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Dr. Imtiaz Khan

Kashmiri American Scholar &
Board Member, World Kashmir Awareness Forum

August 20, 2025

Yasin Malik (born 3 April 1966 in Srinagar, Kashmir) is a prominent leader for the movement of Kashmiri independence and the chairman of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. Raised in the Maisuma neighborhood of Srinagar, Malik’s political activism began early, when he founded the Tala Party and later the Islamic Students League. In the late 1980s, frustrated by blatant rigging of election in the 1987, he along with his colleagues launched a movement that demanded implementation of UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, to which both India and Pakistan are signatory. The mass agitation received mammoth support from the people of Kashmir and international attention unnerved government of India. Yasin Malik was jailed and tortured and consequently, he developed heart ailment and lost his ability to hear from one of his ears. He has been checked for these conditions by several physicians in the United States, but the damage is so severe that the defect is beyond total cure. 

It is important to mention Amy Waldman who wrote in the New York Times on August 24, 2002, that “Rigged elections in Kashmir in 1989 helped trigger the armed uprising that India estimates has taken more than 35,000 lives.”

Yasin Malik is not run of the mill politician, but a revolutionary leader who has flame of freedom burning in his heart. In media interviews he succinctly states that his involvement in “armed struggle” was outcome of the actions by Indian state. The voices of freedom were throttled and space for non-violent protests was diminished. Under mounting pressure from the people of Kashmir and the attention it received from international community, in 1994, a delegation headed by Ambassador Kuldip Nayyar was dispatched by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao to contact Mr. Malik in the Jail. It was unequivocally affirmed that all cases against him will be dropped if he eschews violent measures. 

The statement by eminent journalist Ambassador Kuldip Nayyar in Redfiff.com on August 7, 1999, bears testimony to his fulfillment of the promise.  In Mr. Nayar’s words “The first militant, Yasin Malik, who raised his gun at a public meeting in the heart of Srinagar, has turned nonviolent and vegetarian. Now he is a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.” A prominent journalist Bharat Bhushan, wrote in a prestigious daily ‘The Telegraph’ on February 4, 2007, “The president of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), one of the first to wield the gun in Kashmir, is today training youngsters in non-violent politics. He uses a curious mixture of religion — Sufism — and non-violence to build a constituency for peace in Jammu and Kashmir.”

Indian government cannot ignore the fact that their former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, interacted with Yasin Malik on February 17, 2006, at 6.00 p.m. (India time) and meeting lasted for more than an hour.  Dr. Singh sought help from Yasin Mailk and suggested him to take an initiative to bring separatist and militant voices into a dialogue process that can lead India–Pakistan peace parleys. It was conveyed to Yasin Malik by Prime Minister Singh that he had no qualms in visiting Pakistan to advance the peace talks. Subsequently, before visiting Pakistan, Yasin Malik flew to Washington and discussed the peace initiative with then the Assistant Secretary of State, Richrd A. Boucher. He also had a meeting with Elizabeth Millard in National Security Council.

Yasin Malik was invited by Dr. Micheal Krepon, President of Henry L. Stimpson Center, Washington; Dr. Stephen Phillip Cohen, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at Brookings Institutions, Dr. T. Kumar, the Director for International Advocacy at Amnesty International, Washington, DC, to speak on the peace initiative between India and Pakistan and his role in strengthening the dialogue process. Yasin Malik also spoke at New York based, Asia Society and Harvard University Asia Center. It would be illogical, irrational and insane to expect that Prime Minister of India or the representatives of state department or representative of American think-tanks would meet with a person who has committed murderous acts. 

In April 2025, while still incarcerated, Malik told India’s Supreme Court that he is a “political leader, not a terrorist,” and highlighted that multiple Indian prime ministers who had previously engaged Yasin Malik in dialogue. He also defended his choice to represent himself in court and clarified that his organization was never officially listed as a terrorist group under UAPA post-1994 ceasefire. On August 8. 2025, Malik appeared virtually before Delhi High Court. He had pleaded for physical presence rather than appearance via virtual mode. His plea was rejected.  Presently the National Investigation Agency (NIA) of India is asking for the enhancement of Mr. Malik’s life imprisonment into death penalty. The next hearing will be on November 19, 2025.

