By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 3/3/26

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In the weeks leading up to the Empire’s catastrophic decision to instigate war against Iran, negotiations between Tehran and Washington were intensively ongoing. The Islamic Republic was ordered to accept sharp limits on her ability to develop ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and agree to never stockpile enriched uranium. The former stipulation was a significant sticking point, for such restrictions would gravely undermine Iran’s national and regional security architecture. However, Tehran was intensely relaxed about ceding the latter.

On February 28th, mere hours before the US and Israel unleashed hell on Iran from the skies, it was widely reported Tehran had undertaken to “ensure forever” she would not develop or possess nuclear weapons. This pledge was entirely in keeping with consistent messaging from senior Islamic Republic officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated that same day in Judeo-American airstrikes on his official residence. From the mid-1990s onwards, Khamenei had consistently endorsed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.

Still, concerns about Iran’s supposed nuke ambitions have lain at the core of direly ever-worsening relations between Iran and the US since May 2018, when Donald Trump shredded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action mediated with Tehran by Washington three years earlier. Under its terms, the Islamic Republic granted the International Atomic Energy Agency virtually unhindered access to its secret nuclear complexes, in return for sanctions relief. The deal was torn up despite the IAEA consistently certifying Iran’s compliance.

The JCPOA was inked following a period in which public and state attitudes across the West – and its vassal states – towards the Islamic Republic became highly belligerent. From 2006 onwards, governments and international bodies – including the EU and UN – one by one imposed ravaging sanctions against Tehran, devastating its economy, influence, and standing. Within six years, Iran was the most sanctioned country on Earth. Ever since, these excessively punitive measures have produced soaring inflation, unemployment, preventable deaths, and other egregious ills.

As pressure on Iran ratcheted, numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions demanded Tehran cease enriching uranium, and cooperate with the IAEA. In November 2011, the Association expressed “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” Throughout this period too, mainstream media became awash with scaremongering reports the Islamic Republic would imminently develop nukes, if she hadn’t done so already. Israel, and the wider West, were purportedly under urgent threat.

This demonising narrative was relentlessly disseminated by senior Western government officials, military and spying apparatchiks, think tank pundits, and ‘journalists’. Yet, no evidence was ever presented to support the bombastic charge. The grim truth is Iran’s alleged nuclear desires are a fable, cooked up by British intelligence. What follows is the sordid tale of how MI6 operatives infiltrated ostensibly independent international institutions, then manipulated them and Western governments, ultimately leading the world to perilous, potentially nuclear conflict.

‘Information Operations’

In October 2008, The Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked assessment of then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, prepared by London’s ambassador to Washington. While identifying many areas of consensus, it foresaw a “potential clash” between Downing Street and an impending Obama administration, over Iran “his desire for ‘unconditional’ dialogue with Iran.” This was at odds with Britain’s commitment to the UNSC’s “requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin.” It was thus necessary to change the future White House incumbent’s thinking.

Unbeknownst publicly, during this time MI6 was embroiled in a covert operation to “develop understanding” among foreign governments of the Islamic Republic’s apparent quest for nukes, and therefore “pressurise Iran to negotiate.” A leaked CV of Nicholas Langman, longtime British intelligence dark arts specialist and head of MI6’s Iran Department 2006 – 2008, boasts how he “generated confidence” in its assessment Tehran secretly had a dedicated program to develop nuclear weapons among “European, US and Middle Eastern agencies.”

Then, from 2010 – 2012 Langman led an “inter-agency” effort to comprehensively infiltrate the IAEA, while “[building] highly effective and mutually supportive relations across government and with senior US, European, Middle and Far Eastern colleagues for strategy.” These dark handshakes with MI6 “enabled major diplomatic success [sic] of Iranian nuclear and sanctions agreement.” Britain’s central, clandestine role in corralling global public and political opinion behind the fraud Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, and producing all that followed, has never been acknowledged by the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, Langman’s intimate involvement in the con is deserving of intense scrutiny. He holds the dubious distinction of being publicly ‘burned’ as an MI6 operative on two separate occasions. First, in 2001 it was revealed Langman had been active in Paris at the time of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in the city on August 31st 1997, and was charged with conducting “information operations” to deflect widespread public speculation British intelligence was responsible for her death.

