In the words of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Europe is undergoing one of the greatest struggles in the name of freedom since the American Revolution.

"The Ukrainians are fighting for their country; they're fighting for their future; they're fighting for their freedom. I am convinced and confident that, at the end of the day, Ukraine's independence, Ukraine's sovereignty will prevail and will be there long after Vladimir Putin has left the scene."

What was left unsaid was the reality that Russian President Vladimir Putin has survived four US presidential administrations and is well on his way to outlasting a fifth — the Biden administration that Blinken serves.

Blinken's comments come on the heels of continued calls from Ukraine's embattled President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for additional deliveries of heavy weapons needed for his country's ongoing fight against invading Russian forces.

While acknowledging that Ukrainian forces were suffering "painful losses" on the front lines, Zelensky believes that Ukrainian forces would be able to hold on to the contested Donbas region, and eventually launch a counterattack that would throw Russian troops from the totality of sovereign Ukrainian territory — including both Crimea and the Donbas.

It's time for an update on the latest 'current thing' in Ukraine - traveling to the war torn country as a foreign national looking to take up arms and exact revenge on Putin and the Russian regime.

We're now learning more about the actual scale (and fail) of the foreign mercenary effort in Ukraine and the countries of origin, as we detail later in this report.

How many of these now 'soldiers of misfortune' really knew what they were getting into, and how many of them were simply duped by their political leaders and the corporate media into making the perilous and unfruitful journey?

Two recently captured Americans have since openly admitted to Serbian media that they succumbed to the Western media propaganda blitz about the war in Ukraine.

U.S. military veterans and fellow Alabama residents Robert Drueke and Andy Huynh are now presumed prisoners of war - held in captivity by Russian forces. They were reported captured on the battlefield near Kharkov earlier this week.

Watch this revealing interview as both men tell Serbian journalist Miodrag Zarković how they now lament making the trip to Ukraine:

Russian leader has buried the old world order and outlined his view on Russia's and the world's future, in a key address

New centers of power have emerged, the unipolar world order isn't coming back, and the "colonial" way of thinking has failed, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday, in what the Kremlin described as an "extremely important" speech.

The old world order is gone with the wind

When the US declared victory in the Cold War, Americans designated themselves the "messengers of God on earth," with interests that should be considered sacred and no obligations, Putin told the audience at SPIEF. New centers of power have since emerged, and have the right to protect their own systems, economic models and sovereignty.

These "truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, the global economy, in the technological sphere, in the entire system of international relations," are "fundamental, pivotal and inexorable. And It is a mistake to suggest that one can wait out the times of turbulent change and that things will return to normal; that everything will be as it was. It will not."

The new head of the British Army has issued a rallying cry to troops - telling them they need to be ready to face Russia on the battlefield.

Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, who started the job last week, addressed all ranks and civil servants in an internal message on 16 June, seen by the BBC.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine shows the need "to protect the UK and be ready to fight and win wars on land", he says.

He adds the Army and allies must now be "capable of...defeating Russia".

There are wars and rumors of wars, and then there are shortages and rumors of shortages...

This week on NewsReal, Joe & Niall analyze current events in Clown World, the late-stage degeneration of Pax Americana, covering the latest in the US' proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the spectacular backfiring of sanctions against Western economies, and the increasingly unhinged words and deeds of Our Dear Leaders.

Crazy as things are, they remain relatively calm... for now. Just how bad will things get, and how soon? Tune in for a sane discussion about this insane world!


Running Time: 01:45:08

Download: MP3 — 72.2 MB

Update(11:00am ET) Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed in further remarks given before the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that anti-Russian sanctions have only come back to hurt the people of the EU and the West broadly, amid soaring gas and food prices, inflation fears, and severe supply chain shortages. He declared the end of the unipolar world as we know it, saying, "Over the past decades, new powerful centers have been formed on the planet [...] each of them develops their own political system and public institutions, implements their own models of economic growth, and, of course, has the right to protect themselves, to ensure national sovereignty. We are talking about real processes, about truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, global economy, the technological sphere, in the entire system of international relations". And more, according to a state-backed media translation:

The Russian president criticized the European Union over the decision to impose anti-Russia sanctions, calling it "crazy" and "not well thought out". Putin said that their goal was to crush the Russian economy in one go, but that they have failed to achieve this.

Instead, EU politicians delivered a serious blow to their own economies, prompting high inflation, the president stressed. He estimated the costs of the "sanctions fever" to be around $400 billion this year alone and noted that the measures will become a burden on regular people's shoulders.

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
— Ayn Rand

What we do not need is yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the Fourth Amendment at will under the guise of public health and safety.

Indeed, at a time when red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn't take much for police to be given the green light to enter a home without a warrant in order to seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.

Frankly, a person wouldn't even need to own a gun to be subjected to such a home invasion.

SWAT teams have crashed through doors on lesser pretexts based on false information, mistaken identities and wrong addresses.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws allowing the police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. If Congress succeeds in passing the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order, which would nationalize red flag laws, that number will grow.

At a recent event in St Petersburg, Putin compared himself to Tsar Peter the Great, saying:

"Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia's] ... When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised the territory as Russian. They all recognised it as Swedish territory. The Slavs together with the Finno-Ugric people had always lived there. Moreover this territory had been under the control of the Russian state ... Why did he go there? He went there to take it back and strengthen it, that's what he was doing. Well, it seems it has also fallen to us to take back and strengthen."

This has led various commentators to claim: "See, we told you Putin's invasion had nothing to do with NATO or the West. Now even he admits it's just an imperial land grab!" As someone who has claimed that NATO and the West are partly to blame for the war in Ukraine, do I now have to admit that I was wrong? No. And I'll explain why.

Understanding that prolonged fighting will only hurt them, it seems the top EU states want to sway Ukraine to peace.

When the leaders of the three leading EU countries - Germany, France, and Italy - took a train to Kiev to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, this week, the public show was one of solidarity and support. But there could be much more to the visit than meets the eye.

The politicians, who were also joined in Ukraine by Romania's president, represent the bloc's economic engine, which right now is stalling under the its own anti-Russia sanctions. Themselves a knee-jerk ideological response to the conflict in Ukraine.

Now, it's their own political interests back home that are now increasingly in peril as this conflict drags on and drives up the cost of daily living for the average EU citizen through record high gas prices and inflation. And the situation just seems to be getting worse as the unforeseen consequences pile up.

Since early May, when Xi Jinping said during a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) that China must "persist" in its "dynamic zero" (动态清零) policy toward the containment of Covid-19, the message has remained clear - stream-rolling over criticism of the painful impact the approach has had on the lives of individuals, families, residential compounds and entire cities.

"Dynamic zero" is here to stay. State media have argued consistently that the policy not only cuts viral transmission in the shortest time possible domestically, but also that it has "brought tangible benefits to the whole world." This despite the fact that lockdowns have persisted in waves in cities like Shanghai, with a broad and undeniable impact on local businesses and government finances that will have a ripple effect globally.

This week, as state media pundits stretched for justifications of a policy that has continued to draw domestic and international criticism, one commentator called up a rhetorical ghost from China's Maoist past: "policy of greater benevolence" (大仁政).

What does this phrase mean?