One wonders what his crime is.  Earlier trial court had said that crimes committed by Malik struck at the ‘heart of the idea of India’ and were intended to forcefully secede Jammu and Kashmir from the union of India. One wonders how Kashmir can secede from India when according to all international agreements including the UN resolutions, Kashmir has never acceded to India in the first place. Associated Press reported that Yasin Malik said during the trial, “Terrorism-related charges leveled against me are concocted, fabricated and politically motivated” and that “If seeking Azadi (Freedom) is a crime, then I am ready to accept this crime and its consequences.”

Sampat Prakash—a prominent Kashmiri Pandit, trade union leader, and activist—described Yasin Malik, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chairman, as a courageous leader who “lives in the hearts of the Kashmiri people.” He highlighted Malik’s transition from armed resistance to leading a peaceful struggle for Kashmir’s freedom and expressed pride in his friend for having spent much of his life in jail for the Kashmir cause. Sampat Prakash urged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demonstrate sincerity toward resolving the Kashmir conflict by visiting Srinagar’s Martyrs’ Graveyard, bowing before the graves of innocent victims, and seeking forgiveness from the Kashmiri people. Despite ideological differences, Sampat Prakash publicly acknowledged Yasin Malik’s influence and commitment to the cause of Kashmir. 

The plan and intentions of the current fascist regime are more sinister when it comes to the case of Yasin Malik. Narinder Modi is using Yasin Malik as a pawn for his domestic agenda. The fascist government is encountered with severe backlash due to recent defeat from Pakistan and failed foreign policy. Increase tariffs imposed by present US government has led to economic downturn and Modi’s popularity is in tatters. To ameliorate his political standing, Prime Minister Modi is using concocted, cooked up and contrived cases against Yasin Malik. It should be noted that earlier Indian supreme court had rejected curative appeals for seeking death sentence for Yasin Malik. The trial court ruled that the case did not meet the Supreme Court’s “rarest of rare” threshold for capital punishment. Indian agencies are pursuing nefarious activities by conducting fresh raids after more than three and half decades to manufacture evidence to achieve their iniquitous goals.  

The International community must take cognizance of that historical behavior of India in cases like late Afzal Guru where it was stated by Chief justice of supreme court that notwithstanding the lack of overwhelming evidence, the death sentence needs to be carried to fulfill the collective conscience of the majority. Thereafter, the chief justice was rewarded with seat in the Indian parliament on his superannuation. 

By eliminating peace-loving leaders like Yasin Malik, the Indian regime is closing any avenues of peace in the region and pushing the youth of Kashmir towards actions that can be detrimental to the peaceful resolution of Kashmir conflict. We appeal to the United Nations and other world powers, including President Donald Trump to earnestly impress upon the Indian government to let international standards of justice prevail and free Mohammad Yasin Malik.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs* and Sybil Fares* – Common Dreams

An immediate UN Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent membership in the UN next month would put an end to Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine. It cannot happen without US backing.

President Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and his efforts toward peace in Ukraine, if successful, could possibly help him earn one—but only if he also ends US complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under Trump, as under former President Joe Biden, the US has served as Israel’s partner in mass murder, annexation, starvation, and the escalating torment of millions of Palestinians. The genocide can, and will, stop if Trump wills it. So far he has not.

Israel is committing genocide—everyone knows it, even its staunchest defenders. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has recently made a poignant acknowledgment of “Our Genocide.” In Foreign Affairs, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew recently admitted that extremist parties in Netanyahu’s government openly aim to starve Palestinians in Gaza. Lew frames his piece as praise for the former Biden administration (and for himself) for their supposedly valiant efforts to prevent mass starvation by pressuring Israel to allow minimal food entry, while blaming Trump for easing that pressure.

Yet the actual importance of the piece is that an ardent Zionist insider certifies the genocidal agenda sustaining Netanyahu’s rule. Lew recounts that in the aftermath of October 7, Israelis frequently pledged that “not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, and not a drop of fuel will go from Israel to Gaza,” a stance that still shapes Israel’s cabinet policy. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) can use Lew’s article as confirmation of Israel’s genocidal intent.

The genocide in Gaza, coupled with the annexation in the West Bank, aims to fulfill the Likud vision of a Greater Israel that exercises territorial control between the Sea and Jordan. This will destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state, and any possibility of peace. Indeed, Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist minister of finance and minister in the ministry of defense, recently vowed to “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state” while the Knesset has recently called for annexation of the occupied West Bank.

