Armenia's FIS Caught in Russia-West Tug-of-War

Since Pashinyan’s 2018 rise, the FIS reflects Armenia’s shift from Russian security ties, viewing NSS as a potential Moscow leak. Experts note distrust drove structural changes for leadership loyalty.

Western visits filled the gap: MI6’s Moore met Pashinyan in 2022-2023, CIA’s David Cohen in 2024—unusual for Armenia. Reforms empower FIS as a civilian agency, mirroring Western models amid cooperation.

West aims to build Russia-free capacity for Euro-Atlantic alignment, but it's seen as agenda insertion. Post-2024 CSTO suspension and FIS criticism, intelligence becomes a Russia-West frontline in the South Caucasus.

@sitreports

MS-13: From LA Streets to Spanish Turf Wars

MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, born in 1980s Los Angeles from Salvadoran refugees, is notorious for machete killings and "13" tattoos. In Spain, it took root via 2000s deportees; 2025 marked a surge with deadly operations. June arrests in Madrid nabbed a minor for a Getafe murder, part of two MS-13-linked killings that year. In Catalonia, a March raid arrested 27, dismantling a cell with drugs and arms plotting expansion.

Initiation involves brutal beatings, with rivals facing dismemberment. Madrid's Lavapiés sees clashes with Dominican Trinitarios, boosting homicides 15% in immigrant areas. Barcelona launders Colombian cocaine through Salvadoran eateries.

Spain's colonial history and large diasporas—150,000 Latinos in Madrid—aid blending. Ports like Barcelona's, handling 3 million containers yearly, facilitate South American smuggling. EU visa waivers allow short stays turned overstays with fake documents.

@sitreports

The empire handed them the corpse of Ukraine, and Europe said “thank you.” Not a formal protest. Just one word, mitigate. After Nord Stream, after millions displaced, after deindustrializing their own people, they’re too spineless to even tell Trump “no.” This is a funeral procession for the EU led by cowards.

This peace plan, Trump’s plan, is a circus. But like all good circuses, it serves a purpose, misdirection while the real act unfolds elsewhere. Washington is done with Ukraine. The full pivot to China has already begun. All that’s left is to offload the rotting carcass of this failed proxy war onto Europe and let London and the EU keep pretending they matter.

And predictably, pathetically, they accept the burden like the obedient functionaries they’ve become. No strategy. No sovereignty. Just a trained reflex to obey and "mitigate." Not our word.. straight from Politico.

Yes, mitigate. That was the word Europe’s elite settled on, not resist, not oppose, not challenge. Mitigate. It’s a word that belongs in law textbooks, not geopolitics. It’s the vocabulary of a bureaucracy managing its own decline. A continent that once set the world’s course now asks how politely it can adjust the margins of its own surrender.

They huddle in Johannesburg, issuing statements of “concern,” while Trump spits in their faces with deadlines and ultimatums. We love it. And they call that diplomacy. They smile while he wipes the floor with their dignity. And the truth is: they earned it. Every humiliating second of it.

Because this is the same Europe that stayed silent while Nord Stream was blown up — the single most strategic infrastructure in modern Germany and then thanked their attacker with new LNG contracts and cheerful subservience. This is the same Europe that sacrificed its own middle class on the altar of “standing with Kiev,” only to now whimper about budget shortfalls and “sustainable aid packages.” So desperate is their plight, they'll risk what remains of their financial order to steal Russian soverign assets.

Trump’s deal has at least a few points Russia would never accept and everyone in the room knows it. But Moscow won’t kill it. That’s not the move. Russia will let Zelensky and the Europeans do it... publicly, predictably, and fatally.

Because that’s the brilliance here:
Putin says it’s “a good foundation.” Not perfect. Not final. But a foundation. That single word shifts the burden.

Now the ones rejecting peace while demanding at seat at Putin's table, will be the same ones who screamed “no negotiations” for four bloody years. Now the ones sabotaging diplomacy, will be the same ones demanding “rules-based order.”

