Hungary’s prime minister has vowed to expel those responsible for forced conscription
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has condemned Ukraine’s forced conscription of ethnic Hungarians following the death of another recruit.
Ukrainian draft officers have been detaining military-age men on the streets and at workplaces as the army struggles to replenish its ranks amid the ongoing Russian offensive. The officers have used physical violence during detentions, with multiple deaths reported in custody at enlistment offices.
“Dragged off to war, another Hungarian has died due to Ukraine’s forced conscription. This is unacceptable. We stand with the family, and we will not let this slide,” Orban said in a video address posted on X on Wednesday.
“All Ukrainian officials responsible for forced conscription will be expelled from Hungary without delay. Our people cannot be used as cannon fodder,” he added.
Officials in Ukraine’s western region of Zakarpattia, which is home to a sizable ethnic Hungarian minority, announced the death of Zsolt Reban, 46, on January 20.
Balazs Orban, a political adviser to the Hungarian prime minister, said Reban was “taken from the street by force and pushed into conscription” despite having previously been declared unfit for military service due to a lifelong heart condition. Hungarian media said Reban died at a training center near Lviv. According to Balazs Orban, Reban was an EU citizen.
In July 2025, Jozsef Sebestyen, a dual Ukrainian-Hungarian citizen, died weeks after being drafted. The family of the 45-year-old conscript said he was beaten at a training center. The Ukrainian authorities denied any wrongdoing, stating that Sebestyen died from a pulmonary embolism.
Unlike many fellow NATO members, Hungary has refused to send weapons to Ukraine and has called for diplomacy with Russia over sanctions. Budapest has also criticized Ukraine for striking the pipeline used to transport oil into the EU. In August 2025, Hungary imposed sanctions on Robert Brovdi, Ukraine’s top drone commander.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has requested that the clothing giant turn over documents related to DEI
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is investigating whether sportswear giant Nike discriminated against white employees.
On Wednesday, the commission asked the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri to compel Nike to turn over information about its human resources policies, including those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
The EEOC said it is examining whether the company engaged in “disparate treatment” of white employees and applicants in hiring, promotions, layoff selections, and training programs.
The EEOC said it is acting on allegations of systemic violations at Nike dating back to 2018. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said workplace discrimination law is “colorblind and requires the EEOC to protect employees of all races from unlawful employment practices.”
Nike described the subpoena as “a surprising and unusual escalation,” adding that it had already “shared thousands of pages of information.”
“We are committed to fair and lawful employment practices and follow all applicable laws, including those that prohibit discrimination,” the company said in an email to CNN.
Conservatives have long argued that DEI programs unfairly target white individuals. US President Donald Trump has made combating what he calls ‘woke bias’ a priority of his second term in office.
“I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed,” Trump told Time magazine in 2024.
After returning to the White House in 2025, Trump signed several executive orders rolling back DEI initiatives in the civil service. A number of corporations, including Walmart and Google, have since removed DEI commitments from their websites.
Why supplying the world’s money pressures the US to import more than it exports, and why the imbalance is so hard to reverse
“Money promises abundance, only to return want.” (The Author)
In its disquieting force, this dictum cuts through the allure of monetary power to expose its central paradox: Abundance may broaden choice at the outset, only to unsettle balance and narrow freedom over time, as advantage matures into obligation.
The global supremacy of the dollar bestows upon the US an extraordinary latitude, permitting it to borrow on exceptionally favorable terms and thereby opening a wide spectrum of spending possibilities.
Yet over time, persistent budget deficits build into a mountain of debt, as the costs of debt service, compounding year by year, absorb an ever greater share of resources and progressively constrict the scope of policy choice. And still this is but one turn of the screw.
The Lex Boomerangi: America’s degradation from without
Issuing the world’s reserve currency does more than invite fiscal laxity; it warps the economy from the outside in. This is the law of the boomerang applied to money: global liquidity, domestic costs. As the systemic price of dollar supremacy, liquidity curdles into liability, and dominance hardens into dependency.
The so-called “exorbitant privilege” of reserve-currency status is not merely a financial distinction; it is a structural condition that quietly rewrites the nation’s external accounts, distorting incentives, and redistributing opportunities and risks, gains and losses, across regions, communities, and sectors.
