By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 6/18/26

History in the Making

June 17, 2026, could be remembered as a day that changed the course of history. In a bewildering series of statements from the G-7 in Paris, France, President Donald J. Trump declared that peace with Iran and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz was necessary to prevent a world economic crisis. President Trump also acknowledged that the US was weeks from an energy cliff, and that he did not want to become the modern Herbert Hoover and preside over another Great Depression. In the words of the Wall Street Journal Trump Signs Iran Deal, Says He Wants to Avoid ‘Economic Catastrophe’.

Here’s Trump later on the 17^th:” The alternative would be a worldwide depression. Stupid people want to have a worldwide depression. They are stupid people. Number one, the strait would never open.”

Perhaps without recognizing the symbolism, Trump signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran later that same day, 3 days early, at the Palace of Versailles in France. This palace was where the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, officially ending World War 1. The Treaty is viewed with ignominy as setting in motion events that would eventually lead another World War.

The remaining hurdle is Israel opposition to peace, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The MOU calls for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. Israel has refused. Israel and her allies will try to upend this peace effort.

The effect of the war on Iran has not only been to drive a wedge between the US and Israel, it has also revealed the weaknesses of the US military to the world. This is directly related to the fact that the US Military Industrial Complex is essentially a money laundering operation that has resulted in the US falling behind its rivals in military technology–despite spending trillions.

Tucker Carlson: “You probably never imagined that the end of American Empire would come in a little over a 100-day conflict with a little rogue state on the Persian Gulf that has the 34th largest economy in the world, a country called Iran. You just couldn’t imagine that would happen.”

By March 4^th the war was going so badly for the US and Israel that Will Schryver predicted: “No matter what happens going forward, or how the narrative is spun, ***Iran has achieved decisive strategic victory, ***and history will identify this conflict as a catalyst for accelerated decline of the American empire.”

Others say that Iran has simply “survived” not “won” and that the US will now begin to prepare for the next confrontation. Iran will have to race to match the US preparation while the pseudo continues and stays just under the threshold of total war. Meanwhile, the US will have to contend with Israeli warmongering while holding a ready excuse to restart the war i.e. that Iran is not abiding by the agreement.

To Iran’s credit, while other countries have merely survived confrontation with the US, Iran demonstrated that she can compete with the US and force a climbdown–this is a first.

Trump’s Concessions and Statements

Nuclear enrichment: “It’s a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that,” Trump said. “You have to use a little common sense.”

Nuclear program: Iran gets to keep its nuclear program for civilian purposes

Iran’s ballistic missile program: “Missiles aren’t the problem,” Trump told reporters. “They hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”

Iran’s frozen assets: The country has billions of dollars in overseas accounts that the US has blocked banks from releasing. Part of the justification for years is the claim that Iran, because Iran opposed Israeli atrocities, is a leading state sponsor of terrorism by funding proxy groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Here’s Trump’s response: “It’s not our money, it’s their money — and we froze it at a certain point in time,” Trump said. “I guess we’re going to have to give it back, you know. If we didn’t give it back, nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.”

From Naked Capitalism: “As BBC’s Siavash Ardalan writes, Trump’s responses to the reporters’ questions to justify the agreement with Iran were bizarre and unprecedented in their own way: They asked him how he could allow $300 billion in investment in Iran. He said, “We’ve already inflicted $2 trillion in damage on Iran; $300 billion is nothing in comparison.”

“They asked why he’s giving Iran tens of billions of dollars. He said, “If we don’t return their own money to them, other countries will be afraid to put their money in our banks, and then the dollar’s position will weaken.”

“They asked why the missile issue isn’t in the agreement. He said, “We’ve already destroyed 85% of their missiles anyway; the rest are buried underground, and besides, we sell air defense systems to the countries in the region, so they won’t worry about Iran’s missiles.”

“They asked if he’s not worried that Iran will say, “We’re only producing nuclear energy for civilian purposes.” He said, “You can’t tell everyone else to produce electricity with nuclear power while only Iran can’t.”

“Finally, he said, “If we continue sanctioning Iran, 91 million Iranians will die of hunger—what’s the point of that, really?”

Oh, and he joked that “If [the Iran deal] works out, I’m going to take the credit; if it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming [Vance].”

Israeli Defiance and Regrets

Bottom line: The US and the world economy turned out to be more important than overthrowing the Iranian government, placating Israel, or helping Israel achieve her dream of Greater Israel and world domination.

Israel was reportedly blindsided by the new ceasefire and instead believed that the war would resume. White House leaks of disagreements between Trump and Netanyahu have also accelerated, creating more tension.

Today in Haaretz there is an article accusing Israel of being a terrorist state committing crimes against humanity–written by former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert. Moreover, the global social, political, and economic barriers that prevented people from freely discussing Israeli savagery and the fact that Israel is and has been a terrorist state have fallen. All over social media you can find discussions of historical and current events. This was not happening before October 7, 2023, the Gaza genocide, the war on Iran, and the brutal invasion of Lebanon. The world has been shown that Israel’s military shoots babies in the head and children in the genitals–among many other atrocities–when will this brutality end?