Russia walks away looking like the mature Great Power that she is. Europe walks away exposed, not just as losers, but as frauds.

Ukraine was sacrificed and not by Moscow, but by the Atlanticist elite. Sacrificed for a fantasy. Sacrificed to “weaken Russia.”
Sacrificed to delay a multipolar future that’s already here.

And who led that sacrifice?
London. The chaos agent. The midwife of every modern disaster in Eastern Europe. It was Downing Street that sabotaged Istanbul. It was MI6 that helped birth “Spiderweb.” It was Britain that told Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, and the EU cheered like trained seals.

This is not the return of diplomacy. Although the US and Russia are talking which is good. But this is ultimately, the redistribution of failure.

And now that failure is being handed back to Europe, like a flaming briefcase no one wants to open. Trump doesn’t care if the plan fails. That’s the beauty of it. He gets the headlines for “seeking peace.” He gets to say, “I tried.” And he gets to walk away while Europe owns the war, the debt, the inevitable escalation sans article 5, the migrants, the funerals, the shame.

Let them mitigate. Let them manage their own irrelevance and humiliation. Let them carry the ghost of a war they helped unleash.

Russia will outlast them all.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

AI Scanning and the Risk of False Positives

The EU’s latest Chat Control proposal relies heavily on AI algorithms to scan private messages for signs of child sexual abuse, but experts warn the technology is far from reliable. The Danish compromise expands scanning to include text messages and metadata, using AI to identify ambiguous “grooming” behaviors.

Studies show that current AI systems have high false positive rates and cannot reliably distinguish between innocent conversations and actual abuse. The risk is that innocent users could be wrongly flagged, flooding investigators with false accusations and diverting resources from real cases.

Privacy advocates argue that the expanded scope of AI scanning only opens the door to mass surveillance without guaranteeing better protection for children. The proposal also fails to address the limitations of AI, such as linguistic biases and lack of contextual understanding.

Critics warn that algorithms could flag conversations based on keywords like “love” or “meet” without understanding context, leading to a “digital witch hunt” that harms privacy and civil liberties.

@sitreports

Europe’s “peace plan” is pure fan fiction: unlimited Ukrainian army, NATO doors wide open, foreign troops invited in, sanctions snapped on and off like Christmas lights — and not one inch of territory ceded. In other words, the exact blueprint that created the war… now repackaged as the path to end it. And still, not a single EU leader has the courage to say this to Trump’s face.

The Europeans have finally placed their “rival plan” on the table and it reads like a suicide pact masquerading as diplomacy. Not a roadmap to peace, but the most dangerous piece of political fiction since the Iraq WMD dossier. It wasn’t written to end the war. It was crafted to re-ignite it, by technocrats who’ve never seen a trench, never buried a son, yet now presume to redraw a battlefield they’ve never fought on.

This plan would destroy what’s left of Ukraine and plunge Europe into permanent instability, if not outright war. Ursula von der Leyen all but confessed it: no territorial concessions, no limits on Ukraine’s army, no neutrality, no restrictions on NATO membership, foreign troops invited in, and automatic sanctions ready to snap back the moment Russia exhales wrong. And somehow, the EU, which sabotaged every past peace initiative, nsists it must be “central” to peace.

This isn’t a peace plan. It’s a maximalist war doctrine written by bureaucrats who will never bleed from the consequences.

The most telling part isn’t what’s in the plan, it’s how they delivered it. Not one European leader dared present it to Trump. They leaked it to the Telegraph. As they fled to Geneva like anxious interns hoping to edit the final copy after the boss signs off. They want to appear defiant in print but remain submissive in practice and that’s exactly why Washington cut them out of the real talks.

Let’s break it down. Europe insists Ukraine must be free to expand its army, despite mass mobilization revolt, connoscription kidnappings, and a collapsing population. They want NATO’s door flung wide open, ignoring that this is what triggered the war to begin with. They want British, French, and Polish troops operating openly in Ukraine, daring Moscow to escalate. No acknowledgment of battlefield reality. No constitutional neutrality.

