For some weeks now there have been growing signs of Russian failure at the front, particularly in the north and south.  In Donetsk, meanwhile, the Russian advance is slower than ever.  Pokrovsk is still not fully under Russian control, and may now never be so.  In this video Jason Jay Smart alights on the apparent flight of Vladislav Surkov as a sign of trouble in Putin’s inner circle, and pulls together the political and military strands to make the case for something broken at the top of Russian power that can’t be put back together again.

00:00 – Intro: Putin’s House of Cards
01:40 – Kremlin Exile: The Fall of Vladislav Surkov
03:04 – Putinism Unmasked: The Architect of Russian Propaganda
04:17 – Crimea Assault: Ukraine Destroys Russian Radar
05:04 – Frontline Failure: Russian Soldiers in Retreat
05:47 – Command Paralysis: The Kremlin’s Communication Crisis
06:52 – Internal Sabotage: Putin’s Health and Elite Purges
08:53 – Bot Network Collapse: Russia’s Failed Influence War
09:51 – Russian Shadow Fleet: Espionage and Oil Smuggling
12:38 – The Breaking Point: Putin’s Final Stand

Paul Warburg explains the technical impact and potential military consequences of the ending of unauthorised access to the Starling system:

Sometime tomorrow, or not long after, four things will likely happen in the politics of Epstein World.

1. Keir Starmer will request an audience with the King before travelling back to the House of Commons to announce his departure from No 10.

2. Angela Raynor and Wes Streeting will compete to lead tributes to his leadership and speak of his personal warmth and support during their respective time as an MP.  Both might just be lying.

3. The Labour candidate for the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, someone called Angeliki Stogia, will be pressured into resigning her candidacy, and an unseemly rush to put Andy Burnham on the ticket will be initiated.  However Burnham, having just returned to his Manchester mayorality after an unsuccessful attempt to get the nomination, will be forced to decline on the basis that he can’t dis-own the lucky, lucky people of Manchester a second time.  That said, there is the interesting question as to whether at least half the Labour parliamentary party would want to campaign for Burnham anyway.

4. Peter Mandelson, just thrown out of the party by Starmer and about to have his knighthood revoked, will issue a brief statement of sorrow for the pain and difficulty he has caused to the former PM.  He, too, might just be lying.

Something is definitely happening.  The “loveless landslide” of the May 2024 UK General Election, which handed Keir Starmer a 174-seat majority in the Commons, has been followed by a year and a half of utterly shambolic government.  Labour Party polling is stuck a couple of points above the Conservatives.  Never in any way “a man of the people”, Starmer of the tortured expression and halting, charmless delivery is now held in contempt even by a third of his own MPs.  Everyone knows that complete disaster awaits when he has to go to the country (by May 2029 latest).  And that’s if he survives that long in office himself.  I hope he does.  He’s the perfect failing Establishment clone.

Out among the Englishry, though, it’s a story of gathering rebellion.  There is anger about many things.  But the dominant consideration by far is race and immigration.  The Southport riots were not followed by a period of peace and recalibration.  They were followed by several instances of sexual assault involving illegal migrants, which led to the long-running protests by local people, often women, who did not want young men from the Third World dumped in hotels in their towns and villages.  The protests forced the Home Office to move away from the hotel strategy – but only as far as using army camps instead.  So, of course, protest is switching there.

Consonant with the hotels protests was the sudden and stirring appearance of the national flag – sometimes the Cross of St George, sometimes the Union Jack - along public highways all over the country.  Where these flags came from and how they got to fly in the first place was and is a mystery.  At a time when councils were flying the rainbow flag, the Palestinian flag, the EU flag, patriots decided to issue a riposte.  It certainly felt good to this Englishman.

Now, on top of all that, we have Amelia taking over social media.  Apparently, the pace of it is such that 12,000 posts about her were made on one day.  I don’t even “do” social media, so I had to rely on our sturdy friend Manc to point me in Amelia’s direction.  I won’t re-tell the sorry tale of the Pathways game concocted by Prevent, and its portrayal of this goth girl with purple hair and a choker as a racist and xenophobe.  But it was clearly a great idea to subvert that and make a national heroine out of her.  Now she is everywhere teaching the young about English history and fighting back against the pathologies of the political Establishment.  She has Swedish, German and French variants doing the same service for their young people.  It is a great use of AI.

