Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 9

State of the Union Interview: Witkoff on what Trump and Putin said to each other in meeting

YouTube link here.

***

Joint News Conference by Presidents of Russia and the United States

Kremlin website, 8/16/25

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr President, ladies and gentlemen,

We held our talks in a constructive and mutually respectful atmosphere, and they have proved substantive and productive.

I would like to once again thank my US counterpart for the proposal to come to Alaska. It is quite logical to meet here since our countries, albeit separated by oceans, are, in fact, close neighbours. When we stepped out of our planes and greeted each other, I said, “Good afternoon, dear neighbour. I am glad to see you alive and in good health.” I believe it sounds very friendly and neighbourly. Our countries are separated only by the Bering Strait — essentially, there are two islands, one Russian and one American, separated by a mere four kilometres. We are close neighbours, that’s a fact.

It is also important to note that our shared history and many positive events are largely related to Alaska. There is still an enormous cultural legacy preserved since the age of Russian America, with Russian Orthodox churches and more than 700 place-names of Russian origin.

During World War II, Alaska served as the starting point for the legendary air route that delivered lend-lease supplies, including military aircraft and other equipment. It was a dangerous and challenging route over enormous ice-covered territories. Nevertheless, the pilots and experts of both countries did everything they could to bring victory together. They risked and sacrificed their lives for our common victory.

I have just visited the Russian city of Magadan. A monument honouring Russian and American pilots stands there, adorned with the Russian and American flags. I know that here, too, there is a similar monument, and at a war cemetery a few kilometres away from here, there are graves of Soviet pilots who lost their lives in that heroic mission. We appreciate the efforts of US officials and citizens to preserve their memory. This is a dignified and noble undertaking.

We will always remember other examples from history when our countries stood together against common enemies in the spirit of combat camaraderie and alliance, rendering each other help and support. I am certain that this legacy will help us restore and develop mutually beneficial and equal ties at this new stage, even in the most challenging conditions.

As you know, Russian-American summit talks have not been held for over four years. That is a long time. This period has proved exceptionally difficult for bilateral relations, and, let’s face it, they have deteriorated to their lowest point since the Cold War. And this does not benefit either our countries or the world in general.

Obviously, sooner or later we had to remedy the situation, to move from confrontation to dialogue, and in this regard, an in-person meeting between the two heads of state was really overdue – of course, with serious and thorough preparations, and this work has been done.

President Trump and I have established very good direct contacts. We have had frank conversations on the phone multiple times. As you know, the US President’s Special Envoy, Mr Witkoff, has visited us in Russia several times. Our aides and heads of foreign ministries have maintained regular contacts.

As you are well aware, the situation around Ukraine is one of the key issues. We acknowledge the commitment of the US administration and President Trump personally to help resolve the Ukrainian conflict, and the President’s willingness to understand the root causes and its origins.

I have repeatedly said that the developments in Ukraine present fundamental threats to Russia’s national security. Moreover, we have always considered the Ukrainian people – and I have said this many times – a brotherly people, no matter how strange it may sound in today’s circumstances. We share the same roots, and the current situation is tragic and deeply painful to us. Therefore, our country is sincerely interested in ending this.

Yet, we are convinced that, for the conflict resolution in Ukraine to be long-term and lasting, all the root causes of the crisis, which have been repeatedly explained, must be eliminated; all of Russia’s legitimate concerns must be taken into account, and a fair security balance must be restored in Europe and the rest of the world.

I agree with President Trump. He said today that Ukraine’s security must be ensured by all means. Of course, we are ready to work on this.

Hopefully, the understanding we have reached will bring us closer to this goal and open up the road to peace in Ukraine.

We hope that Kiev and the European capitals will take the current developments constructively and will neither try to put up obstacles nor attempt to disrupt the emerging progress with provocative acts or behind-the-scenes plots.

By the way, under the new US administration, our bilateral trade has been on the rise. So far, it is a symbolic figure but still, the trade is 20 percent higher. What I am saying is that we have many interesting areas for cooperation.

It is obvious that the Russian-US business and investment partnership holds tremendous potential. Russia and the United States have much to offer each other in trade, energy, digital and high technologies, and space development.

Cooperation in the Arctic and the resumption of region-to-region contacts, including between the Russian Far East and the West Coast of the USA, also appear relevant.

Overall, it is crucial and necessary that our countries turn the page and get back to cooperation.

Symbolically, as I have already said, there is an international date line nearby, on the border between Russia and the United States, where you can literally step from one day into another. I hope that we can do the same in political affairs.

I would like to thank Mr Trump for our joint work and for the friendly and trust-based conversation. The main thing is that there was a commitment on both sides to produce a result. We see that the US President has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve, that he sincerely cares about his country’s prosperity while showing awareness of Russia’s national interests.

I hope that today’s agreements will become a reference point, not only for resolving the Ukrainian problem but also for resuming the pragmatic business relations between Russia and the United States.

To conclude, I would like to add the following. I remember that in 2022, during my last contacts with the former US administration, I tried to convince my former US counterpart that we should not bring the situation to a point fraught with serious repercussions in the form of hostilities, and I said directly at the time that it would be a big mistake.

Today, we hear President Trump saying: “If I had been president, there would have been no war.” I believe it would have been so. I confirm this because President Trump and I have established a generally very good, businesslike and trustworthy contact. And I have every reason to believe that, as we move along this path, we can reach – and the sooner the better – the end of the conflict in Ukraine.

Thank you for the attention.

President of the United States of America Donald Trump: Thank you very much, Mr President. That was very profound, and I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting.

There were many-many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we have not quite gotten there, but we have made some headway. So, there is no deal until there is a deal.

I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I will, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell him about today’s meeting. It is ultimately up to them. They are going to have to agree with [what] Marco [Rubio] and Steve [Witkoff] and some of the great people from the Trump administration who have come here, Scott [Bessent] and John Ratcliffe. Thank you very much. But we have some of our really great leaders. They have been doing a phenomenal job.

We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here, and I think, you know, everybody wants to deal with us. We have become the hottest country anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. We look forward to that, we look forward to dealing, we are going to try to get this over with.

We really made some great progress today. I have always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir. We had many tough meetings, good meetings. We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he has probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He has seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we would like to have dealt with. But we will have a good chance when this is over.

So just to put it very quickly, I am going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened. We had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We did not get here but we have a very good chance of getting there.

I would like to thank President Putin and his entire team, whose faces, who I know, in many cases, otherwise, other than that, whose faces I get to see all the time in the newspapers. You are almost as famous as the boss, but especially this one right over here.

But we had some good meetings over the years, right? Good, productive meetings over the years, and we hope to have that in the future. But let’s do the most productive one right now. We are going to stop, really, five, six, seven thousand, thousands of people a week from being killed, and President Putin wants to see that as much as I do.

So again, Mr President, I would like to thank you very much, and we will speak to you very soon, and probably see you again very soon. Thank you very much, Vladimir.

Vladimir Putin: Next time in Moscow.

Donald Trump: Oh, that is an interesting one. I do not know. I will get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening. Thank you very much, Vladimir. And thank you all. Thank you.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you so much.

***

“No blitzkrieg, no defeat”: What Russia’s commmentariat is saying after the Putin-Trump summit

RT, 8/16/25

The meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska marked their first face-to-face talks since Trump’s return to the White House. The summit began with a brief one-on-one exchange inside Trump’s presidential limousine, followed by extended negotiations involving both delegations. At a subsequent joint press conference, the two leaders described the talks as constructive and signaled an openness to a follow-up round of negotiations.

RT has gathered insights from leading Russian experts on how the outcome of the summit is being perceived in Moscow – highlighting the tone, symbolism, and potential global implications of this long-anticipated encounter.

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs:

Analogies are always imperfect, but the Alaska summit inevitably brought to mind the first meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva nearly forty years ago. Not because of its substance – if anything, the content was the opposite – but because of its structure. Just like back then, no deal was struck, but the level of communication shifted dramatically.

Trump didn’t get the diplomatic blitz he was hoping for. But the meeting didn’t end in rupture either. The positional standoff continues. If we follow the logic of the 1980s, the next milestone might be a “Reykjavik moment” – like in 1986, when no agreement was reached, but the ideas floated were radical and far-reaching. The real breakthrough came later in Washington in 1987 with the signing of the INF Treaty – the same agreement that died in two stages, both under Trump’s presidency.

This time, the pace is faster. This isn’t a Cold War; it’s something hotter. There won’t be year-long pauses between summits. We’ll see follow-ups much sooner – of one kind or another. Critics will try to spin the Alaska meeting as a Trump defeat, arguing that Putin dictated the tempo and set the terms. There’s some truth to that. But if the goal is a sustainable outcome, there’s no alternative to tackling the full scope of issues head-on.