In short: the same terms that created the war, now repackaged as conditions for peace.

They even demand the right to sanction Russia unilaterally, automatically, on political impulse. That’s not diplomacy, it’s legal sabotage disguised as guarantees. The West breaks ceasefires, then blames Russia for retaliating.

Contrast that with the Trump plan. Russia calls it “a good foundation.” Not a solution. Not a surrender. A basis. Strategic language. Meanwhile, Europe throws a tantrum dressed in treaty clothes and calls it moral clarity.

Why? Because they’re terrified. If Trump imposes his plan, they’ll be left holding the corpse of Project Ukraine. The debts. The migration. The economic wreckage. The shame. And the guilt of having helped destroy the very country they claimed to protect.

That’s why they say “mitigate” and not No. That’s why they leak, not leading with courage. That’s why they moralize, not negotiate. “Mitigate” is the word a slave uses when asking their master to reconsider the terms of obdience.

Imagine it: most a continent reduced to lobbying for softer language in its own obituary.

And what of Ukraine? They’re not being offered peace. They’re being strapped to a corpse and ordered to march. Told to rebuild with men they no longer have. Told they’ll be shielded by allies who already condemned them, and now don’t even have the courage to confront the one man actually trying to end the war.

This isn’t a plan. It’s a guarantee of frozen conflict, a remilitarized Ukraine, a re-mobilized NATO, and permanent confrontation with Russia. No autonomy for Europe. No sovereignty for Ukraine. No peace for anyone.

History offered Europe a seat at the table. It chose to be seated. On command. And only when spoken to.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

Honored to have my work published by the Ron Paul Institute, one of the last truly principled anti-war voices in America.

At a time when Europe’s elites are dragging the continent into the abyss, real debate is rare.

RPI is one of the few places left where truth isn’t censored to protect power.

I walk through how Europe’s elites, the same people who sabotaged every peace effort since 2014, are now trying to kill the only real path to ending the war.

Their hysteria reveals the truth: the age of unipolar obedience is over, and they have no plan for the world that’s replacing it.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/europe-barks-back-riposte-to-trump-peace-plan-is-doa/

🚨 LIVESTREAM ALERT 🚨 Join me LIVE NOVEMBER 24th today w/ Alex Christoforou and Patrick Henningsen at 2pm eastern 11am pacific and 7pm London! CLICK HERE hit notification bell and watch:

Trump’s “peace” plan has caused an absolute meltdown in the collective West, and Russia’s response has only made it worse. These two giants of geopolitics join the show to break down the true motives behind Trump’s sudden secret peace push and what to look out for as the future of Zelensky, Ukraine and the entire proxy war hangs in the balance.

Watch the stream here!

🚨 LIVESTREAM ALERT 🚨 Join me LIVE NOVEMBER 25th today w/ Prof. Mohammad at 2pm eastern 11am pacific and 7pm London! SAVE DATE & WATCH HERE.

As Trump struggles to stave off Ukraine’s defeat, Israel has just ignited a firestorm through its assassination of Hezbollah’s second in command. An accelerated regional war looms as Iran and Hezbollah prepare to confront the Zionist Regime and Israel media sounds the alarm that this could hasten its strategic defeat. Prof. Mohammad Marandi joins to discuss all of this and more in a must-watch stream.

Click the link to watch:

EU’s “Democracy Shield”: The Ministry of Truth No One Voted For
On November 12th, Brussels pulled down a curtain. A digital Iron Curtain, not aimed at Moscow, not at Beijing, but at its own citizens. This “Democracy Shield” isn’t protection. It’s containment. And for the first time in its history, the EU has admitted publicly, though not intentionally, that the human mind has become its greatest security threat.