The US aids and protects Israel every day in these horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. The US provides billions of dollars in military support, goes to war alongside Israel, and offers diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity. The vacuous mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” is the US pat excuse for Israel’s mass murder and starvation of innocent civilians.

Generations of historians, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and inquiring minds will ask how the descendants and co‑religionists of the Jews murdered by Hitler’s genocidal regime came to become genocidaires. Two factors, deeply intertwined, come to the fore.

First, the Nazi Holocaust lent credence among Jews to the Zionist claim that only a state with overwhelming military power and ready to use it can protect the Jewish people. For these militarists, every Arab country opposed to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine became a dire foe to be crushed by war. This is Netanyahu’s doctrine of violence, which was first unveiled in the Clean Break strategy, and which has produced nonstop Israeli mobilization and war, and a society now gripped by implacable hatred even of innocent women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Netanyahu has dragged the US into countless devastating and futile wars out of Netanyahu’s blindness to the reality that only diplomacy, not war, can achieve Israel’s security.

Second, this non-stop resort to violence reignited a dormant strain of Biblical Judaism, notably based on the Book of Joshua, which presents God’s covenant with Abraham as justification for genocides committed in conquering the Promised Land. Ancient zealotry of this kind, and the belief that God would redeem his chosen people through violence, fueled suicidal revolts against the Roman Empire between 66 and 135 AD. Whether the genocides in the Book of Joshua ever occurred (probably not ) is beside the point. For today’s zealots, the license to commit genocide is vivid, immediate, and biblically ordained.

Aware of the danger of self-destructive zealotry, the rabbis who shaped the Babylonian Talmud proscribed Jews from attempting to return en masse to the promised land (Ketubot 111a). They taught that Jews should live in their own communities and fulfill God’s commandments where they are, rather than seeking to recapture a land from which they had been exiled following decades of suicidal revolt.

Whatever the fundamental reasons for Israel’s murderous turn, Israel’s survival among nations is at risk today as it has become a pariah state. For the first time in history, Israel’s Western allies have repudiated Israel’s violent ways. France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada have each pledged to formally recognize the State of Palestine at the upcoming UN General Assembly in September. These countries will finally join the will of the overwhelming global majority in recognizing that the two-state solution, enshrined in international law, is the true guarantor of peace.

The majority of the American people, are rightly revulsed by Israel’s brutality and are also turning their support massively to the Palestinian cause. In a new Reuters poll released today, 58% of Americans now believe that the UN should recognize the State of Palestine, against just 32% who oppose that. American politicians will surely note the change, at Israel’s peril, unless the two-state solution is rapidly implemented. (Logical arguments can also be given for a peaceful one-state, bi-national solution, but this alternative has essentially no backing among UN member states and no basis in the international law regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that has developed over more than seven decades.)

This Israeli government will not change course on its own. Only the Trump administration can end the genocide through a comprehensive settlement agreed by the world’s nations at the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly. The solution is to stop the genocide, make peace, and salvage Israel’s standing in the world by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel on the June 4, 1967 borders.

For decades, the entire Arab and Islamic world has supported the two-state solution, and advocated to normalize relations with Israel and guarantee security for the entire region. This solution is in full accordance with international law, and was again espoused clearly by the UN General Assembly in the NY Declaration last month at the conclusion of the United Nations High-Level International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution (July 29, 2025).

Trump has come to understand that to save Ukraine, he must force it to see reality: that NATO cannot expand to Ukraine as that would directly threaten Russia’s own security. In the same way, Trump must force Israel to see reality: that Israel cannot continue to rule over the Palestinian people, murder them, starve them, and ethnically cleanse them. The two-state solution thereby saves both Palestine and Israel.

An immediate UN Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent membership in the UN next month would put an end to Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine, as well as its reckless territorial ambitions in Lebanon and Syria. The focus of the crisis would then shift to immediate and practical issues: how to disarm non-state actors within the framework of the new state and regional peace, how to enable mutual security for Israel and Palestine, how to empower the Palestinians to govern effectively, how to finance the reconstruction, and how to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to a starving population.

Trump can make this happen at the UN in September. The US, and only the US, has vetoed the permanent membership of Palestine in the UN. The other members of the UN Security Council have already signaled their support.