Then, in 2005 he was exposed by Greek authorities for overseeing the abduction and torture of 28 Pakistani guestworkers in Athens, suspected of having contact with the individuals accused of perpetrating the 7/7 bombings in London that year. Langman moved straight from this post to running MI6’s Iran Department. That he wasn’t reprimanded over the Greek incident strongly suggests he enjoyed a high level of protection, and London approved of his vicious intelligence-gathering methods – known to invariably elicit false testimony from detainees.

Was MI6 ‘intelligence’ Tehran posed a global nuclear hazard the result of torture? Regardless, as forecast by London’s ambassador to the US, the Obama administration was during its first year in office formally committed to non-interference in the Islamic Republic’s affairs. This policy was enforced so stringently, a State Department official almost lost his job for endorsing protests in Tehran in June 2009. Evidently, Britain’s interventions with foreign partners and the IAEA were decisive in shifting the White House away from conciliation, and towards war.

‘No Return’

MI6’s black propaganda operation was most welcome to senior Zionist entity officials, in particular Benjamin Netanyahu. Ever since the early 1990s, Israel’s current Prime Minister had been publicly warning on a regular basis that Tehran was on the verge of acquiring nukes. He was widely mocked for crying wolf. British intelligence provided seemingly independent verification of Netanyahu’s bogus claims, and influenced Western states into adopting hostile stances on the Islamic Republic. This connivance was of enormous benefit to Tel Aviv.

In the decades since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has supported an ever-expanding and strengthening nexus of anti-Zionist Resistance forces across West Asia. This includes Palestine. The MI6-triggered sanctions significantly hampered Tehran’s ability to provide practical, material and financial assistance to these groups. They also severely truncated the Islamic Republic’s involvement in battling CIA and MI6-sponsored extremist proxy forces and outright civil wars in neighbouring Iraq and Syria, over the past two decades.

Not coincidentally, following the historically devastating sanctions being imposed on Iran, Israeli assaults on the Occupied Territories and their populations, and Zionist theft of Palestinian lands and property, ratcheted significantly. With opposition weakened, the slow motion genocide of Gaza inexorably gathered pace, ultimately leading to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th. With Gaza now flattened and ripe for Zionist seizure, Tel Aviv is preparing to commit a second Holocaust in the West Bank. Lawmakers in the Knesset have passed legislation facilitating its formal annexation.

A fantastical desire to neutralise Iran outright before moving in on the West Bank may lie behind the conflict waged since February 28th, with the spectre of nuclear weapons an ideal cover. Israel justified its calamitous 12 Day War on an intelligence dossier, which concluded the Islamic Republic had reached the “point of no return” in acquiring nukes. Its findings relied heavily on a May 2025 IAEA report that provided zero fresh information, but concluded Tehran supposedly maintained “undeclared nuclear material” until the early 2000s.

However, London has reasons of her own for seeking to subjugate Iran. Nationalisation of the country’s vast oil reserves by elected leader Mohammad Mossadeq in May 1951 crippled British Petroleum’s vast profits locally, placing Britain on a war footing with Tehran. Mossadeq was unseated in an MI6-orchestrated coup two years later, leading to the brutal reign of Shah Pahlavi, who presided over a highly pliant Anglo-American colony. The Islamic Revolution sent Pahlavi fleeing in 1979, and relations with London have been largely sour since.

The US-led War On Terror was heavily influenced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s rabidly interventionist perspectives, which discounted any and all considerations of international law. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Blair privately wrote to President George W. Bush, urging him to exploit “maximum” global sympathy produced by 9/11 to launch military interventions across West Asia. The first two targets on the list were Afghanistan and Iraq, both former British imperial holdings.

Were it not for the Empire getting so ruinously bogged down and overstretched in the War On Terror’s initial phases, Iran – which is sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iraq – would likely have been targeted for regime change and occupation by Anglo-American forces following those two conflicts. Today, an invasion of the Islamic Republic seems ominously close to fruition. However, Britain won’t allow the US to use her bases to strike Tehran, and wishes to stay out of the conflict she was instrumental in starting entirely.

