Israel turns swaths of Gaza into ‘lifeless wastelands’ as attacks intensify

Israeli attacks on Gaza kill 32 people as four more die from malnutrition

Buildings lie in ruin in north Gaza, near the Israel-Gaza border, as seen from Israel, August 13, 2025 [Amir Cohen/Reuters]

At least 32 people, including 13 seeking aid, have been killed on Thursday in Israeli attacks across Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, as four more people died from malnutrition amid a growing starvation crisis in the besieged territory.

Eight people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a residential home in Gaza City in northern Gaza, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Two other people were killed in an Israeli attack on the city’s Tuffah neighbourhood, hospital sources told Al Jazeera.

The killings come as Israel escalates its attacks on Gaza City, the largest city in the enclave, after the country’s security cabinet approved plans for the military to seize the city, an operation that could forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones in southern Gaza.

The plan has received international condemnation from the United Nations and even dissent from within Israel’s own military.

Al Jazeera correspondents reported on Thursday that large swaths of northern Gaza have been turned into “lifeless wastelands” amid the Israeli escalation.

Palestinians in Gaza City have spoken of their fears of further displacement, following an Israeli forced evacuation order to areas further south, in advance of the proposed occupation.

Walaa Sobh said she had already been displaced during the war from the northern city of Beit Lahiya to Gaza City, and was unable to move again.

“We’re afraid to move anywhere else, because we have nowhere to go, no income – and I am a widow,” she told Al Jazeera.

“If they want to force us out, then at least find us a place, give us tents, especially for the widows, the children, and the sick. You’re not only displacing one or two people; you’re displacing millions who have nowhere to stay.”

Al Jazeera reporter witnesses chaos as aid trucks arrive in north Gaza

“I am a mother of five and the wife of a detainee. I cannot escape with my children from one place to another,” Hamdan told Al Jazeera. “I would rather face death here in Gaza City than go to al-Mawasi.”

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said Israel’s plans to occupy Gaza City are a serious cause for concern.

“It’s a terrible escalation, really,” said Bishara.

“[Netanyahu] really intends to reoccupy Gaza … send the military in and just take it on again.”

The humanitarian consequences of Israel expanding its offensive in Gaza “would be dire” for Palestinians who have already endured 22 months of displacement and bloodshed, Mohamed Elmasry, professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“These are people who have been displaced – in many cases more than 10 times and in some cases more than 20 times already – and quite literally dodging bombs for the past 22 months,” Almasri said. “And they are starving in addition to all that.”

Elmasry described the Israeli plan as part of a broader effort to push Palestinians out of Gaza.

“Israel wants to empty the Gaza Strip, and it wants at least all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” he said.

Truce talks

As Israel continues to escalate attacks on Gaza City, Mossad spy chief David Barnea is visiting Qatar in an effort to revive talks over a Gaza ceasefire, two Israeli officials told the Reuters news agency on Thursday.

The visit follows a reported expression of positivity from Hamas officials to restart ceasefire negotiations during a meeting with Egypt’s intelligence chief in Cairo earlier this week.

Earlier on Thursday, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said that a non-Israeli, peaceful civilian administration for Gaza was among the Israeli government’s five key principles for ending the war.

The other principles include the release of captives still held in Gaza, the surrender of weapons by Hamas, the full demilitarisation of Gaza, and Israel retaining overriding security control, he said.

Gaza journalists vow to carry on work despite Al Jazeera staff killings

Aid still ‘a drop in the ocean’

Meanwhile, more than 100 aid groups on Thursday accused Israel of obstructing life-saving aid from entering Gaza, resulting in vast quantities of relief supplies remaining stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt as more Palestinians starve.

“Despite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs [nongovernmental organisations] have been unable to deliver a single truck of life-saving supplies since 2 March,” the groups said.

There is aid sitting all around the boundary between Israel and Gaza that is not being allowed in, Natasha Davies, a nursing activity manager with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, told Al Jazeera.