Peace in the Middle East is possible now—and there is no time to lose.

*Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. 

20 August 2025

Source: other-news.info

By Paul Craig Roberts 

What do we make of it?

A good result came of it. Trump moved away from his demand for a ceasefire and said that it was more important to work toward a permanent peace than a ceasefire which is seldom kept. 

This would seem to commit Trump to addressing the root cause of the conflict, which is Russia’s insecurity with NATO all over her borders.

Putin said that the meeting marked the transition from confrontation and threats to dialogue. This prospect alone made the meeting worthwhile.

These are good results. In a world of nuclear weapons the level of tension had become untenable.

For hopes to be realized two barriers must be recognized and overcome. One is the neoconservative doctrine of American hegemony. The other is the interest of the US military/security complex.

The doctrine of hegemony requires overcoming Russia in order to achieve Washington’s unilateralism. Is this doctrine too institutionalized to be repudiated?

The budget, influence over Congress, and power of the military/security complex requires a major enemy. Russia fills that role. Peace on equal terms with Russia takes away the enemy, and the budget and influence of the military/security complex declines. There are military bases or weapon manufacturers in almost every state, which means this interest is also institutionalized as President Eisenhower warned us it would be.

Therefore, the question before us is: how likely is it that Trump can get NATO and missile bases off of Russia’s border? It is not at all likely if attention cannot be directed to the basic problem.

How helpful will media be? It is the wrong focus to emphasize that Putin wanted the meeting in order to show that he was not isolated and could meet with the American president like Zelensky and Netanyahu do.  

The meeting was fortuitous. Trump had trapped himself. His threatened secondary sanctions or tariffs against India and other BRICS members backfired. Faced with his own 10-day deadline, he had to find a way out. He found it in an immediate meeting with Putin. For Trump the meeting was a way of getting himself off of the spot.

The opportunity to wind down a confrontation that would likely end in nuclear war is based on luck. 

Can this lucky outcome be turned into a mutual security agreement? That depends on the strength of the neoconservatives’ doctrine of hegemony and the willingness of the military/security complex to accept declining sales and profits. Until it is realized that these two interests are the barriers to peace that must be overcome, there will be no peace process.

*

Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

18 August 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Alan Macleod

7 Aug 2025 – After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison—the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison—has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.

Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.

David has already announced significant changes at CBS, promising “unbiased” news coverage and “varied ideological perspectives,” which are widely understood to signal a shift toward right-wing, pro-Trump coverage. Worse still, Bari Weiss, a journalist with a long history of zealous pro-Israel advocacy, is being considered as the network’s new ombudsman, shaping its political direction, precisely because of her “pro-Israel stance.”

MintPress News examines Ellison’s close ties to both Trump and Israel, Weiss’s extensive career as Israel’s most vocal supporter in the U.S., and what this means for the future of free and diverse speech in America.

Israel’s Man In Silicon Valley

Although Skydance, Ellison’s media empire, is officially headed by David, it is well understood that father Larry holds both the purse strings and the reins of power. With a net worth of $301 billion, placing him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Rankings, Larry made his fortune by founding tech giant Oracle.

Oracle started as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, it is named after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation on which Ellison worked. For some time, the CIA was Oracle’s only customer, until it began to win contracts with other agencies of the U.S. national security state. Today, although Oracle’s customer base is much wider, it maintains its role as the privatized face of the CIA.

Yet if Oracle is close to Washington and Langley, it is perhaps even more intimately tied to the State of Israel. An avowed Zionist, Ellison has worked tirelessly to advance Israel’s political project. Among his closest personal friends is Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he vacationed on his private island in Hawaii. Ellison was so impressed and confident in the Israeli prime minister that he offered him a seat on his company’s board, replete with a salary of $450,000.

While Oracle has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state, Ellison himself has personally bankrolled the Israeli Defense Forces, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF, an organization that purchases equipment for the Israeli military. This included a $16.6 million pledge (the largest single donation the group has received) to build a new training facility for soldiers defending what he called “our home.” As Ellison explained:

In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.”

Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project. Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit. “We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none,” she said, adding:

This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”

For a deep dive into Oracle and its connections to both U.S. and Israeli power, read the MintPress News investigation, “Openly Pro-Israel Tech Group Now Has Control over UK’s Most Sensitive National Security Data.”