With the passage of time, reserve-currency status leaves a familiar and deep-seated imprint on the US economy: not only chronic budget deficits and exponentially mounting debt, but also persistent trade imbalances and the gradual hollowing out of the industrial core, fueling populist revolt.
To begin with, the dollar’s global dominance distorts the terms of international exchange. A humble hand tool makes the logic plain.
Balance-of-payments mechanics: A vicious closed circuit
A ratchet turns only one way; in much the same fashion, reserve-currency dynamics, unfolding through iterative, self-reinforcing loops, propel trade disparities forward that are far easier to deepen than to undo. A brief recourse to the fundamentals of international economics renders the forces at work intelligible.
The balance of payments is the ledger of all economic transactions between a country and the rest of the world. It is governed by an unforgiving arithmetic rooted in the principles of double-entry bookkeeping on a planetary scale. Every flow gives rise to equal debit and credit entries, appearing as a payment or receipt matched by a corresponding financial transaction that changes assets or liabilities.
As the economy’s closed circuit, the balance of payments constitutes an accounting identity, an equation that admits no exception. By definition, the current account (encompassing trade in goods and services, net primary income from abroad, and unilateral transfers) and the capital and financial accounts (recording cross-border capital and financial claims) must exactly offset one another.
Accordingly, a deficit on the current account necessarily finds its counterpart in a surplus on the capital and financial accounts taken together, and conversely. This implies that the totality of trade flows, tied to the production of goods and services in the real economy, together with income and transfer flows, are matched in the aggregate by corresponding capital and financial flows. The practical consequences of what appears to be an arcane accounting identity extend far beyond the ledger.
From the liability side, a country whose imports exceed its exports in current-account terms must, as a matter of accounting necessity, be a net borrower from abroad.
In monetary terms, there is no such thing as an external dissipation of funds. Every dollar that leaves the US must, by definition, ultimately find its way home, reappearing as a claim on the domestic economy. The consequence is nothing short of momentous.
Whenever dollars flow abroad to satisfy global demand for the greenback, they can do so only through an external deficit. In current-account terms, the US is compelled to absorb more goods, services, income, and transfers than it dispatches abroad, as corresponding capital and financial claims return upon the domestic economy.
To the extent that dollars flow abroad to pay for imports, they must, by necessity, return as foreign purchases of American assets. Every container ship departing Shanghai laden with goods is mirrored somewhere in New York or Washington by a corresponding external claim on US assets, taking the form of Treasuries, equities, real estate, or the simple holding of dollars in American bank accounts. By virtue of this operating logic, world reserve status entails grave implications over the long run.
The Triffin Dilemma: A hard-wired reserve-currency constraint
In a dollar-based global order, the balance-of-payments identity, as time accretes, hardens into a macroeconomic constraint of a structural kind. At the heart of this configuration lies the systemic necessity known as the Triffin dilemma.
Modern finance can recycle dollars, but it cannot conjure them ex nihilo. An individual central bank abroad may acquire dollars in the market, yet the world as a whole can expand its dollar reserves only insofar as the US supplies them. Succinctly stated, the foreign-exchange market moves money; it does not mint it.
In practice, the system’s logic renders the US structurally prone to large chronic deficits on its balance of trade. To convey a sense of the scale: Merchandise imports exceeded exports by more than one trillion dollars in 2025.
A surplus in services trade and net income receipts do no more than temper the immense imbalance, permitting the steady accumulation of dollar-denominated claims abroad, the counterpart through which the gap is financed.
In balance-of-payments accounting, these regular outcomes register as persistent current-account deficits matched by relentless capital and financial inflows.
Secular dollar appreciation: A quiet tax on US exporters
To the detriment of the US, the massive offsetting capital and financial imports do not arrive neutral.
For a start, these inflows entail a progressive surrender of claims on domestic assets. This means that a growing share of ownership rights, and of the future income they confer, passes abroad. The fateful consequence is a steady narrowing of the nation’s economic autonomy, and with it the very foundations of sovereignty.