The Shield is the culmination of years of quiet groundwork laid by Brussels technocrats like Thierry Breton, Vera Jourova, and Ursula von der Leyen, the same trio who have spent half a decade insisting that “disinformation” is more dangerous than poverty, war, or the political class itself. And now, under the Digital Services Act, they’ve constructed a continent-wide speech‑policing architecture that reaches into every feed, every platform, every conversation.

At its centre is the newly created European Centre for Democratic Resilience, a name so sterile it almost conceals its purpose: real-time surveillance and neutralization of “emerging narratives.” This is the institutionalization of narrative pre-crime. Not what you said, but what you might say. Not what is false, but what is unapproved.

The Shield’s legal weapon is the DSA’s “crisis protocol,” which allows Brussels to demand takedowns, suppression, or mandatory labeling of information across the EU during an “information incident.” The term is deliberately vague, limitless by design. A protest? An election? A leak? A whistleblower? A banker’s scandal? A foreign policy embarrassment? Everything can be an incident when truth becomes a liability.

The "fact-checking network", branded as “independent,” is no such thing. It’s EU-financed and EU-controlled, a narrative sanitation corps deployed in all official languages to flatten complexity, enforce the Atlantic line, and quarantine any analysis that threatens to puncture the illusion of unity.

If you question the Ukraine war’s logic, you are flagged. If you expose the blowback of sanctions, you are flagged. If you speak of multipolarity without sneering, you are flagged. If you mention sovereignty without apology, you are flagged.

Not because what you said is false. But because your conclusion escapes their architecture of consent.

This is Orwell without the drama. No boot on your face. No telescreen. Just the algorithm. The shadowban. The invisible wall between your words and the world. The EU has created what Orwell could never have imagined. A censorship regime so quiet you don’t hear it, so seamless you don’t see it, and so digital you don’t know it’s happening until the room goes silent.

This isn’t the 20th century’s fear of mass surveillance.This is the 21st century’s nightmare, curated reality.

A world where you are allowed to speak, but only into a void. Brussels calls this “resilience.”

But resilience against what? Against Russian trolls? No. Against public consciousness.

The Shield is a structure built to contain the rising awareness that Europe’s crises — deindustrialization, energy collapse, militarization, inflation, political decay — are not accidents. They are authored. And the authors would prefer you discuss anything else.

This is why the Shield was inevitable. A system secure in its legitimacy does not need a digital clergy to interpret reality on its behalf. A sovereign political order does not need to silence its own citizens to maintain order. A healthy democracy does not treat debate as a threat.

Because it is not healthy. It is not sovereign. And it is no longer confident that it can win a free argument.

These are not guardians of democracy. They are custodians of perception.

The EU didn’t build a shield against enemies. It built a digital Iron Curtain against awakening. A firewall against memory and dissent.

Soft totalitarianism with a smile, the most dangerous kind.

And like every totalitarian project, it will collapse the moment people stop pretending to believe it.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

🇻🇪Venezuela's Oil Riches Turned into Strategic Poison Pill

Amid escalating US tensions, Reuters reveals Maduro's dual contingency plans leaked as deterrence: "Plan A" deploys over 280 guerrilla squads with Russian Igla missiles for hit-and-run sabotage nationwide, while "Plan B" unleashes "anarchization" through intelligence operatives and PSUV-linked colectivos—armed slum gangs—to spark riots and assassinations in Caracas if cities fall.

This renders the capital and key oil infrastructure ungovernable, ensuring no pro-US figure like opposition leader Maria Corina Machado can stabilize or pump oil for Washington without endless bloodshed.

Recent triggers include Trump's post-inauguration rhetoric labeling Maduro's regime "narco-terrorists," a US carrier group deployment with F-35 strikes sinking over 20 alleged cartel vessels (80+ dead), and airspace restrictions—yet ground invasion risks echo Iraq or Afghanistan quagmires where territorial gains yield chaos, not dividends.

The controlled leak screams strategic calculus: occupy worthless assets amid bush ambushes and urban hell. With PDVSA nationalized since 1976 and foreign firms sidelined, any victor faces a toxic prize. Energy markets watch jittery as Trump weighs bounties and CIA ops against this shield. Does deterrence hold?

