Russia’s Next-Door ‘EU Neighbors’ Secretly Plotting to Obtain Nukes - Reports

Russia’s Next-Door ‘EU Neighbors’ Secretly Plotting to Obtain Nukes - Reports

Sputnik

European countries bordering Russia have secretly begun discussing the possibility of developing their own "nuclear deterrent" capabilities for the first time since the Cold War, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the talks between certain governments and militaries.

The discussions are taking place bilaterally and trilaterally among closely aligned nations—many of which host US military bases. According to sources, the countries involved are proceeding with caution, carefully calibrating how their actions might be perceived by Russia. The talks are so closely held, Bloomberg reports, that they occur at a military level so high even some ministers may not know of their existence.

The participating countries recognize that the development of a nuclear arsenal would require high costs and potential violations of international agreements, as well as accepting the possibility of being attacked in return for agreeing to defend an ally.

Experts interviewed by Bloomberg believe that the majority of European countries would not be able to afford replacing US nuclear assets with their own. For instance, the United Kingdom and France spend nearly $12 billion per year together to maintain their arsenals, that's more than half of Sweden's annual defense budget.

In March 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that Russia had become a threat to France and Europe. Citing Washington's shift in its stance on Ukraine and its role within NATO, he called for a European debate on extending France's nuclear umbrella to cover the entire EU. The sentiment was quickly echoed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who urged Europe to enter an arms race with Moscow. 

The Kremlin pushed back sharply. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Macron's remarks as "extremely confrontational" and riddled with inaccuracies—pointing out, in particular, their failure to acknowledge NATO's military infrastructure steadily advancing toward Russia's western borders.

US-Controlled ATACMS Missiles Deployed In South China Sea, 10km Off China's Mainland

US-Controlled ATACMS Missiles Deployed In South China Sea, 10km Off China's Mainland

Drago Bosni

Mere days after the US-backed government in Taipei launched the so-called Joint Firepower Coordination Center (JFCC), defined as “an enhanced firepower coordination effort in close cooperation with the United States”, multirole sources have confirmed that the Chinese breakaway island province of Taiwan is deploying the overhyped and exorbitantly overpriced M142 HIMARS MLRS (multiple launch rocket system) to the islands of Penghu and Dongyin.

The US-made system is also equipped with ATACMS missiles, extending its reach to 300 km. Taipei insists that this will “strengthen the effectiveness of the kill chain”, while its Ministry of Defense (MoD) stressed that the increase in HIMARS orders to 111 units was undertaken specifically to forward-deploy them to the islands closest to China’s mainland.

Dongyin, the northernmost island of the Matsu archipelago in the East China Sea, (see Map) is located around 10 km from mainland China. Deploying missiles such as the ATACMS there puts virtually the entire Fujian province within range, including key cities like Fuzhou, Ningde and Quanzhou.

However, the situation is even worse, given that the US controls those missiles through the JFCC. Its establishment and the permanent deployment of American personnel at command and control facilities in Taipei to oversee planning and potential use of ATACMS missiles in case of yet another US/NATO-orchestrated escalation are deeply troubling and concerning for Beijing.

However, Taipei is still trying to present it as “harmless assistance in coordination and supervision”. They’re just not saying for what.

Obviously, China is not buying it and for good reason. Namely, the JFCC allows Washington DC to select targets and finalize attack plans. Formally, this is done jointly with local forces, but we all know how the Pentagon uses vassals and satellite states, especially when it comes to striking strategic assets such as critical industrial and scientific infrastructure, both of which are found in abundance across mainland China.

Taiwanese Defense Minister Koo Li-hsiung says these concerns are “incorrect and misleading”, insisting that US troops on the island are “not acting as supervisors or monitors”. Koo claims that “the presence of US staff reflects longstanding, institutionalized cooperation mechanisms focused on strengthening Taiwan’s defensive and combat capabilities rather than any form of foreign oversight”.

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Matryoshka Satellites, Robotic Arms: Former US Space Force Commander Warns Of Russian, Chinese Threats

Matryoshka Satellites, Robotic Arms: Former US Space Force Commander Warns Of Russian, Chinese Threats

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

When a Russian “nesting-doll” satellite maneuvered into close proximity to a US satellite last June, it was the latest move in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in space.

Cosmos 2558 had been observed shadowing USA 326 ever since being launched in 2022. But now it had hatched a surprise by releasing a smaller module that started moving even closer to the US satellite.

“This is the second one we’ve seen do this from the Russian side,” said DeAnna Burt, who was chief operations officer at the US Space Force at the time of the incident.

“You have a satellite that then has another satellite within it that then, we believe, is a KK or Kinetic Kill vehicle that would go out and rendezvous with another satellite and potentially harm it or image it or do different things,” she added.