Tamir Hayman, former head of the Israeli military intelligence agency (Aman); “This agreement gives Iran the ability to dominate the Middle East. If we had known that things would end this way, it would have been better not to start this war at all.”

From Dr Andreas King: “Sealed inside their own echo chamber, Israelis convinced themselves of a myth of military hegemony, total impunity, a small state that could play global superpower. This has been the narrative of defiance within Israeli discourse since 7 October. The bubble is slowly bursting. Hamas is still standing. Hezbollah fought the IDF to a stalemate. Iran extracted major US concessions without firing a shot. And Israel is more isolated than at any point in its history. The “regional great power” was always just borrowed American muscle. They were just the last to notice.”

Although Israel’s GDP is the size of New Jersey, only the passage of time will determine whether this peace initiative will succeed. The Israeli/Zionist lobby in the US and the entire western world is very rich and very powerful. Their power should not be underestimated.

How Quickly Can Traffic in Hormuz Be Restored

It’s not like flipping a switch. It was reported that 3 of the largest oil companies in the world could not arrange tankers–Petro China, Sinochem, and Indian Oil. Why? In PetroChina’s own words: “There are tankers available, but the problem is it’s too expensive and there is no guarantee you can exit the strait.” Also, Freight rates 3 times the pre-war level, and there are insurance clauses that require special Hormuz guarantees because there is no assurance a loaded 2-million-barrel ship can safely exit the Strait.

There are other problems that will need to be addressed. These tankers have been sitting in the gulf full of crude for four months. This means the oil may not be in good condition. Here’s Larry Johnson: “The heat produces thermal degradation, sedimentation, and in some grades, partial polymerization of heavier fractions. More practically, the cargo specifications that a refinery contracted for may no longer be met after months of heat exposure and water separation issues in the tanks. Before those cargoes can be delivered, they will need to be tested, and some will need blending or reprocessing before any refinery will accept them.”

“The ships themselves have been idle for four months. Engines need to be brought back online carefully. Hull fouling — the accumulation of marine growth on the hull during idle periods — significantly reduces speed and fuel efficiency, meaning transit times will be longer than normal. Some vessels will require port inspections before they can legally sail under their flag state rules. Port- scheduling, berth availability, and refinery run rates all have to be coordinated.”

Then there’s all the damage to oil and gas production throughout the gulf. Many well have been closed in and will take time to restart. The gas facilities of Qatar have been heavily damaged and will take time and money to repair.

Some estimate it could take months, if not years to even come close to what the gulf was producing before the war. Any additional interruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would rattle shippers and extend the timetable for delivery of oil and normalization. This means that Iran retains considerable economic leverage.

The Efforts to Lock in Intelligence Sharing with Israel

These efforts include–Section 622 – a provision buried in the Senate’s intelligence authorization bill that would lock in expanded intelligence sharing with Israel and make it nearly impossible to scale back.

Under the amendment, intelligence sharing with Israel can’t be suspended or reduced unless the president personally determines there’s a “specific and identifiable national security concern.”

There is also a bill in the House. The Bills are H.R. 7540. The house bill has a similar section. Section 224 is now section 219. The Senate Bill is 3855 Section 622. Call Congress 202 224-3121

The Risk that the US Israeli War on Iran Would Fail Was So Well Known It was Repeatedly Discussed by this Substack!

In an essay dated February 24^th this Substack asked: Could the US Face A Reckoning? The essay expressed concern about what would happen if the war in Ukraine or a war on Iran went badly.

An essay on this Substack dated February 24^th noted that 80% of Americans opposed an attack on Iran. The essay also stated: “it does not appear that the US military is in optimum shape to confront Iran. I also doubt the US has a definitive handle on Iran’s current capabilities.”

On February 28^th, the US followed Israel to war on Iran by conducting an illegal, surprise, unprovoked attack, even though ongoing negotiations were making substantial progress towards reaching an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. In an essay dated the same day this Substack noted that Iran declared “No Red Lines” and attacked US bases in 6 countries along with Israel, simultaneously, within 90 minutes of the first US/Israel strike. The bases and facilities attacked were in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, and Iraq, marking one of the most significant escalations in regional conflict in decades. The attack destroyed the AN/FPS-132 radar in Qatar, “America’s Giant Eye”. Over the course of the war, Iran would destroy US bases, radars and similar facilities, blinding the US and demonstrating conclusively that the 800 US bases the US has built around the world, at great cost, cannot be defended.

