain of “participating in this war on the side of the Kiev regime” and warning that Russian forces are gathering intelligence on sites involved in producing missiles and other military equipment in Ukraine in order to destroy them.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also warned last week that Moscow has “every right to regard the proudly proclaimed direct involvement of British missile forces in strikes against Russia as participation in the war, with all the consequences that entails.”

Two employees at Germany’s Frankfurt Airport have died in a rare malaria outbreak caused by infected mosquitoes believed to have been accidentally brought in by plane from a malaria-endemic country.

The outbreak began in early July, according to the Frankfurt Public Health Department. The first worker died shortly afterward, with the malaria diagnosis confirmed posthumously. Authorities traced the outbreak to the airport, where operator Fraport set traps and captured several mosquitoes, sending them for genetic analysis to determine their origin. Staff were advised to seek medical attention if symptoms developed.

In mid-July, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s federal disease-control agency, confirmed four cases among airport employees.

“The affected individuals fell ill between July 4 and 6, 2026,” the RKI wrote in its Epidemiological Bulletin. “It is assumed that the infection was transmitted by an infected Anopheles mosquito imported by plane.”

On Wednesday, Frankfurt health authorities announced that a second infected worker had died. They insisted, however, that “for the population of Frankfurt, the risk is considered very, very low.”

“The disease is not transmissible from person to person but is always transmitted by mosquitoes,” the authorities said in a statement to German media. They did not confirm the total number of cases but said those affected were receiving treatment.

Frankfurt health chief Peter Tinnemann similarly sought to reassure residents, telling DPA news agency that “the risk to the Frankfurt population is insignificant.”

The disease is concentrated mainly in tropical regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest WHO data shows an estimated 610,000 people died from malaria worldwide in 2024 out of roughly 282 million cases – around 9 million more infections than the previous year. More than half of the deaths occurred in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Niger.

Russia has no reason to escalate the Ukraine conflict because its forces are already advancing, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has told Bloomberg.

A Bloomberg report published on Wednesday cited “volume of chatter” among foreign policy hawks in Moscow as indicating that the Russian government could potentially use nuclear weapons. It also claimed “three people close to the Kremlin” told it Moscow is preparing to intensify long-range missile and drone strikes as it sees the diplomatic path as pointless.

In comments added to the report on Thursday, Peskov distinguished battlefield action from Moscow’s response to Kiev’s increasing efforts to cause economic damage with attacks deep inside Russia.

“Ukraine is trying to hit our economic infrastructure, our trading infrastructure, thus causing a response from our side, and this will be a heavy response,” Peskov said. “But if you’re speaking about military escalation, we simply don’t need it because we are advancing anyway.”

The campaign was also reportedly intended to convince US President Donald Trump that Ukraine still has a viable path to victory and persuade Washington to approve additional deliveries of as many as 300 Patriot missile interceptors. Stockpiles of the costly US-made weapons have been depleted by the war on Iran.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the Ukrainian campaign as opening Pandora’s box. Retaliatory Russian strikes have since virtually paralyzed Ukrainian shipping through Black Sea ports and caused congestion in Romania, where traffic has been rerouted. Reuters reported that as many as 70 cargo ships were waiting to pass through the Danube-Black Sea Canal, which has become a logistical bottleneck.

Bloomberg also claimed that Putin “could eventually opt to use tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort.” Russia’s nuclear doctrine allows nuclear weapons to be used only in response to a nuclear attack or during a conventional conflict that poses a critical threat to the existence of the Russian state.

The Landesweingut Kloster Pforta, one of Germany’s oldest wineries, faces insolvency by 2027, according to an expert report commissioned by the state government. Its troubles, from an unsustainable business model to high staffing costs, come amid a wider German wine slump driven by falling consumption and cheaper imports.

Owned by Saxony-Anhalt, Kloster Pforta is one of Europe’s oldest continuously operating wineries. Cistercian monks founded the monastery in 1137 and planted the Pfortenser Koeppelberg vineyard in 1154. The state took ownership after German reunification in 1993, but the estate still grows rare historic varieties, including Weisser Heunisch and White Elbling, alongside Riesling, Pinot Blanc, and Pinot Gris.

An independent report by auditing firm Ecovis, cited by the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday, found that the winery can no longer secure credit or maintain liquidity on its own.

Auditors blamed high payroll costs, inefficient vineyard use, and weak sales and marketing, compounded by a disastrous 2024 harvest and the wider wine-market slump. To avoid bankruptcy, Kloster Pforta now plans to halve its vineyards, cut staff, and receive a €2 million injection under a four-year restructuring plan.

German wine has been in decline for years. German Wine Institute (DWI) data earlier this year showed that annual consumption fell from a Covid-era peak of 24.3 liters per adult to 21.5 liters – below pre-pandemic levels.

Cheap imports add to the squeeze: Spanish bulk wine, for example, enters Germany at just €0.91 ($1.06) per liter, making it difficult for domestic producers to compete at the €1-to-€3-per-bottle end of the market.

Wine woes mirror Germany’s wider slump

The winery’s troubles come amid a broader German slump, with near-zero growth, high energy costs, and business insolvencies at a 20-year high. Since moving away from Russian energy in 2022, Germany has turned to costlier supplies, while major manufacturers have closed factories amid weaker demand.

Germany is considering pouring funds into Britain’s nuclear program as European NATO nations grow increasingly hesitant to rely on the US nuclear umbrella, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday, citing sources.

German officials are discussing financial and industrial support for Britain’s Trident submarine nuclear weapons program rather than pursuing a national arsenal, with one source citing Germany’s World War II guilt as a factor, the newspaper said.

“We have a very strong interest that the existing nuclear powers in Europe extend their capabilities,” one well-placed source told the newspaper.

Berlin is reportedly exploring whether German money or industry could contribute to the next generation of British nuclear submarines, missiles, or uranium enrichment for future warheads. One British defense source, however, questioned whether German companies possess the highly specialized experience needed to build and maintain Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet, which has been reeling under maintenance and manpower issues.

“Policymakers are waking up each morning and asking themselves what the hell the Americans are going to do tomorrow,” a German diplomatic source told The Telegraph.

Rather than respond by seeking a national nuclear weapon, Berlin has increasingly looked for ways to bind Germany into the British and French deterrents, the article says.

Germany remains a non-nuclear-weapon state under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is formally barred from manufacturing or controlling atomic weapons. The 1990 Two Plus Four Treaty, which paved the way for German reunification, also prohibited foreign nuclear weapons and their carriers from being stationed in the territory of the former East Germany.

Berlin nevertheless already takes part in NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements and is believed to store 20 US B61 bombs at Buchel Air Base in western Germany under US custody, with German aircraft assigned a potential role in delivering them during a potential NATO nuclear operation.

Last month, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) reported that at least one NATO country raised “concern about the active research and development work being carried out in Germany that has a nuclear weapons focus.”

It added that NATO specialists believe Germany could produce the necessary fissile material “within one to three months” and build a functioning nuclear explosive device “within a year” without conducting a full-scale test.

Moscow has warned that any NATO plans to buttress its nuclear umbrella are a “direct strategic threat” to Russia.

Nepal has ramped up rescue efforts as it searches for thousands of people missing along its northern border with China, where a catastrophic flash flood wiped out towns and villages on Wednesday morning, killing more than 350 people.

Nepalese Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said Thursday that thousands of families have lost their homes and remain untraced.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority in Nepal said 826 people are missing, with the Nuwakot and Rasuwa districts being the worst affected. The authority said 44 Nepalese Army personnel, 28 police personnel, and 13 Armed Police Force personnel are among those missing.

The Nepalese Army and private helicopters are conducting rescue missions, with about a 100 people rescued from the affected areas, spokesperson Brigadier General Raja Ram Basnet said. Army teams also rescued people trapped in the Trishuli hydropower project’s facilities.