As foreign ownership of US assets expands, the interest, dividends, and profits flowing abroad rise in tandem. Over time, America’s external position comes to rest less on what it sells abroad than on global confidence and foreigners’ enduring inclination to hold US assets.
Beyond this, global demand for dollar assets bids up the currency, lifting the dollar above its trade-consistent equilibrium. This amounts to a silent tax on American exporters, levied so that the rest of the world may hold more American money. The effect is to shift the burden of global liquidity away from the trading desks of Wall Street to the shop floor.
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimates that reserve-currency demand alone may keep the dollar overvalued by some 5–10 percent. By pricing American goods out of foreign markets while subsidizing imports at home, this price distortion depresses US export revenues by roughly $30–60 billion a year. Each additional five-percent appreciation of the dollar adds roughly another $30 billion to that burden.
Because the dollar anchors global trade and reserves, foreign actors readily absorb US liabilities in lieu of goods, blunting the exchange-rate correction that would otherwise restore external balance.
Absent reserve-currency status, deficits would, as a rule, exert downward pressure on the currency, raise competitiveness, and lift net exports until the trade gap is closed. The dollar’s exceptional role arrests this salutary adjustment, entrenching deficits that would in ordinary circumstances correct themselves.
In the language of economics, the dollar’s persistent overvaluation is described as a “secular” trend (from the Latin saeculum, meaning “age” or “generation”): a long-term, structurally driven shift that endures across business cycles.
This upward tendency does not preclude intermittent episodes of pronounced depreciation. One such deviation from the long-run trajectory occurred in 2025, when the dollar declined by roughly 8 percent on a broad, trade-weighted basis, with losses approaching 10 percent against the major currencies, representing one of its weakest annual performances in recent years.
Sustained dollar appreciation begets structural deficit: persistent trade gaps, mirrored by the expanding foreign ownership of US assets. The red ink in trade statistics, together with the concomitant current-account deficits, is not a malfunction of the system or a mere policy error, but the system’s central mechanism and its price: the real-economy expression of a global financial regime centered on the dollar.
In essence, America lives on goods it does not make and leaves behind claims it cannot escape. To compound the predicament, the dollar’s hegemony, hard-wired into the global monetary architecture, carries repercussions that extend far beyond trade, reaching into the very foundations of industry and the power that rests upon it. Heavy indeed rests the crown of the world’s currency.
[Part 3 of a series on the global dollar. To be continued. Previous columns in the series:
For all the media storm the final release is making, neither victims nor predators are likely to see justice
The long-anticipated release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s illicit activity was supposed to deliver justice to hundreds of underage women who were victimized by the late sex trafficker and his elite circle of powerful friends. On that score, it failed dramatically.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that anytime anything is released in the United States on a Friday evening it will land in the public domain with all of the intensity of a soggy firecracker. That’s no coincidence, as the US Justice Department wrapped up its delayed release of files related to the disgraced financier, although authorities conceded that the disclosure was unlikely to tamp down the suspicions that surround the case.
“I think there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents,” Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General who just happens to have been Trump’s personal attorney, told reporters. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
Hours after the release of more than 3 million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos related to the late sex offender, a group of 18 survivors of Mr. Epstein’s exploitation announced in a statement that the disclosure did not do enough to hold his enablers accountable.
“Once again, survivors are having their names and identifying information exposed, while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected. That is outrageous,” they said, without specifying exactly what material had been disclosed. “This is not over. We will not stop until the truth is fully revealed and every perpetrator is finally held accountable.”
Throughout the tortuously slow release of the documents, the public was teased by the possibility that perhaps it might actually happen that dozens, possibly even hundreds, of sick and depraved child molesters would end up behind bars for their purported crimes.
While the release fell short of expectations, the masses at least had the opportunity to laugh at the expense of wealthy and powerful pals of Mr. Epstein’s, like Bill Gates, who was forced to release a furious denial after the files alleged that he slept with Russian girls, acquired a sexually-transmitted disease and asked for antibiotics to give to his then-wife Melinda. Who says the rich and famous don’t have problems, too?
Melinda is said to have expressed displeasure with Bill’s relationship with Mr. Epstein since at least 2013, years after the latter was convicted of child molestation charges. Following the Gates’ highly publicized divorce in 2021, Melinda went on to become the world’s second-richest woman, with a fortune estimated at $73bn.
