Europe falls into poverty and irrelevance — Europe Left Behind Europe is sliding into poverty. That is not just my opinion. It is also the opinion of some of the most powerful people on the continent. Recently, French President Macron warned that the continent is facing impending scarcity, calling it the “end of abundance,” and adding the Europeans needed to…

Very good article. If I were Putin, I would go for Option 3, which may actually prove effective. A recent report from UK think tank RUSI suggests that Western arsenals are beginning to run dry. I think this should factor into any calculations about how long the AFU can continue to enact tactical victories against the Russians. Taken in conjunction with Russian strikes against UKRs energy infrastructure, the Russians may be able to eak out a limited victory for this round of hostilities.

This is an excellent article, and it's something I've also covered (linked below). I think that the Russians did expect/hope for a swift Blitzkrieg but they will have also had a plan B which involved slowly strangulating Ukraine by attrictional warfare, which is now being implemented. I think the initial tactical successes enjoyed by Kyiv have lulled alot of people into a false sense of complacency regarding Russian capability and their willingness to drag the war into the winter.

Good article. Putin has an interest in extending the conflict into the winter where he can exploit Europe's energy dependence, and the globally elevated commodity prices, to force the West to the negotiating table. I covered this in the article below; https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/putins-plan-b-comes-into-view-the-long-war-to-throttle-ukraine-2059e8155c22

Russia can still win — Victory Through Permanent Instability When Russia initially launched her invasion, many assumed that it would be a quick affair. In my previous article, I shared a number of these assumptions. The first was that the Ukrainian military would not be able to effectively resist a Russian Armed Forces which have been effectively modernised over…

Very interesting persective. The fog of war in Ukraine is making it near impossible to get an accurate summary of the gains on the ground. I suspect that the conflict will settle into a stalemate, with the Russians embedded in Donbas and the Southern front. Likely, the Ukrainians will be unable to remove them and Moscow will attempt to use its control of Ukraine's ports and long range attacks against inafrastructure to slowly throttle the Kyiv government and force Zellenskyy to the table.

My view is that when you remove organised religion, you'll find any number of bizarre pseudospiritualist beliefs take its place, or it will just be replaced by another religion whose adherents are more comitted to their faith, as in Western Europe. Beyond the West, the idea of the world becoming less religious doesn't hold up. Africa, the Middle East and India are all major religious centres and are becoming a larger share of the world population.

But about the President being isolated from the world is probably true. Most of the information we have suggests that the Russian military genuinely believed that the war would be far easier for them than it has been. This is the problem with stagnant hierarchies like the Russian state, where information from the ground up gradually begins to diminish in quality and accuracy the further up it goes, until it's completely distorted by the time it reaches Putin's ears.

America’s elite think tank reveals a blueprint for US domination of Russia — “Thinking The Unthinkable” Founded in 1948, the RAND Corporation was created to bring the expertise of scientists and mathematicians into the heart of American military strategy. Over the years, it has been fundamental in the development of US nuclear policy and was the main academic force behind many of the policies adopted during…