In an essay dated March 7^th this Substack asked: “Has the Reckoning Begun? The essay noted important facts about Iran, namely: that Iran has a population of over 90 million highly educated people including a lot of engineers; that Iran was a large country, four times bigger than Iraq, and as large as the entire western US; that Iran was mountainous creating a natural fortress; that Iran was strategically located overseeing the Strait of Hormuz which at its narrowest point was only 21 miles wide–already oil tankers were no longer exiting the Strait; that Iran had adopted a “Mosaic Defense” dispersed throughout the country with the authority to operate independently in the event of an attempted decapitation; and finally, that Iran had built and developed an enormous underground military infrastructure–“entire missile cities, air bases, command posts, and logistics tunnels — built deep underground”. The essay also noted: “How many there are and where they are located is still unknown. These facilities could become an impenetrable shield that ensures the preservation of combat potential even during intense strikes.” The essay concluded with a discussion of the severity of Iranian strikes on US assets in the region, while noting that the damage “to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordon and the United Arab Emirates was severe.”

As a result of these advantages, the militaries of both the US and Israel could not force their will on Iran.

This Substack discussed, early and often, the risk to the global economy from the energy and other shortages resulting from the war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

How Iran Sees It

Dr. Ghalbaf: “We negotiate from Victory! The enemy chased the ceasefire. Iran said no at first then dictated the terms. This is nothing like JCPOA. Today the talks rest on battlefield victory both enemies and friends have acknowledged with Iran’s armed forces having beaten a fully equipped enemy. Negotiation as a method of struggle. No weaknesses, no hollow slogans, while the talks went on.”

Conclusion

Iran’s response to being attacked by the US and Israel was very deliberate and highly strategic. Iran was forced to conduct the war in a way that avoided the threat that the US or Israel would use nuclear weapons. In the face of sneak attacks that murdered their Ayatollah and many of their leaders, Iran refused to respond in kind. Instead of attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure, Iran attacked radars, listening posts, and military bases and facilities. When Israel and the US attacked schools, Iran did not. Iran’s attacks, on energy resources were in response to attacks on Iran’s energy resources by the US or Israel.

Throughout the war, Iran conducted itself with dignity and integrity–they have shown themselves to be educated, honest, and honorable people. They have earned my respect, and hopefully, the respect of the world.

---

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 6/12/26

The odds of Russia agreeing to this under any circumstances remain abysmally low.

Zelensky recently met with the British, French, and German leaders, whose countries comprise what’s known as the E3, in London. They then released a joint statement in which they reaffirmed their vision for a lasting peace, the third point of which “includes the deployment of the Multinational Force – Ukraine” (MFU) once a ceasefire is reached. While it remains unclear what countries would participate in this mission, which Russia has repeatedly warned against, it’s a safe bet that at least those three will.

Casual observers might have missed it, but “The Brits, French, & Germans Are Now Right On Russia’s Doorstep”, the first two have nukes, and the French just extended their nuclear umbrella over a swath of Europe, all of which contributes to exacerbating Russia’s already high threat assessment of them. It’s also by now known that Russia would consider any foreign forces in Ukraine under any conditions to be legitimate targets. Whether or not it would actually strike them, however, remains a matter of debate.

Russia’s primary goal nearly four and a half years into the special operation is to obtain full control over Donbass, at least per what an RT contributor described as the quid pro quo agreed to during the Anchorage Summit whereby Putin allegedly promised to cease hostilities if Ukraine withdrew from there. It’s thus hypothetically possible that it could further compromise by agreeing to the deployment of the MFU if Zelensky made his withdrawal from Donbass dependent on receiving this “security guarantee”.

At the same time, however, there are reasons for Russia to reject any such arrangement even if the MFU only intends to deploy a superficial force west of the Dnieper (at least at first). For starters, the formal presence of any NATO forces in Ukraine could serve as the tripwire for expanding what could otherwise be a localized border skirmish into a hot NATO-Russian war. This is especially so if their troops function as “human shields” at the Ukrainian bases or critical infrastructure against which Russia might retaliate.

Second, the aforesaid scenario could be triggered by a Ukrainian false flag provocation, which Russia would have no power to prevent if Kiev goes through with it. For example, all that it could take is a Russian drone that was captured intact after earlier being brought down by electronic warfare one day hitting an MFU position, which could then set into motion the full-fledged war that was warned about. Russia wants to preemptively avert this possibility since it truly doesn’t want a hot war with NATO.

And finally, “The EU Poses A Much More Credible Threat To Russia Than The Inverse” even without any of its forces having formally deployed to Ukraine, so this threat would only grow if that happened. Even worse, Russia recently warned about the 1941-like threat posed by Germany’s remilitarization, so the deployment of its troops there would be psychologically unnerving for it. Russia might therefore not only strike them like it’s threatened but could even launch a preemptive strike against European NATO too.

