Russia

Trump tightens immigration, expands drug ops, and crises unfold from Ukraine to Hong Kong. Here’s your Friday Morning Brief, November 28, 2025.

Watching a real estate developer freelance foreign policy with a Kremlin insider felt less like statecraft and more like witnessing a slow-motion warning flare for anyone who still expects competence in American diplomacy.

Ukraine is working from a rewritten American peace blueprint that trims the harshest demands from the original plan, but whether this marks the start of a real endgame or another turn in a grinding war will be decided in the fine print and on the battlefield.

Ukraine and Russia are locked in a grinding stalemate where neither can win outright, yet both refuse to accept the cost of defeat as the political ground beneath them steadily erodes.

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.

US expands strikes, Senate blocks limits, China launches new carrier. Here’s your Friday Morning Brief rundown, November 7, 2025.

In the harsh neon glow of a Kansas hotel room, a 28-year-old Guardsman inked a “covert relationship” with ghosts he thought were Russian agents, pocketed cash, snapped pics of Fort Riley, and tried to mail an American helicopter radio to Russia—only to learn later the feds were the ones writing the script.

Russia’s war in Kherson has descended into a sport of civilian hunting; a moral collapse broadcast online for the world to ignore.

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.

In a week when a rare frontline truce let crews re-string Zaporizhzhia’s lifeline and Gaza’s fragile ceasefire yielded a tenth fallen hostage, Madagascar’s colonel-turned-president took the oath while the crowds that toppled Rajoelina wait to see if power, water, and promises finally show up. It’s Saturday, October 18th, 2025. This is your evening brief.

While we served beside Ukrainians under fire, Charlie Kirk framed disengagement as “peace” and treated their struggle like a talking point.