Question: The main question worrying the whole world - will there be a nuclear war?

Sergey Lavrov: President of Russia Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that in our nuclear doctrine we envisage only response measures designed to prevent the destruction of the Russian Federation by direct nuclear strikes or strikes by other weapons that threaten the very existence of the Russian state. This is an exhaustive answer.

I hope those who constantly speculate on the topic of a nuclear war and Russia's "provocations" with WMD are aware of their responsibility.

Question: There is a lot of speculation, indeed. The Americans keep making their calculations - who will die first, who will die second, how many people will perish in the first and second days and in a month. Do we make similar calculations? Will anyone survive? Do we proceed from the assumption that it can be stopped? It feels like everything has already happened and there remains only one thing to do - press the button. We have seen everything else.

Sergey Lavrov: I would advise the Americans and their satellites, as well as our analysts and political scientists involved in such "exercises" to display maximum responsibility in their public statements.

"We are not threatening anyone.... We have made it clear that any further NATO movement to the east is unacceptable. There's nothing unclear about this. We aren't deploying our missiles to the border of the United States, but the United States IS deploying their missiles to the porch of our house. Are we asking too much? We're just asking that they not deploy their attack-systems to our home.... What is so hard to understand about that?" Russian President Vladimir Putin, YouTube, Start at :48 seconds

Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do?

The secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea's Kerch Bridge is revealed in internal documents and correspondence obtained exclusively by The Grayzone.
The Grayzone has obtained an April 2022 presentation drawn up for senior British intelligence officers hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea's Kerch Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers. Almost six months after the plan was circulated, Kerch Bridge was attacked in an October 8th suicide bombing apparently overseen by Ukraine's SBU intelligence services.

Detailed proposals for providing "audacious" support to Kiev's "maritime raiding operations" were drafted at the request of Chris Donnelly, a senior British Army intelligence operative and veteran high ranking NATO advisor. The wide-ranging plan's core component was "destruction of the bridge over the Kerch Strait."

Documents and correspondence plotting the operation were provided to The Grayzone by an anonymous source.

The truck bombing of the Kerch Bridge differed operationally from the plot sketched therein. Yet, Britain's evident interest in planning such an attack underscores the deep involvement of NATO powers in the Ukraine proxy war. At almost precisely the time that London reportedly sabotaged peace talks between Kiev and Moscow in April this year, British military intelligence operatives were drawing up blueprints to destroy a major Russian bridge crossed by thousands of civilians per day.

The roadmap was produced by Hugh Ward, a British military veteran. A number of strategies for helping Ukraine "pose a threat to Russian naval forces" in the Black Sea are outlined. The overriding objectives are stated as aiming to "degrade" Russia's ability to blockade Kiev, "erode" Moscow's "warfighting capability", and isolate Russian land and maritime forces in Crimea by "denying resupply by sea and overland via Kerch bridge."

Read the complete blueprint: Support for Maritime Raiding Operations - Proposal (PDF)

The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, The Labour Files, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of 'democracy' in the UK.

Based on the largest leak in British political history, Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit has exposed how Labour party officials smeared and intimidated rivals on the left of the party. The leaked data comprises 500 gigabytes of documents, emails, video and audio files from the Labour Party, dating from 1998 to 2021. They reveal:

• The weaponisation of antisemitism by the right-wing of the Labour Party to hinder Jeremy Corbyn's chances of becoming Prime Minister.
• A 'hierarchy of racism' within the Labour Party disciplinary process which prioritises the investigation of alleged antisemitism cases over other forms of racism.
• Shocking examples of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism within Labour.
• The crushing of dissent within Labour under Sir Keir Starmer's leadership

The western narrative of a 'losing Russia' has just been decimated by Moscow's blitzkrieg against Ukraine and its foreign-backed terror operations

The terror attack on Krymskiy Most - the Crimea Bridge - was the proverbial straw that broke the Eurasian camel's back.