For these reasons, while it’s still hypothetically possible that Russia might agree to the MFU’s deployment west of the Dnieper (at least at first) in exchange for Ukraine withdrawing from Donbass, such an arrangement would arguably lead to more problems than it would solve. The odds of Russia reaching such a compromise with the West are thus extremely low. The E3 should accordingly heed Russia’s repeated warnings against the deployment of foreign forces to Ukraine under any conditions.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/1/26

Last week, the Guardian gave us a curious little snapshot of the accelerating decline of political thinking in Western Europe. Timothy Garton Ash’s “How to Defeat Putin” essay, three days later presented as a ‘View from the Council’ by the EU-funded lobby group ECFR, begins, as these things often do, with the sensible premise that the bloc needs a serious Russia strategy, but it ends somewhere much darker, with a prescription for saving democracy by making it less democratic.

It’s all part of the recurring contemporary sickness where the author wants the EU to become more authoritarian in order to defeat authoritarians. We can call it ‘Von der Leyenism,’ rooted in that peculiar strain of Western European thought which believes not everything associated with 1930s Germany was bad, and there were more than a few redeeming features. An old trick, dressed up in a clean shirt, which insists we must police speech to defend freedom and pretty much akin to fucking for virginity. All built on the belief that dissent should be treated as treason, provided the dissenter uses the wrong vocabulary and comes from the wrong side of the political tracks.

The phrase “see off our own nationalists” is the big giveaway here, and it exposes the real agenda. If it meant defeating them at elections by addressing voter concerns, it’d be fair enough because that’s how politics is supposed to work. But we all know the new toolbox involves lawfare, censorship, surveillance, deplatforming, financial pressure, spook interference, media campaigns, and the endless insinuation that any party outside the Brussels-approved centre is somehow carrying a matryoshka doll stuffed with Kremlin cash.

For the plan to succeed, liberal democracy would have to be replaced with a new form of “managed democracy,” this time with Western branding. Basically, Russia’s Surkovism of the 2000s remodelled with better tailoring, gender quotas, fewer cigarettes, less rap, more diversity, rainbow flags, pronouns and far duller nightlife.

The tragedy is that the author almost remembers the real lesson of the 20th century Cold War, but then races straight past it as if he were a colt wearing blinkers in the 2.40 at Sandown. The West outlasted the Soviet Union because it offered a better life and not because it could police thought more efficiently. Even the children of Khrushchev and Stalin moved to America, but the Kennedy clan and the Roosevelts didn’t scurry off east pining for the kommunalnaya kvartira of Leningrad.

The West boasted freer institutions, higher living standards, more open debate, more space for the individual and a deeper sense that tomorrow might be yours to shape, rather than something handed down from a committee of grey men who addressed each other as ‘comrades’ and had a strange habit of kissing each other full on the lips.

The entrapped Eastern-bloc youth didn’t look across the Iron Curtain and envy NATO communiqués, what they envied were supermarkets, freedom to travel, universities, jazz records, jeans, nicer cars, uncensored books, Michael Jackson, and the possibility of living without a little censor lodged permanently in the skull.

That’s what made the West attractive, but now look at the programme being offered by the liberal oped writing class. It involves a permanently securitised EU, cut off from cheap Russian energy and raw materials and committed to rearmament, sanctions, industrial strain, falling living standards and endless moral instruction. Does Ash seriously believe this is supposed to become the great attractive pole of the twenty-first century? And on the basis of what? Would it be expensive electricity, deindustrialisation, high youth unemployment, rising inequality, migration crises and a political class that calls voters dangerous when they complain?

Germany is the obvious warning flare because, for decades, its successful model rested on cheap energy, advanced manufacturing, solid infrastructure, a cohesive society and access to both developed and developing markets. Since 2021, that model has been battered as factories are under pressure, energy costs have risen, the country is absorbing more and more migrants (very often of questionable utility to wider society) and the old industrial certainty has gone thin around the edges while even the rail network is falling apart. Yet instead of asking whether EU members can really prosper while permanently severed from Europe’s biggest country, the half-continent’s strategic class reaches for another lecture.

What they fail to grasp is that the EU can’t censor and moralise its way into attractiveness and nor can it build unity by dishonestly pretending that populism is exclusively a foreign infection. The EU’s top dogs prefer the lie that voters have been hypnotised by Moscow because they can’t process the truth which is that more and more of them no longer believe the current political class (that means them) is up to the job. And while calling their opponents agents, dupes, racists, ‘pro-Russians’ or extremists is easier than answering them, it’s also suicidal.

Now, none of this means Western Europe should be weak and its various countries should, of course, defend themselves. They should have armies that function, borders that mean something, industries of substance, clear identities and leaders capable of speaking to Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Kiev without sounding like interns at a think tank panel.

But a serious EU would also understand geography, and accept that Russia isn’t a passing weather system, but rather it’s Europe’s largest country, a nuclear power, a major resource base and a permanent fact of the continent. Trying to exclude Russia from the European project while drawing in every other ex-Soviet state was always a ludicrous form of wishful thinking, and it’s also had structural implications for Russia itself. If the EU had behaved differently it could have waited out the Putin generation, which is understandably aggrieved by the Soviet collapse and the humiliation of the 1990s.

