Even though most Americans aren’t paying much attention at this point, the way that the war in Ukraine is evolving should greatly concern all of us. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his generals very clearly understand that they are in very big trouble unless they can draw the U.S. and other NATO powers directly into the conflict.
All of Bakhmut is now under Russian control, and the Ukrainians continue to lose troops at a staggering pace. They are holding a losing hand, but if Ukrainian leaders can find a way to get the Russians to use tactical nukes or other weapons of mass destruction, that would change everything. Western powers would feel compelled to respond in kind, and then we really would have a truly apocalyptic conflict on our hands.
In recent days, there has been a tremendous amount of hype about the coming “counter-offensive” that the Ukrainians have supposedly been planning…
Kyiv renewed its plea for operational silence around the long-awaited counter-offensive against Russian forces with a clip of heavily-armed soldiers pressing their fingers to their lips.
The sleekly-produced footage features masked front-line troops gesturing for silence amid the distant rumble of artillery and gunfire.
It ends with images of soaring F-16 fighter jets – long coveted by Kyiv as it seeks to boost its air defence against Russian missiles and drones.
But instead of trying to retake Bakhmut or any of the other areas of Ukraine that the Russians have captured, the Ukrainians have been focusing their attacks on Russia itself.
Long-range drones have been hitting targets very deep inside Russia, and on one occasion that even included the Kremlin.
And Ukrainian artillery has been relentlessly pounding Russian territory. The shelling has been particularly brutal in the Belgorod region…
Ukrainian forces continued to shell Russia’s border region of Belgorod overnight into Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
“Overnight, it was quite restless,” Gladkov said on the Telegram channel, adding that the Shebekino and Volokonovsky districts had suffered “lots” of damage from the latest shelling.
Shelling civilian targets in Russian territory is going to do nothing to help the Ukrainians regain lost territory.
But it is putting enormous pressure on Russian leaders.
Just imagine how we would feel if U.S. territory was being shelled. We would be calling on the White House to nuke the living daylights out of whoever was shelling us.
Well, that is exactly how millions upon millions of Russian citizens feel right now.
And what makes things even worse is that small “militia groups” have begun crossing the Russian border to conduct attacks on nearby cities…
The New York Times wrote on Saturday that “Shebekino, a town of 40,000 six miles from the border, has effectively become a new part of the front line as Ukraine has intensified attacks inside Russia, including on residential areas near its own borders.” This is all upending the lives of residents in the border region, akin to what already happened long ago on the Ukrainian side of the border. “The spate of assaults, most recently by militia groups aligned against Moscow, has sparked the largest military evacuation effort in Russia in decades,” the report underscored. The past days have witnessed area residents move into temporary shelters, including the large Belgorod arena in the oblast capital.
The “militia groups” that are performing these raids are actually using equipment that has been provided by the U.S. and Poland…
The Russian fighters aligned against Moscow who launched a cross-border raid from Ukraine into the Belgorod region of Russia last week used at least four tactical vehicles originally given to Ukraine by the United States and Poland, U.S. officials said, raising questions about the unintended use of NATO-provided equipment and Kyiv’s commitments to secure materiel supplied by its supporters.
Three of the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, also known as MRAPs, taken into Russia by the fighters were provided by the United States and the fourth was from Poland, according to people familiar with the U.S. intelligence finding, which has not previously been reported. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
And it is being reported that Polish fighters are among those that have been going across the border during these raids…
The Polish Volunteer Corps has published pictures, confirming it participated in the first armed raid into the Belgorod region, Russia, together with the Russian Volunteer Corps
Russian soldiers claimed earlier they heard some of the enemies communicating in Polish
This war has reached such a dangerous stage.
The Russians aren’t stupid. They know that foreign fighters now make up a very significant percentage of the forces that they are facing.
And if Russian cities continue to get shelled and raided, it is only a matter of time before Russian leaders lose their temper.
If the Russians decide to use tactical nukes, it really will be the beginning of the end.
So let us pray that cooler heads will prevail. Meanwhile, things with China continue to get even more tense.
On Saturday, a Chinese warship and an American warship almost slammed directly into one another in the Taiwan Strait…
This is the astonishing moment a Chinese warship comes within 150 yards of an American destroyer in Taiwan Strait, just days after the Pentagon said it would not stand for ‘bullying’ by Beijing.
Footage obtained by Global News, shows a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warship cut across the bow of a U.S. guided-missile destroyer on Saturday while it was transiting the Taiwan Strait.
USS Chung Hoon and HMCS Montreal had also been transiting the strait on a rare joint mission when a PLAN warhsip cut across the bow of Chung-Hoon.
We really are living during a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, but most of us in the western world are focused on other things.
Even though our leaders have clearly demonstrated how incompetent they are over and over again, most of us just assume that they will be able to keep us out of a nuclear war.
Unfortunately, both sides just continue to escalate matters, and it appears that it is just a matter of time before someone crosses a line that will never be able to be uncrossed.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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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.