“We’ve had a couple of trucks in [to Gaza], but really, it’s just a drop in the ocean … We run primarily a trauma surgical hospital, so every single patient has a wound of some sort that needs fixing with supplies that we are intermittently receiving,” Davies said by videolink from Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis.

“It’s just a humanitarian catastrophe. There are these GHF sites, which are slaughter masquerading as aid, which create mass casualty incidents, which create more injuries for us to treat with limited resources,” she said.

Basal Mahmoud, Gaza’s civil defence spokesperson, told Al Jazeera Arabic that the aid currently entering the enclave is “not sufficient at all”.

He said at least 1,000 trucks of various supplies are needed each day, adding that only about 100 trucks enter daily, most of them going to traders rather than meeting market needs.

Dr Munir al-Bursh, director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said Israel is starving to death “all sorts of people”, including children and women.

He warned that 40,000 children under one were suffering from malnutrition, 250,000 children under five face life-threatening food shortages, and 1.2 million children under 18 are living in severe food insecurity.

“We are facing overwhelming, frightening figures,” al-Bursh told Al Jazeera Arabic.

The accusations from aid groups came as United States President Donald Trump said he would like to see journalists gain access to Gaza to see humanitarian efforts. Israel has not allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza since the start of its war on the besieged enclave, unless they are under Israeli military escort.

“I would be very fine with journalists going,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “And it’s a very dangerous position to be in, as you know, if you’re a journalist, but I would like to see it.”

The total number of aid seekers killed since May 27, when Israel introduced a new aid distribution mechanism through the US-based GHF, has reached at least 1,881, with more than 13,863 injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The total count of hunger-related deaths is now 239, including 106 children, the ministry records.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,776 people and wounded 154,906. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023, attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.

Putin – US efforts to settle Ukraine conflict ‘energetic and sincere’

Russian President Vladimir Putin.
©Kristina Kormilitsyna; RIA Novosti

The US is making a genuine effort to stop the fighting in Ukraine and reach agreements that would account for the interests of all parties involved, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

Putin is scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss ways of ending the Ukraine conflict, as well as steps toward normalizing relations between Moscow and Washington.

On Thursday, Putin met with top government officials in Moscow to discuss the upcoming summit and “the stage where we are with the current US administration.”

He said that the American leadership is making “quite energetic and sincere efforts to stop the hostilities” and working to “create long-term conditions of peace between our countries and in Europe, and in the world as a whole.” Putin added that this process could be further advanced if Russia and the US reach agreements on strategic offensive weapons control in the next stages of negotiations.

Among the officials present at Thursday’s meeting were Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, all of whom will be traveling to Alaska on Friday to take part in the Putin-Trump summit.

According to the Kremlin, the event will begin with a one-on-one conversation between the two leaders, followed by a meeting of the Russian and US delegations.

Trump has described the summit as a “feel-out meeting” that will help him determine whether the Ukraine conflict can be resolved. He has said that if the talks go well, he may seek a second round of negotiations involving Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that Trump will pursue all possible options for a peaceful end to the conflict during his meeting with Putin. She added that the US president would prefer not to impose any new sanctions on Russia but instead resolve the situation through diplomacy.

The Putin-Trump Alaska summit: What you need to know

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Friday in Alaska.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and US President Donald Trump (R) in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018. © Kremlin

The summit is expected to focus on seeking a resolution to the Ukraine conflict, as well as broader Russia-US bilateral relations.

Here is what you need to know.

1. Closest US state to Russia

The meeting will take place in the state of Alaska, the edge of which lies just a few dozen miles across the Bering Strait from the Russian border.

The meeting will begin on Friday morning at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, presidential foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov told journalists on Thursday.

A number of Soviet pilots, servicemen, and civilians who died during the Second World War while ferrying planes under the Lend-Lease agreement are buried near the US military base, he said. The area is a “historically important place, a reminder of the military brotherhood of the peoples of our countries,” the Kremlin aide noted.