Another embarrassing revelation to emerge from the files involved Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary (1999-2001), and former contributor to The New York Times, who asked the convicted sex offender for relationship advice and the chances of “getting horizontal” with a female colleague. Summers maintained a cordial relationship with Epstein long after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008. In fact, the chumminess lasted right up to July 5, 2019, the day before Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges and one month before his apparent suicide in a Manhattan prison.
Another person of high-renowned was Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, who was stripped of his last royal titles by his older brother, King Charles. Yes, Andrew is now just your average commoner. One of Epstein’s trafficked females was Virginia Giuffre, who asserted that she was raped by Andrew on three occasions when she was just 17. Giuffre committed suicide on April 25, 2025.
Of all the powerful names who featured prominently in the files, perhaps none invited more mockery and scorn than that of former US President Bill ‘Slick Willy’ Clinton, who himself was embroiled in a separate sex scandal with White House intern Monica Lewinsky back in 1998 (Clinton was subsequently acquitted on two impeachment charges, of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day US Senate trial). As CNN reported, the former president flew at least 16 times in Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet – infamously known as the ‘Lolita Express’ – on domestic and international trips, often accompanied by both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a lengthy albeit comfortable 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, according to flight logs released during Maxwell’s 2021 trial. Some of those flights were part of extensive international trips with multiple layovers.
This week, the Republican-led House is expected to vote to hold both Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for failing to testify on the Epstein files. House Oversight Republicans together with some Democrats voted last month to hold the former president and secretary of state in contempt, a misdemeanor that could result in up to a 5-year prison sentence, something the formidable Clinton clan probably need not fret over. After all, who has not heard of the notorious Clinton ‘kill list’?
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice has dismissed suggestions that incriminating material about Donald Trump was withheld from the public, and the US president felt emboldened enough to suggest that the latest document dump exonerated him.
“I didn’t see it myself, but I was told by some very important people that not only does it absolve me, it’s the opposite of what people were hoping – you know, the radical left,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One late Saturday.
And just like that, it’s another sad day in America as justice has once again gone missing in action whenever it involves the wealthy and powerful. In the Epstein file saga, the public will have to content itself with a few good chuckles and regrettably nothing more.
A dishonest mindset now prevails among European leaders, Sergey Lavrov has told RT in an exclusive interview
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Western politics is increasingly shaped by a dishonest mindset, with European leaders failing to learn from past mistakes.
Lavrov made the remarks to RT on Wednesday, ahead of Diplomats Day, addressing a question from interviewer Rick Sanchez about whether those connected to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were the same as the figures behind the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine.
“Regarding the specific persons, specific personalities, we can’t probably make generalizations like that,” Lavrov said. “But the fact that what we call the Deep State… they are said to be able to decide the fates of the world,” he added, noting that he does not quite believe it.
Sergey Lavrov tells us that European officials don't need to have Epstein links to be bad actors – most do their work out in the open.
"What we call the Deep State – these groups are said to be able to decide the fate of the world. Well, I don't quite believe that.
Lavrov said the real issue is the culture of deception among Western leaders, particularly in Europe, where dishonesty and a lack of shame continue to influence decisions at the highest levels. “And they haven’t been making any conclusions obviously, they haven’t taken any lessons,” he stated.
The full interview with Sergey Lavrov will air on RT on Thursday at 17:30 Moscow Time.
The presence of the material in the Islamic Republic does not violate any agreements, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said
Russia is willing to take what remains of Iran’s enriched uranium, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.
“At the same time, it is important to note that the aforementioned stockpiles belong to Iran. Their presence in no way contradicts Tehran’s obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Zakharova stated at a briefing on Wednesday, as quoted by Kommersant.
Tehran has full rights to the material, including deciding whether to remove it from Iranian territory and where to export it, she added.
The statement comes amid international efforts to contain the crisis between Tehran and Washington. Over the past weeks, Washington has deployed additional air defense systems to bases across the Middle East, including Patriot and THAAD batteries, and sent an ‘armada’ led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Arabian Sea.
