"The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, and we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone," a Ukrainian complained to The Grayzone.

In a video sent via Facebook messenger in July, Ivan* can be seen standing next to his car, an early 2010s model Mitsubishi SUV. Smoke is pouring out of the rear window. Ivan laughs and pans his phone's camera across the length of the vehicle, pointing out bullet holes. "The turbocharger died in my car," he said, panning his phone toward the front of the vehicle. "My commander says I should pay to repair it myself. So to use my own car in the war, I need to buy a new turbocharger with my own money."

Ivan flipped the camera toward his face. "Well, you fucking motherfucker members of parliament, I hope you fuck each other. Devils. I wish you were in our place," he said.

Last month, Ukraine's parliamentarians voted to give themselves a 70% salary increase. Filings indicate the raise was enabled and encouraged by the billions of dollars and euros of aid that have poured in from the US and Europe.

"We, the Ukrainian soldiers, have nothing," said Ivan. "The things the soldiers have been given to use in the war came directly from volunteers. The aid that goes to our government will never reach us."

Ivan has been a soldier since 2014. Currently, he's stationed in the Donbas region, where he is tasked with using small, consumer-grade drones to spot Russian positions for artillery targeting. "There are so many problems on the frontline now," he said. "We don't have an internet connection, which makes our work basically impossible. We have to drive to get a connection on mobile devices. Can you imagine?"

Another soldier in Ivan's unit sent us a video of himself from a trench near the frontlines in Donbas. "According to documents, the government has built us a bunker here," he says. "But as you see, there are only a few centimeters of a wood covering over our heads, and this is supposed to protect us from tank and artillery shelling. The Russians shell us for hours at a time. We dug these trenches ourselves. We have two AK-74s between 5 soldiers here, and they jam constantly because of all the dust.

Beijing will write off all interest-free loans advanced to African countries that are due this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced on Wednesday.

China will also build hospitals and send more medical experts to Africa to aid in the coronavirus fight, Xi said in speaking at the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity Against the Covid-19 Pandemic, which was conducted by video link.

He said that under the framework of the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, "China will forgive the interest-free loans of relevant African countries due to China by the end of 2020."

Last year a "Center for Countering Disinformation," headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko, was established within Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council under the authority of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Its stated aims were to detect and counter "propaganda" and "destructive disinformation" and prevent the "manipulation of public opinion."

On July 14, 2022, it published on its website a list of politicians, academics, and activists accused of "promoting Russian propaganda," including me.

Two specific reasons were given for my inclusion on this list. The first one was that I said or wrote that "Putin has been provoked to start a war against Ukraine."

This is an easy one to dispense with: I never said or wrote or thought that. Either Polina Lysenko or one of her staff confused me with somebody else, or else they cut short a longer phrase of mine, such as "Putin's agents claim that he was provoked ..."

The other reason given is that I've supposedly proposed holding referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine as a way out of the war.

This is inaccurate: I've proposed holding plebiscites, not referendums, and not just because Russia's fake overnight vote held in Crimea in 2014 made "referendum" an infamous term, but because the term has no precise meaning — unlike "plebiscite," which is defined under the 1919 Versailles Treaty with very precise rules, starting with complete control by neutral powers and the vetting of eligible voters. This is crucial, both to exclude recent border-crossers and to include all traceable refugees. Under these rules, plebiscites were held in 1920 in Eupen-Malmédy to allow the locals to decide between annexation to Belgium or to Germany, in Schleswig to decide between Denmark and Germany, in Carinthia to decide between the new state of Austria and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and in the Allenstein and Marienwerder districts of East Prussia to decide between Germany and Poland, with further plebiscites in 1921 in Upper Silesia, followed by a December plebiscite to allow the inhabitants of Sopron to choose between Austria and Hungary.

We're witnessing the destruction of every institution in the land and nobody knows how to stop it....

The CDC seems to think nobody will notice its crimes, and the crimes of its sister agencies, FDA, NIAID, NIH, (and the White House Task Force) if it strolls jauntily into the fall season whistling a happy a tune: Nevermind Covid anymore, la la la.... Did I say crimes? Yes, I did. As in gross violations of the law and the basic social contract.