Then it could have dealt with a more internationally-minded and liberal-minded leadership, which didn’t even remember the USSR, that was certain to follow. We should never forget that just a month before the first Maidan protests in Kiev, Alexey Navalny came second in a Moscow mayoral election, but after the EU and the US wholeheartedly supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, Russia’s elites concluded, whether we like it or not, that the West’s commitment to democracy and rules was only a sham.

This isn’t a call for the EU to surrender to Moscow, but rather a suggestion that it build a European security architecture that includes both Russia and Ukraine, because no stable order can be built by pretending one of them can be wished away.

If the EU continues to become poorer, more censorious, less free and more frightened of its own voters, it will keep heading down the road to ruin.

By Matt Bivens, Substack, 6/8/26

Half a year ago, the Russians were hopping mad, and reporting that a swarm of more than 90 military drones had just tried to blow up President Vladimir Putin’s home.

The Russian president was not there that day. But his family — long-time girlfriend Alina Kabayeva and their two sons Ivan, about 11, and Vladimir, about 7 — may well have been. (Putin and his first wife of 30 years had an apparently amicable divorce in 2014. The Kremlin has never officially acknowledged Putin’s second family, and so never commented on who was at home the day the drones arrived. But Russian media strongly suggested Kabayeva and the children were there.)

Putin telephoned America that morning to complain, and later that morning Donald Trump was upset on the Russian president’s behalf.

“President Putin told me about it. Early in the morning he said he was attacked. It’s no good. It’s no good,” Trump told reporters then. “I was very angry about it.”

“It’s one thing to be [on the military] offensive,” Trump added. “It’s another thing to attack his house.”

But as reviewed here two months ago, within just a few days, Trump and the U.S. government abruptly reversed this position. The CIA “assessed” that no such attack had ever happened. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also called the story “a fabrication.”

Were the Russians making this whole thing up?

The attack was alleged to have targeted a Russian government complex on the shores of Lake Valdai in the Novgorod region. Russian media report the residence has sports facilities and even its own ice hockey rink, as well as massive air defenses, and that Putin’s family spends most of their time there.

In response to skeptics, the Russians pointed indignantly to video footage of the drones they had shot down, and on Jan. 2 took the extraordinary step of summoning a U.S. military attache to Moscow to formally present a navigation chip they said they’d recovered from one of the drones, urging American decryption specialists to examine it for themselves.

Did our intelligence services actually examine this evidence? No one’s ever said.

But President Trump, who had initially been sympathetic and upset after receiving that early-morning earful from Putin, within days stated he didn’t believe Putin any more. He said he now doubted claims that anyone had ever tried to drone-bomb Putin’s home.

“I don’t believe that strike happened,” Trump told reporters. “We don’t believe that happened, now that we’ve been able to check.”

In the midst of all this, American special forces attacked Caracas and kidnapped the Venezuelan president, followed quickly by the U.S.-Israeli assassination of the Iranian leadership and the Iran war debacle. The question of whether Ukraine +/- the CIA had just tried to kill Putin and / or his wife and children in their home was forgotten.

Yet the story will not go away.

It was too big an event, and it is in the minds of all of the major actors in the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just referenced it in an open letter to Putin. That letter was billed as proposing a one-on-one meeting, but it was too larded with insults and threats to qualify as a peace overture.

Zelensky’s letter opens with the observation that Ukrainian drones had just attacked a high-profile annual economic conference in St. Petersburg that Putin himself had attended. Those drones — which, it should be remembered, are often if not always guided to their destinations by U.S. / NATO satellites and targeting teams — blew up oil refineries and military facilities all over the city this past weekend.

Zelensky shared a 26-second video montage of those attacks on his social media:

“[O]ur long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your [economic] forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities,” Zelensky said in his open letter to Putin, and then continued in a taunting manner:

“We often hear that you are comfortable with this war. Of course, not in those cases when it comes to the security of your residence in Valdai or your parade in Moscow. Your own life is valuable to you.”

This seems very close to a direct admission by Zelensky that Ukrainian drones did indeed attempt to assassinate Putin and / or kill his family at his home in Valdai. (It also sounds like a threat to try again.)

Recall that immediately after the news broke of the Valdai residence attack and Trump pitched a fit, Zelensky called such talk of an attack on Putin’s home “a fabrication.”

Six months later, it’s now an operation he boasts publicly about.

Nor has Putin forgotten.

At an otherwise mundane press conference last week, Putin was asked about the headline-for-a-day that a drone had crashed on the roof of an apartment building in Romania. No one was seriously hurt. The drone was either Russian or Ukrainian and clearly had gone off course, but the event was instantly hyped as a possible Russian attack on our glorious NATO ally Romania!

