(Substack)—In separate stories, it is being reported today that both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are taking the final steps before coming to the table to discuss a truce or temporary ceasefire. This could be the opening for President Donald J. Trump to establish a long-lasting peace between the warring nations.
Bloomberg reported that at last month’s high-level meetings in Saudi Arabia between Russian and US leaders, that there were indications that Putin is ready for a truce under certain conditions. Those conditions center around the good faith understanding that this can be resolved permanently if they begin with this truce.
According to Bloomberg:
Russia is willing to discuss a temporary truce in Ukraine provided there is progress toward a final peace settlement, according to people familiar with the matter in Moscow.
In the first signal of a positive response from President Vladimir Putin to US counterpart Donald Trump’s call for a ceasefire, the offer was conveyed at last month’s talks in Saudi Arabia between top Russian and American officials, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing internal policy.
In order to agree to a cessation of hostilities, there would have to be a clear understanding about the framework principles of the final peace accord, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Russia will insist in particular on establishing the parameters of an eventual peacekeeping mission, including agreement on which countries would take part, said another person familiar with the issue.
Fox News is reporting that President Trump is threatening sanctions if Russia continues their attacks:
President Donald Trump threatened to impose “large scale” sanctions against Russia after the country carried out a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said he was “strongly considering” sanctions and tariffs “until a ceasefire and final settlement agreement on peace is reached.”
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told reporters that Trump is ready to use carrots or sticks” to bring both Russia and Ukraine to the table. When asked by Fox News Channel Senior White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich for more details on what could be sanctioned, Hassett simply said there are “a heck of a lot of things.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is ready to return to the table to discuss a ceasefire and signing a mineral deal with the United States next week. Zero Hedge reported the story below…
High Level US-Ukraine Meeting Set for Riyadh After Zelensky ‘Apologizes’
The US and Ukraine will give it another try, after the ‘missiles for minerals’ deal has faltered amid President Zelensky’s resistance to signing the deal, and the big diplomatic blow-up and spat of last Friday.
Top US and Ukrainian officials are expected to meet in Saudi Arabia next Wednesday to discuss a ceasefire effort with Russia, which will mark the first such high-level meeting since last Friday’s public spat involving Zelensky at the White House.
Not only were weapons shipments to Kiev suspended as of Monday, but US intelligence-sharing followed. Max Blumenthal of the Gray Zone has aptly commented, “Ukraine can not carry out long range attacks inside Russia without US satellite guidance and intel. This is what we meant when we said the US was waging a proxy war that tempted nuclear escalation.”
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The upcoming Riyadh meeting will be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as national security advisor Mike Waltz. Andrii Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, is expected to lead the Ukrainian delegation.
Just prior to that, on Monday, President Zelensky will be in Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This is after an initially scheduled trip for last month was canceled.
Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East has described that President Trump received a letter of regret from Zelensky just prior to his Tuesday Congressional address.
Trump saw the letter “as a good first step — there was an apology and acknowledgment that the U.S. has done so much for Ukraine and a sense of gratitude,” Witkoff said. Other sources cast this more as a ‘tacit apology’.
Crucially, this marks the first time the word ‘apology’ was used, which perhaps explains why talks with Ukraine are back on (the White House said this was a requirement).
Still, the White House has confirmed it is “pausing and reviewing all aspects” of its relationship with Ukraine, with some officials such as Walz describing this as temporary, and which is likely to be turned back on soon.
Zelensky has also confirmed Thursday, “Ukrainian and American teams have resumed work, and we hope that next week we will have a meaningful meeting.” He said he will send a delegation to meet with “military representatives of countries that are ready to make greater efforts to reliably guarantee security within the framework of ending this war.”
Some top Ukraine officials are saying there was no apology…
Zelensky won’t apologize to Trump after their White House meeting, as “there’s nothing to apologize for,” says presidential advisor Podolyak. pic.twitter.com/Qq73utk3Xz
— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 7, 2025
Ironically the last time the US delegation was in Riyadh was for a ‘successful’ first engagement with the Russian side led by FM Lavrov. US and Russia followed this with an Istanbul meeting, amid preparations for Presidents Trump and Putin to meet.
Peace Through Strength
If this can come together, it would mark one of the most extraordinary turnarounds initiated by American foreign policy in history. For three years under the Biden-Harris regime, there was nothing but hostility as peace talks never advanced beyond the whining phase. If President Trump can pull off a truce in his first two months in office, it would be historic.
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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.