At least eight foreign nationals were airlifted to Kathmandu by the army, he said.

Videos posted online by the army show its personnel rescuing people trapped in the thick, concrete-like mud covering many of the villages and towns that stood in the flood’s path.

The aftermath destruction of Nepal-Tibet flood seen from the helicopter view.
Why they built the houses near the river bank. pic.twitter.com/lYTgdyHo5s

— Sohail (@onlysohail_) August 27, 2026

“Rehabilitation is the major concern” for the Nepalese government as people have lost their homes, the spokesman for the Nepalese Prime Minister’s Office, Hemraj Aryal, told RT India. “The main thing is revitalizing and re-engaging the people in the society.”

He said rescue teams are already on most sites where people need help, but added that reconnecting the roads will take time as the devastation is huge.

China, where 558 people are missing in Tibet, dispatched 111 emergency rescuers to Gyirong Port in Xizang carrying detection, life-saving, demolition, communication, and support equipment. With roads washed away or damaged, the team was flown from Chengdu early Thursday morning, landing at Dingri Airport in Shigatse.

PM @narendramodi talk to nepal pm @ShahBalen and assured him of all possible assistance.

The Nepali Army is conducting a rescue operation. See the photos of the helicopter rescue operation.

Pls pray for #Nepal#NepalFloods #Nepal #Rasuwa #FlashFlood #Floods #Dhading pic.twitter.com/iRCC60rHtF

— Ravi Pandey🇮🇳 (@ravipandey2643) August 26, 2026

The People’s Liberation Army also sent a group to take over command over military rescue forces, including aviation, medical, transportation, and engineering troops.

The People’s Daily said a barrier lake has formed about 2.5 km from Gyirong Port, posing “significant challenges to ongoing rescue efforts.”

बाढी प्रभावितहरूको उद्धारमा #नेपालीसेना....
जहाँ संकट, त्यहाँ #नेपालीसेना !!!#NepaliArmy#BhoteKoshiFlood pic.twitter.com/roAhhUGMNt

— Nepali Army (@NepaliArmyHQ) August 27, 2026

Nepal’s Khanal said about 500 foreign nationals are out of contact, many of them on pilgrimage to Mansarovar, a sacred site for Hindus, in Tibet. He said the Nepalese government has been in contact with foreign embassies on the missing foreign nationals.

“We are as committed to the safety and well-being of foreign nationals as we are to the Nepali citizens,” he said in Kathmandu.

All-out Rescue, Relief Efforts after Mudslide Hits Border Port in Xizang

The Chinese PLA Western Theater Command dispatched a directing group to the Xizang Autonomous Region in southwest China on the morning of August 27 to coordinate the military forces’ joint rescue operations… pic.twitter.com/FUbAwPNGEu

— China Military Bugle (@ChinaMilBugle) August 27, 2026

Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah and Infrastructure Development Minister Sunil Lamsal have travelled to Bidur, in Nuwakot. They will meet local officials and discuss relief and rehabilitation as well as how to restore the damaged infrastructure.

India flew in 10 tons of relief supplies to Nepal, including temporary shelters, blankets, hygiene kits, solar lamps, and medicines, on Wednesday evening. A second flight carrying medicines and food packets took off Thursday morning.

India, China, and the World Bank are coordinating financial and other assistance for rescue and reconstruction, the Kathmandu post reported, adding the World Bank has offered to mobilize up to NPR 25 billion (about $165 billion) in emergency assistance.

Ukrainian basketball player Kate Koval has left Louisiana State University’s women’s basketball team less than two weeks after the team signed Russian center Anna Minaeva.

Head coach Kim Mulkey announced Koval’s departure on Monday, saying the Ukrainian had decided to leave the program “for personal reasons.”

“We will respect her privacy on her decision, but we had a long talk about it, and it was a hard decision for her,” Mulkey said.

The announcement came after Mulkey revealed last week that she had spoken privately with Koval about whether she was prepared to play alongside Minaeva and “pass the ball to each other.”

Mulkey said she had hoped the Ukrainian and Russian players could become “ambassadors” for friendship and perhaps even help bring an end to the conflict between their countries. Koval reportedly responded: “I doubt that.”

Mulkey also said she had made clear that geopolitical tensions would not influence LSU’s recruitment decisions.

“I cannot make a decision to not recruit somebody that can help our program because of a conflict between two countries,” she said.

“It takes tremendous courage to leave home at just 17 years old and travel across the world to pursue a dream. I’m excited to support and guide Anna as she begins this next chapter at LSU,” Mulkey said at the time.

LSU has said Minaeva could develop into “one of the college game’s most effective post players.” She previously played for MBA Moscow, competing in the Russian Premier League and Superleague.

Ukrainian athletes have repeatedly avoided interactions with Russian competitors since the escalation of the conflict between Kiev and Moscow in 2022.

In May, Ukrainian rhythmic gymnasts were filmed covering their ears and eyes while the Russian and Belarusian national anthems were played at the European Championships in Varna, Bulgaria.

The tournament marked the first time in nearly five years that athletes from Russia and Belarus had been allowed to compete under their national flags, after World Gymnastics and European Gymnastics lifted restrictions earlier that month.

The US-Canada trade war is reaching the bathroom, with tariffs on paper products threatening to push up prices for toilet paper and other everyday essentials for Americans.

Trade talks between the two neighbors collapsed last Friday, with both sides accusing the other of making last-minute changes to a proposed comprehensive deal. US President Donald Trump immediately imposed 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, including wine, cement, plywood, and clothing. Not to be outdone, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to respond “dollar for dollar,” with Ottawa announcing duties of up to 50% on around 700 American products on Tuesday.

Paper products are among the hardest hit, with Canada targeting toilet paper and facial tissue with 25% duties, along with paper towels and napkins at 50%. Chemical wood pulp used to make such products also faces a 50% tariff.

Canada is the main source of US toilet paper imports, supplying $383.4 million worth in 2025 – about two-thirds of the imported total – according to US International Trade Commission data. Mexico was a distant second at $63 million. Canada is also the main foreign supplier of wood pulp to the US, including northern bleached softwood kraft pulp (NBSK), a key material in toilet paper and paper towels. Canadian pulp reportedly accounts for around 30% of US toilet paper and 50% of paper towel production.

Toilet paper is far from the only potential casualty of the trade war. Canada’s measures mirror many products targeted by Washington, with higher duties covering everything from fish, cheese, clothing, and cosmetics to steel and aluminum goods, motorcycles, smartphones, and exercise equipment. Canadian Industry Minister Melanie Joly said that the counter-tariffs were aimed primarily at protecting businesses while also applying political pressure ahead of the November 3 US midterm elections.

“That gives us this week. It gives us next week,” Christopher Sands, head of the Center for US-Canada Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told AP on Wednesday. “Time to take a breather and talk about how to avert an all-out trade war.”

The US has accused Chinese hackers it described as “state-backed” of breaking into NASA, the Federal Reserve, and other sensitive government networks, just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in Washington for talks with President Donald Trump.

Beijing rejected the allegations. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said China “opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks” and urged the US to “stop using cybersecurity issues to smear or discredit China.”

The Justice Department and FBI announced on Wednesday that they seized three internet domains linked to two hacking platforms allegedly operated by a Chinese group known as QTFY. The US authorities claimed the operation targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Senate, and several government departments, as well as hospitals, telecommunications providers, power companies, financial institutions, and defense contractors.

The latest accusations come little more than a month after Trump accused Beijing of meddling in US elections, claiming China illicitly acquired 220 million American voter files during the 2020 election cycle in what he called the “largest compromise” of election data in US history.