The New York Times published a full article about this single drone that wandered out of a neighboring war zone. The Times said the drone crash “wounded two people” who had to be “admitted to hospital”. This was later described as a 53-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy. The Times provides a link to a statement (in Romanian) that says the woman has first and second degree burns on her legs, and the boy unspecified burns on his forearms. So, minor burns. It must have been terrifying to have the roof of your apartment blasted open out of nowhere. That said, such minor injuries themselves would not usually merit “admission to hospital”. If, as an ER doctor, I tried to admit a case of first-degree forearm burns to Pediatrics anywhere in America, they’d have laughed me out of the building. Maybe they do things differently in Europe.

Although The New York Times was able to devote six reporters, a 30-second video, and more than 1,300 words across 26 paragraphs to this curiosity — “drone of uncertain provenance flies off course on May 29, hits roof of building, causes no major injuries” — it still has yet to mention the May 22 U.S.-backed Ukrainian drone attack on the teachers college at Starob*lsk that killed 21 Russian teenagers and injured, sometimes severely, more than 60.

But even more interesting (and pathetic, and illustrative) is the way The Times handles comments made by Putin about this Romanian drone kerfuffle.

After many paragraphs of emotive drama — a drone hit a building! Everyone was scared! — followed by repetitive insistence the drone had to be Russian, and that this was “Russia’s recklessness,” and that “Russia’s war of aggression has crossed yet another line” — The Times finally turned to the Russian reaction:

Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, declined to take responsibility for the drone accident, suggesting that this could have been a stray Ukrainian drone.

“No one can speak of the origin of this aerial vehicle until it is fully examined,” he told a televised news conference in Kazakhstan. Russia would hold its own investigation if Romania would hand over the debris of the drone, he said.

But what Putin actually said was more interesting.

In a somewhat testy exchange with Russian reporters (a transcription and video are posted in English on the Kremlin website), he basically says it was clearly an accident; and the way to figure out whether it was a Russian or Ukrainian drone would be to examine the remnants of the drone itself.

As he made this glaringly obvious point, Putin then added a sarcastic fling at the West by recalling the attack of six months ago on his official residence in Valdai. He reminded listeners that, when the West expressed doubts that his home and family had just been targeted, Russia had replied by offering up the remnants of one of the downed drones, in a formal ceremony of hand-off to American diplomats:

“If they provide us with objective data [about this Romanian drone] — as we once did with representatives of the U.S. administration, by handing over information and drone fragments from an attempted strike on one of the residences of the President of the Russian Federation to be examined — then … we will conduct an objective investigation. Only then will we be in a position to assess what has actually happened.”

How interesting that The New York Times team edited out any reference to Putin’s reminder that we’d recently tried to assassinate him.

Apparently it still bugs Putin.

But The Times doesn’t thinks that’s news you need. You’ll have to do without the reminder that we probably tried to kill Putin and his wife and two kids, as you struggle to decide how much longer, as a U.S. citizen and voter, you want to spend billions of dollars on weapons to blow apart not just the Donbas, but now even Moscow and St. Petersburg, all while you yourself are targeted by city-vaporizing Russian missiles that could be here within 15 minutes. Good luck!

In summary: In recent days both Zelensky and Putin have again referenced an attack on Putin’s home and family carried out by U.S.-supported Ukrainian drones. This is the same attack that Trump initially believed in but then scoffed at, after the CIA formally told him it never happened.

But it clearly did happen.

Which suggests that the CIA is giving false briefings to the president.

Is anyone in Congress or major media ever going to ask the CIA or the so-called “community” of intelligence services about this? For example, was this an American-approved assassination attempt, or a rogue Ukrainian operation? If a rogue Ukrainian operation, did it still have U.S. logistics and targeting support?

Remember, Trump has long wanted to end the Ukraine war, at least in theory. But many in Western security state circles want to fight on to the last Ukrainian. The attack on Putin’s home in Valdai this winter came exactly as Trump and Zelensky were meeting in Florida to talk about peace, and the attack itself was seen by some as an attempt to derail those negotiations. Maybe it was.

And maybe, if a U.S.-Ukrainian drone attack had killed Putin’s sons, then today we’d all be wondering how we’d ever been so irresponsible, and asking why we’d ever let things escalate so horrifically.

By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 5/20/26

The Limits of Symbolic Deterrence

For the Kremlin, there is an increasingly uncomfortable possibility that the deterrence architecture inherited from the Cold War may no longer function against the West. The structure of confrontation itself has fundamentally changed. NATO increasingly operates through distributed gray-zone escalation involving intelligence sharing, satellite targeting assistance and long-range strike enablement conducted through Ukrainian platforms. These mechanisms are deliberately designed to remain beneath the threshold of direct NATO-Russia war.

Some of the developments that have already occurred during this more than four-year conflict would have been considered almost unthinkable during the Cold War and even up until five years ago. Long-range NATO-enabled drone strikes carried out through Ukraine against Russia’s Armavir and Orsk strategic early-warning nuclear radar stations in April-May 2024, the Western-supported Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast in August 2024 and the highly publicized drone attacks against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in June 2025 represented major breaches of long-standing Russian deterrence warnings.