If the process launched in Alaska continues in the same spirit, we could see an outcome that’s the reverse of what followed Geneva. Back then, Reagan pushed to end the Cold War on Washington’s terms – and succeeded. Today, what’s on the table is the end of the post-Cold War era, a time defined by unchallenged US global dominance. That shift isn’t sudden – it’s been building for years – but it’s now reached a climax. And notably, much of the demand for this shift is coming from within the US itself – just as, back in the day, the Soviet push for change came largely from within its own society.

As before, the road is winding. There are plenty of actors – domestic and international – who will try to halt or reverse the momentum. Much will depend on whether both presidents truly believe they’re headed in the right direction.

One last, telling detail: Forty years ago in Geneva, the defining image of change was a joint press conference, where journalists from both sides got to question the leader of the opposing camp for the first time. Openness was seen as a necessary step toward solving deep-rooted problems. This time, the symbolism lies in the absence of questions – neither leader took any. Real diplomacy is trying to retreat into quiet, away from the performative and often destructive media spectacle that has consumed international politics in recent decades. In a way, secrecy is staging a comeback.

Dmitry Novikov, associate professor at the Higher School of Economics:

From the standpoint of Russian interests, the Anchorage summit can be seen as a relative success for Moscow. Two key aspects stand out.

Tactically, Russia managed once again to regain control over the pace of negotiations. The Kremlin defused Trump’s rising irritation – marked by threats and pressure tactics – that had begun to build dangerously. Had that escalation continued, it could have derailed both the Ukraine talks and the broader process of normalizing bilateral relations. From the outset, Moscow approached both tracks with deliberation and patience – partly because of its still-growing battlefield advantage, and partly because the complexity of the issues demands exactly that: no rush, no oversimplification.

Strategically, both sides came out ahead – if only because the existence of meaningful communication between nuclear superpowers is a net positive by definition. Judging by the signals out of Washington, the Trump administration seems to share that view.

The summit also confirmed something I’ve noted before: Trump is genuinely interested in resetting relations with Moscow. He sees negotiations with Russia as a cheaper, more efficient way to achieve his strategic goals in Europe. That’s why he’s open to serious dialogue – even if it doesn’t produce immediate media wins or flashy breakthroughs.

Going forward, the real test of the impact of Anchorage will be how the Trump administration engages with its European allies and with Ukraine. Both will undoubtedly try to pull Trump back into their strategic framework. The tone and substance of those next conversations will tell us a lot about what was really achieved in Alaska.

Vladimir Kornilov, political analyst:

“A Historic Handshake in Alaska” – that was the front-page headline splashed across many European newspapers this morning. To be fair, most of those editions went to press while the summit was still underway, which means their coverage lacked any meaningful analysis. As a result, much of what was published focused on optics – body language, symbolic gestures, red carpets, and so on.

But the real action has been unfolding online and on Western news channels, which have been flooded with hot takes and instant commentary. Many of them verge on panic – some, outright hysteria.

At the core of this reaction is a bitter truth: the West is coming to terms with the collapse of its long-running effort to isolate Russia and its president. That’s the underlying cause of all the wailing in the Western media swamps.

One theme dominates the Western analysis: Russia got what it wanted out of the Alaska summit. That’s the consensus across a wide spectrum of commentators and anchors. Many of them didn’t bother to hide their frustration that they weren’t allowed to ask a single question during the much-anticipated joint press conference between the US and Russian leaders.

Whatever the tangible policy outcomes of the summit may turn out to be, one thing is now beyond dispute: the meeting in Alaska has locked in a new reality on the global stage.

Valentin Bogdanov, VGTRK New York bureau chief:

“From the very first frames of the broadcast from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, one thing was clear: isolation had failed. The red carpet, the honor guard flanked by fighter jets, the handshake, the smiles – it all looked far more like Russia’s return to the world stage than another attempt to shove it off.”

“Russian America” played host to a summit of neighbors – one neighbor applauding the other. On the runway, the two presidential planes were parked as close together as the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait. The symbolism of convergence wasn’t lost – geographically or diplomatically.

It was a day of mourning for those who had bet on failure or scandal. Now they’re nitpicking anything they can get their hands on. Some latched onto the canceled working lunch as proof of a snub. Though, ironically, many of the same voices had just been criticizing Trump for agreeing to that lunch in the first place – calling it a sign of weakness.

Meanwhile, body language experts wasted no time analyzing the subtle choreography from the moment the two presidents appeared on camera – from eye contact to the timing of their handshake. Putin and Trump quickly settled into a shared rhythm. Of course, there will now be a concerted effort – by the usual suspects – to knock them out of sync.

But inside the White House, officials are already discussing a follow-up meeting. According to their thinking, it could be the breakthrough needed to untangle the Ukraine knot. The American end of that knot, it seems, has already started to loosen.

Elena Panina, Director of the Institute for International Political and Economic Strategies:

The three-hour meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson wasn’t just a diplomatic encounter – it was arguably the defining political event of 2025. It will shape not only the foreign policy agendas of the US, Russia, Europe, and Ukraine, but also their domestic political discourse. Every moment – from the ten-minute one-on-one in the US president’s limousine to the closing handshake – has already become fodder for interpretation in the Western press.

Just consider CNN’s reaction: their lead takeaway was that, contrary to standard protocol, the Russian leader – not the host – was the first to speak at the joint press conference. In diplomacy, such details are never trivial. They’re read as subtle signals of power dynamics – either gestures of politeness or expressions of parity.

And politeness, notably, was in abundant supply – something all observers picked up on. Compared to Trump’s meetings over the past six months, this was a dramatic shift. No shouting matches such as with Zelensky, no mocking jabs like those aimed at German Chancellor Merz, and none of the alpha posturing he’s shown with the likes of Ursula von der Leyen or Cyril Ramaphosa. Instead, the tone was marked by deliberate courtesy and mutual respect, with both leaders carefully sidestepping flashpoints.

So how should we interpret the abrupt press conference and the canceled lunch? In high-level diplomacy, a lack of formal agreements doesn’t necessarily mean the meeting was empty. On the contrary – it’s clear that on core issues like halting arms shipments to Kiev, easing sanctions on Russia, and opening new channels of sectoral cooperation, Trump simply can’t commit on the spot. Not without congressional approval – and not without running it past his NATO allies.

Of course, Anchorage was no “new Yalta” – no grand endgame like the one that concluded the defining geopolitical chess match of the 20th century. But it might just be something else: a strong, tempo-preserving opening in a new strategic game between Washington and Moscow. A game that could unfold in a series of calculated moves – perhaps not redrawing the global map, but at the very least cooling the hottest points of tension.

The opening move has been made. The real question now is whether Trump can push through the internal and external constraints he faces – so that this debut in Alaska evolves into a full-fledged game.

Timofey Bordachev, professor at the Higher School of Economics:

I personally never expected the summit to resolve the war in Ukraine. The conflict is simply the core of a much broader crisis – one that runs through the entire architecture of European security.

What struck me as most important was the spirit of the meeting itself. After 35 years of accumulated tension, the US-Russia confrontation is – at least under Donald Trump – being redirected into a more civilized framework. Each side still operates under its own set of constraints and domestic limitations. But critically, the US has now shelved the idea of pursuing Russia’s “strategic defeat” or attempting to isolate it completely. That shift is profound. Framing the conflict in such absolute, existential terms had made it unsolvable – it took it out of the realm of international relations toward something more akin to a crusade.

This change signals the emergence of a new reality: the conflict remains, and its military-technical phase will likely continue for now. But it’s no longer treated as a moral or existential struggle – it has become a normal, if deeply entrenched, dispute in the history of great power politics. And that makes it solvable.

There are no longer any metaphysical or ideological reasons for it to continue – only diverging interests and circumstantial pressures. In Washington’s case, that pressure stems from a surplus of global commitments and unsustainable strategic wagers. The sooner those burdens are recalibrated, the closer we get to meaningful outcomes.

Ilya Kramnik, military analyst, expert at the Russian International Affairs Council:

A ready-made peace deal is, unfortunately, out of reach right now – largely due to divisions within the West itself.

What comes next is the hardest part. No matter how productive the talks between the Russian and American presidents may have been, peace in Ukraine will require the involvement of European Union countries. That currently seems almost unthinkable, given the public positions of both the EU as a bloc and several key member states individually.

Trump’s own words – “no deal yet” – along with his stated intention to reach out to Zelensky and European leaders, suggest that he understands this reality.

At the same time, it’s clear that the US and Russia have more to discuss beyond the war in Ukraine. Both presidents acknowledged mutual interests across a range of areas, and the existence of ongoing bilateral contacts reinforces that.

So, yes, I expected the two sides to come to some level of understanding – including on issues unrelated to the ongoing conflict. As for ending the war itself, that will require a step-by-step process.

That’s essentially what happened in Anchorage. Now we wait to see how Europe responds – and, of course, what form a draft peace framework might eventually take.

Sergey Poletaev, political commentator:

The most likely outcome was exactly what we got: an agreement to keep talking.

There are two main problems. First, Trump doesn’t see himself as a party to the conflict and wants to remain above the fray. Putin – rightly, in my view – sees it differently. He believes, and continues to insist, that only Trump can make the kind of decisive choices needed to end the war. If some movement on that front occurred in Anchorage, then real progress might now be possible.

