Moscow announced that it plans to increase military spending by nearly 70% in 2024 as it fights against what the Kremlin has dubbed NATO’s “hybrid war.” Russia’s defense budget next year, which is dwarfed by the Pentagon budget, will still be less than the total amount the US has already pledged to assist Kiev in its proxy war with Moscow.

During the disastrous Vietnam War, it was said that the US government treated the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure.  The heroic Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting the unrelenting US government lying about the war in order to protect politicians who would be embarrassed by the truth.  A half century later, during the Ukraine War, the manure is piled even higher. 

News media manufactures consent, and one way that happens is by manufacturing amnesia — burying a government’s past misdeeds makes it easier to sell future ones.

It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.” 

Russia has few options left except for a direct confrontation with the now fascist NATO bloc, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on his Telegram channel.

"It seems that Russia is left with fewer and fewer choices but to engage in a direct ground conflict with NATO, which has turned into an openly fascist alliance similar to Hitler’s Axis, only bigger in size," he wrote.

Serbia’s president demanded Tuesday to have a NATO-led peacekeeping force take over for the national law enforcement agency in northern Kosovo after a daylong shootout between armed Serbs and Kosovar police left one officer and three gunmen dead.

It’s virtually guaranteed that the Kiev regime will get the MGM-140 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System), a US-made tactical/theater ballistic missile system with a maximum engagement range of approximately 300 km and a supersonic speed of up to Mach 3.

Austrian economist and social media personality Gunther Fehlinger has called on NATO forces to “bomb Belgrade now,” after Kosovo security agents engaged in a deadly shootout with unidentified assailants near its border with Serbia.

Kosovo police said on Sunday that they’d killed three men and arrested six others during a gunfight at a monastery in the village of Banjska. The gunmen arrived in the village in the early hours of the morning, the police said, and blockaded a bridge with unmarked trucks, before shooting at least two officers, one of whom died of his wounds.