They lied about their roles in the nefarious origins of SARS CoV-2. They conjured up — already had waiting, actually — dangerous genetic treatments masquerading as "vaccines" and then they faked the safety trials to rush them into use. They denied people proper, effective treatments with inexpensive drugs and killed them with ventilators and remdesivir — solely to maintain a fraudulent emergency use authorization (EUA) that shielded "vaccine" companies from lawsuits. Once the "vaccines' were widely distributed — and forced upon many people with mandates — they confabulated and hid information about adverse reactions and deaths. They destroyed countless small businesses, livelihoods, households, and hindered children's development with lockdowns. And they used both social and news media to censor their critics in direct violation of the first amendment. That's all.

The US regards Ukrainian strikes on Crimea as fair game for "self-defense purposes," Politico reported on Thursday, citing an unnamed official in President Joe Biden's administration.

Washington won't stand in the way of attacks on the peninsula "if Kiev deems them necessary," the outlet reported. Historically Russian, Crimea was part of independent Ukraine from 1991 to 2014 before locals voted to reunify with Moscow.

"We don't select targets, of course, and everything we've provided is for self-defense purposes. Any target they choose to pursue on sovereign Ukrainian soil is by definition self defense," the anonymous official said.

Asked by Politico if the Biden administration considered the peninsula sovereign Ukrainian territory, the official said: "Crimea is Ukraine."

The political fiction that humans cause most or all climate change and the claim that the science behind this notion is 'settled', has been dealt a savage blow by the publication of a 'World Climate Declaration (WCD)' signed by over 1,100 scientists and professionals. There is no climate emergency, say the authors, who are drawn from across the world and led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever. Climate science is said to have degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science.

The scale of the opposition to modern day 'settled' climate science is remarkable, given how difficult it is in academia to raise grants for any climate research that departs from the political orthodoxy. (A full list of the signatories is available here.) Another lead author of the declaration, Professor Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative "absurd", but acknowledged that trillions of dollars and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists currently says it is not absurd.

Particular ire in the WCD is reserved for climate models. To believe in the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. Climate models are now central to today's climate discussion and the scientists see this as a problem.

Singapore's prime minister-in-waiting Lawrence Wong warned that the U.S. and China may "sleepwalk into conflict" if they don't engage with each other and de-escalate rising tensions over Taiwan.

In an interview on Monday with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, Wong said the relationship between the world's biggest economies was on a "very worrying" trajectory in the wake of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and China's subsequent military drills around the island.

Wong, now serving as deputy prime minister and finance minister, said at the Finance Ministry office overlooking the central business district.

"We are starting to see a series of decisions being taken by both countries that will lead us into more and more dangerous territory. As they say, no one deliberately wants to go into battle, but we sleepwalk into conflict. And that's the biggest problem and danger."

Berlin has plans to subjugate Eastern Europe and has designs on the lands that it lost in the past, Adam Glapinski the head of the National Bank of Poland has claimed, adding that his country stands as a bulwark against those ambitions.

Glapinski offered the grim prediction about Warsaw's current diplomatic confrontation with Berlin in an interview with Gazeta Polska, which was published on Wednesday.

Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, Berlin's strategic goal is to "regain in some form their former lands, which are now within Polish borders, and subordinate the entire belt of countries between Germany and Russia," the Polish official said.

Germany's vision for the future of Europe is "the cooperation of two empires: Russian and German, with countries in the middle falling into the spheres of influence of both powers," Glapinski added. Brexit has opened a window of opportunity for that, he believes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not wrong to blame the US for working to prolong the fighting in Ukraine, a high-profile American military expert has told Newsweek.

The respective goals of Washington and Kiev in the conflict contradict each other, claimed Sean Spoonts, a US Navy veteran and editor-in-chief of the Special Operations Forces Report (SOFREP) website.

"It seems like while Ukraine would like to end the war quickly and decisively defeat Russian forces and drive them out of their country, US policy almost seems designed to prolong the conflict hoping to bring about the collapse of Russia itself, both militarily and economically.

"That goes a lot further than [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky's goal, which is to simply get Russian armies out of his country and regain lost territories in Donbass, Lugansk and Crimea."

Ukraine's European benefactors made a big show of rushing military aid to Kiev in the early months of Russia's special military operation, but the torrent has waned to a trickle since then, with no new pledges being made in July. One military expert said Europe is running out of both equipment and willpower to support the "horribly corrupt regime."

Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, told Sputnik on Thursday that NATO's policy of giving Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons that so quickly get destroyed is "inefficient and counterproductive" from both a political and a national security point of view."

The more Europe invests its military capacity into Ukraine, the weaker Europe gets," Ritter said.