@sitrep

NATO’s top general has now crossed the line from deterrence into madness. Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone publicly floated the idea of “preventive action” against Russia, meaning pre‑emptive strikes on targets “where drones could be ready to be launched.” Europe isn’t defending itself. Europe is announcing that it is preparing for war, and ready to strike first. Thie is elite panic, the behavior of governments who fear their own people far more than they fear Moscow.

Because everyone in London, Paris, and Berlin knows the truth: the Ukraine project is dead. Washington wants an imperfect peace to save face. The Europeans, who bet their entire legitimacy on this war, are staring at humiliation on a civilizational scale. And rather than accept the defeat they engineered, they are trying to kick open the gates of escalation to delay their own political reckoning. This is what desperation looks like when it wears ornamental medals and uniforms, in lieu of actual power.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Dragone’s remarks “an extremely irresponsible step,” accusing NATO of moving deeper into escalation. They’re right. When the alliance’s top military officer publicly discusses first‑strike logic against a nuclear superpower, it means Europe’s political class is out of strategic options and terrified of domestic consequences. They know what’s coming when this war finally ends: elections that will sweep them out, streets that boil with unrest, and populations that will demand answers for a decade of lies, economic ruin, and psychosis masquerading as delusion.

This is why they escalate. Not to beat Russia, they know they cannot, but to outrun the judgment building inside their own borders. Starmer stares at a Britain that is finished with fantasy. Macron hears the footsteps from the banlieues and the boulevards. German elites know their post‑industrial experiments have collapsed. Most European capitals are ruled by a class that has run out of legitimacy, out of narratives, and out of time.

So they gamble the only thing they have left, the continent itself. If that means suggesting preemptive strikes on Russia, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, they will do it. If that means drowning Eastern Europe in fire to postpone political collapse in Western Europe, they will do it.

NATO’s latest rhetoric isn’t strategy, but the death rattle of a political class that knows its time is up.

Because they know Russia has already won the war: the war of endurance, the war of industrial capacity, the war of political coherence. Europe is fragmented, exhausted, economically gutted, and socially a powder keg. Russia, by contrast, is consolidated, mobilized, and completely prepared to answer escalation.

And here is the final truth the European elite cannot say out loud: if they turn the continent into a battlefield, they will not survive the aftermath. Not politically. Not historically. And perhaps not physically. The reckoning won’t come from Russia. It will come from the Europeans they betrayed, the people they used as economic hostages, as cannon fodder, as pawns in a geopolitical psychosis that collapsed in front of the whole world.

And this is how NATO dies, not in a blaze of battlefield glory, but as a casualty of Europe’s own rabid hysteria. Not from Russian missiles, but from the self-inflicted wounds of moral decay, strategic incoherence, and suicidal escalation. Washington sees it too. What began as a security alliance has become an ecisto liability, a European powder keg disguised as a partner. Even protection rackets know when to cut loose the client that can’t stop lighting matches.

When this ends, Dragone’s words will not be remembered as strategic resolve. They will be remembered as the panicked confession of an empire drowning in its own failures, a warning flare fired by a ruling class that senses that its final enemy is not Moscow, but the citizens waiting just outside the palace gates.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

If Kim Dotcom is right (his bating average is very high), and Ukraine really is developing nuclear weapons with UK and French help, then Europe isn’t just escalating. It’s playing Russian roulette with civilization.

And the worst part? It’s plausible. Horrifyingly plausible.

This adds up sadly... That Ukraine is developing a nuclear program with assistance from Britain and France, a charge that will be dismisses in Western capitals, but one that fits too neatly with Kiev's own public statements. This isn’t a wild accusation from the fringe. Ukraine’s leadership has repeatedly signaled nuclear ambitions: from Zelensky in Munich hinting at abandoning the Budapest Memorandum, to the ambassador, Andrey Melnyk in Berlin threatening nuclear rearmament, to “we may need nukes if NATO won’t take us.” These aren’t slips. They are warnings and confessions disguised as hypotheticals.