Russian President Vladimir Putin neatly summarized it:

"This is a terrorist attack aimed at destroying the critical civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation."

The head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, confirmed face-to-face with Putin that Terror on the Bridge was carried out by the SBU - Ukrainian special services.

This article was originally published by Moss Robeson's Ukes, Kooks and Spooks blog and lightly edited by The Grayzone. Read part one of Robeson's series on Azov's US tour here.

This September, a delegation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network's "depoliticization" had reached a fever pitch. By this time, the New York Times had ceased referring to Azov as "openly neo-Nazi," and was referring to the ultra-nationalist organization as "celebrated."

Since news broke of Azov's US tour, more information has come to light about the ultra-nationalist organization's outreach in the country, including efforts by Azov to reverse Congress' ban on supplying it with arms and training.

The Azov delegation included three veterans of the regiment formerly holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. They were led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the only fighter not taken prisoner by the Russians.

It is impossible to track the geoeconomic turbulence inherent to the "birth pangs" of the multipolar world without the insights of Professor Michael Hudson at the University of Missouri, and author of the already seminal The Destiny of Civilization.

In his latest essay, Professor Hudson digs deeper into Germany's suicidal economic/financial policies; their effect on the already falling euro - and hints at some possibilities for fast integrating Eurasia and the Global South as a whole to try to break the Hegemon's stranglehold.

That led to a series of email exchanges, especially about the future role of the yuan, where Hudson remarked:

"The Chinese whom I've talked to for years and years did not expect the dollar to weaken. They're not crying about its rise, but they are concerned about flight capital from China as I think after the Party Congress [starting on October 16] there will be a crackdown on the Shanghai free-market advocacy. Pressure for the coming changes has been long building up. The spirit of reform to rein in 'free markets' was spreading among students over a decade ago, and they have been rising in the Party hierarchy."

One of the things I've been thinking about for a long time is just how easily we assume some things are so, when in fact it's only that we have a well entrenched faith that such things are so. This can be both positive and negative. For me, being the science type of guy, Darwinian evolution has been the biggest of these assumptions on the negative side. It's a theory, but for the most part people assume it as fact, and that stance is not benign. In fact it has had the most incredible impact on our view of life.

That faith, in evolution as a fact, is so strong that I'm sure many have already left this page and are searching for the unsubscribe option for this Substack. The same sort of reaction someone believing the mRNA 'vaccine' is safe and effective would have to an 'anti-vaxer'. "What the hell is Winston on about now! He's lost the plot and deluded!" The concept is so deeply embedded into our psyche that to oppose it can elicit a visceral retort or religiously zealous combativeness.

Vector politics in Ukraine has added new dimensions to the 222 day-old conflict.

Typically, any conflict behavior should end when a new balance of powers has been determined. But the 'balancing of powers' will not end until a balance is actually achieved - and evidence abounds that Ukraine is about to enter yet another 're-balancing.'

Russian Duma's ratification of the annexation of four regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions), and the adoption of the relevant laws thereof, creates a new dynamic and will take some time to create a new balance of forces on the ground within Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin's speech from the Kremlin last Friday, delivered to the nation and the world as four regions of Ukraine were reintegrated into Russia, was another stunner, in line with numerous others he's made this year, demonstrating a fundamental turn in the Russian president's thinking over the past eight months.

The implications of this new perspective warrant careful consideration. Putin has taken to looking forward and seeing something new, and in this he is hardly alone.

"The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation," Putin said while standing beside the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Phrases such as this bear the weight of history. By way of magnitude, presidential speeches do not get any larger. Here is how the Russian leader expanded on the thought:

"New centers of power are emerging. They represent the majority — the majority! — of the international community. They are ready not only to declare their interests but also to protect them. They see in multipolarity an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means gaining genuine freedom, historical prospects, and the right to their own independent, creative, and distinctive forms of development, to a harmonious process."