The second issue is Europe and Ukraine. For now, both remain committed to continuing the war. And I don’t believe that can be changed through diplomacy alone – it will be decided on the battlefield. Sooner or later, the facts on the ground will shape a new shared reality for all four players: Russia, the US, Europe, and Ukraine.

And based on how things are going, that reality will likely align more closely with Russia’s view than with the Euro-Ukrainian one. That’s when Trump will get his deal – but not before.

Ivan Timofeev, program director of the Valdai Club:

No one realistically expected any breakthrough agreements from this summit, but the overall tone was clearly positive. It ended on an optimistic note, with both sides expressing a willingness to keep moving toward de-escalation and to explore broader areas of cooperation in US-Russia relations. In short, this is a process that’s meant to continue.

I believe both leaders walked away with everything they reasonably could have hoped for. Russia stood firm on its core positions but remained engaged in dialogue. The US, for its part, moved a step closer to the kind of peace it wants – one that lets it stop pouring resources into a geopolitical asset that’s yielding no meaningful political return. In that sense, both sides can count the meeting as a win.

There won’t be any immediate sanctions. At the very least, we’re likely to see a few weeks of status quo. What happens after that will depend on whether the dialogue continues in a stable, productive fashion. If concrete discussions follow – especially around terms for a settlement – and those discussions begin to bear fruit, we might even see a modestly positive shift on the sanctions front.

But if the process stalls or collapses for any reason, the risk of renewed pressure will rise. In that case, we’re likely to see the so-called “secondary tariffs” that Trump has previously floated – higher duties on third countries that buy Russian raw materials. We could also see new sanctions targeting Russia’s energy sector to some degree.

That said, it’s worth noting that the US and its allies have already imposed a substantial range of restrictions on Russia. Moscow is not easily intimidated by new escalation measures. Still, that doesn’t mean further sanctions are off the table – they remain a real possibility.

Pavel Dubravsky, political commentator:

Russia came out of the summit looking stronger than the United States. Trump may have declared the meeting a “ten out of ten,” but in reality, he seemed tired – and frustrated.

That’s likely because he had two clear goals going into Anchorage. The first was to secure a hard “no” from Moscow and then walk away from the Ukraine peace track entirely, spinning it as a win for his base: “I’m cutting your taxes, I’m cutting your foreign entanglements – look, I didn’t waste time or money on this.” The second, far more ambitious goal was to clinch a deal – a ceasefire of some kind, even a temporary one. A one-month pause, a symbolic step, anything he could present as diplomatic momentum. But he left empty-handed.

In contrast, the Russian side struck a composed and strategic posture. They demonstrated an understanding of global diplomacy, but also sensitivity to US domestic politics. They even made gestures toward Ukraine’s internal dynamics, calling on Kiev and European allies not to derail the talks. That tone – measured and outward-looking – was a diplomatic win in itself.

One of the most notable developments was Putin’s language shift: for the first time, he openly spoke about Ukraine’s own security. It seems likely this was something Trump pushed for, and Putin agreed to engage on. That signals potential future discussions on issues like territorial arrangements and security guarantees – topics that were long considered off-limits.

Whether Trump is willing to travel to Moscow remains uncertain – it could carry political risks for him. But what’s already clear is that Russia has broken out of a narrow diplomatic box. For the past three years, Western powers insisted on speaking to Russia only about Ukraine. That principle guided both the EU and the previous US administration. Now, the agenda has widened.

Ukraine is no longer the sole topic on the table. That shift in itself is a major accomplishment for Russian diplomacy – reframing the dialogue and reshaping how Moscow is perceived in international politics today.

Brian McDonald: Do Russians have toilets? Why that question tells us more about you than about them

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/9/25

Brian McDonald is an Irish journalist long based in Russia.

You see it all the time on X. Some blue-check warrior parroting a long-dead statistic, grinning to themselves as they jab out: “Russia doesn’t even have toilets.”

It was out in force again this weekend, stirred up by my Substack post, “Is Russia’s Economy Really Just Spain and Portugal? Let’s Do the Math.”

It’s the kind of smirk that aims to end debate before it begins—as if flushable porcelain were the final measure of geopolitical relevance. The reasoning, such as it is, runs like this: if some Russians use outhouses, then Russia is primitive, and therefore nothing it does can matter.

It’s rubbish. Lazy, brittle rubbish that should have been flushed long ago. But since the u-bend of discourse keeps spitting it back up, let’s deal with it properly.

Fresh from Rosstat—Russia’s state statistics agency—we now know that 91.8% of Russian residences have indoor toilets. That’s more than nine in ten homes, across a landmass that stretches from the Baltic to the Bering Sea, Arctic tundra to Caucasus ridge.

Of these: 77.1% are hooked up to centralized sewerage; 6.2% use septic tanks or the like; 13.7% rely on piped cesspits. Meanwhile, just 0.4% said they had no toilet at all.

These aren’t guesses pulled off a Reddit thread. They come from a rigorous, face-to-face survey of 60,000 households across every region of the Russian Federation in 2024.

So where does the myth come from?

Simple: Russia is vast. It contains some of the most remote, unforgiving terrain on the planet. In places like Yakutia, where the mercury dives to -50°C, laying sewer pipes is less public works and more madness. The same goes for highland hamlets in Dagestan or indigenous settlements hugging the Arctic rim. Infrastructure there isn’t about budget. It’s about thermodynamics.

And then there are the dachas—summer cabins, deliberately spartan, where urbanites escape the city and embrace simplicity. Plenty of Moscow professionals are content to use an outhouse for two weekends in July. That doesn’t make Russia a basket case any more than it makes Finns barbarians for loving a cabin sauna.

Still, the trope hangs around. Its chief propagator? A 2019 article from The Moscow Times (a Dutch outlet, despite the name) that wouldn’t pass inspection in any functioning bathroom.

There’s also a shift happening. More Russians are trading flats for homes, moving to the suburban edges. Many choose septic systems not because they’re forced to, but because they prefer autonomy. It’s the same setup you’ll find in most of rural Ireland.

We can have a serious debate about Russia—its politics, economy, war, or trajectory. But we cannot have that debate if the opening gambit is, “They don’t even have toilets.”

It’s not just false. It’s cowardly. A smirk in place of a thought. A meme instead of a fact. It says: Don’t analyse. Don’t map. Don’t think. Just laugh and move on.

To which the only proper response is: grow up. The world is more complicated than your favourite punchline.

Russia has toilets. Russia has sewerage. It also has oil, wheat, reactors, satellites, aircraft, and yes—some furiously cold villages.

If your best contribution is an outhouse gag, then maybe your whole worldview belongs in one.

Scott Ritter: Return to Russia

By Scott Ritter, Substack, 8/9/25

On June 3, 2024, I was preparing to board a plane at New York City’s JFK airport that would take me to St. Petersburg, Russia, where I was scheduled to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. From there I was going to embark on a 40-day tour of Russia, engaging in the vital work of citizen diplomacy—waging peace—that I had undertaken since my initial visit to Russia, back in April-May 2023.

It was not to be.

Three armed Customs and Border Patrol agents pulled me aside and, without further explanation, seized my passport.

No charges were made, no allegations of wrongdoing offered.

They simply seized the same passport that I had used for my two previous trips to Russia.

They didn’t even provide a receipt.

It was clear my visiting Russia was deemed a threat by the United States government—at that time headed by the administration of President Joe Biden.

Two months later, scores of armed FBI agents showed up at my home, carrying a search warrant that empowered them to seize my personal electronics.

No charges were made.

But this time the FBI accused me or serving as an agent of the Russian government.

They accused me of taking direction from the Russian Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov.

And they accused me of taking direction from RT, a Russian media company.

The FBI executed at least two other search warrants during this time, one against Dmitri Simes, a well-known American journalist of Russian origin, and an unnamed RT producer based in Miami.

Together, these three FBI raids were the public face of a campaign being waged by the Department of Justice to counter what it claimed to be a massive effort undertaken by the Russian government to manipulate the 2024 Presidential election.

In short, I was being accused of undermining American democracy because of my work as a journalist.

My speech, protected under the US Constitution, was now deemed a threat to the national security of the United States.

And yet, no criminal charges were ever filed.

The Justice Department did convene a federal grand jury to investigate my relationship with the Russian government and RT.

But nothing ever came of it.

Because, frankly speaking, nothing ever could.

I had committed no crime.

I was a victim of the weaponization of law enforcement and the US intelligence community by the US government, operating at the behest of the Ukrainian government, which had labeled me an “information terrorist” and subjected me to a “black list” which sought to ban my presence on social media platforms (I was kicked off of YouTube, Twitter (X) and Facebook as a result), as well as a “hit list” (the infamous Myrotvorets list) that targeted me for death (Daria Dugina and Maxim Tatarsky, two well-known Russian journalists, were victims of this list, murdered by the Ukrainian intelligence service which manages it.)

