A new Ukrainian government statement has made clear the country will reject any alternative to NATO membership if it is proposed as part of a peace plan with Moscow.

Reports of President-elect Trump’s peace plan say it hinges on security guarantees while indefinitely postponing Ukraine joining NATO (for at least 20 years). This is precisely what the Zelensky government is now very vocally pushing back against.

A Tuesday statement from the Foreign Ministry asserts, “Having the bitter experience of the Budapest Memorandum behind us, we will not settle for any alternatives, surrogates, or substitutes for Ukraine’s full membership in NATO.”

The statement continued by calling upon “the U.S. and Great Britain, which signed the Budapest Memorandum,… France and China, which joined it and all the states participating in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” to immediately back Ukraine’s efforts to joint NATO. 

It further suggested that anything less is to fall in line with Russia’s ‘blackmail’. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 saw Ukraine give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons arsenal, and in return Moscow provided security guarantees and recognized borders.

The hard-hitting Ukrainian government statement further stressed, “We are convinced that the only real security guarantee for Ukraine, as well as a deterrent factor for further Russian aggression against Ukraine and other states, is only Ukraine’s full membership in NATO.”

Ukraine has representation at a Tuesday through Wednesday meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels. Zelensky has been pushing allies hard to not back down on allowing full NATO membership. He’s even tried to argue that the alliance’s Article 5 self-defense pact doesn’t necessary have to apply to parts of Ukraine occupied by the Russians.

But NATO leaders appear cold to the idea, given the risk of nuclear-armed confrontation with Russia, and given Ukraine’s military is clearly losing the war in the east. NATO chief Rutte has also rejected Zelensky’s plea:

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Tuesday sidestepped questions about Ukraine’s possible membership in the military alliance, saying that the priority now must be to strengthen the country’s hand in any future peace talks with Russia by sending it more weapons.

Rutte’s remarks, ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, came days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that extending alliance membership to territory now under Kyiv’s control could end “the hot stage” of the almost 3-year war in Ukraine, where Russian forces are pressing deeper into their western neighbor.

“The front is not moving eastwards. It is slowly moving westwards,” Rutte said. “So we have to make sure that Ukraine gets into a position of strength, and then it should be for the Ukrainian government to decide on the next steps, in terms of opening peace talks and how to conduct them.”

Kiev is also urgently pushing for more anti-air defense weapons systems from partners. This after Russia has stepped up attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure.

“We are talking about an emergency delivery of at least 20 additional Hawk, NASAMS or IRIS-T systems,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga said Tuesday in Brussels, as quoted by RBK Ukraine. “This will help us avoid blackouts. We understand that the Russians are trying to undercut our generation capacity.”

Russia’s military has announced Tuesday that it conducted major naval and air force drills in the eastern Mediterranean, off Syria’s coast, in the wake of Aleppo falling to Al-Qaeda linked jihadist insurgents, and at a moment the central Syrian city of Hama is coming under threat.

Russia confirmed that it has “increased” its troop numbers stationed in the region as a result of the exercises. “Russia’s army said Tuesday it had fired hypersonic missiles during naval and Air Force drills in the eastern Mediterranean that come as its ally Syria loses ground to Islamist rebels,” AFP writes.

Presumably Russia’s naval base off the Syrian city of Tartus played a role as a center of operations for the drills, at a moment Russian warplanes are actively assisting Syrian jets in striking the positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

“On 3 December, during an exercise to test the combined activities of Russian Navy and Air Force troop groups, precision sea-based missiles were launched in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea,” Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed in a Telegram post.

The ministry listed that this included the test-firing of hypersonic Zirkon missiles and a Kalibr cruise missile – and additionally an Onyx cruise missile was launched “from a designated area on the Mediterranean coast.”

“In the course of preparing for the exercise, the Russian Armed Forces’ troops grouping in the eastern Mediterranean was increased,” the ministry added, detailing that it included over 1,000 personnel manning ten naval vessels and two dozen aircraft.

Footage of one of the Tuesday missile launches in the eastern Mediterranean: 

‼️🇷🇺 Russia issues a warning: steer clear of its naval base in Tartus, Syria:

MoD, Russia: The Navy fired hypersonic missiles during exercises in the Mediterranean Sea: frigates “Admiral Gorshkov” and “Admiral Golovko” fired “Zircons.”