And now? Europe is openly discussing preemptive strikes on Russia. NATO’s top general, Cavo Dragone, floated “preventive action” against Russian sites, code language for first-strike doctrine. Russia responded by calling it “an extraordinarily irresponsible step.” They’re right. This is not deterrence, but brinkmanship from a political class that has lost its mind, and knows it.

Why is the claim more than plausible? Because Kiev has the motive, is on record expressing the intent (to give cover for its patrons), the remanents of a Soviet scientific base, and the Western patrons capable of providing the expertise. And because a desperate state with collapsing front lines, a sacrificed population, and dwindling Western patience will consider anything, including the unthinkable, to secure leverage.

And Europe? Europe is no brake. Europe is the accelerant. London and Paris, terrified of their own political collapse, are escalating in every direction: naval-drone terror, hybrid and kinetic warfare, now nuclear ambiguity. They fear their own voters more than they fear Moscow. That’s why they push Zelensky to take risks no sane leadership would touch. Because if Ukraine falls, their governments fall with it.

This is how great powers sleepwalk into catastrophe, a desperate puppet state, unhinged European elites, and nuclear ambiguity. And a military alliance openly debating first strikes on a nuclear superpower.

The world is standing at the abyss. Not because Russia wants war, but because Europe’s political class is trying to outrun the judgment waiting for them at home. And if they drag Ukraine into becoming a terror regime with nukes, or drag NATO into first-strike doctrine, the next miscalculation won’t be “hybrid warfare.” It will be irreversible.

We are closer to the abyss today than at any point since 1962, and the people lighting the fuse are in Brussels, London, and Paris. Not Moscow.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

Europe Just Made the Odessa Case for Russia

The beauty, and tragedy of Europe’s strategy is its flawless stupidity.
You authorize naval-drone terrorism against civilian tankers… then gasp when Moscow considers redrawing the map.

You turn Ukraine’s coastline into a NATO launchpad… then act shocked when Russia inevitably decides that coastline can no longer exist.

That’s the core of it... Europe didn’t support Ukraine. Europe weaponized it and now guarantees Russia the legal, moral, and military case for taking Odessa.

The drones weren’t Ukrainian.
The targeting wasn’t Ukrainian.
The decisions weren’t Ukrainian.
This was Western Europe engaging in terrorism with someone else’s coastline and now the bill is due.

I lay it all out here:

👉 https://ronpaulinstitute.org/europe-just-made-russias-case-for-odessa/

Panic indeed. When US controlled NABU (reportedly) opens cases against 70 MPs from the ruling party, that’s not anti-corruption. That’s D.C. executing a controlled demolition. Zelensky’s entourage is fleeing because everyone can smell the verdict: the actor’s run is over.

Neither Trump nor Putin will legitimize him, and Kiev's political class is already sneaking to Moscow for terms because they know the Americans have cut the power. The post-Zelensky transition has begun, the only people still pretending it’s not happening are his corrupt European handlers.

Zelensky outlawed negations with Putin, and is unelected with zero legal mandate to negotiate. Russia and the Trump admin are merely honouring Zelensky's wishes... You didn't want to negotiate with Putin? Great stop whinning, there's the door. Elections will come and a settlement that reflects Russia's legitimate interests and the battlefield reality, will be finalized.

Capitulation, with cosmic humiliation downloaded onto the Europeans. Speaking of corruption — look at Ursula von der Leyen, the Empress of Corruption herself, drowning in scandal after scandal. From the secret-text multimillion-dose vaccine contract with Pfizer (Pfizergate), to the revolving-door influence networks she’s spent her career cultivating, to the latest detonation: her own former High Representative, Federica Mogherini, and top EEAS official Stefano Sannino detained over a rigged Diplomatic Academy tender. Procurement fraud, corruption, conflict of interest, the whole arsenal.