In November 2024, the election I was accused of interfering in on behalf of the Russian government voted out the Biden administration (Kamala Harris, Biden’s Vice President, was the candidate for the Democrats), and voted in Donald Trump, who had previously served as President from 2017-2021.

Elections have consequences.

Earlier this month, I was re-visited by the FBI. This time they came to begin the process of returning the property they had seized a year ago. They acknowledged that, because of the election, their priorities had been changed.

Trying to silence the free speech of a government critic was no longer on the agenda.

And last month, after being given the silent treatment by the US government about the fate of my passport, I simply reapplied, listing my passport as having been “stolen”, and naming the US government as the perpetrator.

A new passport was immediately issued.

And now I am in Russia, completing a journey that had begun back in June 2024, but cut short by government intervention.

I am in Russia as a guest of the National Unity Club, an organization which promotes the strengthening of global peace, the maintenance of friendship and mutually respectful relations between peoples while seeking a respectful position of the world towards Russia, its history and its role in key events. The National Unity Club has as part of its mission the creation of platforms for cultural and educational exchange which promote the understanding of the historical, scientific and humanitarian achievements of Russia.

My visit fits well with the mission of the National Unity Club, and I am deeply grateful that they were willing to host and facilitate my visit and work.

This is the visit the US government did not want me to make.

And here I am.

Truth be told, a large part of my wanting to make this trip was to prove a point, to demonstrate to the US government that the tactics of intimidation would never work, especially when it came to limiting the free speech of law-abiding American citizens such as myself.

But there is a larger purpose as well.

We live in a time where the dysfunctional nature of US-Russian relations has place both nations, and indeed the entire world, at mortal risk.

The United States has implemented a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that has led to further deterioration of relations, to the point that the US has deployed nuclear bombs to the United Kingdom, France and the UK have unified their nuclear posture to counter perceived Russian threats, and President Trump has ordered nuclear armed submarines closer to Russia’s shore. Russia has responded by re-writing its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the potential use of nuclear weapons, providing Belarus with its own nuclear deterrence capabilities, and placing a new intermediate range missile, the Oreshnik, into serial production.

The last remaining arms control vehicle that limits the size of the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, the New START treaty, expires in February 2026.

And yet there is no meaningful dialogue taking place today between the US and Russia to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Instead, we are confronted with an escalation of tensions brought on by the threats and actions of the United States, and the war-like posturing of NATO and Europe, all because Russia refuses to submit to the will of the collective west and terminate the conflict with Ukraine on terms it finds unacceptable.

The average observer might ask how my visit to Russia could impact the situation I have just spelled out. To answer this, I’m going to take you back in time, to the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Back in March of 1994, E. Wayne Merry, the head of the political-internal section of the US Embassy in Moscow, authored an unsolicited analysis of American policy toward Russia in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The recipient was the Secretary of State, whom Merry believed was getting bad advice and inaccurate reporting from official channels. Merry took advantage of what was known as the “dissent channel” to publish a cable containing an unvarnished assessment about the absolute failure of US policy in Russia, and what the consequences of this failure could be.

Titled “Whose Russia is it Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect”, Merry slammed the US prioritization of emphasizing market reforms over the building of democratic institutions and the rule of law as an “especially virulent case of Washington institutions trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole,” warning that this policy direction ran the risk of exhausting “an already diminishing reservoir of goodwill toward America, assist anti-democratic forces, and help create an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.”

Merry criticized the quality of the experts and advisers the US was dispatching to Russia in the name of implementing reform, noting that “very few of the multitudes of American ‘advisors’ in Russia since the Bolshevik demise [i.e., the fall of the Soviet Union] acquainted themselves with even the most basic facts of the country whose destiny they proposed to shape… Even the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call ‘assistance tourists’ who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs.”

Not every American was useless, however. Merry observed that “serious” visitors to Russia—“those interested in long-term relations and who can listen as well as speak”—were enjoying success. Merry noted that American businessmen who fell into this “serious” category were actually the most effective presence the United States had in Russia.

It has been more than forty years since Merry wrote what is today referred to as “the new ‘Long Telegram’—a reference to George Kennan’s famous missive, written in 1946, which is widely seen as the starting point for the policy of containment of the Soviet Union which triggered the Cold War. The failure of what passed for American policy in Russia during the 1990’s is now historical fact. And since that time, successive administrations have fumbled their way through the same policy trap that confounded the American “assistance tourists” forty years ago—the inability, due to their ignorance of all things Russia—to comprehend that policy designed in Washington, DC which was intended to appease American sensibilities had no chance of success in a Russia defined by Russian realities. In short, for more than four decades Washington institutions have been guilty of, as Merry so eloquently observed, “trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole.”

Moreover, since successive generations of what passes for Russian “experts” within these same institutions have been confronted with the fruit of their ineffectual labor, the very “adversarial relationship” predicted by Merry, having become reality, produced new “experts” whose focus was no longer “fixing” Russia, but rather “containing” and “defeating” a Russia which refused to conform to American expectations. This new generation of “experts” are even more ignorant of the Russian reality than their predecessors of forty years past, instead focusing all of their attention on the figure of one man—Russian President Vladimir Putin—whom they portray in simplistic, cartoonish fashion, characterizing his recalcitrance over surrendering Russian sovereignty to a cabal of western overlords as “authoritative dictatorship”, failing to understand that the root cause of Russia’s reticence toward the West is founded in the American policies of the 1990’s, which undermined Russia’s efforts at building so-called “democratic institutions.” Even today, those who lament this failure ignore the fact that “democratic institutions” that are built on the notion of American Jeffersonian democracy can never succeed in Russia—that Russian democracy can only exist in the context of the Russian reality.

There is a vacuum of genuine Russian expertise in the United States today. Moreover, the ongoing Russophobic posture on the part of American society—the government, academia, the media, Hollywood, etc.—has toward all things Russia means that the average American citizen faces a near impossible task when it comes to deciphering the Russian reality for his or herself. The stringent sanctions that have been imposed on Russia are not just a tool to punish Russia but also to sustain Russophobia in the United States. The American businessman whom Merry rightfully recognized as possessing the appropriate skill set when it came to successfully interacting with Russians inside Russia—that unique trait of being able to “listen as well as speak”—are precluded by law from engaging with Russia.

This leaves the average American citizen as the last remaining hope of instilling a modicum on common sense when it comes to relations between the United States and Russia. This isn’t simply about restoring a sense of decorum in the interaction between our two nations, but rather a national security imperative. The Russophobic poison that has infected the brains of Americans manifests itself in failed policy. This failure, however, extends beyond dysfunctional trade and cultural isolation, and into actual conflict—hybrid, proxy, conventional and nuclear. This failure could very well trigger the means of our collective extinction.

Failure is not an option.

So here I am, back in Russia.

One American citizen fighting an uphill battle against the forces of ignorance, trying to find an antidote to Russophobia so that the American people can think more clearly about US-Russian relations, and demand better policy options from those we elect to higher office.

Thanks to the efforts of the National Unity Club, I will be provided the opportunity to interact with Russians from all walks of life. I will engage in discussions, dialogue, perhaps even debate.

But most importantly, I will listen to what they have to say.

About Russia.

About America.

About the danger of war.

About the prospects for peace.

Bad policy is generated from ignorance.

Ignorance fuels fear.

And politicians exploit fear to promulgate policies that otherwise would not pass muster with a discerning public.

By listening, I will learn.

I will empower myself with knowledge and information about the Russian reality.

I will no longer be ignorant about Russia.

I will no longer fear Russia.

Last year the US government stopped me from travelling to Russia.

They sought to criminalize my rights of free speech to silence my voice when speaking to my fellow Americans about Russia.

And now I am back in Russia.

I will neither be silent nor silenced.

And I invite you to join me on this wonderful journey of discovery and enlightenment.

Read about the danger of nuclear war and the importance of arms control in my latest book, Highway to Hell (https://www.claritypress.com/product/...).

Tucker Carlson Interviews John Mearsheimer: The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It + Discussion on Ukraine

YouTube link here.

Russians Break Through Ukrainian Line Near Strategic City Pokrovsk

By Andrew Day, The American Conservative, 8/12/25

Russian forces in recent days punched through Ukraine’s defensive line near its key stronghold Pokrovsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk province, according to news reports on Tuesday.

The breakthrough—Russia’s biggest in many months—comes ahead of a Friday summit in Alaska between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The timing suggests Moscow is pushing for battlefield gains to enhance its bargaining position in peace talks. Putin has demanded that Kiev cede the entire Donetsk province, including parts that Ukraine still controls.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Monday evening that Russia was “redeploying their troops and forces in ways that suggest preparations for new offensive operations.”

Russian troops now nearly surround Pokrovsk, which had served as a logistics hub for Ukrainian troops. Kiev may need to order a withdrawal from the semi-encircled swath of territory or risk exposing its forces there to capture or bombardment.