Washington has been signaling that while the immediate threat of military action has eased, the US retains the capacity to respond if needed. The core US demands include limits on uranium enrichment and restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is purely peaceful.
Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Monday that the likelihood of an immediate US strike on Tehran has diminished, and diplomacy has been given a new chance after intensive mediation – primarily by Russia and Türkiye, along with Qatar.
Moscow first suggested removing enriched uranium from Iran last summer, saying it could remove and reprocess it and then return it to Iran’s nuclear facilities. Russia also informed Iran, the US, and the International Atomic Energy Agency of its proposal. However, the Iranian authorities did not publicly give a definite response.
In January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia remains ready to help avoid escalation between the US and Iran.
What does it mean to talk about intellectual property? While it’s easy to grasp the concepts of physical property and ownership, we often operate under the assumption that no one truly owns ideas. However, intellectual property hinges on a different question: can society control the use of ideas? This shift from ownership to control is […]
Latvia and Estonia have backed the idea of an EU envoy after four years of the bloc’s refusal to speak to Moscow
The leaders of two Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia, have called for talks with Russia after four years of refusing to engage with Moscow, Euronews has reported.
The bloc should appoint a special envoy to reopen diplomatic channels with Russia, Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina and Estonian President Alar Karis separately told the outlet on the sidelines of a summit in Dubai on Wednesday.
The idea is dividing major European powers. While it has been backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, German Chancellor Merz has dismissed the idea outright.
“We have to be at the negotiation table because Ukrainians themselves have started to negotiate. So why should Europeans not negotiate?” Silina told Euronews.
“We should have a say as well, but you see, we are a bit late. We should have started it, maybe not [US] President [Donald] Trump, but maybe the European Union,” the outlet quoted Karis as saying.
Washington has engaged in direct negotiations with Moscow for nearly a year, while the EU, sidelined from the negotiating table, has relied on slapping sanctions on Russia and backing Ukraine diplomatically, militarily, and financially. Up until now, some member states, including the Baltic nations, have consistently opposed reengagement with Russia.
The inaugural Moscow-Kiev-Washington talks in Abu Dhabi on January 23-24, the first since February 2022, were termed constructive but yielded no concrete agreements.
Following the meeting, EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas discouraged Europeans from pursuing direct re-engagement with the Kremlin, demanding that Moscow make concessions first. Russian officials have accused Kiev’s European backers of hindering US-led peace efforts and of increasingly preparing for a direct war against Russia.
The second round of Russia-Ukraine-US talks in Abu Dhabi took place on Wednesday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would not comment on the results.
Russia has insisted that while it prefers a diplomatic solution to the conflict, it is ready to achieve its goals through military means if talks fail.
The usual suspects are desperately trying to frame the Israel-linked pedophile with Russia
While everyone is scouring over the millions of newly released Epstein documents, which continue to expose the disgusting depths of depravity among Western elites, a familiar discredited voice has surfaced with a convenient alternative tale: blame Russia.
Where did the “blame Russia for Epstein” conspiracy come from?
The conspiracy, first pushed in London by the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and later in the day by the New York Post, began claiming that Epstein, the proudly Jewish, pedophile financier, was somehow linked to Russia. Former BBC host Andrew Marr delivered an 11 minute sermon to his listeners on LBC radio on the same theme. No sense of coordination here at all, obviously.
Next in line, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a figure whose political identity has practically been built upon antagonism toward Moscow, jumped on the bandwagon. Tusk, even announced an investigation into a scandal he, without basis, announced was “co-organised by Russian intelligence.”
History repeated itself as farce on Wednesday, however, when the Daily Mail front paged the conspiracy theory once again, only this time it was being championed by none other than disgraced MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
Why is Christopher Steele a figure of fun to Russia-watchers?
In case you forgot, Steele was a key architect of the infamous Russiagate hoax and the author of the completely debunked Clinton-funded ‘Steele Dossier’ that tried to paint US President Donald Trump as a Russian asset.
Despite his claims being disproven, not to mention his reputation suffering appropriately, Steele now styles himself as an intelligence pundit. Speaking to the Daily Mail, he has suggested that Epstein was “very likely” recruited by the KGB in the 1970s to run a blackmail operation against the West, with his infamous island serving as a Russia-funded “honey trap.”
