The News of the World
What happened this week, according to me.
Friday, 23/05/25, saw the first stage of the agreed prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine received 390 POWs. These will be soldiers, some or many of whom surrendered to the Russians. It seems unlikely that they’ll be court-martialled, but will probably be sent straight back into the fray. Of the 390 Russians, 270 were soldiers. The other 120 were civilians; innocent non-combatants.
70 of them are Ukrainian citizens, political prisoners accused of treason. Their crimes include speaking Russian, having family in Russia and using Russian SIM cards to call them. The other 50 are mostly elderly, mostly women, with some young mothers among them. Their crime was not evacuating from Kursk when they had the chance. Perhaps they thought the Ukrainians wouldn't bother with geriatrics, or nursing mothers. Wrong.
Shocking footage from August 2024 reveals Ukrainian troops abducting Russian civilians in Kursk, forcibly loading them onto trucks, and subjecting them to brutal beatings. When losing the Kursk front, the AFU used these people as human shields while they made their escape. They were detained in Sumy prison camps as hostages, to be exchanged for conscripted soldiers who didn't want to fight in the first place.
Many of these kidnapped Russian citizens remain imprisoned by the same people who falsely claim that Russia stole Ukrainian children. This blatant war crime is how the Ukrainians do. The footage of old women weeping with relief as they are loaded onto buses to take them home exposes Kiev’s ruthless tactics and undermines its moral claims while fuelling the cycle of violence and justifying Moscow’s harsh responses.
No Russian would be left behind on the battlefield, but there are thousands of Ukrainian corpses, abandoned by their fellow soldiers, rotting in places along the border area of the Kursk region were sporadic fighting persists. This is what Apti 'Akhmat' Alaudinov, a Chechen Major General of the 141st Motorized Regiment and commander of the special forces involved in the clean-up operation, told RIA Novosti news.
Also abandoned in Kursk region are numerous military vehicles, including one based on the American M577 armoured personnel carrier, recovered by Black Sea Marines. Teutonic lettering was visible inside and it was covered in Nazi-style crosses, but it’s since been cleaned up and restored. It will now be put back into service on the Russian side.
President Putin has visited Kursk in the past few days, where he revealed that the Ukrainians keep trying to reinvade. "They push", he said, "but we push harder". While Ukrainian social media accounts boast that the RUBpAK 'Prime' drones of the 5th Sumy Border Detachment are 'methodically sending the Russian enemy to hell and thwarting his plans', the reality is that the advance is barely being impeded.
Video that looks a lot like a shoot-em-up game purportedly shows Russians of the 177th Guards Marines crushing the remnants of Ukraine’s 21st Mech Brigade in Miropolye, near the Kursk border. Another failed incursion by a Ukrainian sabotage group from Ryzhevka & Atinskoye (Sumy Oblast) was obliterated by seven FAB-500s, Soviet-era 500-kilogram general purpose air-dropped bombs with high-explosive warheads.
These repeated, futile, irritating incursions have lead Putin to announce Russia’s intention to create a buffer zone along the border. "We are talking about Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, which have suffered and are being shelled", he said. "Moreover, the enemy usually chooses targets that have no military significance. Peaceful sites, houses, people." The range of missiles being supplied to the AFU by its NATO sponsors in around 70km, so a 100km buffer zone should prevent that and shall be Zelensky’s legacy.
When the appalling Ukrainian troll will eventually fall off his perch, who knows? Sergey Lavrov has incurred the ire of pro-Ukrainian bots on TwitteX by reiterating the position spelled out by his President nearly a year ago, on 14/06/24, that Russia cannot sign a peace deal with Zelensky because he is not a legitimate leader. Zelensky is a war criminal who governs under martial law and has never honoured an agreement with the Russians, despite his electoral promises.
The only ceasefire in Ukraine will be to permit parliamentary elections. Consequently, potential political rivals to Zelensky are being eliminated. On Wednesday, Andriy Portnov, a senior aide to Ukraine's former president Viktor Yanukovych, was assasinated, shot dead outside a school in Pozuelo de Alarcón, a suburb of Madrid.
President Trump, having failed to negotiate the peace he promised to secure within days of taking office and unable to blame Vladimir Putin, with whom he has had long telephone talks during which the reality of the Russian position will have been spelled out, still doesn't get it. He will, however, be persuaded that further US involvement in this proxy war is futile, so he should get out now and blame it on Biden.
Trump doesn't like war, not for any moral reason, but because it interferes with commerce. When it makes money, he's all for it. Consequently, he has announced his ambition to increase the annual US 'defence' budget to a trillion dollars and to build a domestic defence system like the Israeli 'Iron Dome'. Only Trump's Dome will of course be Golden and cost a projected $184 billion. This is despite the Iron Dome having been repeatedly breached because it can't cope with hypersonic missiles and the fact that the continental USA has never come under missile attack and is unlikely to. Unless Canada goes rogue.
When Ukraine's current tranche of US military aid is exhausted, Trump will walk away. Leaving his erstwhile European partners to carry on supporting Zelensky's losing fight. Quite how Starmer, Macron and Merz plan to do that isn't clear. It cannot be explained because it is not militarily possible. The Russians have demonstrated technical and tactical superiority in every area of the battlefield, except propaganda + disinformation.
The Russian army is swelling with patriotic pride and, markedly unlike those European leaders who are despised by the people they purport to represent, President Putin has never been more popular. One reason for Russians’ willingness to enlist being that nobody gets left behind on the battlefield and bereaved families are well cared for by the state.