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Iran War Cost Tracker

https://iran-cost-ticker.com

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 2/15/26

In late January, the US Department of Justice dumped millions of documents detailing the criminal activities of US oligarch and serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including his vast rolodex of paedophilic celebrities, financiers, politicians and public figures. The tranche is so vast, independent journalists and researchers have barely scratched the surface yet. But preliminary investigations amply demonstrate Epstein was centrally enmeshed with multiple foreign spy agencies. First and foremost, the Zionist entity’s notorious Mossad. The horrors wrought on West Asia as a result are incalculable.

A recurrent phenomenon in the newly-released documents, emails and text messages is Epstein and his grand global nexus seeking to profit from Western-inflicted misery the world over. On March 18th 2014, in the Maidan coup’s immediate, violent aftermath, he emailed Ariane de Rothschild, a French banker and CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group since March 2023, due to her marrying into the famous, powerful Jewish family. Epstein was exhilarated. “Ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites [sic],” he wrote.

De Rothschild was drained after a “very long day sitting on bank board,” but delighted to hear from her close friend. “Miss our talks and hope you’re well,” she gushed. “Will be at home tomorrow night, will you be free? And let’s discuss Ukraine.” The “opportunities” Epstein perceived in the shattered post-coup country, as it plunged into Western-sponsored civil war, could’ve ranged from an untapped reservoir of young girls and vulnerable women, to pillaging the country’s vast resources.

To real full article click here.

By Nicole Grajewski, Russia Matters, 3/5/26

Nicole Grajewski is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI), Sciences Po in Paris, an associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum last June what Russia would do if the United States or Israel assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, he declined to answer. “I do not even want to discuss this possibility,” he said. “I do not want to.” Eight months later, the scenario became reality. Russia’s response was a Foreign Ministry statement condemning “unprovoked acts of armed aggression,” four phone calls to Gulf leaders offering to mediate and silence from the Kremlin itself.

Russia’s immediate stake in the conflict is straightforward: any war that preoccupies the United States, depletes Western munitions stockpiles, divides alliance attention and forces Washington to prioritize the Middle East over Ukraine serves Moscow’s purposes. Every day the fighting continues, American attention and resources are split between two theaters. Every Patriot interceptor expended over the Gulf is one unavailable for transfer to Kyiv. Every week Washington is consumed by the Middle East is a week it is not pressing Moscow on Ukraine.

Beyond this tactical windfall, Russia has a structural interest in Iran’s survival as a partner. Iran is one of a small number of states that shares Moscow’s interest in fracturing the U.S.-led international order and a node in the constellation of relationships Russia has cultivated to complicate Western strategy globally. An Iranian defeat, particularly one resulting in regime change or a forced strategic reorientation, would extinguish that partnership. Russia fears, above all, a post-war Iran reoriented toward the West.

Russia therefore has strong reasons to raise the cost of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries and to prevent a rapid Iranian defeat. But it also has reasons for restraint: the risk of direct confrontation with the United States and Israel, the need to preserve the relationship as an ongoing asset rather than exhaust it in a single crisis and the reality that some of the most valuable support it could provide would cross thresholds even Moscow calculates it cannot afford. 

Unlike the United States’ expansive military backing of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, or the West’s sustained military mobilization for Ukraine in 2022, Russia will not come to Iran’s defense with airpower, troops or open confrontation with Washington. It will posture diplomatically and perhaps assist quietly behind the scenes, but it will not fight America over Iran. Russia’s position in Iran’s war is that of a well-equipped backstage partner with a clear interest in the conflict’s prolongation and a sophisticated, if selective, toolkit for achieving it.

No Mutual Defense

In April 2025, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko addressed the State Duma to clarify the nature of the comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that Russia and Iran had just formally ratified. It was not, he emphasized, a mutual defense pact. If Iran were attacked, Russia was under no obligation to provide military assistance. The statement was not a surprise to Tehran—the Iranians had negotiated the same document and purposely avoided any commitment to send their troops to Ukraine. 