During the Cold War, attacks connected even indirectly to strategic nuclear infrastructure would have been viewed as carrying immense escalation risks. Yet these actions occurred without direct consequences imposed on the Western states backing Ukraine. From Moscow’s perspective, this may itself represent evidence that Russian deterrent signaling has progressively lost coercive credibility against NATO’s evolving gray-zone strategy.

This growing perception of deterrence erosion is increasingly visible inside Russian strategic discourse itself. One of the clearest examples is Sergei Karaganov, who has openly argued that Moscow’s repeated restraint has encouraged further Western escalation and that Russia must restore fear and deterrence credibility against Europe through more direct forms of coercion. While Karaganov’s views are more extreme than official Kremlin policy, they are significant because they reflect a broader anxiety emerging within Russian strategic circles that deterrence fails when red lines are repeatedly crossed without consequences.

The question increasingly confronting Moscow may therefore is whether symbolic deterrence still imposes meaningful costs on the alliance.

Russian Restraint and the Logic of Containment

Despite extensive Western involvement in the conflict, Moscow has thus far avoided direct attacks on NATO territory. This restraint may reflect a broader strategic calculation that the current structure of the war still favors Russia more than a widened European conflict would.

The Kremlin may likely believe time remains on its side inside the Ukrainian battle space. The war is geographically contained, Russia retains escalation dominance within Ukraine and can continue grinding down Ukrainian manpower and infrastructure without triggering direct confrontation with the full NATO alliance.

At the same time, Moscow almost certainly understands that a strike on NATO territory, no matter how calibrated, could play directly into the hands of the Zelensky regime and the more hardline factions in the West seeking more direct military intervention. Zelensky has increasingly depended politically on the continuation of the war itself, and widening the conflict has long been one of Kiev’s clearest strategic objectives. Direct Russian attacks on alliance territory could therefore alter the war in Kiev’s favor while triggering escalation dynamics that rapidly exceed political control.

Moscow may also calculate that direct strikes on NATO territory would not begin Europe’s militarization, but complete its political consolidation by turning an already accelerating rearmament project into a wartime consensus with far less public resistance. Such attacks could remove remaining hesitation, silence internal dissent and boost the already dismal public opinion approval ratings of leaders across the continent.

For now, Moscow may calculate that ambiguity serves it better than open confrontation. Cyber operations, sabotage, battlefield escalation inside Ukraine and pressure on European infrastructure allow Russia to impose costs while avoiding direct NATO-Russia combat. A wider war would also stretch Russian logistics, air defense systems and force deployments far beyond the Ukrainian theater.

Yet prolonged gray-zone warfare creates pressures of its own. The longer Western-enabled attacks inside Russia continue without direct consequences for NATO states, the greater the pressure on Moscow to restore deterrence credibility while still attempting to keep escalation controlled.

The Return of the Berlin Problem

The historical precedent for this escalation dilemma emerged during the Cold War confrontations surrounding Checkpoint Charlie and divided Berlin. American and Soviet planners understood that even a localized clash between forward-deployed forces could trigger an uncontrollable escalation cycle between nuclear powers.

This fear became especially acute during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Inside the Pentagon, strategists repeatedly war-gamed scenarios in which a limited confrontation spiraled beyond political control. During ExComm discussions, the logic of escalation was captured with chilling clarity:

Robert Kennedy: “What do we do when … he moves into Berlin?”

Robert McNamara: “Well, when we’re talking about taking Berlin, what do we mean exactly? Do they take it with Soviet troops?”

President John F. Kennedy: “That’s what I would see, anyway.”

McNamara: “I think there’s a real possibility of that. We have U.S. troops there. What do they do?”

General Maxwell Taylor: “They fight.”

McNamara: “They fight. I think that’s perfectly clear.”

Kennedy: “And they get overrun.”

McNamara: “Yes, they get overrun, exactly.”

Robert Kennedy: “Then what do we do?”

Taylor: “Go to general war, assuming we have time for it.”

Kennedy: “You mean nuclear exchange?”

Taylor: “Guess you have to.”1

The terror inside these discussions was not merely the prospect of war, but the realization that escalation could acquire its own momentum once direct combat between superpowers began.

The same dilemma was later captured satirically in the British series Yes, Prime Minister, where the logic of “salami tactics” exposed the central problem of deterrence: if an adversary escalates incrementally rather than through all-out attack, at what point does the alliance actually risk nuclear war?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3OpsP-gz_00?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

That same dilemma may now be reemerging in a different form.

The Escalation Ladder: From Demonstration to Retaliation

One possibility increasingly discussed within strategic circles is a Russian nuclear detonation for demonstration purposes. Rather than immediately attacking NATO territory, Moscow could attempt to restore deterrence credibility through a dramatic act of coercive signaling short of battlefield nuclear use. Professor John Mearsheimer has repeatedly suggested that Russia could eventually resort to a demonstration detonation in order to restore fear and deterrence credibility against the West.