Burt retired in October 2025 and spoke to RFE/RL during a visit to Prague organized by the Aspen Institute. In a wide-ranging interview on January 30, she discussed threats to satellites from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as a shadowy conflict already ongoing since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“We have seen what we would call rendezvous proximity operations, which means…flying around and surveying the other satellite,” Burt said, when asked about the incident last June.

The concern, she added, was “would they release a kill vehicle” or was it “purely surveillance and reconnaissance?” It turned out it was the latter. But it was still alarming, not only due to the risk of collision.

“What you’re seeing in the development here, all of these are tests building up to capability…hypothetically, if I were going to launch a counter space capability, first I’d want to make sure I can acquire targets before I could then strike targets.”

Burt is not the first to warn of such Russian threats.

The previous incident was briefly discussed by the then chief of space operations of the US Space Force, General John Raymond, in comments to Time Magazine in 2020. “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls,” he said. “The second satellite came out of the first satellite.”

In 2024, Raymond’s successor General Chance Saltzman warned of a “Day Zero” if Russia deployed a nuclear weapon in space to destroy satellite capabilities. That year, a claim by the Pentagon that Russia had “likely” deployed an anti-satellite weapon in space was denied by the Kremlin.

More recently, on January 21, an Atlantic Council report said the United States was “unacceptably vulnerable” to such threats and urged a shift to “resilient satellite architectures.”

Burt said this was something that was already a major US priority: “Having the ability to take a hit and to be able to recover…with satellites that are on the shelf ready to launch.”

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Amazon's Ring And Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal The Severity Of The U.S. Surveillance State

Amazon's Ring And Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal The Severity Of The U.S. Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald 

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.

The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.

Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.

Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”

Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.

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Are the Ukrainian peace talks a hoax?

Are the Ukrainian peace talks a hoax?

Paul Craig Roberts

The so-called Ukrainian peace talks have puzzled me for sometime. For the conflict to be resolved requires Trump and Putin to work out an agreement between themselves, but this necessary meeting has not occurred.

Trump has said repeatedly that he wants the issue resolved, but his terms have never been clear other than demanding a cease fire before the terms of the agreement are known. It is not clear that Trump has taken trouble to understand what Putin means by the root cause of the problem or that the real problem is the absence of a mutual security agreement between Russia and the West.

Perplexingly, the “peace process” has been characterized by Trump blaming Putin for not accepting a cease-fire in place of a negotiated agreement and adding more Russian sanctions as a punishment. This has never struck me as indicating any seriousness on Trump’s part toward finding a solution, and it has puzzled me that Putin continues to see hope in such an unpromising process.

Russian foreign minister Lavrov has come around to my point of view. He says the negotiations continue in words, but not in deeds, which is a polite way of saying that the negotiations have lost their purpose.

Lavrov has noticed what I have been pointing out for sometime, and that is that there is dialogue on paper but pressure in practice. I called attention to the fact that it is inconsistent for Washington to allegedly pursue peace in Ukraine while it foments regime change in former provinces of the Soviet Union that border the Russian Federation. Washington seeks to win the allegiance of these provinces away from Russia as is currently underway in Armenia. 

These efforts follow Washington’s recent attempt at color revolution in former Soviet Georgia. To allegedly negotiate peace in Ukraine, while stirring up trouble elsewhere on Russia’s border gives the lie to the Ukrainian “peace process.” Just last Monday American vice president Vance was in Armenia on a high profile visit chipping away with American offers Armenia’s economic engagement with Russia.

Another peculiar aspect of this so-called “peace negotiations” is the two people who are conducting them. One, representing Trump, is Witkoff an American real estate developer. The other, representing Putin, is the American– Russian Kirill Dmitriev, an Atlanticist Integrationist in charge of the small $10 billion Russian sovereign investment fund. Both are trying to negotiate money deals, not the elimination of armed conflict.

The Kremlin’s line is that it is a double-track policy to see if economic deals can be made, regardless of whether the Ukrainian situation can be resolved.

This strikes me as utter nonsense, and it seems to strike Lavrov the same way. Lavrov notes that Washington is interfering with Russian oil exports by illegally seizing Russian-flagged tankers at sea in international waters, and by applying sanctions to India for its oil and weapons deals with Russia. Clearly, Washington is increasing pressures on Russia. What basis does Putin have for continuing to pretend and to deceive the Russian people that Ukrainian peace negotiations are almost concluded? Why is a popular leader destroying his own credibility, or allowing Dmitriev and Witcoff to destroy his credibility?

Putin made an extraordinary strategic error when he refused early in the game to put down a strong Russian foot. It remains to be seen what consequences the world will pay for this extraordinary strategic blunder by the president of Russia