China dismissed that allegation as “groundless” and “entirely fabricated.” Trump’s assertions of election hacking were met with skepticism even among some of his supporters, as the documents released by the White House only showed Chinese interest in collecting publicly available or commercially obtainable American voter information.

“We spy like hell on them too,” Trump told reporters. “We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about,” Trump said he told Xi, describing the two countries’ espionage activities as a “double-edged sword.”

Beijing has made similar accusations against Washington, claiming last October that the NSA conducted a years-long cyberattack on China’s National Time Service Center, which supports critical sectors including finance, energy, transportation, and defense. The NSA did not confirm or deny the allegation.

The renewed cyber accusations come ahead of Xi’s expected visit to the US on September 24. Trump said he plans to host the Chinese leader following their talks in May in Beijing, as the two sides seek to manage disputes over trade, technology, and cybersecurity, as well as the sanctions threats against nations that continue trading with Iran.

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has warned that AI and social media are eroding people’s ability to think and feel, while powerful interests exploit technology, politics, and war for profit.

Speaking to RT on Wednesday, the legendary musician welcomed Australia’s decision to bar fully AI-generated songs from its music charts, saying streaming platforms have already gutted musicians’ livelihoods with minuscule royalties while concentrating ownership and profits in the hands of Big Tech.

“So that piracy has almost destroyed everything. But if they are then allowed to use AI to produce fodder for their very tame audience who pays so much a month to get any music that they want from anywhere… Unfortunately, we know that a large number of that audience won’t be able to tell the difference between AI and Pink Floyd, or Neil Young, or Bob Dylan, or The Beatles or anything else.”

“It reduces the size of your brain and your capacity to think and your capacity to feel,” Waters said. “In fact, it reduces everything human about anybody who goes in that direction.”

“So where do you draw the line? I’m not sure,” he added. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a factual, you know, a sort of fact-based library, if that’s all there was? But it’s not. It’s controlling our political motivations and our feelings and our emotions, and also releasing dopamine.”

“We live in a world that is controlled now by gangsterism,” he said. He cited Israel’s destruction of Palestinian communities in Gaza and the occupied territories, as one example, while accusing Washington of openly stealing Venezuela’s oil wealth through coercion.

Turning to Ukraine, Waters blamed the failure to implement the Minsk agreements and the collapse of the 2022 Istanbul peace talks, accusing Western governments of preventing a negotiated settlement.

Waters warned that the Ukraine conflict has since escalated “in a very, very dangerous way” and increasingly resembles the future of warfare, dominated by drones and missiles.

“Just who gets killed, nobody cares anymore,” Waters said, “because all they’re interested in is making money.”

Watch the full interview below

Iran has praised China for rejecting US threats to impose sanctions on countries that continue to trade with the Islamic Republic, with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf saying on Wednesday that Tehran’s strategic partnership with Beijing “needs no one’s permission.”

Ghalibaf welcomed China’s “principled statement” rejecting “illegal sanctions against Iran” in a post on X.

“The Iran-China comprehensive strategic partnership is rooted in mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and a shared vision for a multipolar world,” he wrote. “This relationship needs no one’s permission.”

His remarks came after Beijing strongly rejected Washington’s threat of secondary sanctions against countries and companies that continue doing business with Iran. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that Beijing firmly opposes sanctions that have no basis in international law or authorization from the UN Security Council.

Washington unveiled a new round of economic measures against Tehran on Monday as part of what the Trump administration described as an effort to further isolate Iran from the global economy. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced sanctions against nearly 60 individuals, entities, and vessels and warned foreign countries and companies that they could face penalties for maintaining financial ties with Tehran.

The measures targeted companies based in mainland China and Hong Kong but stopped short of sanctioning major Chinese financial institutions. Beijing has been the biggest buyer of Iranian oil for years, although flows have been severely curtailed since Washington resumed its blockade of Iranian ports in mid-July.

Iran has denounced the expanded sanctions as a violation of international law and argued that Washington’s attempt to force other countries to sever economic relations with Tehran amounts to interference in their sovereignty.

Ukrainian forces launched a major missile strike on Donetsk, the capital of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), on Wednesday, damaging residential buildings and civilian infrastructure, regional head Denis Pushilin has said.

The strikes targeted several locations in the east of Donetsk, with most of the casualties reported near the Donetsk-City mall. The Western-supplied munitions used included the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles, according to Pushilin.

At least eight civilians, including two minors, were injured in the strikes near the mall, while another man was wounded by the detonation of an unexploded ordnance piece at another location, Pushilin said.

Two other civilians were wounded in the Ukrainian attacks elsewhere in the DPR, the governor added. A total of eight residential buildings, 11 civilian infrastructure sites, and multiple cars were damaged in the attacks across the city and beyond, he said.

An RT crew filmed the aftermath at one of the strike sites near the Druzhba sports center in Donetsk. The building, which belonged to a long-defunct research institute, partially collapsed after apparently being hit by multiple projectiles, while residential buildings nearby sustained minor damage, footage shows.

The Russian Investigative Committee has launched a probe into the attack, with operatives working at the affected locations to collect evidence and assess the damage.

“During the inspection of the scene, it was established that the massive attack resulted in extensive damage and destruction to apartment buildings, civilian infrastructure, and passenger vehicles. The enemy targeted civilian areas of the city, where there was no weaponry or military equipment,” an operative with the committee has said.

“Ukrainian terrorists are like junkies,” the diplomat, who leads a Foreign Ministry mission for tracking war crimes in the Ukraine conflict, said on social media. “If they get their hands on something, they want to use as soon as possible, usually in the worst possible way for others.”

Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian military conducted a deadly drone strike on an intercity passenger bus in the neighboring Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR). The attack killed at least nine civilians and injured another five, according to local governor Leonid Pasechnik.

Kiev has stepped up long-range attacks against Russia in recent weeks, repeatedly targeting its energy and civilian infrastructure. Moscow has condemned the strikes as indiscriminate terrorist attacks and has mounted a retaliatory campaign, which has already resulted in heavy damage to Ukrainian military-related industrial sites, as well as brought the country’s maritime traffic to a halt.

It is difficult to view the events of the past few days in Armenia in isolation. On August 24, Nikol Pashinyan announced that Yerevan would soon begin preparing a formal application for membership in the European Union. The very next day, former President Robert Kocharyan – one of the current prime minister’s most recognizable opponents and the leader of the Armenia Alliance parliamentary bloc – was detained.

Officially, the two developments are unrelated. The former president has been charged with money laundering, accepting bribes, and abuse of office. Investigators claim that, during his presidency, he was involved in transferring state property to himself and his associates on favorable terms. The authorities, meanwhile, categorically deny that Kocharyan’s arrest was politically motivated.

But politics is shaped not only by the substance of a criminal case, but also by its context. Kocharyan is not simply a former official facing questions nearly two decades after leaving office. He leads an opposition alliance, has consistently opposed a break with Moscow, and is an outspoken critic of Pashinyan’s foreign policy. At the same time, other government opponents have also faced investigations or restrictions, including members of the Strong Armenia party, Samvel Karapetyan, Gagik Tsarukyan, and senior clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church. As a result, even if formal legal grounds exist, every new case is inevitably seen as part of a broader campaign to clear the political field.

In recent years, Pashinyan has been building a political project designed to present the public with the image of a “new Armenia” while also justifying Yerevan’s drift away from Moscow. That project is a “European Armenia.” Within this framework, abandoning the country’s previous foreign policy is portrayed not as the consequence of past failures, but as a historic choice in favor of “sovereignty, peace, and democracy.” Russia, meanwhile, becomes a convenient explanation for nearly every domestic problem, while opposition figures with political, economic, or personal ties to Moscow are cast as obstacles standing in the way of this new Armenia.