18 August 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Jan Oberg

13 Aug 2025 – But did you know? Is this discussed now when the UN turn 80 in October? No, politicians, media and scholars generally focus on war and ignore humanity’s most important peace-maker.

“UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2025 (IPS) – The United Nations, facing a liquidity crisis, has been threatening to lay-off about 20 percent of its estimated 37,000 employees world-wide: a proposed move that has triggered widespread protests from staff unions both in New York and Geneva.”
Thus starts Thalif Dean’s analysis in a recent IPS article.

The UN is in a liquidity crisis!!!???

This is an issue the whole world should talk about NOW.

This is a situation that every thinking person should condemn in the strongest possible terms: The UN must cut down, while the rest of the world, the West in particular with its 5% of the GNP, invests perverse sums in militarism and war, while other, cheaper and more efficient, peace-making means are available.

It is not that the UN should not be reformed and made more efficient. But in whose interest is it to force the UN to become even more poor and powerless?

World military expenditure reached $2718 billion in 2024, an increase of 9.4 per cent in real terms from 2023 and the steepest year-on-year rise since at least the end of the cold war, SIPRI has just told the world.

No reaction! No outrage!

Here are key facts about the United Nations’ budget:

The General Assembly has approved a $3.72 billion budget for the United Nations for 2025. The UN regular budget funds the core administrative costs of the organisation, including the UN General Assembly, Security Council, Secretariat, International Court of Justice, special political missions, and human rights entities.

“The biggest single item of expenditure is (UN) peacekeeping, which costs $9 billion across all agencies ($7.9 billion via DPKO). Much of the rest is spent on humanitarian assistance (e.g. $ 4.5 billion from the World Food Programme, $3.2 billion from the High Commissioner for Refugees, $2.3 billion from UNICEF – the children’s fund) or development programmes (e.g. $5 billion from the UN Development Programme). Overall $14.9 billion is spent on humanitarian assistance and $12 billion on development programmes.” More here.

Thus, these main items make roughly US$ 31 billion: 4 + 15 + 12 for all the United Nations does in our world.

Thus, the UN has 1,1% of the world’s military expenditures to do good worldwide.

Or, UN member states spend 100 times more on armament and war than on the entire UN system. Further, the US, one of the largest contributors to the UN budget, does all it can to undermine the UN, leave its organisations and cut down its contribution.

And as of 7 August 2025, only 119 Member States have paid their regular budget assessments in full.

Here is how the UN is funded and who is not paying up – and more. And here is one that puts it all in perspective: “When you add up the regular UN Secretariat and peacekeeping budgets, the annual average cost of the UN for each person on the planet is about $1.25; that’s about the cost of a bag of chips…”

There exists no way the world can move towards a future with more peace and less violence as long as these priorities continue – and continue un-discussed as if they were natural, normal and healthy. The reality is that the global system is fundamentally sick, militarising itself to death. Period.

Military expenditures have never been as high as they are today, and everyone talks about the increasing risk of war, regional or global. Armament means less security, and bigger risks. And possessing nuclear weapons is a violation of international law.

In contrast, disarmament, another type of defence thinking, education about conflict analysis, resources for mediation and peace-making will, without a doubt, increase human and global security and open roads to peaceful co-existence.

The madness must stop. Therefore:

World taxpayers unite!
Refuse to pay for these perverse priorities.
Let the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complexes, MIMAC, arrange coffee and bake sales for their – kakistocratic – militarism and war.

See also my recent article “The UN at 80: Still humanity’s most important organisation, but member states deliberately destroy it” and this conversation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DYuL68qNN8]

Prof. Jan Oberg, Ph.D. is director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research-TFF in Sweden and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

18 August 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

16 Aug 2025 – Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.

After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”

Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.

Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.

In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.

We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?

At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18th, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine..

The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.

The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.

How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.

Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:

“We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”

Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?

The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.

NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.

So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.

The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.

U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war and in the wider Cold War it is part of.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022.

18 August 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

7 Aug 2025 – Standing at the giant parking lot of Kerem Shalom Crossing in southern Gaza next to the Egyptian border on 29 August 2024, I drew a parallel between Auschwitz and Gaza.

All comparisons typically fail to capture certain aspects. My comparison is no exception.

