Arming Kiev is a cost-effective way of preventing Moscow from threatening NATO, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said on Wednesday at the Warsaw Security Forum.

Ollongren was asked whether the US and its allies can continue supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes," given the political in-fighting in Washington.

"We cannot pretend that we'll just wait and see how the American elections are going," she said. "Because they have the same interest, in a way. Of course, supporting Ukraine is a very cheap way to make sure that Russia with this regime is not a threat to the NATO alliance. And it's vital to continue that support."

"It is very much in our interest to support Ukraine, because they are fighting this war, we are not fighting it," Ollongren noted, while admitting that NATO has "skin in the game."

Can a West of shared, cultural like-mindedness 'imagine itself' into total cultural war against the values of Russia?

"The rules-based international order has not been this imperilled since the 1930s", writes Professor of Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead:

"The UN was supposed to be the crown jewel of the rules-based order ... but lately [it] has sunk to new lows. Among the five permanent members of the Security Council, only Joe Biden bothered to show up for the General Assembly last week. Emmanuel Macron was too busy ... [and] Rishi Sunak was the first [UK] prime minister in a decade to skip the annual meeting. Mr. Putin and China's Xi Jinping also ditched the U.N. meeting ...There was a time when people would have cared ...".

Had you been watching images broadcast from the General Assembly, when Zelensky was speaking, you would have seen the auditorium was almost entirely empty, or, at best, a third full. Prime Minister Netanyahu also addressed the GA, as did Chancellor Scholtz, who again addressed a bare handful of delegation note-takers.

The crux of it is, there is no excitement. No-one in the Global Majority is particularly interested to listen to western leaders, with their litany of cultural fixations, whilst their societies' 'Life' problems spiral down into real crisis. "Boring" was how one commentator described western discourse; "the real excitement is in Asia".

A stash of cocaine was discovered in the office of the private military company Wagner Group, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. Wagner's boss, businessman Evgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane crash in August, two months after staging a short-lived failed mutiny.

"We know that... the [Federal Security Service] found not only 10 billion [rubles] in cash in the company's [office] in St. Petersburg, but also 5 kilograms of cocaine," Putin explained during a session of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi.

The police and security officials raided properties belonging to Wagner shortly after Prigozhin's revolt. On June 23, Prigozhin announced that his troops would march on Moscow, but backed down the next day after reaching a deal with the authorities.

In a hotel conference room in Kyiv late last week, Ukrainian leaders huddled with hundreds of defense industry officials and policymakers from allied countries. The message was clear: Ukraine is open for business.

Despite the specter of Russian missile fire in the Ukrainian capital, the International Industries Defense Forum was eerily similar to the panel-laden conferences that pop up many times a year in Washington and London. But the stakes were different for this one, as Ukraine finds its supporters running out of weapons to send while others are increasingly wary of committing more money to the conflict.

With the charm offensive directed at weapons-makers around the world, the country is effectively trying to take matters into its own hands.

"It's a survival issue," said Pavel Verkhniatskyi, managing partner at COSA Intelligence Solutions in Kyiv, since there is only so long Ukraine can expect to rely on donations from partners whose support can be switched off with a single election.

Kicking off the event, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the audience that co-production deals are "already being negotiated with our partners" and that he has established funding in the national budget to help finance those collaborations. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also addressed the event, as did NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Historical revisionists are now trying to argue that actual Nazi soldiers were just anti-Soviet resisters.

We knew that it was coming. It was only a matter of time. And now attempts to whitewash the actions of actual Nazis from WWII have begun - all because a bunch of ignoramuses in the Canadian parliament cheered one alongside Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and it all just makes Ukraine and its Western supporters look bad.

It also makes Western lawmakers look like they have no clue when it comes to Nazism in Ukraine - either past or present. So instead of asking questions about their judgment, it's time to ask whether you've just misunderstood Nazis.

