(Zero Hedge)—The enthusiasm in the Western media for an imminent Ukrainian victory over Russia has been ever-circular; people who only get their news from corporate sources are likely to believe that Russia is about to be defeated any day now. However, as with all propaganda campaigns the public eventually grows tired of hollow optimism and skeptical of bombastic claims. Influencing hearts and minds is a fading prospect if your campaign is based on lies.
If the war has taught people anything it is to never trust establishment media sources to be accurate in their reporting, or prescient in their predictions.
A year ago we heard a deafening chorus of voices in the West suggesting that Ukraine’s victory was all but assured. The media’s boasts were relentless, but the numbers just didn’t add up. Zelensky’s appetite for NATO money and arms kept growing instead of waning. Recruitment efforts were expanding to include more women and older men. The talk of a glorious counter-offensive went on for months with no concrete actions taken. Rumors of mass deaths at Bakhmut circulated and it became clear that it doesn’t matter how many weapons NATO sends to Ukraine, there aren’t enough soldiers to utilize them.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Valery Zaluzhny, acknowledged in a recent essay that training and recruiting troops was becoming a serious challenge.
“The prolonged nature of the war, limited opportunities for the rotation of soldiers on the line of contact, gaps in legislation that seem to legally evade mobilization, significantly reduce the motivation of citizens to serve with the military.”
The essay admitted a bleak reality: Ukraine needs more people in uniform, and it needs them now. Wars are won by men, not by armaments. Going by this metric, Ukraine has already lost.
The situation is far worse than Zaluzhny lets on. Reports of aging recruits are more frequent these days (the average age of new recruits is older than 40 years). Training of Ukrainians is rarely done in Ukraine. Instead, conscripts are shipped to places like the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. This may be because training facilities in their home country are not safe from Russian missile strikes, but a more likely explanation is that Ukraine is running low on experienced soldiers to train new fighters.
Training in foreign facilities is highly expedited, with programs that normally take months being fast tracked and completed in mere weeks. Yet another sign that Ukraine is desperate for combat-capable troops. The life expectancy of these trainees is not good, and it is saddening to see Ukraine’s population being used as a proxy in a conflict that should have gone to the negotiating table a long time ago.
NATO’s clear intent is to see the war continue, perhaps indefinitely. The problem is, that the general public has moved on to other concerns, including the war in Israel and its potential to spread beyond Gaza. Ammunition and arms shipments once destined for Ukraine are now being diverted to Israel. Zelensky has become visibly frustrated with the situation. After many months of being told by US and EU politicians that the whole of the West was flying Ukrainian flags over their homes, reality is finally slapping the former comedian in the face.
As some predicted last year, “Ukraine fatigue” has set in. The majority of Americans polled now say they no longer support more funding or arms for Ukraine. The Democrat and Neocon push for American boots on the ground was immediately quashed by the public. The purpose behind prolonging the war (convincing Westerners to jump behind a plan for direct engagement with Russia) seems to have failed.
Beyond the logistical nightmare, the growing possibility of Donald Trump returning to the White House is also weighing on the minds of the Ukrainian leadership. Trump has stated that he plans to put together a deal to end the war as soon as he enters office. This means that Zelensky will be forced to accept a diplomatic settlement, something he has said he will never do.
As winter closes in the tone shift in Ukraine is dramatic. It’s another winter of Russian infrastructure strikes, power outages, and utility shortages. Today calls for a ceasefire and peace in Gaza are overwhelming, and yet, similar calls for peace in Ukraine are nonexistent. Maybe it’s time to ask why.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.