The aerial images captured from some Jordanian air craft engaged in air drop of aid to Gaza’s population being starved to death by what “Jewish Fascists” of Israel as apartheid “ethnocracy”, to borrow the words of Oxford University’s Avi Shlaim, boast as “the world’s most moral army” blows a hole in my Auschwitz analogy. (See “First Thing: Gaza from the sky – a landscape of rubble, dust and graves”, The Guardian, Wed. 6 Aug 2025.)

Gaza is more than a slaughter house

As evidenced from the freshly emerging videos and photographs, Gaza’s physical landscape today resembles Hiroshima City in the morning after on 7 August 1945. Just as Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians of all ages is the direct, intended outcome by Israel’s planners of this “war for annihilation” of an entire Palestinian society so is the near total destruction of the physical infrastructure that sheltered the 2.3 million Palestinians at the start of the war on 8 October 2023.

The vastly undercounted deaths of over 60,000 — of whom more than 16,000 were babies, and children – by the Gaza Health Ministry must be paired with the staggering number – 377,000 – presented by Dr. Yaakov Garb, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who are “missing” (presumed dead and buried under dozens of tons of rubble of bombed out Gazan buildings).

Let’s also not forget that Israel had allowed Gaza to exist as its “open air prison”, to use the term publicly utter by retired IDF naval admiral Ami Ayalon who also served as the chief of Shin Bet, or Shabek, which runs Gaza like prison guards, since 2007. That was the year when the Hamas became the elected government of the 28-mile strip along the hydrocarbon rich Mediterranean Sea, something Israel eyes with its characteristic lust for land and resources.

Chillingly, the common element here is both Hiroshima and Gaza have been variously vaporized by the American weapons.

Obviously, the estimated 80,000 tons of the explosives delivered through Made-in-USA 1,000 and 2,000 lb bombs, all provided by the bipartisan Washington dropped from F-35s, almost daily and nightly over 660 days, could do a similar degree of physical destruction as Truman’s Bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who then needs atomic bombs to destroy Gaza?

Here worth noting is the fact that the American Creator of history’s first-ever atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, the German-trained professor of theoretical physics at the flagship campus of the University of California, in Berkeley, was capable of painful and honest self-reflection that “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds“.

Alas, there is absolutely no sign of such capacity for honest soul-searching amongst the American political leaders and their foreign policy advisors: the United States continues to be the destroyer of worlds, that is, other peoples’ worlds (whole sale societies, countries and nations), from the Korean peninsula to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to throughout the Muslim Middle East of Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza and all of the Occupied Palestine, as well as Latin America.

In the early autumn of 2016, I visited Hiroshima , with an old British friend of mine, Professor Edward Vickers, whose father is a retired Royal Air Force pilot. Ed resides in Japan with his Japanese partner and their children. I was in Kyoto for a small international seminar on comparative cases of genocidal violence where I presented my main research theme of my own “Buddhist” country’s genocide against Rohingya people, still ongoing to date.

I decided to take a long train journey from Kyoto to Hiroshima and asked Ed to join me at Hiroshima, a place we had both wanted to go. For me, Hiroshima has long had a personal ring: the extended American family (of two sisters, both of whom did their undergraduate degrees at Oppie’s university when the man was on the faculty of physics) who practically adopted me as a young foreign graduate student in Northern California was entangled in the Manhattan Project. The older sister got a job at Los Alamos National Lab where the bomb was developed, specifically as Oppenheimer’s personal secretary. As a matter of fact, her boss walked her down the aisle at a small chapel established for the thousands of project workers as she fell in love with and married a young scientist working on the project.

In the video below, Marilyn Langlois describes her pilgrimage to Hiroshima, Japan, in April 2025, recalling her family connection to the first atomic bomb, countering myths surrounding its use, and stressing the urgency of “never again.”

One Thousand Paper Cranes

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTjaoflsuq8]

If it weren’t for the name Hiroshima and our historical knowledge it triggers, we would see neither the traces of the old Hiroshima nor the evidence of the first atomic bomb’s impact on the physical and natural environment.

When I visited the dark site, Hiroshima is no more dark or tragic, no traces of the atomic scars of the World War II savagely fought amongst Western imperialists and the axis of fascists for 6 years.