***

Alaskan Waste

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 8/13/25

Battlefield

Russian activity in Ukraine has been intense in the lead-up to Friday’s scheduled meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin in Alaska, centering most in and around Pokrovsk. Russian sabotage and reconnaissance forces are attacking the south of the city in what may be artillery preparation for a major offensive, and have already penetrated to its center.

To the immediate north of the city Russia has secured Sukhetske and is extending west towards Novooltksandrivka and Shevchenko, while further north still it is extending via Zatyshok and Zapovidne into Novo Shakove, Zolotyi Kolodiaz, Shakove and Kucheriv Yar.

From Pokrovsk, northwest to Novekonomichne, Russia is forming a cauldron centered on Balchan. To the west of Novekonomichne, Russia is battling to take Rodynske (it is reported to have secured 60% of the settlement), which lies to the south west of Fedorivke and Rezine) and battling southwards to Myrnohrad, close enough to the northeast of Pokrovsk to be considered a suburb.

Although Russia has reportedly taken 150-200 square kilometers in the past 24 to 48 hours, further westward advances from Pokrovsk may be awaiting the arrival of units of the main Russian army, particularly in view of unresolved issues that lie to the east of Pokrovsk, northeast of Maisk, around Volodymyrivka and Shakove, Toretske and Solivka – all lying southwest from another targetted settlement, Kostiantynivka (west of Chasiv Yar, now in Russian Hands).

A Ukrainian Azov-led counter-offensive is expected in this area starting from Ivanopillia (north of Russian-held Toretsk) towards Solivka and on down to Russian-held Fedorivka. Anticipating and heading off this move, Russian forces need to progress towards Toretske and Solivka but must first complete their struggle for Kucheriv Yar. Russian forces may also move up towards Solivka from Rusyn Yar.

Southwest of Pokrovsk, Russian forces have taken 60% of Udachne and are moving towards Novoserhaivka and Novomykolaivka in a possible bid to cut the M30 supply route to Pokrovsk.

Preparing to move on Kostiantynivka to the north east of Pokrovsk, Russian forces are attacking Plebsn Byk from Russisn-held Katerynivka. East of Kostiantynivka, Russia has taken full control of Stupechky and Pyredechyne.

Russian forces have taken the Southern Torkse Forest east of Lyman and are bombing Siversk.

Alaska

There is intense chatter as to the potential outcomes of Friday’s Presidential meeting. I maintain my judgment that the meeting is ill-advised, is dangerous as well as largely pointless for Putin to attend, and has been very poorly prepared. I note Larry Johnson’s coverage in his Sonar21 report yesterday of a story of a potential assassination plot, and although he himself is skeptical as to its veracity, it demonstrates the absurd ease with which potential assassins, professional or amateur, may disrupt the summit.

Trump’s anticipatory statements and positions veer wildly from day to day. Yesterday’s phone conversation between European leaders, Zelenskiy and Trump have confirmed that Europe supports Zelenskiy’s completely obstructionist mode that, in turn, will likely reduce the possibility of anything close to a meaningful concession from Trump to Putin, while Putin will find it extremely difficult to move away from his terms laid out in June 2024, perhaps only to the extent of offering to withdraw Russian troops from his ““buffer zone” in Kharkiv and Sumy in return for a concession from Ukraine – which seems very unlikely to be offered – to withdraw its troops from those parts of Kherson and Zapporizhzhia in which Ukraine still maintains a military presence (and which Russia is otherwise almost guaranteed to take in the very near future in any case).

Does Russia have good reasons to participate in this summit? One can think of reasons, but none of them are convincing. Perhaps Putin wants to prepare Trump for the post-conflict scenarios that may unfold if and when the Ukrainian army collapses and Russia moves to the Dnieper or even further west. Is Putin concerned to make sure that Russian territorial acquisitions will be internationally recognized? Perhaps. Trump recognizing them will not guarantee or even incentivize European or UN recognition. Does Putin want to talk about arms control? Fat chance he will find an enthusiastic listener in Trump who is in charge of the most aggressive military-industrial (MICIMATT) incubus the earth has ever seen and whose profits sustain the US corporate-plutocratic ruling tyranny and who would love to encourage a nice, deceptive Russian “pause” to its currently accelerating growth in military capability. Does Putin want to talk about joint exploitation in the Arctic? Then he should first be talking to his friends in the BRICS and to those allies who will be most central to the construction of BRICS-friendly south-north trading routes at the very same time as Trump is attempting to sabotage Russian and Chinese interests in west-east trading routes from the always malevolent influence of Turkey through the south Caucasus, with a view to disrupting Russian-Iranian transportation route and destabilizing Iran’s Azeri northwest.

***

With Desertions, Low Recruitment, Ukraine’s Infantry Crisis Deepens

By Yauhen Lehalau, RFE/RL, 8/10/25

As Russia presses its offensive, Ukraine faces a crisis that experts say is as critical as its shortages of ammunition and weapons: a dwindling supply of infantry.

“Drivers, artillerymen, and cooks” are holding the line, says Bohdan Krotevich, an officer formerly with the Azov Brigade’s headquarters. “A maximum of 12 fighters hold sections 5-10 kilometers wide.”

The lack of manpower is allowing Russia to employ what Ukraine’s commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskiy, recently called “total infiltration” tactics. Small infantry groups make it through Ukrainian lines — including into Pokrovsk, the key city in the Donetsk region that is likely the main target of Russia’s current offensive.

One of the brigades responsible for defending the area had “run out of infantry,” according to Ukrainian conflict-monitoring group DeepState, allowing the Russians through. A video from July, geolocated to a gas station in the southern part of the city, shows a Ukrainian transport coming under fire from one of the infiltration groups, and other units had to be sent in to attempt to clear the area.

The Manpower Gap Flips In Russia’s Favor

Early in the war, the balance was radically different. In the lead-up to the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia’s army had about 1 million troops, with some 150,000 – 190,000 concentrated along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus.

At the time, Ukraine’s military had some 260,000 in active service, but the country mobilized up to 700,000 men by mid-summer, handing it a manpower advantage over the invading Russian forces, who had by then been expelled from the Kyiv region. Russia was forced to conduct a “partial mobilization” of about 300,000 reservists to stabilize the front line after yielding thousands of square kilometers of territory in eastern Ukraine.

In 2023, Russian recruitment picked up, introducing thousands of prison inmates to the army as well as mercenary groups like the infamous Wagner private military company and offering significant sign-up bonuses to volunteers. Ukraine, on the other hand, was struggling to find new recruits to replace losses. As analysts from the investigative group, the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) observed, this was the year that momentum shifted in Moscow’s favor, as Russia’s recruitment drive neutralized Ukraine’s manpower advantage while Kyiv faced mounting difficulties replenishing its ranks.

In 2025, according to The Military Balance, an annual assessment of military capabilities worldwide, Russia’s numbers of active-duty personnel reached over 1.13 million — with Syrskiy claiming that some 640,000 of them were on Ukrainian territory, a figure echoed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Ukraine’s total troop strength is officially over 1 million, the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) says not more than 300,000 of them are deployed on the front lines.

Russia Recruiting More Than Ukraine

According to the OSW, Ukraine needs to recruit some 300,000 soldiers to replenish its brigades, some of which are only at 30 percent strength. Last year, it managed 200,000, a number that “proved insufficient to maintain unit strength at an adequate level” given “the scale of desertions and personnel losses,” the OSW report says. Currently, Ukraine is estimated to recruit 17,000 to 24,000 people per month, or between 204,000 and 288,000 per year.

While it has had to increase its sign-up bonuses, Russian recruitment is estimated to have increased to a rate of about 30,000 per month –- an advantage of roughly 70-150,000 per year.

Thousands AWOL

Beyond the gap in recruitment figures, Ukraine’s army has a desertion problem, with tens of thousands of instances of soldiers going Absent Without Leave (AWOL) recorded per year. According to popular Ukrainian war correspondent Yuri Butusov, the Anne of Kyiv brigade, trained in France, had up to 1,700 soldiers go AWOL between March and November 2024 — a staggering figure, given that Ukraine’s average brigade strength is between 4,000 and 5,000.

The founder of the Frontelligence Insight group says cases of forced mobilization, where Ukrainian men are taken off the street to a recruitment center, contributes to the desertion problem, with mobilized recruits often less motivated than those who volunteer. A Ukrainian commander told CNN that “the majority” of these recruits leave their positions. “They go to the positions once and if they survive, they never return. They either leave their positions, refuse to go into battle, or try to find a way to leave the army.”

Can Ukraine Close The Gap?

Ukraine has adopted several policies to address the recruitment and desertion issues. Soldiers who went AWOL have been allowed to avoid prosecution by voluntarily returning to their units. Tens of thousands have done so — although the numbers of those deserting are still higher.

Despite pressure from both the Trump and Biden administrations, Ukraine has so far resisted lowering its draft age to 18 — a move that would be deeply unpopular with the public. Ukrainian men aged 25 and above can be drafted after the age was lowered from 27 in April 2024. However, the military has begun offering monthly salaries of 120,000 hryvna (about $2,900) and other financial incentives to incentivize those aged between 18 and 24 to volunteer.