This is precisely why Kocharyan’s arrest carries significance far beyond the criminal case itself. To a domestic audience, it symbolizes a final break with the old elite. To the West, it can be presented as a campaign against corruption and alleged Russian influence. To the opposition, it sends a warning that participation in political life no longer offers any protection from criminal prosecution.

Pashinyan appears to be betting that Brussels and Washington will judge Yerevan’s actions primarily through a geopolitical lens. As long as the Armenian leadership continues distancing itself from Moscow, openly curbing pro-Russian forces, and advancing a Western, openly Russophobic agenda in the region, the shortcomings of “Armenian democracy” will be treated more leniently. Put simply, this is a gamble on political indulgence: what might otherwise be called pressure on the opposition can instead be framed as “defending democracy from foreign interference.”

That calculation, however, is already running up against some inconvenient facts. In the June 7, 2026 parliamentary election, Pashinyan’s party received 49.8% of the vote, while the two main alliances advocating close ties with Russia won roughly 31% between them. Numerous violations were reported, and even OSCE observers noted that the concentration of arrests and criminal proceedings targeting opposition figures had created the appearance of “selective justice.” They also documented pressure on public-sector employees and a clear bias toward the ruling party on public television. Six candidates from the opposition Strong Armenia party were detained the day before the vote.

Tellingly, even Freedom House – an American organization whose objectivity has been repeatedly questioned because of its lenient treatment of pro-Western governments that emerged from “color revolutions” – does not classify Armenia as a free country. In Freedom House’s 2026 rankings, Armenia scored just 54 out of 100 and retained its status as “partly free.” Judicial independence and due process received only one point out of four. An increasingly clear pattern is emerging: formal democratic procedures remain in place, while administrative powers and the criminal justice system are applied to political actors in a profoundly uneven manner.

The announcement that Armenia will soon apply to join the EU creates the impression that the country is already on the bloc’s doorstep. In reality, it has not even reached the beginning of accession talks; it has yet to begin the application process itself.

The law adopted by Armenia in March 2025 to launch the process of European integration was not an application for membership – a point the European Parliament itself explicitly acknowledged. As of August 26, 2026, Armenia has neither candidate status nor a European Council decision recognizing its European perspective, much less open accession negotiations. The European Commission’s official list of candidates and potential candidates includes nine countries and Kosovo. Armenia is not among them.

The substance of the first EU-Armenia summit, held in May 2026, is equally revealing. The official documents express support for Armenian sovereignty and call for partnerships in transportation, energy, digital development, and security, but contain no commitment to grant the country candidate status or draw up a road map for accession. Brussels welcomes Yerevan’s rapprochement, and some officials have all but promised the moon. But no one in Europe is waiting for Armenia.

For the European Union, Armenia is valuable as a partner in the South Caucasus and as a foothold for weakening Moscow’s influence in a region that has historically formed part of Russia’s sphere of national interests. All of this makes Yerevan useful to Brussels. But a “useful partner” is not the same thing as a future EU member. The bloc can spend years deepening sector-specific integration, liberalizing visa rules, and financing reforms without making any commitment to membership. The experience of Türkiye and Georgia’s stalled European path shows that even formal candidate status guarantees nothing.

Moreover, Armenia’s accession would require the unanimous consent of all 27 EU member states, full adoption of the bloc’s body of law, and withdrawal from the Eurasian Economic Union’s common customs regime. Pashinyan himself has previously acknowledged that membership in both integration blocs at once is impossible. This is therefore not an expansion of Armenia’s multi-vector foreign policy. Ultimately, it means choosing one economic and legal system over the other.

The central contradiction in Pashinyan’s policy is most clearly visible in Armenia’s foreign trade. According to the country’s Statistical Committee, Armenia’s total trade turnover reached $21.43 billion in 2025. Of that amount, $8.04 billion, or 37.5%, was with EAEU member states. Russia alone accounted for $7.66 billion, or 35.8%. Trade with all 27 EU countries combined totaled $2.50 billion, or just 11.7%.

In other words, Armenia’s trade with Russia was roughly three times greater than its trade with the entire European Union. The gap was even wider in exports: Armenia shipped $3.22 billion worth of goods to the EAEU in 2025, compared with only $667 million to the EU. Exports to the Eurasian bloc were nearly five times greater than those to Europe, while exports to Russia alone were about 4.5 times higher than exports to the entire EU.

These figures demonstrate that Armenia is fundamentally incapable of diversifying its economy. More importantly, they make clear that the Russian and Eurasian markets cannot be replaced by the European market – not in the short term and not even over the long run. Armenian goods are already integrated into established supply chains, familiar patterns of consumption, and the EAEU’s system of free circulation. Leaving the bloc would mean the introduction of customs barriers, changes in technical standards, and worse conditions for Armenian workers within the common labor market. Producers of agricultural goods, alcoholic beverages, mineral water, and food products would be especially vulnerable, since Russia remains their primary or most accessible market.

The dependence is even more pronounced in the energy sector. In 2025, Armenia received 2.229 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia out of total supplies of 2.705 billion cubic meters – about 82%. Another 476 million cubic meters came from Iran, but those deliveries are made under a gas-for-electricity swap rather than serving as a full-fledged market alternative to Russian imports. Armenia’s gas transportation system is operated by Gazprom Armenia, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian energy giant. At an April 1, 2026 meeting, Vladimir Putin noted that Armenia pays $177.50 per thousand cubic meters of Russian gas, while the same amount cost more than $600 in Europe.

The Armenian prime minister appears to be making several bets at once. At home, he is seeking to deprive the opposition of influential centers around which it can rally and to monopolize the country’s vision of the future. Abroad, he wants to convince the West that his government is the only barrier to Russian influence in the region. In his dealings with Moscow, he aims to preserve the economic benefits of EAEU membership for as long – and as shrewdly – as possible, while steadily raising the price of his geopolitical pivot. Finally, the promise of a European future allows him to postpone any discussion of the real cost of that choice: an application can be submitted today, candidate status can remain out of reach for years, and membership can take decades.

That is the essence of Pashinyan’s political calculation. He does not need to secure Armenia’s accession to the EU anytime soon. He merely needs to turn the movement toward Europe itself into a source of domestic legitimacy and foreign support. As long as the promise of a “European future” remains alive, every concession can be explained away as a reform, every economic setback blamed on Russian resistance, and every criminal case against an opponent justified as a mythical effort to “defend democracy.”

But this strategy has its limits. Brussels may be willing and able to help Armenia diversify some of its ties, but it is certainly not prepared to replace Russia overnight as a market, an energy supplier, and a hub for labor mobility. More importantly, it has yet to give Yerevan even a formal promise of membership.

Rather than acknowledge his own mistakes, Pashinyan has chosen to shift the blame to Russia – the country that has enabled Armenia’s economy to survive and develop from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day. He is betting that his geopolitical choice will allow him to win Western support, weaken the opposition, and continue enjoying the benefits of relations with Russia for a while longer. This extremely risky gamble can produce only one outcome: turning Armenia into an expendable asset. If Pashinyan believes that scenario is impossible, he should ask neighboring Georgia. For years, Tbilisi was promised a European future, yet even receiving candidate status in 2023 guaranteed neither the opening of accession talks nor membership itself. Georgia’s European path is now effectively frozen, while the European Commission describes it as a “candidate country in name only.”

The experience of Armenia’s other neighbor, Türkiye, is even more revealing. Ankara’s institutional rapprochement with Europe began with the 1963 Association Agreement. Türkiye applied for membership in 1987, became a candidate in 1999, and opened accession talks in 2005. More than 20 years later, the negotiations remain frozen and the prospect of membership is deeply uncertain. Erdogan was recently forced to acknowledge that joining the EU is no longer a priority for Ankara. The lesson is clear: the promise of European integration can be used for decades as an instrument of political influence without ever translating into actual membership.

