A large-scale embezzlement scheme has been revealed amid Kiev's struggle to secure more aid in its conflict with Russia.

Republicans in the US Congress have slammed Ukraine after the country's Security Service (SBU) uncovered an embezzlement scheme in which top officials are implicated. This comes as Kiev attempts to secure more funding from its supporters for its conflict with Russia despite growing reluctance in the West.

The SBU announced on Saturday a major embezzlement scheme involved high-ranking Defense Ministry officials and a private arms manufacturer. Five suspects attempted to steal 1.5 billion hryvnia (around $39.6 million) in state funds intended for mortar shells for Ukrainian troops, according to the security service.

The announcement comes as Republicans in the US Congress push back against President Joe Biden's efforts to send a further $60 billion aid package to Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the American Conservative (TAC) magazine published an article in which several congresspeople were asked to comment on the matter.

The agency has stepped up recruitment to counter Russia and China, William Burns wrote in an op-ed...

The director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has admitted that his country no longer enjoys undisputed superiority in global politics.

In an op-ed published by Foreign Affairs magazine on Tuesday, William Burns acknowledged that China's rising military and economic strength, Russia's willingness to use military force in Ukraine, and a growing number of regional powers pursuing independent foreign policies have all led to "a world of intense strategic competition in which the United States no longer enjoys uncontested primacy."

With American power facing more challenges than at any point since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has increased its recruitment efforts in Russia and opened a new "mission center" focused exclusively on China, Burns revealed.

Much of the article makes a case for continued military aid to Ukraine, arguing - as other Washington officials have - that cutting Kiev off from Western weapons would send a message of "American fecklessness" to China, thus encouraging President Xi Jinping to attack Taiwan.

The tech billionaire's apologetic tour after an offensive tweet is a massive moral failure...

The world's richest man has visited one of the world's darkest places. Elon Musk has gone to Auschwitz - to be precise, to the museum that preserves the memory of the Nazi camp in that location.

A whole complex of camps - which combined mass murder with brutal slave-labor - Auschwitz played a key role in the Holocaust, the genocide of Jews committed by Germany (with some help from others) between 1933 and 1945.

The background of Musk's visit is simple: Last year, the tech billionaire got himself into serious - and well-deserved - trouble by retweeting and endorsing an anti-Semitic tweet on X, the powerful social media platform (formerly known as Twitter) that he took over in 2022. Since then, he has been on what the New York Times gloatingly calls his "rehabilitation" (as in criminal) and "penitence" (as in sinner) tour.

He has called his own nasty tweet "literally the worst and dumbest post I've ever done." He has gone to Israel and de facto helped its government in its propaganda effort to "justify" its ongoing genocidal attack on the Palestinians. And now he has visited Auschwitz in an attempt to signal that he understands the gravity of anti-Semitism and what it led to, namely, a genocide.

Contradictory? Indeed. We will get back to that.

The World Economic Forum gives us the exceptional privilege of a study that only living fossils can give. Representative of an era that we can assume is in the process of being overcome, if not materially, at least in terms of the trend observed, in Davos we find everything that is paramount of neoliberal and Western supremacist ideology, its potential, its limitations and the very causes of its destruction. Like a living fossil, in every word, every expression, theme or conclusion, we find the fundamental reasons why the species did not and could not win.

Davos tells us, above all, about a problem of adapting to the real world. At every moment, the World Economic Forum revealed the full extent of resentment, bitterness and disillusionment towards a world that has revealed, and insists on revealing, ever more stubbornly, that it does not accept the premises that would make neoliberalism a lasting and universal hegemonic system.

In this sense, the Davos Forum is a moral lesson. A moral lesson from the West to the global majority, in a kind of recriminatory cry, for the latter in not accepting the solutions that it had so "wisely and rationally" to convey; but also, a moral lesson from the global majority to the West, which took advantage of every opportunity, in every scarce moment of attention given, to convey the reasons why the proposed contract would never be acceptable.

Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun has told his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoigu, that strategic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is a pillar of maintaining peace around the globe, in his first public appearance since his appointment at the end of last year.

As two great powers, Russia and China should deepen their cooperation and decisively respond to global challenges, the defense chiefs said during a video call on Wednesday.

"We have supported you on the Ukrainian issue despite the fact that the US and the EU continue to put pressure on the Chinese side," Dong stated, promising that Beijing "will not change or abandon our established policy course over this," even under the threat of more sanctions.

A new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order, out in mid-February, asks the make-or-break question of the young 21st century: will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go Captain Ahab on Moby Dick and drag us all to the depths of a - nuclear - abyss?

An extra touch of poetic beauty is that the analysis is conducted by a Scandinavian. Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeast Norway (USN) and an associate editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. He had a stint at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, working closely with the inimitable Sergey Karaganov.

It goes without saying that European MSM won't touch him; rabid yells - "Putinista!" - prevail, including in Norway, where he's been a prime target of cancel culture.

That's irrelevant, anyway. What matters is that Diesen, an affable, unfailingly polite man and an ultra-sharp scholar, is aligned with the rarified cream of the crop who is asking the questions that really matter; among them, whether we are heading towards a Eurasian-Westphalian world order.

Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that devastatingly debunks, with proven facts, the official NATOstan narrative, Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here.

He starts to make the case harking back to the Silk Roads: "The Silk Road was an early model of globalization, although it did not result in a common world order as the civilizations of the world were primarily connected to nomadic intermediaries."

The demise of the Heartland-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the rise of the thalassocratic European powers reconnecting the world in a different way. Yet the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia.

We did not in fact had "five centuries of western dominance", according to Diesen: it was more like three, or even two (see, for instance, the work of Andre Gunder Frank). In a historical Long View that barely registers.

What is indeed The Big Picture now is that "the unique world order" produced by controlling "the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end".

A White House aide has admitted that his colleagues are worried about US President Joe Biden's deteriorating cognitive skills and the unpopularity of his vice president, Kamala Harris, but they can't publicly voice those concerns as the president seeks reelection later this year.

Speaking in a hidden-camera interview posted online by undercover journalist James O'Keefe on Wednesday, White House cybersecurity analyst Charlie Kraiger acknowledged that the 81-year-old Biden is "slowing down." He also said that there had been discussions about removing Harris from the 2024 ticket, given her struggles as vice president, but the Democratic Party's nominees are set in stone.

"I think they need to get rid of him or get rid of her, but I don't think they're gonna do that," Kraiger told O'Keefe, who disguised himself for the conversation by dyeing his hair and wearing fake glasses. Asked if White House staffers could speak publicly and truthfully regarding the fitness of Biden and Harris to seek another term, he added, "No, no, they've got to toe the line."

Ukraine is a convenient, rather cheap tool for the US to weaken and contain Russia, and to force its European allies to keep their discipline and obey. This is all part of an international struggle for a new form of hierarchy.

Of course, it's just a temporary phenomenon until a new balance of power, recognized by all, is established. Until this point is reached, we will see foreign policy experiments by various countries. The position of small and medium-sized states is increasingly attracting the attention of the great powers, which are negotiating the formation of a new balance. We are at a point where a small state can demand much more than it would get in a system of rigid hierarchy.

In the struggle to increase its status in the world hierarchy, Russia feels like it's well prepared to defend its national interests and restore justice. It is through such a stress test, like the one we see now, that the realism of assessments, national qualities, and the strength of resources and strategy are put to the test.

In essence, this crisis is a test of the quality of the strategy of all participants: Everyone enters it with their own initial understanding of what the world looks like, how it works and where history is going.

This problem has arisen not just now, but as the West, having received for one historical moment a semblance of sole planetary domination (after the collapse of the USSR), was unable to put its leadership into practice, as a result of which new sovereign poles — Russia and China — began to assert themselves. Other poles are on the way — India, the Islamic civilization, Africa and Latin America. All in all, there are seven centers of power, including the West. Six of them have united in BRICS and are beginning to build a multipolar order.

The West continues to cling to its hegemony and is attacking the most dangerous opponents to its dominance — Russia, China and the Islamic world. This did not begin today, but rather in the very early 2000s. But the current contrast of the political map of the world has finally come into focus in recent years — and especially after the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. The SMO was the first hot war of the multipolar world against the unipolar world. Before that — especially during President Trump's first term and because of the rise of populism in Europe — it seemed that a direct clash would be avoided, that the West would peacefully accept multipolarity, and try to reclaim its rightful place in the post-globalization world order. This is what Trump had in mind when he called for draining the globalist swamp in the US itself. But then the swamp managed to drain Trump himself and, during the period of the swampiest President Biden, to unleash a bloody conflict in Ukraine, throwing all the forces of the collective West against Russia as the most important pole of the multipolar world.

The main result of 2023 was Russia's disruption of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which for the globalists was the decisive moment in the entire conflict. They gave the Nazi regime in Kiev maximum support with arms, finances, political, informational and diplomatic resources. When Russia stood its ground and began to prepare for its own offensive, it turned out that everything the globalists had done had been in vain. However, as long as globalists are in power in the U.S., they intend to continue the war. And, apparently, not just to the last Ukrainian, but to the last globalist.

At the end of 2023, however, the second front in the war of unipolar and multipolar worlds opened. This time the vanguard of the West in the Middle East — the state of Israel in response to the invasion of Hamas began a systematic genocide of the population of Gaza, without any consideration at all. The United States and the collective West fully supported Tel Aviv's actions, thus drawing a new fault line — the West against Islamic civilization.

The American neocons were already on this path in the early 2000s, which resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and then support for radical Islamists in Libya, Syria, and so on. Now the West is again confronted with the Islamic world, led by the Palestinians, the Yemeni Houthis, the Lebanese Hezbollah and also Iran.

The former Finnish Prime Minister joins other big names like former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has joined the newly established International Task Force on Security and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine, aimed at bolstering the country's security position.

The high-profile task force held its inaugural meeting on Tuesday, hosted by the Office of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Besides Marin, the group includes notable figures such as former Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.