Presidential military adviser Pavlo Palysa said in April that the new program had drawn just 500 recruits in the first weeks since it was launched, and it’s unclear whether the figures have picked up since then.

While US President Donald Trump has recently threatened increased pressure on Moscow if a cease-fire deal is not agreed to soon, analysts haven’t seen a shift in the Kremlin’s policy yet. “I do not observe any substantive change in Russian tactics toward Trump or Ukraine,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said on X.

With no indication that Putin is willing to back down or accept a cease-fire along current lines — his forces have so far failed to take much of the four Ukrainian regions Russia officially claimed to have annexed in 2022 — Ukraine will need to deal with its manpower shortage to hold the line.

Brian McDonald: When the breadbasket boils: why Russia’s drought is the world’s problem

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 7/31/25

By any measure that matters, agriculture in southern Russia is in trouble. The sort that sinks in like cracked clay and doesn’t let go.

This summer, a brutal drought—the worst in decades—has scorched the Krasnodar and Rostov regions, an area long known as the grain heartland of Russia. The figures don’t lie. State of emergency declarations have now spread across 37 districts, with thousands of farms reporting yield collapses that are nothing short of catastrophic.

Wheat yields in the Kuban are down from 64.7 to 48.8 centners per hectare; barley is off 21%; peas and maize are also flagging—and sugar beet losses are still being counted.

According to Konstantin Yurov, deputy chairman of the People’s Farmer association, Krasnodar alone has lost 2.8 million tonnes of grain, translating to around ₽42 billion in damages. Rostov’s losses are expected to be similar. In total, Yurov told RBK, “Farmers in the Kuban and Don regions have missed out on 70–80 billion rubles.” That’s $855 to $978 million, gone with the heat.

And this is no local misfortune. This is Russia—the world’s largest grain exporter. Southern Russia produces up to 20% of its grain, most of it passing through Novorossiysk and Azov ports to markets stretching from Cairo to Jakarta. When the Kuban stumbles, bread prices don’t just shift in Kursk or Kazan—they spike in Lagos, Damascus, Amman.

We’ve seen this story before. In 2011, a surge in global food prices—driven in part by Dmitry Medvedev’s export restrictions following another severe drought—helped trigger unrest across the Arab world. Despite what some think tanks would try to have you believe, the Arab Spring wasn’t born in Twitter feeds. It was born in bakeries. When bread doubles in price and wages don’t, people don’t just complain. They revolt.

So when Russian officials from the Ministry of Agriculture now claim that the 2025 grain harvest will hit 135 million tonnes, surpassing last year by 5 million—even projecting 55 million tonnes for export—the optimism feels brittle, like a harvest forecast written in chalk on a dry stone wall.

The numbers from the ground tell another story. In some of the worst-hit districts—Kanevskoy, Pavlovsky, Yeysky—grain yields have plummeted to just 20–30 c/ha, two to three times lower than the usual regional average. Maize and sugar beet assessments aren’t even in yet. Livestock producers are already discussing cutting the cattle herd due to feed shortages.

Equipment loans. Fertilizer bills. Warehousing costs. They don’t take a year off because the skies didn’t cooperate. And they certainly don’t pause for the slow gears of Moscow’s subsidy machine. “In what happened, the farmers bear no blame,” says Vyacheslav Legkodukh, the governor’s representative for farmer relations in Krasnodar. “We must do everything possible to ensure these farms survive to next season.”

But survival in this new era can’t rely on last-century tools. Yes, subsidies, crop insurance, emergency lending—all of these help soften the blow. But none of them solve it. You don’t adapt to climate breakdown with forms and stamps.

What’s needed now is strategic resilience: new drought-tolerant crop strains; smart irrigation systems that can stretch a dry season; data-driven yield modelling that sees past the next quarterly target.

Russia’s grain heartland is shifting under its own boots, whether Moscow likes it or not. The Kuban and the Don—fields once fat with black earth—are drying out, while the better soil edges north toward Ryazan, Kursk, Tambov. Trouble is, up there you’ve got dirt but no silos, no rail spurs, no deep-water docks. Hard to ship a loaf out of a meadow.

The real peril isn’t only in the cracked furrows. It’s in the comforting lie that last year’s export crown guarantees this year’s. The sky doesn’t read ministry memos. Weather tears up contracts for fun. If the planners don’t move with it, they’ll end up— as every old farmer knows— betting the harvest on a cloud that never breaks.

And if that wager goes sour? Russia will still feed itself, just about. But the grain market’s strung tight as a fiddle string; miss one shipment out of Novorossiysk and bread jumps in Cairo, tempers boil in Khartoum. Wheat isn’t just food. It props up governments.

So what’s happening down south isn’t a local mishap. It’s front-line climate news. In this new game, soil is strategy and a sack of grain can tip a cabinet.

The breadbasket’s smouldering. Best notice before the wind changes.

Uriel Araujo: Trump’s Venezuela U-Turn: why Chevron back in Caracas despite neo-Monroeism

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 7/31/25

In a somewhat striking (and underreported) reversal, the Trump administration has authorized Chevron to resume oil operations in Venezuela, granting a six-month license to extract and export crude to the United States. This comes just months after Trump had revoked the company’s license in February, citing electoral irregularities and failed promises on migrant repatriation. The decision thus marks a notable shift in Washington’s traditionally hostile posture toward Caracas.

US-Venezuela relations have indeed long been defined by sanctions, diplomatic standoffs, and ideological confrontations. Trump’s first term saw the recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaidó and a “maximum pressure” campaign that quite effectively strangled Venezuela’s oil output to some extent. Thus far, the Biden interregnum had offered only temporary respite, and Trump’s return to power brought back neo-Monroeist rhetoric to the Americas — complete with tariff (and even “annexation”) threats against Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, and, one may recall, even Canada.

Why, then, make an “exception”, so to speak, for Venezuela? Why is Chevron suddenly welcome back in Bolivarian territory, with Washington’s blessings?

Well, oil prices and domestic economic imperatives must be taken into consideration. As I noted, in July 2024, any escalation in the Iran-Israel conflict could send gas prices soaring, thereby undermining Trump’s economic credibility and crashing markets. That escalation, thus far, has not materialized — Iran’s retaliation to US strikes last month was restrained, and Tel Aviv has not pursued overt escalation after taking a heavy blow under Iranian missiles.

Yet even without a Middle Eastern full blow-up, oil remains a pressure point. After the February revocation of Chevron’s license, crude prices rose by nearly 2%. Inflation continues to hover above target, and any relief for US consumers and for “MAGA” — particularly heading into the 2026 midterms — is very welcome.

I’ve noted elsewhere how much the incumbent American President is dealing with domestic turmoil, while now also facing a political crisis amid the Epstein scandal; all of that further intertwines domestic and foreign policy.

In any case, Venezuela’s heavy crude is uniquely suited for US Gulf Coast refineries. Its output to Chevron alone may reach up to 220,000 barrels per day — roughly 3.5% of US imports. No wonder Washington would rather siphon oil from a manageable adversary than allow inflation to erode its domestic standing.

But oil prices alone do not explain the full picture. A more underreported — and arguably more strategic — motivation lies in countering Chinese influence. As I’ve recently written, Venezuela has become a quiet but critical node in Beijing’s energy belt. As oil analyst Antonio de la Cruz puts it, “it’s not about Caracas… it’s about Beijing.”

With over half a million barrels per day flowing to China under opaque contracts, US sanctions have become increasingly toothless. Chevron’s return is thus a surgical maneuver to reassert US presence and try to prevent China from “monopolizing” Venezuela’s reserves — which, suffice to say, are among the largest in the world.

This aligns with what some have called a “tightrope act”: re-engaging Venezuela without legitimizing Maduro, thereby preserving strategic leverage in the Caribbean. In this light, Chevron is less an oil company than a geopolitical instrument.

Not everyone buys the high-strategy explanation, for sure. Some view the decision as a byproduct of corporate lobbying and debt recovery, pure and simple. After all, Chevron spent over $9 million with lobbying in 2024 alone, and still seeks to recover at least $1.7 billion of Venezuela’s unpaid debts. With Washington, it is always a bit of both.

The new license is structured under “external profit control” — ostensibly to “keep Maduro at bay” — but critics contend that this is window dressing. No wonder some suggest that Chevron, not the State Department, is setting the policy tone in Caracas.

In any case, diplomatic gestures have also played a role. A recent prisoner exchange — ten Americans for 252 Venezuelans — softened bilateral tensions somewhat. Though underreported, this development (which was being quietly discussed for some time) arguably created space for economic détente, at least in limited form.

Yet internal contradictions abound. Hardliners like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have reportedly voiced concerns about re-engaging Maduro, fearing that any deal — no matter how conditional — may embolden “Chavismo”. I’ve written before about Trump’s emboldened neo-Monroeism and its focus on Latin America. The administration thus walks a narrow line between realpolitik and ideological consistency.