Moscow could theoretically detonate a tactical nuclear weapon at a remote site such as Novaya Zemlya near Europe’s northern flank without directly attacking NATO territory. The objective would not be battlefield destruction, but psychological shock: forcing European governments and publics to confront the reality that nuclear escalation may no longer remain safely abstract.

Such a demonstration might create an immediate crisis inside NATO. Some states, notably the Eastern Europeans and the Baltics, would likely demand stronger military escalation and reinforcement, while others in Western Europe may push urgently for de-escalation out of fear that the next threshold could involve actual battlefield nuclear use. A demonstration detonation would not destroy NATO militarily, but it could fracture the alliance politically by forcing it to answer a question long kept theoretical: how does one respond to nuclear use intended not for warfighting, but coercive signaling?

If such a demonstration failed to alter NATO behavior, pressure could emerge inside Moscow for more direct forms of retaliation. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which Russia conducts a precision strike against a military site in Poland or the Baltic states used for operational support to Ukrainian attacks inside Russia. The target is not American forces, but a French, German or British deployment hub. Moscow frames the strike not as an attack on NATO itself, but as retaliation against states directly participating in hostilities against Russia.

Such a strike would represent a major escalation. Yet its real significance would lie in the political dilemma that follows: would the United States truly risk direct war with Russia over the destruction of a European military base in the Baltics? The answer is less obvious than public NATO rhetoric suggests.

Washington today faces mounting strategic overstretch. The United States remains heavily engaged in the Middle East while simultaneously preparing for long-term competition with China in the Indo-Pacific. A direct war with Russia would consume enormous resources while creating escalation dynamics that could rapidly exceed political control.

Yet failing to respond could be equally catastrophic. If Washington responded only symbolically, or attempted to avoid escalation altogether, the consequences for NATO could become historically transformative. Article 5 would suddenly appear conditional rather than absolute. European governments would begin reassessing whether the American nuclear umbrella is genuinely automatic or ultimately discretionary. Moscow, meanwhile, might conclude that calibrated retaliation works precisely because NATO fears direct war more than Russia fears controlled escalation.

This is precisely the escalation dilemma that haunted Cold War planners during Berlin.

India and the Normalization of Threshold Crossing

Yet the assumption that nuclear deterrence permanently prevents calibrated retaliation has already been challenged elsewhere. An important modern precedent emerged in the long confrontation between India and Pakistan. For decades, Pakistan relied on nuclear deterrence to wage a low-intensity proxy war against India in Kashmir under the assumption that New Delhi would avoid escalation for fear of nuclear conflict. This created what Indian strategists described as the “stability-instability paradox”: nuclear stability enabling persistent proxy warfare beneath the nuclear threshold.

For years, this strategy constrained the Indian response. That calculus gradually changed under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After the Uri attack in 2016, India crossed the first threshold through Special Forces raids on terrorist launchpads across the Line of Control. Following the Pulwama attack in 2019, India crossed a second threshold by conducting precision air strikes in retaliation against terror camps on the other side.

The largest escalation followed the 2025 Pahalgam terror attacks against civilians and India’s retaliation through Operation Sindoor. Unlike the earlier episodes, the crisis evolved into the largest engagement ever between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. India ultimately degraded Pakistan’s air defense network and carried out strikes on major Pakistani air bases before Islamabad sought a ceasefire.2

In all three cases, India’s retaliation remained calibrated and limited. Yet the broader significance was the gradual normalization of increasingly overt retaliation beneath the nuclear threshold: first cross-border raids, then precision strikes and finally sustained conventional escalation.

This precedent matters because Russia may eventually reach a similar conclusion regarding NATO’s gray-zone war structure. If Western-enabled attacks inside Russia continue expanding without consequences for NATO states, Moscow may increasingly conclude that calibrated retaliation carries lower strategic costs than indefinite restraint.

The Danger Beyond the Gray Zone

The central danger emerging in Europe is not simply escalation itself, but the gradual erosion of deterrence credibility under conditions of prolonged gray-zone war.

History suggests that states confronting persistent proxy or indirect attacks eventually begin reconsidering thresholds once thought too dangerous to cross. India progressively normalized retaliation beneath the nuclear threshold against Pakistan. Iran similarly demonstrated how prolonged confrontation can gradually erode the credibility of an American security umbrella once an adversary becomes willing to impose direct costs.

Russia may eventually reach a similar conclusion if Western-enabled attacks deep inside Russian territory continue expanding without direct consequences for NATO states. Scenarios such as a demonstrated nuclear detonation or limited retaliation against NATO infrastructure would likely emerge from an attempt to restore deterrence before escalation spirals further.

This, however, is precisely what makes the situation so dangerous. Measures intended to reinforce deterrence can themselves become the next rung on the escalation ladder. The longer gray-zone warfare persists without a stable strategic equilibrium, the greater the possibility that Russia concludes symbolic warnings are no longer sufficient and that deterrence must instead be demonstrated through action.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.