2. Face-to-face meeting

The summit will open with a one-on-one conversation between Putin and Trump, accompanied by their translators, according to Ushakov. The talks will then continue between the Russian and US delegations in a five-on-five format, he said.

The Kremlin and the White House initially confirmed that the two leaders are expected to speak at a joint press conference following the negotiations. Trump later told Fox News Radio that if the meeting goes badly, he would speak to journalists alone.

3. High-level delegations

Moscow’s team will include Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Special Presidential Representative for Investment and Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries Kirill Dmitriev, as well as Ushakov himself, the Kremlin aide said. Experts will also be present at the summit.

He noted that Russia has been informed of which officials will be in the US delegation, but declined to name them ahead of an official statement from Washington.

4. Trump’s team has yet to be announced.

Peace talks and more The central issue of the summit is expected to be the Ukraine conflict. Trade and economic issues, and other bilateral cooperation will also be discussed, according to the Kremlin.

Putin said on Thursday during a meeting with members of the Russian delegation that Trump’s administration was making “quite energetic and sincere efforts” to end the crisis and “create long-term conditions for peace between our countries.”

The Kremlin indicated on Thursday that no documents are expected to be signed as a result of the meeting.

Trump has described the summit as a “feel-out meeting” intended to help him better understand Putin’s position. He has also suggested that any potential settlement in Ukraine could involve territorial exchanges with Russia, and has dismissed Ukrainian reservations about such swaps.

Neither Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky nor leaders from Western European nations have been invited to the talks.

5. The lead up

The summit was organized in short order after a visit by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow last week. Trump had long promised to end the hostilities but has increasingly expressed discontent with the pace of Russian-Ukrainian talks.

The Kremlin earlier indicated that Witkoff had brought to Moscow an “acceptable” offer from Washington.

Russian strike killed numerous foreign fighters in Ukraine – NYT

FILE PHOTO. ©Global Look Press/Geovien So

At least a dozen foreign volunteers in Ukraine’s military were killed late last month when a Russian missile struck a training camp’s mess hall during lunchtime, in one of the deadliest attacks on foreign fighters of the war, according to soldiers with knowledge of the incident.

The Ukrainian Army, which only occasionally acknowledges missile strikes on military sites, confirmed that the attack had killed and wounded soldiers but declined to disclose details. Three soldiers, including one who witnessed the strike, described a harrowing assault that hit fresh recruits from the United States, Colombia, Taiwan, Denmark and other places.

The attack showed the risks that Ukraine has faced throughout the war when it has assembled soldiers at places like military academies, barracks and parade grounds, making them targets for Russian attacks.

Ukraine has been deploying foreign troops to bolster its forces against Russia’s larger and better-armed military, which has bombarded the country daily even as President Vladimir V. Putin plans to meet with President Trump on Friday in Alaska to discuss an end to the war.

The missile attack on the training camp, which took place near the central Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi on July 21, was timed for when recruits sat down at picnic tables for lunch, the soldiers said.

An American recruit from Florida, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the explosion was the loudest he had ever heard. In a telephone interview, he said the blast had sent debris flying around him and had shaken nearby trees.

Afterward, he saw at least 15 dead soldiers and more than 100 wounded lying near the mess hall. The strike also ignited a nearby ammunition depot, triggering secondary explosions and sending shrapnel flying, as survivors rushed to aid the injured.

“I applied tourniquets to some gravely wounded soldiers and helped carry them to ambulances, trucks, and private cars racing to hospitals,” the recruit said.

Thousands of flags and portraits of fallen Ukrainian soldiers and volunteer fighters from foreign countries at a makeshift memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine, in March. Credit... Nicole Tung for The New York Times

He added that no air raid alarm sounded before the strike, and first aid kits were noticeably absent around the mess hall.

Volodymyr Kaminskyi, a spokesman for the international legion of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency—which oversees the site—said an investigation was underway but declined to reveal casualty figures while it continued, The New York Times noted.