The US has labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group, marking the first time that a British left-wing organization has been targeted by US terrorism sanctions. The US Treasury also blacklisted two other left-wing groups.

Palestine Action was added to the US’ list of Specially Designated ​Global Terrorist organizations on Wednesday, according to a statement posted online by the US Treasury Department. Under the department’s sanctions, the group will have any of its bank accounts or property in the US frozen, while its members could be barred from entering the country.

Formed in the UK in 2020, Palestine Action’s stated goal is to end “global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime.” Its members have vandalized British military aircraft and factories owned by or linked to Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

The British government declared Palestine Action a terrorist organization last July. Since the designation, four of its members have been sentenced as terrorists for causing criminal damage to an Elbit Systems plant, while more than 3,500 of its supporters have been arrested and 480 charged with terror offenses for endorsing the group.

Today, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control took action to counter the growing threat posed by violent far-left terrorist groups. Globally networked and politically motivated terrorists—particularly far-left terrorists—are increasingly embracing organized, deadly violence…

— Treasury Department (@USTreasury) August 26, 2026

“Today’s action complements the UK’s proscription,” the Treasury Department stated, adding that Palestine Action was being sanctioned “for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism.”

The Treasury also sanctioned Masar Badil, a Palestinian revolutionary movement allegedly run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Autistici Inventati, described by the department as “an Italy-based entity that supplies specialized digital architecture, tools, and services for Antifa cells and other violent far-left extremists.”

The 2026 US Counterterrorism Strategy identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as one of the top three terror threats facing the US, along with transnational drug cartels and Islamist terrorists. In late 2025, the US State Department designated four European ‘Antifa’ groups – including a German group that attacked right-wingers with hammers in Budapest in 2023 – as terrorist organizations.

Russia and Ukraine have conducted a new prisoner of war exchange involving ten servicemen from each side, Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova has announced.

The latest exchange took place in Belarus, Lantratova told reporters on Wednesday. Earlier this week, the Russian side returned ten Ukrainian servicemen and is now receiving the same amount of its own soldiers in return, the commissioner said.

“Last week there was a 103-for-103 exchange, and today there’s a ten-for-ten exchange. We’re preparing for more exchanges, hopefully soon,” Lantratova stated. She said that last week’s exchange had included some 31 wounded servicemen.

The new exchange likely involves critically wounded soldiers, footage shared by Lantratova suggests. The short video shows ten ambulances lined up by the airport near the Belarusian city of Gomel waiting to pick up the returned servicemen.

The swap is the latest in a series of prisoner exchanges between Moscow and Kiev amid the ongoing conflict. Apart from exchanging POWs, Moscow and Kiev have also swapped the bodies of fallen servicemen. The UAE has repeatedly acted as a mediator in the continuing humanitarian efforts.

Meta has reached a settlement in a landmark lawsuit filed by multiple US states that accused it of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children and teenagers.

The social media giant has faced allegations of encouraging compulsive use among young people, misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms, and improperly collecting personal data from children under 13.

Meta previously estimated that the claims could have exposed it to penalties of as much as $1.4 trillion, while the states were also seeking sweeping changes to how Facebook and Instagram operate.

On Wednesday, the social media giant announced that it had reached an approximately $18 billion settlement with 52 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia, effectively ending the case without a jury ruling on the allegations and without Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg taking the stand.

Teens will face a two-hour daily limit across both apps unless a parent allows them more time, while access will be blocked from midnight to 6 AM and most notifications muted during school hours.

Meta said it will also offer teenagers the option of a non-algorithmic feed, allow autoplay to be disabled, hide like counts by default, and strengthen age checks and parental controls. Most of the measures will remain in place for ten years.

The tech giant has further demanded that rival tech giants TikTok and YouTube also face certain restrictions. Meta said it would pay out 30% of the settlement, or $5.3 billion, only if the two companies adopt similar safeguards and make matching payments.

The settlement came during the second week of a federal trial in Oakland, California involving claims brought by 29 states, which based their accusations on Meta’s own internal research and communications.

Internal messages revealed that some of the figures were deliberately removed from a presentation to company leadership, following advice from Meta’s lawyers, to avoid creating a paper trail back to Meta’s top brass. Instagram product design director Francesco Fogu admitted that he agreed to scrub the statistics from the presentation because “at the end of the day, I didn’t care.”

Meta has denied wrongdoing throughout the case, insisting that it has worked to protect children and teenagers online. It has also rejected the idea that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately made addictive, arguing that “social media addiction” is not even a recognized psychiatric condition.

Despite the settlement, Meta, along with other social media companies, continues to face thousands of separate lawsuits from individuals, families, and school districts over alleged harm to young users.

Hungary considers Russia a “threat to Hungary, Europe and the global order,” according to a foreign policy directive published by the country’s new pro-EU government. The statement marks a dramatic shift from the pragmatic relations pursued by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Signed by Prime Minister Peter Magyar on Tuesday, the document states that “Hungary condemns Russian military aggression and fully supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, and recognizes Ukraine’s right to self-defense.”

“Russia’s behavior poses a threat to Hungary, Europe and the global order, and also puts the Hungarian minority living in Transcarpathia in serious danger, therefore we support all efforts aimed at initiating negotiations towards sustainable peace and long-term security guarantees,” it continued.

Hungary had not formally designated Russia a “threat” at any point since 1945.

Since taking office in May, Magyar has worked to align Budapest’s foreign policy with Brussels’. He has ended Hungary’s opposition to EU accession talks with Ukraine, backed the bloc’s 21st package of anti-Russian sanctions, and lifted Budapest’s veto on a €90 billion loan package to Kiev.

Magyar’s predecessor, Viktor Orban, condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. However, he also condemned the “war policies” of the West that provoked the conflict, and refused to help arm Kiev, arguing that Ukraine cannot hope to defeat Russia and should seek an imperfect peace deal instead. Orban argued that the EU’s self-imposed embargo on Russian energy would “kill off the European economy,” and lent support to its sanctions packages only after securing exemptions that would allow Hungary to continue purchasing Russian oil, gas, and nuclear fuel.

Hungary still imports energy from Russia under Magyar. Andrey Kolesnik, a member of Russia’s State Duma committee on defense, Andrei Kolesnik, suggested that Russia could cut these supplies in response. 

Orban’s government viewed Kiev, not Moscow, as the most pressing threat to Ukraine’s Hungarian minority. Under Vladimir Zelensky’s rule, ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia have had their language rights restricted and been subjected to brutal forced conscription. 

In June, Magyar struck what he called a “formal agreement” with Zelensky to protect the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians. However, no documents concerning the agreement have been published to date, making it completely unclear what protections Zelensky has agreed to.

Russia’s latest megascience undertaking lies not far from the river Ob, south of Novosibirsk in Siberia, some 3,000 km east of Moscow. The Siberian Ring Photon Source (SKIF) synchrotron complex is effectively an ultra-powerful X-ray microscope for research ranging from medicine and chemistry to metallurgy and geology.

RT has been granted access to SKIF, a state-of-the-art megascience project built to let scientists examine matter at the atomic scale.

SKIF was officially unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. At the time, he said that the opening was postponed from 2024 because foreign suppliers failed to deliver certain equipment due to Western sanctions, forcing Russian teams to reproduce key components domestically. Now, the first research stations are expected to enter operation before year-end.

The scientists can then watch a chemical reaction as it happens, studying how metals behave under shock waves, examining proteins and medicines, or looking inside archaeological objects without cutting them open. The method is also expected to drastically reduce the development time for new materials, pharmaceuticals, and cancer drugs.

“The emission that the source creates is well suited to studying the atomic or molecular structure of a compound… It’s viruses, medicine, bone fractures, aircraft engine, turbines, chemical reactions, high-speed processes. Indeed, it’s useful to everyone,” SKIF Director Evgeny Levichev told RT.