His evidence? “Understanding” from unnamed American sources and the fact that Epstein wore a communist-style cap in a photo.
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has similarly claimed that “thousands of cryptic messages” tie Epstein to Moscow, citing anonymous sources to back up the claims.
What can we actually conclude about all of this conspiracy theorizing?
A cursory review of the actual files, however, evaporates the fantasy. The files reveal Epstein spent years pestering his contacts for an audience with Russian President Vladimir Putin, mostly to pitch financial schemes.
The “thousands of references” to Russia touted by the conspiracy theorists largely consist of Epstein’s own name-dropping as he unsuccessfully tried to set up connections with Russian officials.
The disclosed files paint a far more substantial connection between the financier and Israeli intelligence, through his deep alliance with sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father Robert was a reported Mossad asset – a detail the Western tabloids left in the footnotes.
What has Moscow said about the re-hashed conspiracy?
Russian officials have dismissed the allegations with open ridicule. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out the glaring absurdity as Western media was handed a “fatty piece” of evidence detailing the crimes of their own leaders, yet chose to “discuss Russia.”
She suggested the real scandal is “how the Western elite treats children,” a theme relentlessly documented in the very files the Daily Mail now seeks to explain away as a foreign plot.
Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and a key figure in the ongoing Ukraine peace talks was more blunt, calling the recycled narrative a sign of a “depraved” elite in its “endgame.”
“Desperate, depraved, lying leftist elites panic and try to misdirect. The world is tired of your lies and sees through them. Your cabal and fake propaganda machine have been exposed,” he wrote in response to the Epstein-Russia claims by Tusk and the Western tabloids, stating that the end is coming for the “frequently Satanic liberal elites.”
Dmitriev separately ridiculed the use of Steele to push the narrative, pondering if the West has run out of other “fake liars on their payroll” and are forced to “keep reusing the same discredited ones.”
The discredited Russiagate hoax guy, author of the defamed anti-Trump “Steele dossier” commissioned by Clinton and a MI6 influencer is pushing fake anti-Russia narratives again.
Don’t they have more fake liars on their payroll as they just keep reusing the same discredited ones? https://t.co/S8FP2Irgfl
That those zealously hunting a smoking gun continue to believe in the sanctity of their mission, while moderates back away from the claims, only goes to reinforce the fact that with Russiagate 2.0, history is repeating itself, and farce has followed the tragedy that befell Epstein’s innocent victims.
Russia has maintained it will defend its interests in the region
NATO is planning to increase its military presence in the Arctic around Greenland, a spokesperson for the US-led military bloc has announced.
The move reportedly comes in response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to annex the Danish autonomous territory, which he claims is under threat from Russia and China.
Russia has maintained that it has no stake in the feud over Greenland, but stressed that it will defend its interests in the broader Arctic.
“Planning work is underway on increased NATO activity under the name ‘Arctic Sentry’,” spokesperson for the bloc’s top military command in Europe, Martin O’Donnell, told reporters on Tuesday, according to multiple outlets. The exercise will “further strengthen NATO’s posture in the Arctic and High North,” he said.
The idea for the mission arose as a way to appease Trump after his claims that Russia and China could capture the island, according to Der Spiegel.
Both Moscow and Beijing have dismissed the accusations, with China arguing that the US is merely using the claims as a pretext for a military buildup in the Arctic.
EU officials have also rejected Trump’s claim. Last week, EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas noted that there was no evidence that “foreign adversaries” were targeting Greenland.
Russia already has widespread access to the region, as it possesses more than half of the global Arctic coastline. It also operates the world’s largest fleet of icebreaker ships to support regional development and maintain shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
However, Western governments are now increasingly relying on “illegitimate sanctions aimed at hindering the development of the Russian Arctic,” and favoring the “use of force” to secure their interests, Russian Foreign Ministry official Vladislav Maslennikov has said.
Russia “will continue to firmly defend its position in the region,” and will retaliate against any attempts to supplant its national interests in the Arctic, “especially in terms of security,” he told RIA in an interview published on Wednesday.