Neither Moscow nor Tehran was ever willing to bleed for the other. The design of the relationship, from its acceleration after 2022 through to its formal codification in 2025, was always something more limited and more durable: each side would help the other last longer on its own terms, sharing technology, intelligence and operational learning, without taking on the exposure of a formal alliance commitment. That was the deal, and the current conflict is revealing it under pressure rather than contradicting it.

The arrangement has deep structural logic on both sides. Russia’s war in Ukraine has made explicit alliance commitments genuinely unaffordable—in political, military and economic terms simultaneously. Iran, for its part, has domestic constituencies deeply suspicious of Russian intentions and a historical memory of Russian imperial behavior toward Persian territory that no amount of current partnership fully overcomes. The comprehensive strategic partnership is real and consequential, but it was built to deliver specific things: technology transfer in sanctioned categories, diplomatic cover in multilateral forums and operational learning from shared adversaries. It was not built to function as a mutual defense guarantee, and neither side ever pretended otherwise.

Limits

Russia cannot meaningfully arm Iran in its moment of greatest need because both states are consuming the same categories of weapons in their respective wars, running the same supply deficits and in some cases competing through the same illicit procurement networks. The ceiling on dramatic Russian military support is inventory and time.

Consider what Iran most urgently needs: ballistic missile components, air-defense interceptors, loitering munitions at scale and precision navigation hardware resilient to jamming. These are, with minimal variation, precisely what Russia is consuming at maximum rate in Ukraine. Moscow’s own S-300 and S-350 interceptor reserves have been under sustained pressure since 2022. Its domestic ballistic missile production has been prioritized entirely for the Ukrainian theater. Its loitering munition output, however impressive in absolute terms, is committed to filling gaps created by attrition rates that exceeded all prewar planning assumptions.

Even where inventory could theoretically be found or diverted, the time problem is severe. Modern weapons systems are not transferred—they are integrated. A consignment of S-300 interceptors without trained operators, calibrated fire control software, spare parts pipelines and maintenance infrastructure is not an air-defense capability; it is an expensive liability. The integration timeline for a major system transfer, conducted under wartime conditions, across a logistics chain that must avoid Western interdiction and Israeli intelligence collection, runs in months at minimum. A conflict that changes shape in days does not wait for that timeline. The same logic applies to ballistic missile components: Iranian Fateh and Fattah variants require specific guidance packages, propellant formulations and ground support equipment that cannot be improvised at pace. Delivering components is the easy part; integrating them into a functional, sustained firing capability under active attrition is the hard part, and there is no shortcut to it.

This shared scarcity creates a structural ceiling on the relationship that is analytically as important as any diplomatic calculation. The absence of large-scale Russian arms transfers to Iran in the current conflict is not evidence of a partnership in retreat. It is evidence of a partnership operating within constraints that were always present but are now visible under pressure.

Adaptation

The most consequential thing Russia has contributed to Iran’s military capacity over the past two years is not a weapons system. It is a process: a sustained cycle of operational feedback, engineering iteration and battlefield learning that has transformed the platform Iran first sold Russia in late 2022 into something considerably more dangerous.

Iranian Shahed systems arrived in Russia as functional but relatively unsophisticated one-way attack platforms—GPS-dependent, predictable in their flight profiles and vulnerable to the jamming and interceptor combinations that Ukrainian forces developed with notable speed to counter them. Over the following two years, those airframes became laboratories. Russian engineers modified them, scaled production domestically under Alabuga factory expansion programs and subjected the evolving designs to sustained combat testing against a peer-capable air defense system. The lessons generated by that process are operationally precise: which jamming geometries defeat which receiver types; which flight profile modifications improve low-altitude survivability; which approach corridors avoid specific radar coverage arcs; how to construct mixed packages that impose discrimination dilemmas on interceptor operators.

Whether those lessons have been transmitted back to Tehran in systematic form is suggestive but not conclusively established, and precision matters here.