It looks and feels like another vibrant and populous Japanese city, eighty years after the city was reduced to rubble and a large number of its residents instantly vaporised.

That is, until we approached the Hiroshima Peace Park where the museum is located. We immediately recognized an iconic landmark of the vaporised city: the skeleton of a building with its dome, which has been kept as an unreconstructed memorial to the old Hiroshima which existed until 8:15 am on 6 August 1945.

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

The United States has long become death, and destroyer of the worlds, while its corporate political class continues to celebrate its power of annihilation and seeks to send the massage that they will continue to destroy the world, natural and human, in order to rule over it.

For that reason alone, I am not so sure that we can be optimistic about Gaza’s reconstruction alas post-war Hiroshima, even as a Trumpian dystopian Riviera on the “unmarked mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians exterminated in their extended families over 2-3 generations.

As Rev. Dr Munther Isaac, the renowned Palestinian theologian of Shepherd’s Field, Bethlehem, said in his recent address to the Churches for the Middle East Peace Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the ongoing US-Israel’s joint mass extermination campaign against his fellow people in Gaza, (and the West Bank) is the clearest indication of the total collapse of the current moral order of this post-Holocaust world.

In Isaac’s words, “Never again!” is really ‘Yet again!” while the Zionized Imperialists have integrated elements of both Auschwitz (closed on 27 January 1945) and Hiroshima (destroyed on 6 August 1945) in their annihilation of Gaza, both the physical environment and residential human population.

Isaac continues, “the law (now) protects the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza while punishing those who oppose (this crime against humanity.”

In passing, I will point out that even the relentless attempts to deny, defy and erase truths about USA and Israel by the planners, executioners and supporters of the genocide in Gaza have a precedent in the way the United States as the occupying military power in Tokyo handled the atomic bomb survivors’ attempts to document and tell the factual truths about what the Americans did with their atomic bomb in a single morning at 8:15 am on 6 August 1945.

The flyer I picked up from the Special Exhibition during my visit to Hiroshima speaks volumes about the typical perpetrator behaviour: erasure or concealment of evidence, oral or physical.

It reads: “In 1950, five years after the bombing, Hiroshima City invited its residents to send stories of their A-bomb experience in order to share with others and thereby help create a peaceful nuke-free world. A total of 165 stories were collected. …

However, due to various reasons such as the intensifying Cold War with the outbreak of the Korean War, a Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 6 that year was cancelled at the last minute by order of the GHQ (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers), which had occupied Japan.”

Fast forward to 2025
The destroyers of Gaza today see themselves as God’s chosen people with the divine right to perpetrate a Holocaust of their own against the largely Muslim population of Palestine whose land they have stolen to build “the Jewish national homeland”, under the imperial patronage of first Britain and now the USA.

There are daily crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Gaza by USA and Israel over 660 mornings – and still counting.

So expect these two states to become even more shrill and extreme as they struggle to exterminate factual truths about their victim-livestreamed crimes against Palestinians, specifically, the bogus “antisemitism” laws as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) run by the Jewish Supremacist or Jewish Exceptionalist psychopaths working for the genocidal state of Israel.

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

18 August 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

15 Aug 2025 – In contemporary conflict the “weaponization of information” or “targeting of journalists” shows a pattern of squashing dissent. Analysts like Martin Libicki and John Arquilla argue how information itself becomes a battlefield in what they call noopolitik. The U.S. and Israel are historically accustomed to exploiting land, sea and air. Manipulating the information space is also nothing new. +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham indicated that Israeli intelligence, or Aman, formed Legitimization Cells to preempt Gaza journalists as Hamas members when Palestinian reporting was spot on, although the press with a political affiliation is commonly accepted elsewhere in the world.

In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the 10 Aug 2025 Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.

Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?

Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.

The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.

Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.

The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.

In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]

This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.

Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?

Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.

Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.

The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.

Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Daniel Falcone: Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?

Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’

Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.

As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.

Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.

The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.

Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.

Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.

Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.

__________________________________________

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee Member, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. 