The newly-resigned Canadian House Speaker introduced Ukrainian one-time Waffen-SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka as a Ukrainian (and naturalized Canadian) who fought Russians back in the day, yet apparently no one bothered to do the math. The Soviet Union was allied with the West against Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was who fought against the Russians. Okay, it wasn't the only one - there were others, like the Polish Home Army, which fought against both the Soviets and the Germans. So maybe Hunka was part of that? That's the theoretical explanation the German Foreign Office offered when it emerged that the German ambassador to Canada was also present at the standing ovation in parliament. Yeah, that must have been it. A Ukrainian going to war to protect Ukraine from the Soviet Union by joining the Polish Home Army. Sounds plausible.

Mexico's president on Friday slammed U.S. aid for Ukraine and economic sanctions on Venezuela, Cuba and other nations as the first of two high-level U.S.-Mexico meetings got underway in Washington.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a broad criticism of U.S. foreign policy, saying U.S. economic sanctions were forcing people to emigrate from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The harsh comments came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina and Trade Representative Katherine Tai were meeting their Mexican counterparts at the State Department.

Friday's talks will focus on commerce and trade issues but Blinken will lead a U.S. delegation to Mexico next week with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that will focus on border security and migration.


The State Department said in a statement that Blinken would be meeting López Obrador during the Oct. 4-5 trip.

The bloc's security depends on integrating several key countries, Czech President Petr Pavel has said.

The European Union should accept not just Ukraine, but Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans for the sake of its own security, Czech President Petr Pavel claimed at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, on Tuesday. Continued expansion to the east is a geopolitical necessity, he argued.

At the new academic year's opening ceremony, which was attended by the former president of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, and the former head of EU diplomacy, Federica Mogherini, Pavel stated:

"The new geopolitical imperative requires a new dynamic of enlargement. For too long, we have left some European countries at the mercy of geopolitical manipulations. European and Atlantic" integration of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans should be "completed."

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a session of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, where he delivered a keynote speech and took questions from the audience.

During the event, which lasted for nearly four hours, Putin shared his thoughts on a wide array of issues, including the Ukraine conflict, the recent flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the role of the West in the origins of current tensions.

Putin also outlined his vision for a more fair and equitable model of international relations, and provided an update on Russia's nuclear arsenal.

Failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton believes half of the country needs to be forcibly re-educated to abandon the ideology that led them to vote for former President Donald Trump.

In a sitdown interview with CNN on Thursday, Clinton — who infamously said in 2016 that half of Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables" — alleged that "MAGA extremists" who only "take their marching orders from Donald Trump" deserve to be brainwashed.

"When do they break with him?" Clinton pondered aloud. "Because at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen."

CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who conducted the interview, nodded in response.

The "Collective West" led by the chief imperialist power, the United States, is careening and buckling, the wayward collapse evident with each passing day.

For what it's worth, the transatlantic alliance of the U.S. and its European allies - embodied by the NATO military bloc - had a fairly good chronological run. The imperialist clique managed to hold together for nearly eight decades. But now that ship is running aground on the rocks of a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Signs of collapse and disintegration are coming fast and thick. The military defeat in Ukraine by the NATO powers after a $100 billion investment in weapons is foremost among the casualty list - together with up to 500,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers.

What a hideous fiasco the NATO-sponsored campaign against Russia has turned out to be. A bloodbath in Europe akin to the worst among history's many imperialist slaughters. The U.S.-led military alliance of 30 nations has spectacularly forfeited any pretence of being a "security organization".

The gnashing of teeth has only just begun. The farcical shame over NATO's retreat two years ago from Afghanistan in August 2021 - after 20 years of failed military occupation - is but a prelude to the horrendous debacle unfolding over Ukraine.

For the first time in the history of the United States republic, that country this week saw its Congressional leader getting the sack. Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House of Representatives - third in line to the presidency - was forced out of his job largely due to political infighting in Washington over the scandalous funding of a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, all while the U.S. federal government is teetering on bankruptcy shutdown.

Hours before McCarthy was ousted, President Joe Biden made a desperate conference call Tuesday with European leaders to "reassure allies of continued U.S. support for Ukraine." The phone conference included all the main allies, Britain, Germany, France, and Poland as well as Canada and Japan.

The sole topic was the war in Ukraine and pledges from Biden that the United States would continue its military support for the Kiev regime.