The judge now has 48 hours to decide how deep the rot runs, but the symbolism is already terminal. The very institution meant to train Europe’s diplomats has become a crime scene. And the more the Commission sermonizes about “values” and “rule of law,” the clearer it becomes that the swamp isn’t in Kiev, it’s in Brussels. Kiev is merely a franchise.

Ukraine’s corruption is a mirror, while Brussels keeps smashing the glass in vain so no one sees their reflection.

Europe is exposed, and the West’s entire Ukraine project is entering its terminal hour. The great irony? Moscow may not have to bring it all down. Washington seems to have cut the power, Brussels pretendingthe lights are still on, and Kiev? Too busy stripping the place for copper, to notice the whole grid collapsing.

The era of illusions is over. The settlement is coming, on the battlefield or via the pen. And Europe, drunk on its own propaganda and hypocrisy, is about to wake up with the kind of hangover that ends empires.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

The great farce of late-imperial Europe is that every time Brussels stumbles into another historic blunder of its own making, it immediately searches for a foreign hand to blame. And so the EU’s court chronicler, Politico, delivers its latest fever dream: that Belgium, the most indecisive, over-medicated country in the bloc, has somehow transformed into “Russia’s most valuable asset.” In reality, the only asset Russia needed was the EU’s own arrogance.

Belgium merely did the unthinkable, it told the truth.

What Politico dresses up as geopolitical intrigue is actually a confession of EU derangement. The EU are trying to engineer the largest state-sanctioned theft of sovereign wealth in modern history, a direct raid on the Russian Central Bank’s reserves and expected applause, unity, and moral ecstasy. Instead, Belgium asked the only sane question left in Europe: “Are you all completely out of your minds?” For this, Politico paints De Wever as eccentric, impulsive, unstable, the same labels always deployed when someone refuses to bow to the imperial autopilot. But the deeper scandal is that Brussels expected him to sign off on detonating the post-war financial order for the sake of one more photo-op with Zelensky.

Politico can hide behind metaphors of summit dinners and langoustines, but the legal reality is brutal: raiding another nation’s central bank is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration of financial war on the entire world. It would obliterate sovereign immunity, destroy the neutrality of reserve holdings, and instantly signal to the global South that their assets in EU banks are hostage to EU’s emotional spasms. One act, one reckless stroke of a pen, and the euro collapses as a safe currency, capital flees to Asia, and the West loses its last functional pillar of power. Belgium saw the cliff’s edge, Brussels mistook it for a (perverse) moral leap of faith.

Politico’s narrative stumbles further when it pretends the only danger lies in Moscow’s retaliation. It does not. Russia’s symmetric countermeasures are well-known, lawful, and devastating: nationalization of Western corporate assets, seizure of industrial infrastructure, liquidation of bond holdings, and the dismantling of Western financial footprints inside Russia. The value of Western assets exposed inside the Russian Federation rivals what sits in Euroclear. Brussels knows this. Euroclear knows this. Investors know this. Only the EU pretends the ledger is irrelevant. But the real threat is not Russia’s response , it is the irreversible collapse of trust in Western custodianship. Once the EU steals central bank reserves, no nation with self-respect will ever again store wealth in Europe. The theft of Russian reserves would be remembered not as an isolated act, but as the day the West proved it cannot be trusted with global money, let alone soverign assets.

This is the part Politico is terrified to articulate. Belgium wasn’t protecting Russia. Belgium is trying to protect the very system the EU purports to defend. Yet instead of portraying De Wever as the only adult in the room, Politico stages a melodrama about a Flemish nationalist gone rogue, supposedly spoiling the EU’s grandiose plan to hurl another €140 billion onto the Ukrainian funeral pyre. The reality is simpler, Belgium refused to mortgage its own future so Europe could continue its cosplay as a geopolitical superpower utterly detached from material reality. The EU elite wanted to play empire with someone else’s risk. Belgium refused to be the guarantor of their delusion.