What is observable is that Iranian drone employment in the current conflict differs in several respects from patterns documented in earlier campaigns, including the strikes of April and October 2024 and the 12 Day War. Route geometries in larger raid packages appear more complex than earlier profiles, with greater variation in altitude and more pronounced use of terrain masking. Some analysts tracking flight path data have assessed that certain Shahed variants display behavior consistent with routing that accounts for known or anticipated radar coverage—approaching defended areas from directions and altitudes that imply an updated picture of the air defense environment rather than fixed pre-planned waypoints. Low-altitude profiles that were documented inconsistently in earlier Iranian employment appear more systematically integrated into larger packages now.

The most plausible explanation, given the timeline and the depth of Russian-Iranian technical cooperation since 2022, is that some portion of the operational learning Russia has generated through sustained Shahed employment in Ukraine has been transmitted back to Iranian engineers and mission planners. Likewise, large Iranian strike packages in the current campaign have displayed a sequencing logic—strikes that appear to prioritize radar and command infrastructure before the main wave of fires—consistent with the complex raid architecture Russia has developed and refined in Ukraine. Iranian strikes against Saudi refinery infrastructure, UAE logistics facilities and Israeli electrical grid nodes in the opening 72 hours of the current campaign reflect this pattern, though not exclusively so.

Future 

Where direct weapons transfers run into the problem of inventory shortages, other forms of Russian assistance do not. Understanding what Moscow can still provide is therefore more important for anticipating the trajectory of the conflict than cataloguing what it cannot deliver. The most plausible form of assistance is intelligence and targeting support. The Strategic Partnership agreement specifically alludes to joint support in intelligence, a unique facet of the treaty compared to others that Russia has. Western intelligence assessments have reported that Russia provided the Houthis with satellite-derived targeting data, drone routing guidance and strike sequencing advice, demonstrating both the willingness and institutional capacity to provide this type of support to partners. Whether a comparable arrangement exists with Iran is unknown, but the capability maps directly onto what Tehran would find valuable.

A second area to watch is signals intelligence and electronic order-of-battle support. Drones that consistently route around radar coverage rather than directly through defended airspace require an updated picture of the electromagnetic environment: where emitters are located, how their coverage geometry evolves and where gaps in detection may exist. Producing that level of situational awareness across a theater stretching from the Persian Gulf to Israel is difficult to achieve using ground-based collection alone. Some of the routing behavior observed in Iranian drone operations is at least consistent with access to a broader and more dynamic electronic picture. That does not prove Russian involvement, but it illustrates the type of enabling intelligence that Russia could provide with minimal political risk. For Moscow, this form of assistance is attractive precisely because it raises the operational effectiveness of Iranian strikes while remaining difficult to detect or attribute.

The domains in which Russia can most credibly and deniably raise the costs of the war for Iran’s adversaries lie in electronic warfare and navigation resilience, where some cooperation already exists. Russia supplied Iran with Krasukha jamming systems in 2025 and has reportedly shared lessons from its extensive GNSS jamming campaign in Ukraine. Over two years of combat, Russian forces have refined which frequencies, power levels and geometries are most effective against GPS-dependent Western munitions. That knowledge has direct applicability to the Middle Eastern environment and could help Iran degrade the accuracy of precision weapons such as JDAM-ER and JSOW used against dispersed or hardened targets. More consequential still would be assistance in protecting Iranian systems from jamming. Russia has invested heavily in controlled reception pattern antenna technologies, such as the Kometa system, that allow munitions to maintain satellite navigation while filtering jamming signals. If this expertise migrates into Iranian drones or cruise missiles, it would not expand Iran’s arsenal but make existing systems far harder to defeat.

All of this will ultimately depend on how the conflict evolves and what Iran determines it needs over time. Moscow’s willingness to provide deeper support will also hinge on whether doing so risks distracting resources or attention from Russia’s war in Ukraine. For now, the relationship offers Russia a range of ways to cooperate with Iran without committing itself directly to the fight. If the war continues or intensifies, these quieter forms of cooperation may become more important than large weapons transfers. Technical assistance, operational lessons and selective intelligence support allow Russia to raise the costs of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries while limiting its own exposure.