Foreign volunteers serve in both regular Ukrainian Army units and two international legions, one under the army and the other under military intelligence (HUR).

Early in the war, veterans from the US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan joined Ukrainian forces inspired by their staunch resistance.

More recently, many recruits have come from South America, drawn by salaries much higher than those at home despite the risks of frontline combat.

Foreign soldiers earn base pay between $1,000 and $1,750 per month, with combat bonuses that can push total earnings above $3,000 monthly. Russia has also recruited foreign fighters, including thousands from North Korea.

Ukrainian soldiers have also been victims of strikes on training facilities. Recently, Russian troops launched a missile strike on the territory of one of the training units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' Ground Forces.

One person is known to have died, and 11 were wounded to varying degrees. Another 12 soldiers sought medical help with complaints of acoustic trauma and acute stress.

Such attacks on assembled troops have raised concerns and calls for investigations into whether soldiers were placed at unnecessary risk.

The American recruit from Florida had been at the base less than a week and had not yet been issued a rifle when the strike occurred. He said he had felt safe at the camp, set amid sunflower fields and forests.

“I accepted the risks of joining Ukraine’s military out of a desire to support a struggling democracy, but I never expected people to be killed during training,” he said.

Earlier, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi, called for military training activities to be relocated underground where possible, citing ongoing risks from missile and drone attacks across the country.

White House teases Trump visit to Russia

FILE PHOTO: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
©Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

US President Donald Trump could visit Russia in the future, the White House has said. Trump is set to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin this week.

The two leaders are scheduled to hold talks in the US state of Alaska on August 15, with discussions expected to focus on resolving the Ukraine conflict and strengthening bilateral ties.

Asked by reporters on Tuesday if Trump planned to visit Russia, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “It’s possible that there are plans to travel to Russia in the future.”

Moscow previously stated that it expects the two leaders’ next meeting following Alaska to take place in Russia. Trump has officially been sent an invitation, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said last week.

The US leader said on Monday he plans to organize the next top-level talks on the Ukraine conflict, aiming to bring Putin and Vladimir Zelensky to the same table. He also confirmed that Zelensky has not been invited to his meeting with Putin on Friday.

Moscow has long accused Zelensky of being in denial and unnecessarily prolonging a conflict he cannot win.

The Russian president has said he has “nothing in principle” against meeting with Zelensky, but maintains that “certain conditions must be created” for it to take place.

Putin has also cast doubt on Zelensky’s legal capacity to sign binding agreements, as the Ukrainian leader’s presidential term expired last year and he has refused to hold a new election, citing martial law. This has prompted Moscow to declare him “illegitimate.”

Recap : Alaska meeting, Ukraine conflict and trade with Russia - Key takeaways from Trump’s Q&A

The summit with Vladimir Putin will show whether a peace deal can be reached, the US president has said

US President Donald Trump shared his expectations regarding the upcoming meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, during a Q&A session with journalists after a press conference on Monday.

The summit will reveal whether Moscow and Kiev are capable of resolving the Ukraine conflict or should just be left fighting, Trump claimed.

The results of the meeting would then be shared with the EU, NATO and Kiev, Trump said, adding that he would be particularly keen on relaying Moscow’s proposals if he believes they could be translated into a “fair deal.” According to the US president, the settlement of the Ukraine conflict is bound to involve some “land swapping.” The president also said that he still sees great potential in trade with Russia, which “has a very valuable piece of land.”

Here are the highlights of the Q&A session:

‘Feel-out meeting’

According to Trump, he expects the Friday summit with Putin in Alaska to be a “feel-out meeting” that would help him understand Moscow’s intentions better. The American president stated that he believes Russia wants to engage with Washington and “get it over with” when it comes to the Ukraine conflict.

He also welcomed the fact that Moscow has agreed to hold the summit in a US state. “I thought it was very respectful that the President of Russia is coming to our country, as opposed to us going to his country, or even [to] a third-party place,” Trump said, adding that he believes he and Putin “will have constructive conversations.”

