(End of the American Dream)—The war in Ukraine has just moved to an entirely new level, but most Americans do not even realize that we are closer to “nuclear Armageddon” than ever. Very early on the morning of May 10th, Russian forces began to pour across Ukraine’s border north of Kharkiv. In the short-term this will enable the Russians to create a buffer zone around the Belgorod region and force Ukraine to pull desperately needed forces away from the eastern front. But eventually I believe that the Russians fully intend to take Kharkiv, and that would be an absolutely devastating blow.
Needless to say, losing Ukraine’s second largest city is not an option for Ukraine’s western backers, and they are determined to do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of what we just witnessed. Russian forces have come across the border in an area that is far away from any other current conflict zone. UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron says that Russia has basically “invaded [Ukraine] again”…
A Ukrainian regional official insisted Russia’s progress was not yet “significant” but admitted ground fighting in the area was spreading. Meanwhile, speaking on British television, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron acknowledged it was an “extremely dangerous moment,” adding that Russia had effectively “invaded [Ukraine] again.”
He is right. This move by Russia really is essentially a fresh “invasion”, and it represents the most dramatic offensive that the Russians have undertaken since the early days of the war. According to CBS News, the Russians were able to capture five villages on Saturday and four more on Sunday…
Evacuation teams worked non-stop throughout the day to take residents, most of whom were elderly, out of harm’s way.
At least 4,000 civilians have fled the Kharkiv region since Friday, when Moscow’s forces launched the operation, Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said in a social media statement. Heavy fighting raged Sunday along the northeast front line, where Russian forces attacked 27 settlements in the past 24 hours, he said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had captured four villages, in addition to five villages reported to have been seized the day before.
It is being estimated that the Russians are in control of about 100 square kilometers in the border area, and this advance is going to force Ukrainian leaders to transfer forces from other areas…
Russian Federation forces have penetrated the defenses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from 3 to 5 km in Kharkov region, with a control zone in the border area to 110 square kilometers.
This will have a ripple effect in all the 600-mile-long frontline. As soon as Ukrainian top General Syrsky begins to transfer units to the northern regions of Kharkov and Sumy, the front in Donetsk will fold, and Chasov Yar, Kurakhovo and Krasnoarmeysk are expected to instantly collapse.
Ukrainian Armed Forces in fact have withdrawn some of the units of the 42nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade from the front near Chasov Yar and are hastily transferring troops north.
Of course the Ukrainians don’t have enough soldiers anywhere at this stage.
The Russians have been steadily gaining ground all over the map in recent weeks, and over the weekend significant gains were made near Chasiv Yar and Krasnohorivka…
It is not just in Ukraine’s north that Kyiv’s armed forces are losing ground.
DeepStateMap also shows Russia making further gains in two other key areas, most notably towards the town of Chasiv Yar, which has become an important forward military position, and further south in the industrial town of Krasnohorivka, where Russian troops are now in control of the town’s main facility, a brick factory.
Ukraine is clearly losing the war, and western leaders are getting desperate.
When asked about the new Russian offensive near Kharkiv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Face the Nation that we “are not going anywhere”…
“We’ve been providing the systems to do that, but it’s a challenging moment. We are not going anywhere, and neither are more than some 50 countries that are supporting Ukraine. That will continue and if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin thinks he can outlast Ukraine, outlast its supporters. He’s wrong.”
The U.S. is going to continue to pour billions of dollars into Ukraine, but everyone can see that isn’t going to be enough to alter the trajectory of the conflict.
The only way that Ukraine will be able to win is for NATO to intervene directly, and that is dangerously close to becoming a reality.
For example, politicians in Germany actually want to use NATO air defense systems based in Poland and Romania “to protect the western regions of Ukraine from Russian drones”…
There is a proposal to use NATO air defense systems deployed on the eastern borders of the Alliance to protect the western regions of Ukraine from Russian drones. In particular, Poland and Romania could do this.
This idea is supported by representatives of some German political parties, including the ruling Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Union 90/Greens.
According to the newspaper, the idea of using NATO air defense systems deployed in Romania and Poland and operated by NATO forces to shoot down Russian drones over Western Ukraine was proposed by Nico Lange, an expert at the Munich Security Council (MSC) and former NATO Deputy Secretary General, and was suggested by Lieutenant General Horst Heinrich Braus.
According to Lange, this would create a 70-kilometer safe zone on the Ukrainian border. This could relieve Ukrainian air defense forces in other parts of the front.
It is also being reported that the Germans are now considering conscripting all 18-year-olds…
Germany is considering introducing conscription for all 18-year-olds, as it looks to boost its troop numbers in the face of Russian military aggression.
Military planners in Berlin are in the final stages of discussing three options, two of which involve a form of conscription, according to leaked plans reported in the German media.
I was stunned when I saw that.
I don’t think that young people in Germany will be too thrilled about being forced to go into the military. But this is where we are at.
NATO really is on the brink of a hot war with Russia.
Speaking of NATO, the largest military exercises that the alliance has organized since the Cold War are being conducted right now…
State-of-the-art attack helicopters today swooped in a show of force against Vladimir Putin for NATO’s biggest military exercise since the Cold War.
British and US troops performed a land assault in Estonia, amid the threat posed by the Kremlin. They were supported by two of our Apache AH-64E attack helicopters, making their debut in an alliance exercise.
Explosions rang out during the exercise, with troops simulating a battlefield scenario of seizing territory. Over two years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the wargame took place under Exercise Swift Response.
During the early stages of 2024, there has been a lot of chatter about the possibility of western troops being sent to Ukraine.
If that happens, that will put us just one step away from nuclear war.
What would you do if you were the president of the United States and you just learned that the Russians have launched their nukes?
Whoever is in the White House when that day arrives will only have a very limited amount of time to decide…
Once the president learns from his nuclear command and control team that he must act, he has only six minutes to respond. To “respond” means responding with our own nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoir that six minutes is an irrational amount of time to “decide whether to release Armageddon! …Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope…How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”
Yet, the president must respond anyway. In this six-minute window, the president must decide how many nuclear weapons to use and which targets to strike—while also being briefed on estimates of how many tens of thousands, or millions of people, would be instantly incinerated, with an almost equal number dying days, weeks, and months later from radiation poisoning. All this to consider under a literal ticking clock.
As I keep warning my readers, the Russians have been feverishly preparing to fight a nuclear war for many years and we have not.
If the Russians launch missiles from ultra-quiet submarines parked just off our shores, the nukes will start hitting before they can even get the president out of bed.
It is imperative that we avoid such a scenario, and that is why I have been pushing for a peaceful solution in Ukraine for a long time.
Unfortunately, no peaceful solution is even being considered.
Leaders on both sides are absolutely obsessed with “winning” this war, and that means that “nuclear Armageddon” is getting closer with each passing day.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.