In conclusion, Trump’s Venezuela manoeuvre is a case study in hyper-pragmatism. It reveals a foreign policy often driven by domestic cost-benefit calculations, corporate influence, and geopolitical hedging — rather than any coherent doctrine. Whether this move stabilizes fuel prices or merely enriches a few players remains to be seen. Be it as it may, Trump’s often unpredictable foreign policy remains erratic, improvisational, and at times strategically opaque.

James Carden: The Carnegie Endowment for the Permanent State: Why should taxpayers subsidize this think tank?

By James Carden, Substack, 7/28/25

Despite the myriad of disasters the permanent state—with the assistance of its allies in the media and its enablers on Capitol Hill—have brought about, it remains as entrenched as ever, Trump’s claims to the contrary.

How is that?

One answer is that, of course, the permanent state is lavishly well funded; it essentially functions as a public-private enterprise, in which Washington think tanks play a critical role. Perhaps it has escaped the administration’s notice, but tax-exempt organizations like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (which has assets of over half a billion dollars) are, as we speak, providing an institutional home for a number of men and women who sought to overthrow Trump’s first administration.

Now that DNI Gabbard has revealed the extent to which the Obama administration, acting in concert with former CIA director John Brennan, had to do with fomenting the Russia ‘collusion’ scandal, the administration might do well to turn its attention to a number of Washington tax-exempts that have long protected discredited members of the national security apparatus.

The Brookings Institution’s links to Russiagate, via Fiona Hill, are by now well known. It was Hill who made the connection between Igor Danchenko and Christopher Steele, the mendacious ex-British spy who authored the Steele Dossier. And it was Danchenko whose fantasies fueled the most salacious parts of that report, which went on to serve as a foundational report for Brennan’s fictitious Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of January 6, 2017.

As it happens, one of the proud authors (they were all handpicked by Brennan) of the Intelligence Community Assessment, Gavin Wilde, served as a former NSC director for Russia during the first Trump administration and is now nonresident fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The ICA claimed, without evidence (or logic), that Putin interfered in the US election to benefit Trump and kicked off what was to be a years-long McCarthyite witch hunt culminating in his first impeachment. The impeachment drive, as readers will recall, was set off by an Ukrainian-American dual national on the staff of the National Security Council who decided that he, not the president, was responsible for the conduct of US foreign policy.

The Ukrainian national, a publicity-hungry Army foreign affairs officer named Alexander Vindman worked with a CIA operative detailed to the Trump NSC, Eric Ciaramella, who, reports indicate, leaked the contents of a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian president Zelensky to the staff of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Chairman Adam Schiff. As it happens, Ciaramella now works side by side with Wilde at the Carnegie Endowment where he serves as senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program.

In addition to these two, Carnegie boasts a slew of former high ranking intelligence and diplomatic officials, including Biden and Obama era national intelligence officers; former CIA operatives; and even a Clinton-era national security council staffer with a sideline in writing comic books.

Trump may think he is hitting the permanent state where it lives with indiscriminate firings across the federal workforce, but until such time as the IRS and Department of Justice turn their sights on the tax exempt status of institutions like Carnegie, the permanent state will not only survive, it will thrive.

Uriel Araujo: Trump, Epstein and politics of child abuse: American intelligence apparatus has a history

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 7/30/25

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

With the recent developments involving Ghislaine Maxwell, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal (involving the trafficking of teenage girls for powerful individuals) is definitely back in the spotlight, and analysts are wondering the extent to which this could undermine Donald Trump’s presidency, given his ties to Epstein.

With reports on Trump’s involvement with the Elite Model teen abuse scandal of the nineties, and the Virginia Giuffre case (who worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and then for Epstein), it is fair to say that the American leader is under attack in terms of media coverage. Accusations of pedophilia and cover-ups swirl, but framing all of this as mere “personal indiscretions” or personal wrongdoings, grave as they are, on Trump’s part would be a mistake. It is a US systemic societal and state issue.

Releasing the Epstein files was ironically enough initially promised by Trump’s own task force. One may recall that the Epstein case “backfired” on Trump largely thanks to Elon Musk, who also had his own ties to the billionaire. As I suggested back in February, it’s not far-fetched to see Trump’s task force for releasing classified files, including those on Epstein, as a strategy to weaponize information for leverage. The risk, I argued, was self-incrimination, given Trump’s own ties to Epstein — and to other organized crime figures. The “break-up” with Musk seems to have sparked precisely such backfire.

Consider the fact that the aforementioned Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein’s girlfriend and “madam”) was granted limited immunity for two days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and now she claims to be ready to testify before the US Congress, if given clemency. Her attorney has confirmed she answered questions about approximately 100 individuals. The timing is quite interesting to say the least — and the implication is clear: Maxwell’s list of names may very well be weaponized to shift the narrative, thereby shielding powerful figures including Trump from further scrutiny. But one needs to look still beyond that.

I wrote before on Epstein links to espionage, including but not limited to an Israeli Mossad angle. The former US Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta is on the record saying that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”, and thus was “above his pay grade” and should be left “alone”, despite all the serious accusations.

It is a well known fact that the billionaire’s properties were rigged with cameras, making blackmail the most obvious scenario. Sexually exploiting teenage minors is nasty enough but the exploitation of actual prepubescent children would bring far greater “value” in terms of kompromat and weaponizable damage, which leaves one wondering what else could be in the Epstein files (the same ones American officials now claim to have nothing).

American abuse of minors, espionage, blackmail: none of this would be a new phenomenon. The United States’ political machinery has long thrived on kompromat, a tactic refined during the Cold War when intelligence agencies exploited sexual vices to manipulate leaders and recruit operatives. The CIA’s so-called “brothels,” laced with LSD for blackmail, are a well-documented example taken from the infamous MKULTRA program.

This program also involved the torture and sexual abuse of children, among other human rights violations including clandestine scientific experiments with even newborns. In the Cold War years, the US government went so far as to feed radioactive oatmeal to disabled American school children (thus used as guinea pigs) as part of Atomic Energy Commission experiments. The point is that the US national security apparatus has a history of treating children as abusable and dischargeable objects for various purposes.

One may recall also that former US President Barack Obama was going to release information and even photos pertaining to torture conducted by the US regime at the Abu Ghraib and Bagram prison. Obama too changed his mind, as one does and the matter was closed. At the time, General Antonio Taguba confirmed (see page 17) the existence of unreleased images and videos showing sexual torture, including the rape of a boy by a US contractor. No wonder such material has never been released, but one still may wonder: why would authorities film or photograph such state crimes, thereby producing what is by definition child pornography?

It’s long been known that the American intelligence apparatus has engaged in illicit operations for its black budget, including organized crime sectors such as drug trafficking, to the point of creating the crack addiction problem in the US. Historian Alfred W. McCoy’s “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia” and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott’s works — such as “Cocaine Politics” — offer thorough documentation of part of this history.

Well, it just so happens that child pornography is a multi-billionaire industry and is part of the crime landscape. There is no reason to assume that the American “deep state” would have any qualms in taking part in such things. We are talking, after all, about a complex that for the last half century has been promoting “regime-changes”, torture, assassinations, trafficking, death squads, terrorism, and neo-fascism in different parts of the world.

Consider this: in the 1980s, an investigation into the Finders — a cult-like group based in Washington, D.C. — raised alarms over child trafficking and pornography, and a CIA-linked cover-up (the group had CIA ties via front companies such as Future Enterprises). In 1987, police in Tallahassee, Florida, found six filthy, hungry children aged 3 to 10 in a van with Finders members, along with videotapes, a computer, and urine-soaked bedding. Some children showed signs of sexual abuse.

Authorities later uncovered passports to sensitive places like North Korea and North Vietnam, large sums of money, and photos of chained children. Notably, Isabelle Pettie, wife of the group’s leader Marion Pettie, was a confirmed CIA employee, and their son worked for Air America, a CIA front tied to drug trafficking. A 1987 D.C. Police Intelligence report marked “Confidential” stated the case was “treading on the toes” of the CIA and had become a “CIA internal matter.” The suspects were released and the children returned to their guardians — charges were dropped.

Similar cases abound to this day, but are usually dismissed by the American media as “conspiracy theories”, unless it is convenient to weaponize them for electoral or political purposes (as is the case now with Epstein and Trump). To sum it up, releasing the Epstein files would be a good first step, but it’s merely the tip of a deeply disturbing iceberg.

Gordon Hahn: Trump’s Suicidal Nuclear Brinksmanship

By Gordon Hahn, Website, 8/5/25

I noted at the advent of his first term that Mr. Trump would be good for US domestic politics, especially the economy but bad for foreign policy and that is bearing out again in this second term. It is one thing for a political leader to loosely play with language that circles around making a nuclear threat, as Russian Security Council Deputy Head and former Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev has done again recently in a public social net spat with US President Donald Trump. But it is quite another to play global chess with the repositioning of nuclear forces to actually threaten another country, especially another nuclear power of equal if not superior nuclear weapons strength. No matter, that is precisely what President Trump has been doing of late. Not even the clueless, corrupt, and strategically incompetent Biden and Obama administrations made such a foolish move.