Conclusion

What makes the current dynamic analytically important is that it reflects the fundamental character of the Russia-Iran relationship rather than deviating from it. Russia is not coming to Iran’s rescue because the relationship never contemplated rescue. It contemplated something more limited and more sustainable: enough technical transfer, operational learning and intelligence support to raise the cost of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries and extend Tehran’s capacity to absorb punishment, without Moscow taking on the exposure and expenditure that direct intervention would require.

Russia’s position in this war is that of a well-equipped backstage partner with a clear interest in the conflict’s prolongation and a selective but sophisticated toolkit for achieving it. The constraints on that role—the inventory ceilings, the integration timelines, the thresholds Moscow declines to cross—are not an aberration from the partnership. They are its operating logic, now visible under the pressure of a war neither side fully anticipated.

Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.

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Iran War Cost Tracker

https://iran-cost-ticker.com

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 3/13/26

DAY 12: Things seemed to be settling down a little bit as the fog of war becomes a little thinner. As we were writing yesterday the permits-for-passage system is expanding pretty quickly. In addition to India, Tehran has granted a permit to Bangladesh and already 70% of India’s imports are bypassing the Straits of Hormuz.

Oil traffic through the streets used to be 20mn barrels a day however from our calculations it appears that 6.5mn barrels a day is getting out via the westward pipelines and Iran itself is exporting at least 1.5mn barrels a day. The supply coming out of the gulf is down heavily but at least half of the pre-war levels of exports are reaching the market.

The markets have calmed and are taking a more realistic perspective on the conflict. Despite the IEA suggestion to release the largest amount of oil additives from reserves the price of oil rose above $100 again as the IRGC target oil tankers Our top story is Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei made his first public statements yesterday – we still haven’t seen or heard from him personally as all that was issued was a written statement – that calls for domestic unity and warned of further escalation if the US and Israel do not back off.

Traders are also cutting through Trump’s bluster. The failure to open the Straits of Hormuz and the inability of the US Navy to escort tankers means that expectations that this war will be over in a month are fading fast. The forecast for $150 oil is becoming mainstream.

As I argued yesterday, I think Trump has already painted himself into a corner with the need to end this war by the end of the month. That clearly isn’t going to happen. Terrain issued a three-point list of demands on March12 which includes an American withdrawal, the payment of reparations and security guarantees that Israel will never attack Iran again. As the month wears on surely the Trump administration will become increasingly desperate as it realizes it’s wandered into a cul-de-sac and caused what is now being called the “biggest energy crisis ever.” In separate news, I also took a look at the debacle surrounding the release of the mooted €90bn EU loan to Ukraine. At the start this was hailed as a major success as it provides most of the funding Kyiv needs to continue the war for the next two years. However, thanks to the row with Hungary over oil pipelines, the money has not been released. Moreover, looks increasingly likely not to happen at all.

The EU loan was already the second line of defence after the preferred solution to confiscate Russia’s frozen $300bn of reserves failed in December.

Now it looks like this second line of defence is also going to collapse. The Nordic countries are suggesting to go to the third line which is bilateral $30bn loans.

No one wanted to use this option because it comes out of the national budget and is taxpayers money. Moreover, it only funds Ukraine through to September so the EU plan A is “cross your fingers and hope Orban loses” in the Hungarian general elections in April.

At the moment, Kyiv is living hand to mouth. The IMF just signed off on its $8.1bn a new 48-month $8.1bn Extended Fund Facility (EFF) and immediately released $1.5bn in the first tranche but Ukraine is back in the position of facing a macroeconomic collapse as soon as April if this mess is not sorted out before then.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is sounding increasingly desperate and frustrated. He’s taken to calling out his EU partners for failing to come up with the needed support. He’s done an incredible job, but Ukraine simply doesn’t have the cash to continue without help.

Russia has earned somewhere between $2bn and $6bn since the war started in excess oil revenues. That’s going to help but the energy crisis will need to go on for six months to make a real impact on the Russian budget.

