Global Politics

I went to Ukraine thinking I could choose how to help, only to find that on the morning the war began everything I knew—plans, love, even my sense of who I was—was smashed by artillery, paperwork, and the chaotic, makeshift mercy of volunteers who’d been thrown together to survive.

Watching Pokrovsk ground to dust meter by meter, I see Washington and Budapest flirting with an alliance of convenience that would codify the stalemate into Western policy and rename exhaustion as realism.

Russia’s nuclear-powered 9M730 Burevestnik (SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a low-altitude, long-endurance cruise missile, with a claimed 14,000 km in 15 hours still unverified, built to slip past missile defenses and push the nuclear arms race into a harder phase.

Sanctuary is a shabby myth in the Golis, where satellite eyes, patient ISR, and surgical fire are turning those wadis into dead ends for ISIS-Somalia.

Trump forced a Gaza ceasefire with a “hold my beer” shrug, exposing the hollowness of our rules-based priesthood while Congress, gelded and drowsy, watched power act and then tried to explain it.

When Russian armor crossed the border and the drones began their ragged buzz over Kyiv, I learned that heartbreak and geopolitics break you in the same place, and the only answer was to hold the line long enough for principle to matter.

Trump rattled the saber then slid it back in the scabbard, as a disputed breach strains Gaza’s shaky ceasefire and one careless trigger pull could light the whole map.

With CIA covert ops greenlit and Night Stalker rotors skimming the Caribbean, Washington is squeezing Maduro’s lifelines the way a dockhand cinches a hawser, while drug routes slither through the Lesser Antilles like eels in an oil slick.

Treat the cache as a warning: the files hand the PLA both hardware and the playbook for an airborne crack at Taiwan, and when instructors, BMD-4M infantry fighting vehicles, and Dalnolyot long range parachute drops begin to surface, the smoke will have turned into a line of fire.

Two hundred American troops will sit at the edge of Gaza, acting like air traffic controllers for a fragile truce, keeping aid lanes open, logging every breach in real time, and pressing partners to fix problems before the rumor mill sparks fresh shooting.

Phase One feels like slapping a tourniquet on a two year hemorrhage, buying enough breath to get the hostages out, pull the troops back, and see if anyone is ready to run Gaza without the gunsmoke.

Two years after 7 October, the Middle East feels like riding around in the desert in a Humvee with a grenade with the pin half-pulled, grinding from Gaza to the Red Sea while diplomats in Cairo try to keep the spoon down and stop hostages, rockets, and headlines from detonating at once.