Trump responded to Medvedev’s verbal assault by making a material nuclear threat against Russia. He announced he had redeployed to US nuclear submarines closer to Russia – an act of open nuclear threat and intimidation. 

But that is not even the whole story. Trump’s nuclear sabre-rattling relates to much more than ‘merely‘ forward deploying two nuclear submarines a spart of a self-declared threatening of Moscow. 

In recent weeks, Trump has ordered the deployment of additional American nuclear weapons to Europe for the first time since Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations concluded treaties leading to massive cuts in Soviet and American strategic, intermediate, short-range, and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. In other words, he has negated the results of years of arms control efforts and decades of nuclear arms comity with Moscow. As Larry Johnson has noted, the Trump administration has deployed some 100-150 B61-12 tactical nuclear gravity bombs to six bases in five NATO countries: RAF Lakenheath (United Kingdom); Kleine Brogel Air Base (Belgium); Büchel Air Base (Germany); Aviano and Ghedi Air Bases (Italy); Volkel Air Base (Netherlands), and Incirlik Air Base (Turkey) (https://open.substack.com/pub/larrycjohnson/p/trump-escalates-nuclear-threat-to?r=1qt5jg&utm_medium=ios).

All this comes on the background of a NATO(US)-Russia Ukrainian War and an imminent Russian-American nuclear arms race, given the expiration of the New START nuclear arms treaty coming in seven months, not to mention Trump’s apparent last ditch attempt to revive Russian-Ukrainian negotiations and transition to normal US-Russian relations with his roaming negotiator Steven Witkoff’s visit to Moscow this week. Perhaps this is Trump’s provocative way of opening up discussions on renewing or replacing the expiring New START (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/05/23/a-new-new-start-putin-sees-trump-administration-as-a-window-of-opportunity-for-strategic-arms-control/).

Not surprisingly, except perhaps to Trump and his neocon provocateurs, Moscow responded by removing its self-imposed moratorium on forward deploying forward short and medium-range nuclear missiles. This might be a bit of a ruse for now, since in June 2023 Russia deployed nuclear missiles to Belarus, as NATO persisted in conducting the Ukrainian War it clearly provoked and in April 2022 blocked prevention of. Mr. Trump’s deployment of tactical nukes to Europe could be seen as a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s earlier nuclear deployments to Belarus (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-has-started-taking-delivery-russian-tactical-nuclear-weapons-president-2023-06-14/). But the nuclear submarine redeployment cannot be so viewed, and the redeployment of tactical nukes to Europe comes too long after the Russian deployment to Belarus to be convincing as such.

The Western imperative of escalation in and around Ukraine after provoking the war by way of battlefield and geostrategic escalations in Ukraine is clear and undeniable. From blocking the April 2022 Istanbul peace agreement to providing offensive rather than just defensive weapons, from first providing Ukraine with tanks and armoured personnel carriers, then artillery systems, then fighter jets, mid-range missiles, and soon perhaps longer-range ones, the West has taken every opportunity to escalate the war rather than negotiate an end to it. 

The endgame of Western persistence in escalating in order to level a ‘strategic defeat against Russia‘. This can be seen in the US, NOT UKRAINIAN, initiative to send HIMARS missiles to Kiev. For it was not Ukraine that requested the supply of HIMARS to Kiev, but rather it was American generals who did. As the New York Times reported: “Generals Cavoli and Donahue soon proposed a far bigger leap — providing High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS.” “When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like ‘standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?’” (https://archive.is/Fdwq3). This also can be seen in the proposal by some Biden-era US officials, according to the New York Times, to ‚return‘ nuclear weapons to Ukraine (www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/us/politics/trump-russia-ukraine-war.html). This would end either in a pre-emptive Russian nuclear strike or massive conventional one, using the likes of Oreshkin missiles, that would finish off the process of Ukraine‘s Second Great Ruin. This is suicidal brinksmanship and over what? NATO’s expansion to Ukraine.

Mr. Trump is returning to this stupid, futile, and dangerous Biden-era escalation policy, even as he ostensibly pursues a Ukrainian peace process. But Trump’s innovation is to escalate at the nuclear level, threatening a security-vigilant Moscow with a nuclear first strike in eastern Ukraine or the homeland proper. Continuing this petulant foolishness, as I have noted repeatedly in the course of the decade-long Ukrainian crisis, cannot end well.

***

Putin Subtly Puts the US on Notice… Russia is Locked and Loaded

By Larry Johnson, Substack, 8/5/25

Following two months of provocations and threats from the United States, Vladimir Putin announced a major policy change regarding intermediate-range missiles that pushes the world to the brink of nuclear war. While the mainstream media has largely ignored Russia’s announcement that it would no longer abide by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a few podcasters — e.g., Danny Davis and Alexander Mercouris — recognized both the importance and danger inherent in this decision and discussed this at length during their respective shows. This is not Russia going rogue. Putin’s decision was a unambiguous response to a series of foolish and reckless actions by the United States since June 1st of this year.

The Spiderweb attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force on June 1st, using drones deployed from hidden compartments in semi-trucks, was a dangerous provocation, although little damage was inflicted. Twelve days later, Israel launched a decapitation attack on Iran — that too thankfully failed — using the same drove tactic employed in Russia just weeks earlier. In mid-July the Russians listened in shock to General Christopher Donahue, Commander of US European Command (USEUCOM) describe how NATO has tested plans to quickly overrun and capture Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave. At the same time, Trump re-deployed B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs to at least six airfields in Europe, including the UK’s Lakenfield. Lastly, Trump brashly announced the deployment of two nuclear submarines with the specific mission of being in position to strike Russia. [NOTE: This was most likely a symbolic statement because submarines with that mission were already on station.]

The Trump administration also has announced that it will begin deploying intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and other long-range fire capabilities in Europe starting in 2026, with Germany as the initial host country for these systems. This deployment specifically includes advanced missile systems such as the Typhoon and Dark Eagle, which have been referenced in recent official communications and news reports. The Typhon Missile System (Mid-Range Capability) is a mobile, ground-launched system that fires multiple missile types (not a missile itself, but a multi-missile platform). It can fire the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which has a range of 1,500–2,500 km, or the SM-6, which has a range of 320 km. The Dark Eagle is a Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon aka LRHW, with a range of 2,775 km. The Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, after several failed attempts from 2021–2023, has been successfully tested. The system achieved its first successful end-to-end flight test in June 2024, followed by a second successful test in December 2024.

It is worth reviewing the INF Treaty that Donald Trump cancelled in 2018:

Major Points of the INF Treaty

1. Elimination of Intermediate- and Shorter-Range Missiles:

-The treaty required the US and Soviet Union to eliminate all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (approximately 300–3,400 miles), including both nuclear and conventional variants.

-Intermediate-range (1,000–5,500 km) and shorter-range (500–1,000 km) missiles were targeted, covering systems like the US Pershing II and Soviet SS-20 Saber.

-By June 1, 1991, both parties were to complete the destruction of these missiles and their launchers, resulting in the elimination of 2,692 missiles (1,846 Soviet, 846 U.S.).

2. Prohibition on Production and Testing:

-The treaty banned the production, flight-testing, or possession of ground-launched intermediate- and shorter-range missiles after the elimination deadline.

-This applied to both nuclear and conventional missiles within the specified range, ensuring no new systems could replace those destroyed.

3. Scope and Exclusions:

-The treaty covered ground-launched missiles only, excluding air-launched and sea-launched systems (e.g., submarine- or ship-based missiles like the US Tomahawk).

-It applied to missiles regardless of warhead type (nuclear or conventional), making it comprehensive within its range category.

-Support structures, such as launchers and associated equipment, were also to be destroyed or rendered unusable.

4. Verification and Inspection:

-The treaty established a robust verification regime, including on-site inspections, data exchanges, and continuous monitoring of missile production facilities to ensure compliance.

-A Special Verification Commission was created to resolve compliance disputes, with inspections continuing for 13 years after 1991 (until 2001).

-Both sides provided detailed inventories of their missile systems and destruction sites.

5. Indefinite Duration:

-The treaty was of unlimited duration, meaning it remained in force until a party withdrew (as the US did in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance with the 9M729 missile).

-Either party could withdraw with six months’ notice if they believed their supreme interests were jeopardized.

6. Global Application:

-The treaty prohibited deploying covered missiles anywhere in the world, not just in Europe, addressing concerns about Soviet SS-20s targeting Asia and US Pershing IIs in Europe.

-It applied to missiles stationed in allied territories (e.g., US missiles in NATO countries, Soviet missiles in Warsaw Pact states).

That treaty has prevented nuclear war in Europe for 37 years. Now, with Trump’s nuclear sabre rattling, Putin has put Trump on notice… Any IRBMs introduced to Europe will be destroyed. When that happens — mind you, I don’t say “if” — we will be at the very threshold of a nuclear nightmare. I don’t think Trump will get a Nobel Peace Prize out of this.