Excellent NYTimes article with insights into the Ukraine peace negotiations.

Two key points for me:

(a) The US was a key player in the strikes carried out on Russian oil refineries.

(b) The Russians simply don't trust Trump.

Some screenshots below and link at the end. 1/7 2/7

I have for a long time said that I thought that NATO troops would eventually openly enter Ukraine. Many did not agree. But we are now on the very edge of that. If it happens, it may well be the beginning of the next great European war. It is not in the Russian character to... 1/ back down when directly threatened in what they regard as their historical homeland (whether others agree is not relevant). It needs to be clearly understood that Russia will in all likelihood escalate this thing to the very end. While there are other options open to Russia...2/

"War is a racket"

In 1935 Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient published a book titled 'War is a Racket'.

The book contains this summary: 1/6 "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best... 2/6

NYTimes opinion piece today (gift link at the end):

Key message: NATO's primary purpose has always been to expand US influence over Europe on the cheap and at the expense of Europe.

Key extracts in the following tweets. /1 "...NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. ...
Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection... /2

The alleged transcript of communications between the Titan and the Polar Prince prior to the Titan's implosion. The transcript shows that Titan struggled for twenty minutes to return to the surface before finally imploding. Early in the news cycle relating to the Titan submersible disaster, there was a note around a message having been sent from the Titan to the Polar Prince (the surface vessel) about problems being experienced by the Titan.

Following from the thread below, there's a narrative building that the Moscow clique (Shoigu and Gerasimov) intended to either act against Putin's policies on the Ukrainian war (by ending it when Putin has cancer treatment) or by removing Putin... 1/

https://twitter.com/RSA_Observer/status/1672838688915574788

as president (presumably the timing would be the same, whatever it is).

In this narrative, Prigozhin is seen to be acting against Shoigu and Gerasimov to keep the Russian constitutional order intact and to maintain the power position of the St Petersburg grouping... 2/

1/8 There's a narrative that the US is militarily superior to Russia (and probably also China). Many people in the West and particularly those living in NATO countries take comfort from this. But it may not be true. Let's leave aside for now the question of whether... 2/8 Russia has a larger, more advanced, modern and capable nuclear and anti-ballistic missile fleet (which it almost certainly does but which creates many hot collars) and touch on a subject that very few people are aware of and which the media almost never talks about. What...

1/4 War between the US and China over Taiwanese independence seems almost inevitable. The US will tell you its about democracy, freedom and the rules based world order. But the simple fact is that under international law... 2/4 Taiwan is recognised by the UN only as a province of China which has no separate status. See further along the extracts from the UN Juridical Review 2010, which can be found on the UN website.

What the US seeks to achieve is illegal. As uncomfortable as that may make...

Michel and Macron talk about European strategic autonomy. But it's an impossibility for a long as a militarily weak EU is on the one hand reliant on US hard power and on the other hand it is faced with a revanchist major nuclear power that is rapidly increasing its... 1/6 military capability and intent upon rearranging the European security architecture. There are only two ways of getting to strategic autonomy:

A. Replace US hard power military capability with a European equivalent. That includes full nuclear capabilty, weapons... 2/6