One of the upcoming experiments will examine titanium-based catalysts used to produce ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, while other planned work includes studying difficult-to-extract gold and searching lake sediments near the site of the 1908 Tunguska event for possible extraterrestrial particles.

WATCH THE FULL REPORT.

Thirty-five years have passed since the dramatic events of August 1991 in Moscow which marked, more clearly than any later declaration or diplomatic ceremony, the end of the era we call the Cold War.

The failed ‘August Coup’ attempt to preserve the Soviet Union made continuation of the old confrontation impossible given one of its principal participants had effectively left the battlefield. Everything that followed, including the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, merely recorded a change that had already taken place.

The essential fact was that the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, could no longer sustain the material and political foundations required to continue the struggle. There were many reasons for this, but foremost among them was the exhaustion of the Soviet model of state governance.

Moscow therefore chose to end the confrontation. This was historically unusual because Russia hadn’t been defeated on the battlefield or forced to surrender, and the Cold War ended because of internal political change and a voluntary decision by the Soviet leadership.

Paradoxically, this peaceful ending helped make a future confrontation more likely. The principal reason was simple: the Western powers, led by the United States, regarded the end of the Cold War as a victory, but Russia didn’t regard itself as a defeated country. That contradiction became one of the central problems of the post-Cold War order.

We can see something similar today in the United States. It remains the strongest individual power in the international system, but domestic conflict increasingly limits the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Meanwhile, China places internal stability and development at the center of its strategic thinking precisely because its leaders understand that domestic cohesion ultimately determines external strength.

The same logic shaped the Cold War because once Washington and Moscow accumulated enormous nuclear arsenals, direct military conflict became irrational. The confrontation instead developed according to what George Kennan described as containment in restricting Soviet influence and applying pressure across numerous fronts while avoiding a direct war between the superpowers.

But we shouldn’t romanticize this arrangement because the Cold War was still a war in the political sense and the objective of the Soviet Union’s adversaries wasn’t simply peaceful coexistence, rather it was the containment and ultimately neutralization of their opponent.

From Moscow’s perspective, this amounted to a struggle against Russia itself, which at that particular historical moment existed politically and economically in the form of the Soviet state.

When the Soviet Union disappeared, therefore, Western capitals naturally interpreted the event as the achievement of that objective, but the victory was incomplete.

Russia had lost the geopolitical struggle but had not been defeated in the traditional sense. Its territory hadn’t been occupied and its armed forces hadn’t surrendered, so Russians could therefore reasonably believe that the changes of 1989-91 were the result of decisions taken in Moscow rather than terms imposed by a victorious enemy and that distinction proved enormously important.

It also explains why comparisons with France after 1815 or Germany after 1945 are misleading as both countries were militarily defeated before being incorporated into new international systems established by the victors.

France was reintegrated into the European order after Napoleon because Russia, Britain, Austria, and Prussia quickly developed disagreements of their own so Paris could therefore play a useful balancing role within the Concert of Europe.

Nothing comparable existed after 1991 when the Western coalition was unusually united and organized around NATO under American leadership and there was no internal balance of power in which Russia could become an indispensable partner.

After 1991, the central problem was never resolved given that the West saw itself as the victor of the Cold War and wanted to construct a political order reflecting that victory. Russia, on the other hand, saw itself as a sovereign great power that had voluntarily abandoned the previous confrontation and expected to participate in the new order on that basis and these expectations were fundamentally incompatible.

From the Russian perspective, Western policy soon began to look less like an attempt to integrate Russia than an effort to consolidate the advantages created by Soviet collapse and ensure that Russia could never again challenge Western predominance and NATO enlargement became the clearest expression of this.

The decision to begin moving the alliance eastward was taken in January 1994, barely two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. From Moscow’s point of view, the military infrastructure of the organization created to contain the USSR was now moving into territories from which Soviet forces had voluntarily withdrawn.

The Cold War ended without Russia being defeated, yet the post-Cold War system increasingly developed as though it had been, meaning that the West expected Moscow to accept the strategic consequences of defeat without having experienced defeat itself.

Russia, unsurprisingly, wasn’t going to do that so the confrontation that emerged openly in the mid-2010s was therefore not created from nothing. Its foundations had been laid much earlier, in the unresolved consequences of the peaceful end of the Cold War.

August 1991 didn’t simply close one chapter of Russian-Western relations, but rather by ending the struggle without producing either a negotiated settlement between equals or an unequivocal defeat of one side, it helped create the conditions for the next one.

This article was first published by Vzglyad.ru, translated and edited by the RT team.

AP and Reuters have demanded answers from Israel over last year’s strike on Nasser Hospital in Gaza, which killed more than 20 people, including five journalists.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, marking the first anniversary of the August 25, 2025 attack, the news agencies said Israel had yet to provide the “clear answers and accountability that an incident of this gravity requires.” They stressed that the journalists were killed at a hospital, a site protected under international law and a key location for news coverage from Gaza.

The victims included Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri, visual journalist Mariam Dagga, who worked for AP and other outlets, and Moaz Abu Taha, a freelancer who collaborated with Reuters. The other two reporters slain in the attack were Al Jazeera photographer Mohammad Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, who worked for the Quds Feed Network and several other media outlets.

Reuters also renewed its demand for an explanation over the October 2023 death of visuals journalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli tank fire while reporting in southern Lebanon.

The IDF acknowledged carrying out the ‘double-tap’ strike on Nasser Hospital. It later said it regretted harm to “uninvolved individuals,” denied deliberately targeting journalists, and promised an inquiry.

The attack came two weeks after four Al Jazeera journalists were killed in an Israeli strike near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Israel has repeatedly faced accusations of targeting reporters since launching its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza in October 2023.

In February, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the 129 journalists and media workers killed worldwide in 2025. It described Gaza as the deadliest assignment for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.

CPJ also said that Israel had conducted few transparent investigations and that no one had been held accountable in the cases it examined.

The IDF has “strongly” rejected the allegations that it intentionally targets journalists or their families.

At least nine people have been killed and six others wounded in a Ukrainian strike on a passenger bus in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), according to Governor Leonid Pasechnik.

The attack occurred in broad daylight on Wednesday, when an intercity bus traveling from Lisichansk to Stakhanov was targeted, the governor said. Eight passengers were killed on the spot, while another, a young woman, later died of her wounds in hospital.

“This is yet another act of terrorism by the bloodthirsty Kiev regime. Cynical, inhumane, and unjustifiable. It is a war crime for which those responsible will surely be punished,” Pasechnik wrote on Telegram.

While the governor did not explicitly say what exactly was used to strike the bus, the Russian Investigative Committee confirmed the vehicle was attacked with a kamikaze drone. A criminal probe into the incident has been launched, and investigators are now working to establish the exact type of the UAV involved in the deadly attack, the committee said.

Footage from the scene shared by LPR officials suggests that the UAV hit the bus in its roof hatch, pelting the passengers with shrapnel.

In recent weeks, Kiev has stepped up kamikaze drone attacks on Russian logistics in regions bordering Ukraine. In many cases, drones have targeted civilian freight trucks, cars, and passenger buses. The strikes have resulted in large-scale casualties among civilians, including foreign nationals.

African gold producers are pushing for greater resource sovereignty as governments seek to retain more of the economic value generated by their mineral wealth, Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) representative has said.

Speaking to RT, Prince Kwame Minkah, the agency’s media relations officer, stated that African countries are increasingly moving away from a model in which minerals are extracted domestically and much of the processing, certification, trading, and financing takes place abroad. He noted that the shift is part of a broader African drive toward resource sovereignty and local value addition.

“If we produce the mineral, why should we capture only the value extraction while other countries continue to capture the value processing and, for that matter, trading?” Minkah said.