Path forward

According to Trump, the meeting with Putin will help him understand whether there is a way to settle the Ukraine conflict. “We're going to see what the parameters [of a potential settlement] are,” the president said, vowing to share the details of the discussion with EU and NATO leaders, as well as with Vladimir Zelensky.

“I'd like to see the best deal that can be made for both parties,” Trump stated, adding that he would also like to see a ceasefire between the two sides as soon as possible. He still admitted that there is a chance the meeting could end in failure and he would just “leave and say: good luck.”

‘Land swapping’

A potential solution to the Ukraine conflict is bound to involve some exchange of territories between Russia and Ukraine, the US president believes. “There will be some land swapping going on,” he told journalists.

Trump also criticized Kiev’s approach to settling territorial disputes with Moscow. According to the president he was “bothered” by Zelensky telling him about the need of “constitutional approval” for any changes on the ground. “He got the approval to go into war, kill everybody,” the US president said.

Zelensky not invited

When asked why the Ukrainian leader was not invited for the Friday summit, Trump said Zelensky “wasn’t a part of it.” The president also pointed to the fact that the Ukrainian leader “has been there for three and a half years” and had gone “to a lot of meetings” but “nothing happened.”

Trade with Russia

When asked if he still believes the US could still do some “normal trade” with Russia, Trump replied: “I do.” He went on to say that Russia “has a very valuable piece of land” and could benefit from it if Putin “would go toward business.” He also described Russia as a “massive country” that has “tremendous potential … to do well.”

Listen to Lavrov: Here’s why Russia won’t take crap from the EU anymore

FILE PHOTO: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
©Sputnik/Sergey Bobylev

Like him, hate him, Otto von Bismarck – Prussian aristocrat, arch conservative, user of German nationalism, maker of wars, and then keeper of the peace – was no dummy. And his ego was Reich-sized. Yet even Bismarck had a grain of humility left. Smart politics, he once remarked, consists of listening for “God’s step” as He walks through “world history,” and then to grab the hem of His mantle.

In other words, stay attuned to the needs and especially the opportunities of the moment. Tragically, Bismarck’s single greatest skill was to seize – and, if need be, help along – opportunities for war. But sometimes peace, too, gets its chance. Fifty years ago, all European countries – minus only Albania, initially – plus the US and Canada, signed the Helsinki Final Act (or Helsinki Accords).

A complex document addressing four areas (called ‘baskets’) of international relations and follow-up implementation, the Helsinki Final Act was a breakthrough for Détente in Europe. Détente was a global attempt, driven by Brezhnev and Gromyko’s Moscow and Nixon and Kissinger’s Washington to, if not wind down, then at least manage the Cold War better.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was not the only reason for this policy of restraint and reason. Coming extremely close to all-out nuclear war Dr.-Strangelove-style helped concentrate minds. Add the US fiasco in Vietnam, and by the late 1960s, the desire to de-escalate was strong enough even in Washington to quickly override the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. In the first half of the 1970s, a flurry of high-level international diplomacy and treaties marked the peak of Détente. By 1975, the Helsinki Accords were the peak of that peak.

Stemming from Soviet and Warsaw Pact initiatives and resonating with a Western Europe – and even post-Harmel Report NATO (those were the days!) – that genuinely wanted to combine due diligence in defense policy with real diplomacy and give-and-take negotiations, the Helsinki Accords also fed on the preceding French, that is, De Gaulle’s, “politique à l’Est,” as well as Willy Brandt of Germany’s “Ostpolitik.”

The latter is much maligned now in a Germany where disgracefully incompetent elites have gone wild with Russophobia and a new militarism. In reality, both De Gaulle and Brandt – as well as Brandt’s key foreign policy adviser, Egon Bahr, made historic contributions to mitigating the worst risks of the Cold War and, in Germany’s case, also to preparing the ground for national re-unification.