18 August 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Ranjan Solomon

The story of Ukraine is inseparable from the twilight of the Soviet Union. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced Perestroika and Glasnost, promising economic modernization and political openness. Europe and the United States, charmed by his popularity, cheered these moves, yet often misread the signals. Gorbachev’s reforms unleashed centrifugal forces within the USSR: nationalist movements surged, the economy teetered, and political authority fragmented. While celebrated abroad, he lacked the domestic authority to stabilize the union, and Western encouragement at times accelerated disintegration rather than containing it.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and military pressure had already strained the Soviet economy. By 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving Boris Yeltsin to preside over a Russia in chaos. Privatization created oligarchs while ordinary citizens endured hyperinflation and unemployment. Into this vacuum, the United States and Western Europe moved decisively. Clinton’s administration (beginning 1993) expanded NATO eastward despite reportedly promising Gorbachev that the alliance would not “move an inch eastward.” Each new member—Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states—was, from Moscow’s perspective, a strategic encirclement (Carnegie, 2015). Europe, meanwhile, applied selective morality: promoting democracy while advancing its economic and security interests, often overlooking the historical and cultural complexities of Russia’s neighbours.

By November 2013, Ukraine found itself at a crossroads. President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU association agreement in favour of closer ties with Moscow sparked the Euromaidan protests. Over three months, violent clashes left more than 100 dead (BBC, 2014). The West hailed this as a democratic uprising, yet it also aligned Ukraine decisively with NATO and EU strategic objectives. Russia viewed the ouster as a direct threat, leading to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the insurgency in Donbas (Carnegie, 2015; CEPA, 2016). NATO’s eastward posture, long framed as defensive, had become an instrument of strategic projection.

Into this volatile environment rose Vladimir Putin, who assumed the Russian presidency in 1999. He quickly consolidated power, curtailed oligarchic excesses, and restored a sense of national purpose. Putin approached Ukraine as both neighbour and buffer, acutely aware of NATO’s encroachment. Western actors, by contrast, often pursued episodic interventions, emphasizing short-term strategic goals rather than sustained, historically grounded policy.

Ukraine’s political turbulence continued. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, won the presidency with over 73% of the vote. He faced a divided country, Russian-speaking eastern regions, and Western expectations that often-constrained sovereignty. Billions in U.S. and EU aid flowed to Kyiv, sometimes contingent on policy directions. Zelensky publicly protested some conditions, highlighting how international assistance can shape, and sometimes constrain, domestic governance (USA Facts, 2025; EEAS, 2025).

The military-industrial complex looms large. The U.S., responsible for roughly 40% of global military expenditure, allocated $182.8 billion to support Ukraine by 2025 (China Daily, 2025), while the top Pentagon contractors received $771 billion from 2020 to 2024 (Quincy Institute, 2025). For Ukraine, physical damage has reached $152 billion, with reconstruction estimates up to $486 billion (Social Europe, 2023).

Diplomatic efforts illustrate the asymmetry of power. The 2025 Alaska summit between Trump and Putin excluded Zelensky from initial talks, exemplifying how Ukrainian sovereignty can be sidelined (The Australian, 2025). Biden’s administration, despite structured support, often acted reactively, constrained by domestic politics and NATO consultation. The result has been a perception of indecision in the West, contrasting sharply with Russia’s disciplined strategy.

International institutions, including the UN Security Council, remain limited. Dominated by five permanent members—the victors of WWII—the council struggles to mediate impartially. NATO’s operational posture, framed as defensive, often functions as strategic projection, exacerbating conflict rather than preventing it.

Way Forward: Philosophical and Strategic Perspective

The Ukraine crisis challenges the post-Cold War unipolar paradigm. A durable solution requires embracing multipolarity, historical literacy, and mutual respect for sovereignty. Peace is cultivated not through military aid or sanctions alone, but through dialogue that acknowledges demographic realities, historical grievances, and security concerns. Western powers must reckon with the consequences of past interventions; Russia, Ukraine, and Europe must negotiate in a framework that transcends zero-sum thinking. Philosophically, the crisis compels a re-evaluation of international ethics: power without justice, strategy without history, and aid without sovereignty, cannot achieve lasting peace. Global governance structures—UN, NATO, EU—must evolve to reflect equitable participation and shared responsibility, ensuring no nation is perpetually marginalized or encircled.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

16 August 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.

After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.” 

Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.

Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.

In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022. 

We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?

At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18th, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.

The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022. 

The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government. 

How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries. 

Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit: 

“We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.” 

Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?

The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.

NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.

So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.

The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us. 

As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of a new edition of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, just published by OR Books.

16 August 2025

Source: countercurrents.org