Ghana is among several major African gold producers tightening control over its gold sector. From September 1, gold doré purchased by self-financing aggregators under arrangements with approved offtakers must be refined in Ghana before it can be exported.

According to the Ghana Chamber of Mines, the country is now the world’s sixth-largest gold producer, behind China, Russia, Australia, Canada, and Peru, after producing about 185 tons in 2025, marking a 23.41% increase from its 2024 production of 4.82 million ounces. It is the only African state in the global top ten and remains the continent’s largest producer.

South African Minister of Employment and Labor Nomakhosazana Meth has revealed that more than 47,000 jobs were saved over the past year through interventions by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA).

The Minister revealed this in a written reply to Parliament after Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) MP Tebogo Mokwele asked what concrete measures the department had taken to address South Africa’s persistent unemployment. Mokwele also asked what measures had been put in place to hold corporations accountable for exploiting workers and denying them fair wages and benefits, as well as what strategies were being implemented to boost job creation in key sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture.

”The Department has implemented a number of measures to help curb the unemployment challenge. The Department has provided in the last financial year, counselling to more than 357,000 work seekers, more than 116,000 work seekers were placed in employment opportunities,” Meth said.

On measures to ensure that companies comply with labour laws and protect workers’ rights, Meth said the department’s Inspection Services had conducted more than 309,000 inspections.

”The NPMN has created more than 96,418 employment opportunities during the last financial year. The Department has also introduced the National Labour Migration Policy and amendments to the Employment Services Act, that will create further employment opportunities for local South Africans”.

First published by IOL

Palestinians in the West Bank village of Madama say they fear further violence after Israeli MP Zvi Sukkot smashed a local memorial with a sledgehammer as IDF soldiers stood by. The military later insisted the incident was neither authorized nor anticipated.

A far-right lawmaker known for confrontations with Palestinians and a member of the ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, Sukkot traveled to Madama, south of the city of Nablus, on Tuesday, ostensibly for a tour.

Videos he later posted online instead showed him pulling out a sledgehammer and defacing a memorial to Palestinians killed in conflicts over the past century. He claimed the memorial “glorified terrorism” and “must be removed,” arguing that children who grow up seeing it could be encouraged to become terrorists themselves. His IDF escort could be seen standing meters away and not intervening as he struck the memorial.

Locals, however, reject the suggestion that the soldiers were innocent bystanders, pointing to repeated confrontations with Israeli troops and settlers. One said army patrols had passed through Madama just hours before Sukkot arrived, firing tear gas and stun grenades and waking residents.

RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij spoke to Madama residents about why they dispute the IDF’s account and what they fear could come next. Watch her full report below.

Israeli forces shot and wounded a Palestinian teen during a raid on a UN-run training center in East Jerusalem, local officials have reported.

The moment the boy was shot was caught on camera, with footage published by Middle East Eye and other media outlets on Tuesday showing him collapsing as gunfire rings out.

The Jerusalem Governorate said the boy sustained a minor gunshot wound to the shoulder from live ammunition as Israeli forces raided and seized the Qalandiya Training Centre, a key UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) facility in Kafr Aqab in East Jerusalem.

VIDEO | The moment a Palestinian child was struck by live ammunition fired by Israeli occupation forces after they raided and seized the Qalandiya Training Centre, a key facility operated by the UNRWA, in the town of Kafr Aqab, in occupied Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/D8xRucHqp1

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) August 25, 2026

More than 50 Israeli security personnel and at least four armored vehicles entered the facility while around 20 UNRWA employees were inside, according to the agency. Staff were forced from the premises during the operation.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir joined the raid, saying “there is no place for the agency in Jerusalem and Israel.” He later posted an image from the compound on X declaring: “UNRWA in our hands.”

UNRWA “unequivocally” condemned the raid, saying the center is UN property protected under international law. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also hit out at the “unlawful” entry and said Tuesday’s operation was the fifth unauthorized Israeli incursion into the facility since May.

The incident comes amid rising violence in the Palestinian territories. Days earlier, Israeli settlers shot dead 17-year-old Karim Sanad Shalaldeh near Hebron, while Israeli troops killed 58-year-old Fathi Khazem in Jenin in a separate incident. The IDF said Khazem had attempted to attack a soldier with a knife.

Russia has repeatedly said a negotiated two-state solution is the only viable way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moscow supports an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, coexisting peacefully with Israel.

Israel will continue building illegal settlements in the West Bank in preparation for a “major” wave of Jewish immigration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. Israel’s most recent settlement expansion triggered rebukes from its Arab neighbors and Western partners.

“Today, many of our brothers and sisters around the world understand: This is our land and it will remain ours,” Netanyahu said in Jerusalem on Tuesday. “And when I say our land, every Jewish man and every Jewish woman, the door is open. We are waiting for you. We are preparing the door for major Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel).” 

It is unclear whether the “major Aliyah” predicted by Netanyahu is actually coming. Israelis have emigrated in growing numbers since Hamas’ 2023 attack and the subsequent war on Gaza. More than 150,000 Israelis left the country from 2024 to 2025, according to a report by 972 magazine.

The Israeli prime minister spoke at an event organized by the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs 47 Jewish settlements in the West Bank. All of these settlements, which are located outside Israel’s 1967 borders, are considered illegal by the UN, and Israel’s transfer of population to them has been deemed a breach of the Geneva Convention by the International Criminal Court.

“It isn’t easy, it’s never easy,” he continued. “The land of Israel is acquired through suffering. Sometimes also through smiles, sometimes also through arguments, but it is being acquired by us. We are not giving up, we have a vision, this is our land, and it will remain ours.”

Last week, Israel opened bidding for the construction of more than 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement project, located east of Jerusalem. Named after its designation on Israeli planning maps, the project will comprise more than 3,400 homes, and was green-lit by Netanyahu’s government last year.

The E1 plan will establish a land corridor between East Jerusalem and the existing settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, both of which are built on Palestinian land. It will also sever road links between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem, located to the north and south of Jerusalem, respectively. 

“The E1 settlement will undermine the prospect of the two-state solution by driving a wedge through the West Bank,” they said in a statement last Thursday. “At a time of grave instability in the West Bank with unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians, and serious restrictions on the Palestinian economy, this decision is even more concerning.”

Netanyahu has suggested for years that he intends to annex the entirety of the West Bank, describing the option as “on the table” even as he signed peace accords with Arab states in 2020. Netanyahu’s hardline coalition partners have been more explicit, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urging the prime minister in June to “apply sovereignty here in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] before the elections” in October.

Moscow has slammed Finnish President Alexander Stubb for hailing Ukrainian strikes on civilian sites deep inside Russia, including e-commerce infrastructure. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Stubb of “degradation.”

Ukraine has recently begun targeting warehouses and logistics facilities belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, and its rival, Ozon. Kiev has acknowledged the strikes are deliberate, claiming the companies’ networks are used by the Russian military to procure, store, and transport dual-use goods. Moscow has rejected the claims, denouncing the attacks as acts of terrorism aimed at generating publicity.

What Stubb said

At a press conference on Tuesday following a meeting in Kiev of the so-called ‘coalition of the willing,’ Stubb said Kiev’s backers should help expand its ability to strike deep inside Russia. He claimed such attacks “increased the cost and the price of the war for Russia” and could pressure Russians to seek an end to the conflict.

“We can see that now in the sense that 65% of the Russian population wants to end this war. And hitting logistics centers like Wildberries increases it with an additional 10%,” Stubb said, without providing a source for the figures. He called the attacks “a sensible military strategy” and “the only way we’re going to get into the peace negotiations.”