“Russian ships conducted exercises in… pic.twitter.com/tIdrROFre3

— ⏳Towhee 🌏☮️ (@amborin) December 3, 2024

Despite the significant muscle-flexing off Syria’s coast, Russia has for years steered clear of directly engaging Israeli fighter jets as they repeatedly bomb Syria, especially targets in and near the capital.

These exercises seem a warning primarily aimed at the United States and its proxies on the ground in Syria. The Pentagon has been sending its own warplanes airborne over regions it occupies in Syria’s east. Moscow also is trying to signal that even though it’s busy fighting in Ukraine, it can still demonstrate a strong force posture in other war theatres as well, specifically the Middle East.

Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

Ukrainian soldiers refusing to report for duty or walking away from their front-line positions are becoming an increasing problem for Kiev. One Ukrainian lawmaker said that there have been as many as 200,000 desertions. 

Ukrainian officials and soldiers told the AP that “Facing every imaginable shortage, tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops, tired and bereft, have walked away from combat and front-line positions to slide into anonymity.”

The report adds, “Entire units have abandoned their posts, leaving defensive lines vulnerable and accelerating territorial losses, according to military commanders and soldiers.”

“Some take medical leave and never return, haunted by the traumas of war and demoralized by bleak prospects for victory,” writes The Associated Press. 

“Others clash with commanders and refuse to carry out orders, sometimes in the middle of firefights.”

Soldiers failing to report to their posts are a rapidly worsening problem for Kiev. In 2022, only 9,000 Ukrainians were prosecuted for desertion.

That number increased to 24,000 in 2023. Ukrainian government data showed prosecutions skyrocketed to 50,000 during the first nine months of 2024. 

The prosecutions do not capture the whole picture as one Ukrainian lawmaker told AP the number “could be as high as 200,000.”

The growing problem is likely a result of war fatigue.

“It is clear that now, frankly speaking, we have already squeezed the maximum out of our people,” said one military officer. 

Between casualties and desertions, Kiev is facing a massive manpower shortage. The AP noted Kiev lost a net 4,000 soldiers along the front lines in September. The White House is pushing Ukraine to lower its consumption age to 18 to help fill shortages.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

With Oreshnik now entering the picture, everywhere the Hegemon will try to harass China they will also have to face Russia…

When it comes to state of the art Russian weaponry, what the inestimable Ray McGovern defines as the MICIMATT – the whole Hegemonic complex – seems to dwell in perpetual stupor.

They had no clue about Kalibr, Sarmat, Khinzal, Zircon or Avangard before they were introduced. They had no clue about Oreshnik (‘Hazel”) before the 30-minute protocolar warning by the Russians, stating a missile test was coming, and it was not nuclear. The Americans assumed that would be just another ballistic missile test, as they happen routinely close to the Arctic.

Even President Putin didn’t know Oreshnik was ready for its close-up until the last minute. And Kremlin spokesman Peskov confirmed that only an ultra-rarefied circle knew Oreshnik even existed.

In a nutshell: the MICIMATT only sees what Russia shows off – and when it happens. Call it a leak-proof vow of secrecy permeating the Russian military complex – which, by the way, is a massive state, nationalized company, with a few private components.

And that offers the Russian government, in practice, better engineering, better physics, better mathematics and better practical, final results than anything across the self-important collective West.

Oreshnik – a kinetic weapons system – is a certified game-changer when it comes to military technology and warfare in more ways than one: actually several. Simple physics tells us that by combining enough kinetic force and mass, utter devastation is guaranteed, comparable to a low-to-medium yield nuclear weapon. With the added benefit of no radiation.

Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), under development by Russia (along with other systems) even before Trump 1.0 pulled the U.S. out of the INF treaty in 2019.

A few concise analyses have pointed out how Oreshnik can be fitted into intercontinental (italics mine) non-nuclear missiles. The Russians are being very diplomatic, not stressing that if Oreshnik is launched from the Russian Far East, it can easily reach most latitudes across the USA.

Moreover, applying Oreshnik tech to tactical missiles – Putin late last week said this is already happening – also changes the whole tactical domain.

The new game in town is Russia being capable of unleashing ultra-high-velocity kinetic weapons literally anywhere around the world – after warning civilians to abandon the area around the targets. And there’s absolutely no defense against it, anywhere.

Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide

It’s quite predictable that the woke, arrogant/ignorant MICIMATT, as well as NATO and the whole, brainwashed collective West simply have no idea what just hit them, seemingly out of the blue.

To be concise: a system with the destructive power of a tactical nuclear weapon but carrying the precision of a top sniper’s bullet.

Ergo, sitting duck billion-dollar aircraft carriers; the whole, 800-plus Empire of Bases; assorted underground bunkers; ICBM launch platforms; naval shipyards; not to mention NATO’s HQ in Brussels, the Aegis Ashore base in Redzikowo (Poland), the NATO joint force center in the Netherlands, southern NATO command in Naples – all these immensely expensive assets are fair game for non-nuclear Oreshniks capable of reducing them to dust in a flash after flying for mere minutes at over Mach 10.

By now multitudes around the world are aware that Oreshnik may reach Berlin in 11 minutes and London in 19 minutes. Also that launched from southern Russia, Oreshnik may reach the U.S. air base in Qatar in 13 minutes; launched from Kamchatka in the Far East, it may reach Guam in 22 minutes; and launched from Chukotka, it may reach Minuteman III silos in Montana in 23 minutes.

To quote the epic 1960s Motown hit: “Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”

Graphic proof that the MICIMATT and NATO have absolutely no clue what hit them – and will hit them again – is the escalation dementia in effect even after Oreshnik’s warheads reduced a missile factory in Dnipropetrovsk to smithereens. And even after Moscow made it quite clear that they don’t need nuclear weapons to hit anything they want anywhere on Earth.

The MICIMATT plus NATO, in tandem, fired ATACMS twice against Kursk; released a P.R. trial balloon related to the suicidal possibility of sending nuclear weapons to Kiev; NATO warned businesses to enter a “wartime scenario”; NATO’s armchair admiral Rob Bauer, a Dutch non-entity, advocated pre-emptive bombings of Russia; Le Petit Roi in France and the ghastly British PM re-started the gambit of “troop deployments” to Ukraine (Starmer later backed off); and last but not least, the Liver Sausage government in Germany started to draw plans to use metro stations as air raid shelters.

All this escalation paranoia sounds like a bunch of screaming kids playing in their dirty sandbox. Because for all practical purposes it is Russia which is now ruling the escalation game.

Breaking up Russia-China is hard to do

And that brings us to Trump 2.0.

The Deep State has already targeted Trump with a vicious war – a de facto pre-emptive counter-insurgency, even before he attempts to do anything practical regarding NATO’s collapsing Project Ukraine.

His ideal off-ramp might be an Afghanistan-style exit, leaving all the burdens ahead to a basket of NATO chihuahuas. Still, that’s not gonna happen.

Andrey Sushentsov is a program director of the Valdai Club and dean of MGIMO’s school of International Relations. He’s one of Russia’s top analysts. Sushentsov released this pearl to TASS, among other things:

“Trump is considering ending the Ukrainian crisis, not out of any sympathy for Russia, but because he acknowledges that Ukraine has no realistic chance of winning. His goal is to preserve Ukraine as a tool for U.S. interests, focusing on freezing the conflict rather than resolving it. Consequently, under Trump, the long-term strategy of countering Russia will persist. The U.S. continues to benefit from the Ukrainian crisis, regardless of which administration is in power.”

Sushentsov fully recognizes how “the U.S. state system is an inertial structure that resists decisions it deems contrary to American interests, so not all of Trump’s ideas will come to fruition.”

That’s just one graphic illustration, among many, that Moscow harbors no illusions whatsoever about Trump 2.0. Putin’s conditions for an attempt to solve the Ukraine riddle have been known at least since June: total Kiev withdrawal from Donbass and Novorossiya; no Ukraine in NATO; end of all 15,000+ Western sanctions; and a non-aligned, nuclear-free Ukraine.

That’s it. Everything non-negotiable; otherwise the war will continue on the battlefields, the way Russia sees fit, until Ukraine’s total surrender.

Evidently the Five Eyes – actually only 2 (U.S.-UK) – plus minion France, side by side with the most powerful silos inside the Deep State will continue to force Trump to double down on Project Ukraine, which is an essential part of the Forever Wars ethos.