Yet, after 1975, things started to go downhill, and they’ve never really stopped. That is one of the key points recently made in a long article by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Since Western mainstream media excel at not reporting what Russian politicians are trying to tell us, it is likely that few will notice outside of Russia. That’s a shame because Lavrov has more than one message we should pay attention to.

Under the understated title “Half a Century of the Helsinki Act: Expectations, Realities, and Perspectives,” Lavrov delivers a harsh and – even if you disagree with some of the details – fundamentally valid and just criticism of the disappointing failure following the promising beginnings at Helsinki. That failure has a name – the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Incidentally, the OSCE is the successor of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which actually produced the Helsinki Accords between 1972 and 1975. Before the leaders of the time, both great and small, could meet in Helsinki to sign them, at what Cold War historian Jussi Hanhimäki called a “largely ceremonial affair,” there had been years of painstaking, meticulous negotiations. There’s a lesson here for the impatient Trumps and Zelenskys of today: serious results take serious preparation, not a day or two of grandstanding.

What happened to the OSCE next is not complicated: with 57 member states, making it the largest security organization in the world today, it has massively under performed. At least if we measure it by its aims, as originally set out at Helsinki in the heyday of Détente.

The OSCE could have been an indispensable international forum, bridging the front lines of geopolitics and ideologies (or, as we now say, “values”). After the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, it could even have become the core of new security architecture, which included everyone from Lisbon to Vladivostok. But for that to happen, it would have had to stick to the Helsinki Accord’s core principles and rules: strict respect for sovereignty, equality, and non-interference, all maintained by a heavy emphasis on consensus.

Yet, instead, the OSCE turned, first, into a Cold War and, then, a post-Cold War tool of Western influence, bias, and – behind the façade of multilateralism – hardball realpolitik. Like the EU, the OSCE should have been fundamentally different from, and even antagonistic towards NATO. But like the EU, it ended up becoming a mere junior partner in America’s imperial vassal system.

Much of Lavrov’s article is dedicated to detailing this failure in various countries, regions, issues, and conflicts, including Chechnya, Kosovo, Moldova, and Ukraine, to name just a few. That’s important because it serves as a corrective to silly and complacent Western mainstream tales, which put the blame for Helsinki’s and the OSCE’s failure on – drum roll – Russia and Russia alone. Not to speak of the demented attempts by Ukraine’s delusional, corrupt, and increasingly isolated Vladimir Zelensky to use the Helsinki anniversary to once again call for “regime change” in Russia.

Yet what is even more important is Lavrov’s candid message about the future, as Russia sees it. First, it is polycentric or multipolar and, in this part of the world, Eurasian and emphatically not transatlantic. In that respect, it is almost as if we are back in the mid-1950s. Back then, long before the Helsinki Act became reality, Moscow – then the capital of the Soviet Union – suggested building comprehensive security architecture. The West refused because Moscow was not willing to include the US.

By the 1970s, the Soviet leadership had changed its position, affirming that it was possible to include the US, which, in turn, made Helsinki possible. So much for fairy tales of Russian “intransigence.”

That inclusion was an irony of history, as Washington initially showed only distrust and disdain. As Hanhimäki has shown, Henry Kissinger considered Europe a sideshow, though not the Soviet Union: the US has always respected its opponents much more than its vassals. He suspected that if Moscow and Western Europe got to cozy it could end up threatening Washington’s control over the latter. He once told his team with more than a tinge of nasty racism that the Helsinki agreements might as well be written in Swahili.

Now, Moscow is back to standing firm against trans-atlanticism. Lavrov writes, “Euro-atlantic” conceptions of security and cooperation have “discredited themselves and are exhausted.” Europe, he warns, can have a place in future Eurasian systems, but it “definitely” won’t be allowed to “call the tune.” If its countries wish to be part of the “process, they will have to learn good manners, renounce [their habit of] diktat and colonial instincts, get used to equal rights, [and] working in a team.”