Keir Starmer, a thoroughly dishonest politician, will not concede. He won't wake up before an Oreshnik obliterates the Palace of Westminster. Herr Starmerfrüher - rejoicing in slaughter and aiming to beat his idol, Tory B.Liar’s, death count - is determined to keep the killing going in Ukraine and Gaza. This week, after nearly a year and a half of systematic annihilation, Western politicians have been sufficiently shamed by the images of starving Palestinian babies to cry, 'enough'! It is far too little, much too late.
The predictably demented response from Netanyahu to censure has been to accuse those European leaders who have backed him to the hilt and perverted their own democratic rules of fair play and free speech in order to protect the Zionist entity of, 'antisemistism'. There is evidence that this chorus of disapproval has been orchestrated for the benefit of European citizens who are sickened by the ongoing slaughter. It is merely a momentary distraction while the carnage continues.
Last weekend, Zvi Yedidia Sukkot, a Member of the Knesset for the party of self-proclaimed fascist government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, participating in a panel discussion on Israel’s Channel 12, commented on the fact that the panel was discussing draft legislation and not Israel’s renewed invasion of Gaza and crowed that this was, "because everyone got used to the idea that you can kill a hundred Gazans in one night, in a war, and nobody in the world cares".
He is wrong. Few Israelis care, because theirs is a sick society, propagandized from bris, more than half of whose members now agree with Smotrich, who said last August that killing two million Palestinians would be "justified and moral". The latest poll shows that most Israelis want to see all Palestinians exterminated.
Keir Starmer would probably be totally cool with that, but it's not a good look. So, his administration has made a token protest. Starmer is incapable of telling the truth, especially when it comes to Israhel, so when he says he has suspended export licenses, it's not strictly true. In fact, component parts of F-16 fighter jets are still being manufactured in the UK. David Lammy, who revels in genocide almost as much as his boss, says it's not possible to interrupt the trans-national supply chain. Because honouring trade agreements is so much more important than killing kids.
This week, perfidious traitor, Keir Starmer, has betrayed British Sovereignty twice. He achieved his ambition of re-linking the UK to the EU and will no doubt use the war in Ukraine as an excuse to formally join the UK Armed Services to a European Army. He has also signed the dreaded WHO Pandemic Treaty, without there being any vote in Parliament. In the next pandemic, which is no doubt being prepared in some secret laboratory, decisions about how to respond will be delegated to an unelected authority under the indirect control of Bill Gates!
This treachery will, of course, benefit Starmer's even more right-wing opponents. Reform UK, the Faragistes, did well in the local council elections and are growing in popularity, even while their leader is less interested in domestic politics and opposing European interference, but increasingly determined to emulate his hero, Donald J. Trump.
Trump has been trampling the Constitution of which the USA was once so proud by denying Habeas corpus to people he is expelling from the USA and negating the First Amendment right to criticise Israel. Harvard University has responded by putting together a free online course in Civics.
Trump outdid himself this week in a replay of the Oval Office Ambush he contrived so successfully with Zelensky, while demonstrating just how cucked he is by his Zionist sponsors (to use a Ye word!). In a meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump accused South Afrika of conducting a 'white genocide'. There are undeniable problems in rural South Africa, where white farmers have been attacked and murdered. But that is not government policy and still, thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Afrikan farmland is mostly white-owned. But South Africa brought a case of Genocide against Israel to the ICC and an arrest warrant has been issued for Netanyahu. Therefore, Trump, advised by his pathetic man-boy sidekick, Elon Musk, concocted a spiteful, dishonest response.
On both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the English-speaking world, democracy is failing or has been usurped. WTF are we going to do about it? The USA has its Constitution to fall back upon. I predict that a growing movement over the next few years of the Trump Presidency will arise to take back the Republic from the diabolical billionaire oligarchs who have subverted it. Perhaps there will be a new political party. Similarly, in the UK, another couple of years of increasingly overt fascism and cast iron media control will prompt an equal and opposite reaction.
An Independent Alliance of MPs has formed around Jeremy Corbyn in the UK Parliament and will hopefully get its act together to stand candidates in the next General Election. But that might not be until 2009, when Jezza will be knocking eighty. Corbyn's brand of pragmatic socialism was overwhelmingly popular, so that half a million people formally joined the Labour Party under his leadership. That’s why the sinister powers-that-shouldn't-be in this country conspired to bring him down, weaponising 'antisemitism' to do so.
Now, in the harsh glare of the Israeli genocide, that trick won't work any more and Jezza manifestly stands on the right side of history. Those stout-hearted, fair-minded and principled Corbynistas have not gone away. They turn out every weekend in their hundreds of thousands, marching through central London to chant, “Free Palestine”. On Friday night they crowded in to Brockwell Park, where Jezza spoke before Kneecap took the stage. The Irish Republican rap trio are being persecuted by the British state, one of 'em having been charged with a terrorism offence for waving a Hezbollah flag in a gig at The Forum in Kentish Town last Summer.
On Thursday night, Kneecap did a warm-up at the 100 Club. It was like punk rock all over again, happening in the same place! Unfortunately, the despicable old fraud, Jolly Rotten - who has gone full Hollywood and turned into a total wanker - is not part of it. The sad old Gooner joined Sharon Osborne in the LA chorus of disapproval of Kneecap, while denouncing the recent version of the Sex Pistols, in which he was replaced by the excellent Frank Carter. "I am the Pistols, and they’re not", he told NME. No, mate, you are a sad old has been and you have always been a hypocrite. No Future, UK? We’ll see about that.