The Ministry of Finance is in the process of adjusting this year’s budget and is planning for the worst. MinFin is calling for 10% spending cuts. The macro team running Russia is amongst the most prudent and conservative in the world. It has done an amazing job of keeping the economy on track despite the massive shocks and distortions. This crisis has only played to Putin’s advantage just when he needed it most. It will significantly ease the economic pressure on Russia’s economy and also starve Ukraine of essential ammunition at a time when the battle for Donbas is raging. Ukraine has practically run out of Patriot interceptor missiles and its skies are open.

Based on battlefield reports it appears that Putin has wound down the assault as the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has been retaking territory. However, given the peace negotiations are on hold for the meantime I think Putin is just taking his foot off the pedal because advances and assaults are part of his negotiating mechanisms not a military goal per se. If there are no talks then there’s no need to throw a lot of soldiers into the meat grinder. Putin doesn’t intend to take the Donbas by force. He only winds up the assaults when they’re about to sit down with the Ukrainians in some nice hotel somewhere.

By Glenn Diesen, Substack, 2/24/26

Thank you for the invitation, it is a great privilege to speak here today. I want to address how the conflict in Ukraine takes place on both the battlefield and in the information space, and why we should be concerned about the media manipulating narratives and demonising Russia as the adversary.

Some of the most insightful literature about political propaganda comes from Walter Lippmann following his work for the US government during the First World War. Lippmann recognised that liberal democracies tended to present conflicts as a struggle between good and evil, to mobilise public support for war. The great risk, according to Lippman, was that once the public believed the adversary was pure evil – then the public would also reject any workable peace. Because, in a struggle between good and evil, compromise is appeasement, and peace demands war as the good must defeat the evil.

This is deeply problematic because the point of departure in international security is the recognition of the security competition, as efforts by one country to enhance its security can diminish the security of others. The first step toward a common peace is therefore to place ourselves in the shoes of our opponents and recognise mutual security concerns.

However, in a struggle between good and evil, even understanding the opponent becomes treasonous. We should therefore be terrified that our political leaders and media no longer even discuss the security concerns of adversaries. Those attempting to see the world from the other side are simply denounced as “Putinists”, “Panda-huggers” or “Ayatollah-apologists”. If the generations before us had this level of maturity, it is highly unlikely that we would have survived the Cold War.

It is evident that the media does not always report on objective reality. Convinced that they are fighting the good fight, the media socially constructs its own reality. For example, recognising the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces threatens to reduce public support for the war effort. Similarly, recognising that sanctions do not work threatens to reduce public support for sanctions. So, the media ignores reality and stays loyal to the narratives to ensure that the public is committed to the conflict, but (as Lippmann noted) thereby also removes all pathways toward a workable peace.

Russia must play a dual role in our media. It is both hopelessly backwards and weak, yet also an overwhelmingly powerful threat to West. We are told that Russia is unsuccessful in Ukraine, yet it can conquer Europe if not stopped. This communicates to the Western public that the adversary is very dangerous, yet also reassures the public that Russia can easily be defeated if we just keep the war going.

The foundational narrative in the media has been the “unprovoked invasion” by Russia

This implies that Russia is an expansionist and imperialist power, as opposed to responding to legitimate security threats. There is no debate about the narrative of an “unprovoked invasion” in the media as any challenge to this narrative is smeared and censored for allegedly “legitimising” the invasion.

The “unprovoked invasion” narrative is dangerous because it implies that any compromise is appeasement that rewards the aggressor which incentivises more aggression. Thus, we are told that peace demands supplying weapons to elevate the costs.

As with almost every other conflict after the Cold War, the media describes the opponent as another reincarnation of Hitler to remind the public that war is peace, and diplomacy is appeasement. As the former NATO Secretary General proclaimed: “Weapons are the path to peace”.

I say this is a dangerous narrative, because if this conflict was provoked, then we are escalating and getting directly involved in a war against the world’s largest nuclear power, which considers this to be an existential threat.

Since the 1990s, many leading diplomats warned about the consequences of expanding NATO. NATO expansion Western politicians, intelligence chiefs, ambassadors and other entailed cancelling agreements for a pan-European security architecture and instead redividing the continent, restarting the logic of the Cold War, and fighting in the shared neighbourhood over where to draw the new dividing lines.