The best he might be able to do is to divert attention from Project Ukraine by accommodating the Old Testament psychopathological genocidals in Tel Aviv, plus the Zio-con armada in D.C., in their obsession of forcing Washington to fight their war on Iran. Talk about a slight change of focus of the Forever Wars.

Tehran not only exports most of its energy to China but is an absolutely essential node of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) as well as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); that is, north-south and east-west crisscrossing Eurasia.

That would be the real war of choice – simultaneously against three BRICS (Russia, China, Iran). After all the American ruling class is already invested on a do-or-die Hybrid War against BRICS.

Still, the Trump 2.0/China face-off will be the fulcrum of the Hegemon’s foreign policy starting January 20. Virtually all of Trump’s appointments – as misguided as they may be – believe it is possible to break apart the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership and prevent China from buying energy from Iran.

There will be attempts to disrupt shipping lanes and supply lines – from the Maritime Silk Roads in the Indian Ocean rimland to the Northern Sea Route by the Arctic, including possible false flags along the INSTC.

But with Oreshnik now entering the picture, everywhere the Hegemon will try to harass China they will also have to face Russia. So the temptation to end Project Ukraine and NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s western borders will always be there in the back of Trump’s mind, part of a “seduce Russia to undermine China” syndrome.

The problem for the Hegemon is that the interlocking BRICS/SCO-wide Russia-China-Iran strategic partnerships do have other – kinetic – ideas.

There was a lot of chatter on Monday morning about defunct Enron rising from the ashes after an X account named “Enron” posted, “We’re back. Can we talk?”

We’re back. Can we talk? pic.twitter.com/9kt4g0Q84Z

— Enron (@Enron) December 2, 2024

On its website, “Enron.com,” the company, supposedly operating as “Enron Corporation,” published what could be described as one of the laziest press releases imaginable, with formatting that resembles something generated by ChatGPT… 

Buried in the “Terms of Use and Conditions of Sale” section of the website, Enron states: “THE INFORMATION ON THE WEBSITE IS FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTED PARODY, REPRESENTS PERFORMANCE ART, AND IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.”

Public records forensic analysis via the platform Sayari shows “Enron Corporation” has been “Inactive” for years. In other words, the website has nothing to do with defunct Enron.

“No @Enron is not back… Original IP is DEAD and some clever people registered it earlier this year… Caveat emptor,” one X user said. 

No @Enron is not back… Original IP is DEAD and some clever people registered it earlier this year… Caveat emptor pic.twitter.com/D7Qu9dvrBh

— Mike Periu (@mikeperiu) December 2, 2024

Exactly. 

The domain has expired and someone just grabbed it to launch the scam pic.twitter.com/KQwjZEK2Rt

— Ekim Kaya (@ekimnazimkaya) December 2, 2024

And trademarks?

Enron – saw a gaggle of trademarks filed on this one recently. Before you get excited, pretty obvious that someone bought/licensed the brand and is about to start selling lame t-shirts and crypto tokens https://t.co/tuSPCGDrxM pic.twitter.com/Smzy9P70FK

— Odd Diligence (@OddDiligence) December 2, 2024

Take a look at the alleged Enron team. Whoever built the website just used iStock models with a focus on diversity.

Not believable. 

Pictured: models https://t.co/kWH5g1MuGT pic.twitter.com/VgMfiaFFc1

— laurence (@functi0nZer0) December 2, 2024

More LoL from the website. 

Love this. 10/10 grift content. It’s got everything. Sand ballet. Old guy eyeballs stapled to an Apple Vision Pro. Farm man. Black guy boxing. Even AI couldn’t fart out something this generic. Top class, boys. https://t.co/GumEUev4Jb pic.twitter.com/lKJ253Jb3E

— Dan Toomey (@dhtoomey) December 2, 2024

Selling merchandise is the goal? 

Enron is selling $118 hoodies

Are we cooked? pic.twitter.com/7CwagVrm4e

— Jeremy (@jeremywaitforit) December 2, 2024

Possibly, but this might be tied to a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.

Not sure if this coin is related.

Funny this Enron coin started trading 30 hours ago https://t.co/X4O32cKSWN pic.twitter.com/4tnyeImalj

— TheLastBearStanding (@LastBearStandng) December 2, 2024

Caveat emptor.