1/2 — part 2 👇

2/2

What makes Politico’s narrative even more absurd is that it accidentally reveals the deeper rot, Europe's elite caste are incapable of unity, incapable of strategic thought, incapable of honesty. Merz shoots from the hip. Von der Leyen improvises legal fantasies. Orbán holds a veto the size of a continental fault line. Trump instinctively knows he needs an offramp via peace talks and is happy to download project Ukraine's corpse along with the humiliation onto Western Europe. Zelensky arrives in Brussels begging for cash while European governments fight over whether the money should be spent on their own weapons factories. This is not a union. This is a collective suicide pact.

And through all this chaos, Politico clings to the illusion that Russia must somehow be “laughing.” But Russia isn’t laughing. Russia is watching.
Watching as Europe destroys its own energy security, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy, its own diplomatic credibility, its own financial reputation, and finally — with this proposed asset raid, the very legal foundations of the Western economic system. If Moscow appears calm, it is because it doesn’t need to act. Europe is demolishing itself at a pace Russia could never have engineered.

Belgium’s “no” was not an act of betrayal. It was the last flicker of European rationality. The EU’s hysteria and psychosis, not Russia, created the crisis. Europe is trying to violate international law, sabotage its own financial institutions, and torch what remains of the bygone postwar order to salvage the illusion of a war it has already lost. Belgium simply refused to join the ritual suicide.

So let us rewrite Politico’s headline as history will record it: “How the EU Became Russia’s Greatest Strategic Gift.” Not because Russia manipulated Europe, but because Europe manipulated itself, into hysteria, into decay, into legal nihilism, into economic ruin. Belgium didn’t hand Russia an asset. It denied the EU the final act of self-destruction... for now.

The tragic irony of the entire Politico piece is that its authors still cling to the fantasy that Europe can recover simply by shaming Belgium into compliance. But history will not be kind to this moment. When future scholars study the collapse of the Western financial empire, this attempted seizure of Russian assets and Belgium’s lonely refusal, will stand as the point where the veil fell, revealing a Europe that could no longer distinguish faux moral posturing from strategic insanity.

Belgium didn’t break with Europe, it broke with Europe’s delusions. The EU convinced itself that tearing down the last pillars of the post-war order was an act of courage. Belgium saw it for what it was, a death rite dressed as morality. And when this era ends, when capitals move eastward, when trust evaporates, when the euro cracks under the weight of its own blind arrogance, historians will look back on this moment. They will not ask why Belgium said no. They will ask why Europe said yes.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work

💥America wants an exit, but Europe will have no choice but to wear the humiliation...

🟥 Is Trump Hanging Europe Out to Dry on Ukraine?
https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/04/is-trump-hanging-europe-out-to-dry-on-ukraine/

POLITICO calls Belgium “Russia’s most valuable asset.”

No, Belgium is Europe’s final warning before the plunge.

My latest just dropped via @RonPaulInstitut

The Eu wants a moral spectacle, a €140B looting of frozen Russian assets dressed up as “reparations.” Belgium asked the only question that still matters: Are we really going to blow up what remains of the postwar financial order, when we've already lost the war against Russia?

The EU doubling down on its Russophobic psychosis, didn’t just flirt with looting a nuclear superpower’s central bank. It's flirting with detonating the very foundation of the post-war financial order:

→ Sovereign immunity
→ Legal neutrality of reserve holdings
→ Investor trust in European banks

You don’t survive that. You collapse. Quietly at first, then all at once.

They call De Wever “rogue.” We him one of the last of a European political class still capable of sanity.

Belgium didn’t betray Europe. Europe betrayed itself. Europe, not Belgium has become Russia's greatest asset. Belgium is just refusing to go down with the ship.

And when this all comes crashing down, when capital flees, when the euro collapses, when the world stops trusting the Western custodians of its wealth, no one will ask why Belgium said no. They’ll ask why Europe said yes.

👉 Read the full article here.

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Donate - Support Our Work