(none other than) George Kennan stated in an interview in 1998 that NATO expansionism would start a new Cold War and he predicted: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong”. However, the media cannot recognise the obvious, that NATO expansion provoked this conflict, BECAUSE it risks legitimising Russia’s military actions.

NATO countries crossed the ultimate red line by pulling Ukraine into the NATO orbit and developing it into a frontline state against Russia. Angela Merkel once recognised that offering Ukraine a membership action plan would be interpreted by Moscow as a “declaration of war”. The former British ambassador to Russia, Roderic Lyne, said the following about pulling Ukraine into NATO: “It was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it”. CIA Director William Burns, had also argued that attempting to pull Ukraine into NATO would likely trigger a Russian military intervention, which Burns noted was something Russia would not want to do. This seems like excellent definitions of the word “provoked”.

Yet, in February 2014, NATO countries backed a coup to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit. Our media nonetheless sold the coup as a “democratic revolution” even though Yanukovych was elected in a free and fair election, his removal and even the Maidan RIOTS did not have a majority support among Ukrainians, and it violated the Ukrainian constitution.

For a brief moment, in 2014, the Western media reported that the new authorities in Kiev were attacking Donbas and killing civilians who rejected the legitimacy of the coup. CNN even questioned if the people of Donbas would ever again allow Kiev to rule over them. Yet, soon thereafter, full media conformity was implemented and the resistance in Donbas was portrayed as merely a Russian operation – opposing Ukraine’s democratisation.

We have now learned that on the first day after coup, American and British intelligence agencies set up a partnership with the new intelligence chief in Kiev to rebuild Ukrainian intelligence services from scratch as a proxy against Russia. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor argued that the US was running Ukraine as a fiefdom after the coup. Members of parliament were arrested and some stripped of their citizenship, the media was purged, the Russian language purged, and the Orthodox Church was purged. Civilians in Donbas were killed for year after year. Nationalists and Western-financed NGOs undermined the Minsk-2 peace agreement, and set clear “red lines” for Zelensky to not implement the peace mandate he received in 2019. A top advisor to the former president of France, argued that the signing of the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked”. Had Russia or China done any this in Mexico, we would surely have defined it as provocative. (yet we cannot recognise Russian security concerns – to solve the crisis)

To sell the story of a Russian war of conquest, the media from day one promoted the notion of a “full-scale invasion”, suggesting that Russia used its full military might to conquer Ukraine as opposed to forcing Ukraine to restore its neutrality.

For this reason, the media cannot inform the public that the low Russian troop levels and initial actions were completely inconsistent with conquest, they indicated the intention of keeping Ukraine out of NATO. The media cannot inform the public that on the first day of the invasion, Zelensky confirmed that they had been contacted by Moscow to discuss peace negotiations based on Ukraine not joining NATO – which Zelensky agreed to. The media cannot inform the public about how even Zelensky said in March 2022: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

The media cannot inform the public about the sabotage of the Istanbul peace negotiations, after which the Turkish Foreign Minister concluded: “I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.

Instead of discussing a European security architecture with the goal of mitigating the security competition and preventing Ukraine from being a battlefield in a redivided Europe, the media demonised Russia as pure evil and sold the story that even diplomacy should be rejected, even as hundreds of thousands of men died in the trenches.

The media pushed narratives of Ukraine winning, of Russian efforts to restore the Soviet Union, downplaying the losses of the Ukrainian army, ignoring the de-russification policies, and the brutal conscription of Ukrainian men. Even as Ukraine now faces disaster, and we could end up in a direct war, there is no willingness to recognise that Russia has legitimate security concerns. Instead, the media remains committed to the narrative of an evil Russian enemy, and the logical conclusion is thus further escalation rather than exploring paths to a workable peace.

If we want to understand why it has become near impossible to discuss peace, look toward the irresponsible and dangerous media coverage, and remember the warning of Walter Lippmann about simplifying complex conflicts into a fight between good and evil.

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