Finland's Stubb expressed support for long-range Ukrainian strikes, including attacks on logistics centers like Wildberries pic.twitter.com/4gfrYAXKxJ

— Jungle Journey (@JnglJourney) August 25, 2026

Moscow reacts

Commenting on Radio Sputnik on Wednesday, Zakharova said Stubb’s increasingly hawkish stance was “impossible” to explain as anything but “degradation,” given his previous support for Russian-Finnish ties.

Zakharova recalled the strong business and civil-society ties between Russia and Finland before the Ukraine conflict, saying Stubb had supported them and “can’t be unaware” of the damage his anti-Russia policies have inflicted on Finland. She suggested his shift reflected either pressure from “hostile forces” or his own political decline.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Stubb’s remarks “evoke nothing but surprise,” contrasting them with his comments in May urging the EU to resume dialogue with Russia.

“He said that it would be better to do it sooner rather than later. But now we see that escalatory rhetoric has prevailed,” Peskov said, branding Stubb “a prominent representative of the party of war” alongside new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. “They want the war to continue. But they are deceiving their voters by claiming that Russia can be defeated… And they apparently refuse to acknowledge the realities that exist on the ground.”

“The Finnish president really is a complete idiot,” Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and known for his often sharp comments, wrote on the messaging platform Max. “He talks about defeating Russia through strikes on the Wildberries marketplace. His level of professional competence is below rock bottom. A moral degenerate and a fool.”

Since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022, Finland has joined Western sanctions on Russia, supplied military aid to Kiev and abandoned decades of neutrality to join NATO. The result has been a sharp deterioration in relations with its neighbor, with which it shares a 1,340km border. Earlier this year, Helsinki lifted a longstanding ban on transporting or stationing nuclear weapons on its territory, a move Moscow called “concentrated confrontation.” Peskov warned that “if Finland threatens us, we [will] take appropriate measures.”

Russia has responded to Ukrainian attacks on civilian infrastructure with retaliatory strikes on military-industrial sites, Black Sea shipping, and key port facilities that handle military-related imports. The Russian military maintains it targets only infrastructure that supports Ukraine’s war effort.

President Vladimir Putin recently warned that Ukraine faces a “catastrophic scenario” after “opening Pandora’s box” with attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure. He said retaliatory strikes had hit Ukraine’s “most sensitive economic sectors,” including agricultural exports, while Kiev’s attacks had failed to change the course of the conflict. Citing Putin’s remarks, the Russian Defense Ministry vowed to continue retaliatory strikes, writing on Max: “There will always be a response.”

US President Donald Trump has reportedly submitted a landmark nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia for congressional review and renewed demands that Riyadh normalize relations with Israel as part of the deal.

According to US media outlets, citing unnamed administration and congressional sources, the document was sent to Congress on Monday. The White House has yet to publicly confirm the move.

Lawmakers now have 90 session days to review the US-Saudi pact. If they attempt to block it, Trump is expected to use his veto powers to push it through. A two-thirds majority in both chambers would be required to overrule the president.

The agreement was originally signed last month and aims to allow American companies to play a major role in developing Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear energy program. The 30-year deal is expected to involve the construction of US-designed nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia and could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

Riyadh says it wants nuclear power to meet the growing domestic energy demand, reduce the amount of oil consumed at home, and free up more crude for export.

However, the deal has raised concerns over nuclear proliferation. Unlike a similar US deal with the United Arab Emirates, the pact does not permanently bar the kingdom from reprocessing nuclear fuel or enrichment, which could potentially be used to make weapons.

Trump has also tied the nuclear agreement to Saudi Arabia formally joining the Abraham Accords and establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. The condition was unexpectedly announced by Trump late last month after the agreement had already been negotiated and signed.

An administration official cited by Reuters on Wednesday said Trump’s position on the issue “has not changed.”

The Abraham Accords, brokered during Trump’s first term, established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.

The US has also pushed for Saudi-Israeli normalization, but the efforts have stalled since the outbreak of the Gaza war in 2023. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly said it will not normalize relations with Israel without an irreversible path toward the creation of a Palestinian state.

The deep physical and structural wounds inflicted on the African continent by European colonialism will take generations to heal – if they ever heal at all. In today’s fast-moving geopolitical landscape, where crises like illegal migration, economic turbulence, and regional conflict dominate African headline news, the question of historical justice is often forced onto the back burner. Yet, through continental efforts, Africa refuses to let the issue recede into memory.

The landmark Algiers Declaration, adopted last December under the auspices of the African Union, marked a shift from moral grievance to a legal strategy, demanding the codification of colonial atrocities as crimes against humanity and establishing that justice requires binding legal reparations, not voluntary Western aid usually publicized as gifts.

The march through the ancestral burial grounds of the paramount chiefs stands as an active protest against modern colonial evasion – and a direct challenge to a European power attempting to settle a multi-century blood debt on its own convenient, unilateral terms.

To understand the full weight of this grievance, one must return to 1904, when Imperial German colonial forces unleashed a systematic campaign of destruction following an indigenous uprising against relentless land dispossession and colonial tyranny. In October 1904, German General Lothar von Trotha issued his notorious ‘Vernichtungsbefehl’ (extermination order), explicitly declaring: “Within the German borders, every Herero, with or without a gun... will be shot.”

Far from facing criminal prosecution, von Trotha was long celebrated as a hero at home – a street in Munich bore his name until public pressure finally forced the city council to rename it ‘Hererostrasse’ in 2006.

By the time the campaign ended in 1908, it had claimed an estimated 70,000 lives, systematically wiping out 80% of the Herero population and 50% of the Nama population in what historians and legal scholars recognize as the 20th century’s first genocide.

Yet, when confronting the modern reckoning for these atrocities, Imperial Germany’s successor state has constructed a masterclass in diplomatic and legal evasion. In May 2021, after six years of closed-door bilateral negotiations, Berlin and Windhoek initialed a joint declaration in which Germany acknowledged the atrocities as “genocide from today’s perspective” – a carefully calculated semantic formula designed specifically to avoid admitting legal liability under international law. Rather than offering legally binding reparations, Berlin committed €1.1 billion over 30 years earmarked for state-level development projects, framing the financial support strictly as a voluntary gesture of reconciliation.

The contrast with Germany’s handling of European historical crimes could not be more glaring. In the aftermath of World War II, Germany recognized direct legal liability for the Holocaust, paying tens of billions of euros in formal reparations directly to survivors and representative organizations – commitments that continue to this day. When dealing with African victims, however, Berlin invoked intertemporal legal loopholes, arguing that international law against genocide did not exist in 1904. By bypassing the Herero and Nama leaders to cut a state-to-state deal, Germany sought to buy immunity from future legal claims. This double standard is precisely why affected communities rejected the 2021 agreement.

The resulting political impasse has paralyzed parliamentary ratification in Windhoek, while opposition lawmakers in Berlin increasingly view the agreement as a diplomatic liability. By challenging a deal struck over their heads, the Herero and Nama are establishing a critical precedent: Sovereign states cannot settle the blood debt of indigenous genocide without the direct inclusion and consent of the victim communities themselves.

This domestic legal battle has become the focal point of a broader international legal push. In August 2026, Amnesty International officially filed court papers in the Namibian High Court seeking to join the Herero and Nama litigation as ‘amicus curiae’. Amnesty’s legal intervention targets a fundamental principle: State-to-state development packages cannot override the recognized rights of indigenous communities under international law to seek direct, full reparations for genocide. Former European powers have long shielded themselves behind the principle of non-retroactivity, claiming that atrocities committed prior to the 1948 Genocide Convention fall outside modern judicial frameworks. However, joint efforts between the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are systematically dismantling this defense.

As the African Union moves to codify colonial atrocities into international law, the ongoing High Court challenge in Windhoek serves as a test case for former colonial powers across the West. Until Berlin meets its obligations with the same legal and financial rigor applied to European historical crimes, the solemn gatherings in Okahandja will stand as an active front line in the global struggle against impunity.