Here, then, is by far the best Amelia video I have seen, a gentle and beautiful, purpose-written song exquisitely handling the subject of mass repatriation.  It is posted by Choking Fox.  The AI is high quality.  The video even finishes with a solution to the sorry fact that childbirths to the non-native cohorts are now virtually equal to those of the English:

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Friday 9th January

Mahyad Tousi, an Iranian–American film-maker, scriptwriter, producer and director lives in London and runs TousiTV, claimed to be the most watched political channel in the UK.  As one would expect he is following the people’s revolution in his homeland with amazement and joy.  What he showing us now makes it very unlikely that the Khamenei regime can survive.  For a flavour of the electric excitement on the streets here is his latest show:

24 hours on, Saturday evening, 10th January

... and this is the TousiTV broadcast:-

... and then the IRGC began its slaughter of somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 protesters on the streets of Iran’s cities.  The process came to a halt.  But now ...

February 28th - Khamenie dead, IRGC leaders dead, US strikes on-going.

The people are celebrating already.  There are calls for Pahlavi to return.  A gun battle is being waged to free political prisoners in Tehran (which could be important, because there is no revolutionary leadership among the people at large).  We wait for news.

From the exiled dissident news outlet Moscow Times:

Residents of the town of Valdai in Russia’s Novgorod region said they neither heard nor saw signs of a large-scale drone attack overnight on Monday despite official claims that nearly 100 Ukrainian drones targeted President Vladimir Putin’s residence there.

Fourteen residents told the independent outlet Mozhem Obyasnit that they received no text alerts warning of a drone threat and did not hear any buzzing sounds or explosions characteristic of a drone attack.

“There was no noise that night, no explosions, nothing,” one resident was quoted as saying. “If something like that had happened, the whole town would have been talking about it.”

Putin’s Valdai residence, known as Dolgiye Borody, lies northeast of the town and is separated from it by Lake Valdai.

Residents told Mozhem Obyasnit that they usually know when the Russian president visits his residence due to the heavy helicopter traffic accompanying his arrival.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that Ukraine’s armed forces had attempted a “massive” drone attack on Putin’s residence using 91 drones, all of which were allegedly destroyed by air defense systems.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s official report said only 18 drones were shot down over the Novgorod region during the night.

Lavrov said the alleged attack would prompt Russia to revise its negotiating position on Ukraine, though he added that Moscow did not plan to withdraw from talks with the United States.

He also warned that the incident would not go unanswered, saying Russian forces had already selected targets and timing for retaliatory strikes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Lavrov’s allegations “fake” and “extremely dangerous,” arguing that Moscow was trying to sabotage diplomatic efforts to end the war and justify continued strikes on Ukraine.

Shortly after Lavrov issued his statement, the White House said U.S. President Donald Trump concluded a “positive” phone call with Putin about Ukraine.

Trump then criticized the alleged Ukrainian drone attack, saying it was “not the right time” given the ongoing talks to end the war.

This morning Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that Russia’s negotiating position towards Ukraine will become tougher.  So the lumbering, lying Kremlin machine clunks into gear to prevent Donald Trump from moving forward on the basis of Zelensky’s 20-point peace plan.  It had been 95% agreed, Trump had said.  Now nothing will be agreed.

So, a question.  Does Trump actually believe that Ukrainian armed forces chose this most critical moment, of all moments, to launch a 91-drone attack on one of Putin’s palatial homes, but failed to get a single one past the creaking Russian anti-aircraft defences?  Or does he, in fact, understand perfectly well that Putin told him the most obvious, bare-faced lie, but his policy-aim of making American corporations great again requires him to smile on the Russian dictator all the same and in all things?

As a rule, ignorance in high places does not go unremarked.  Ignorance is one of the markers of the Trump administration, almost as though the president does not believe in knowledge and experience.  Perhaps he associates it with that self-interested profession of government which he saw, at least at the beginning of his first term, as “the swamp”.  He certainly values loyalty and ideological unity above it.  How else could one explain Hegseth and Gabbard ... Witkoff ... Kushner?  As best, they are signifiers of the shallowness and inconsistency of MAGA thinking.

Here is Paul Warburg lucidly explaining the new National Security Strategy’s intellectual failings.  He doesn’t venture into MAGA ideology.  Alas, there are no revelations about Donald Trump’s Cromwellian leanings, courtesy of Curtis whatsisname.  But the trespass of ideology on the ground of strategy is identified as the basic mistake of the confused people in the State Department who fashioned the new policy (which, if it survives reality for any extended period is going to have profoundly negative implications for the European world).

Paul is a geopolitical analyst associated with The Icarus Project.

Caolan Robertson, the young independent film-maker and campaigner for truth and justice in Ukraine, demonstrates the will and unity, courage and simple virtue of the people of the Donbas.  This is the real Ukraine, at war for the values of home, family, land.