You may think that this is very far from the Europe we are seeing now: one that is submissive to the US to the point of self-destruction (as the Turnberry Trade and Tariff Fiasco has just revealed again), blinded by hubris in its “garden-in-the-jungle,” and fanatically invested in not even talking to Russia and confronting China.

And yet, none of the above can last forever. Indeed, given how self-damaging these policies are, it may not last much longer. The news from Moscow is that, though Russia has not closed the door on Europe entirely, if or when the Europeans recover their sanity, they will find that Russia won’t allow them to return to having it both ways: being America’s vassals and enjoying a decent relationship with Russia at the same time.

Germany and rest of EU transforming into Fourth Reich – Lavrov

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused Germany and the wider European Union of sliding into what he described as a “Fourth Reich,” marked by a surge in Russophobia and aggressive militarization.

The stark warning was delivered in an article published on Friday in the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act on European security.

Lavrov criticized the EU and NATO for betraying the core principles of the Helsinki process, which emphasized equal and indivisible security for all. Instead, he claimed that Western powers have pursued unilateral dominance, NATO expansion, and political interference in sovereign states under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights.

Today’s Europe has completely plunged into a Russophobic frenzy, and its militarization is becoming, in fact, uncontrolled,” Lavrov wrote, citing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s calls to build Europe’s strongest army and reintroduce conscription as evidence. He also pointed to recent remarks by Germany’s defense minister about the need to be prepared to kill Russian soldiers as further proof of a hostile and dehumanizing agenda.

This brings historical events to mind. With their current leaders, modern Germany and the rest of Europe are transforming into a Fourth Reich.

He argued that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has failed in its mission and has instead become a vehicle for Western propaganda and selective enforcement. He said the West ignored Russian calls for equitable security guarantees, and that NATO’s continued encroachment on Russia’s borders left Moscow no choice but to launch its 2022 military operation in Ukraine.

To defuse tensions, Lavrov called for “an honest dialogue” aimed at stabilizing the situation on the Eurasian continent through a new security framework based on sovereign equality and the principles of the UN Charter.

“There will be a place for European countries within this architecture,” he wrote, “but they certainly will not be the ones calling the tune. If they want to be part of the process, they must learn proper manners, abandon diktat and colonial instincts, and get used to equality and teamwork.”

Lavrov concluded by warning that if NATO and the EU continue to hollow out the OSCE’s core principles, the organization may collapse altogether, and history will remember those who “buried” the last chance for peaceful coexistence in Europe.

Ukrainian plot to assassinate Russian defense industry leader derailed

©FSB of Russia

Russian agents have arrested a man accused of plotting to assassinate a general director of a defense industry enterprise on behalf of Ukraine, the Federal Security Service (FSB) has said. The suspect also reportedly admitted he had been spying on the Russian army since last summer.

In a statement on Tuesday, the FSB said that a Russian national had made contact with a representative of an unnamed pro-Ukrainian terrorist group via Telegram. He was ordered to travel to Bryansk Region which borders Ukraine, to recover a drone-dropped cache containing firearms and explosives, the agency said.

The weapons were intended for use in an assassination attempt on the head of a defense industrial facility in Belgorod, the FSB said. The suspect is now charged with high treason and faces up to life in prison

©FSB of Russia

The FSB also released a video in which the man confesses that since June 2024, while serving with Russian forces on the conflict frontline in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region, he relayed to Kiev data on the whereabouts of Russian army personnel and hardware as well as positions of electronic warfare and air defense systems.

In addition, he confessed to coordinating Ukrainian missile and artillery attacks and transmitting photographs and contact information of Russian military personnel.

The footage released by the FSB also shows the agency’s operatives driving up to the suspect in a minivan in a rural area. Within moments, the man, who is carrying a large backpack, is seen being pinned to the ground.

Another part of the video shows a forest stash containing what appears to be explosives and a handgun.

Russian authorities have accused Ukraine of organizing multiple sabotage and assassination attempts on Russian territory in recent months, including attacks targeting military commanders and other high-profile figures.