A month ago, US president Donald Trump appeared to be all in favour of doing a deal with his Russian counterpart whereby Ukraine would give up land in return for peace.
With Ukraine’s actor-stooge ‘president’ Volodymyr Zelensky usefully marginalised and the two presidents engaged in intensive head-to-head diplomacy in Alaska, it seemed possible that a deal could be struck whereby Zelensky, or his successor, could be forced to get serious about negotiating the terms of Kiev’s surrender – the only real deal to be brokered.
Yet now President Trump is bragging on Fox News that the Kiev junta could still regain all the land it has lost, and posting on his TruthSocial account that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”
What can this mean? Has the Pentagon stumbled across some superweapon guaranteed to reverse the whole tide of the war?
There were some Simple Simons who took this fervid optimism at face value. French president Emmanuel Macron, up to his ears with mass street protests and threatened economic meltdown at home, was happy to escape to the United Nations where he could congratulate Trump on his reassurance that Ukraine can “not only hold on, but ensure its rights prevail”.
And Zelensky himself, quizzed by a journalist as to whether Trump’s shift on the role of land concessions could help end the war, told him: “I think so, and God bless.”
However, cooler heads will have noticed that Trump’s seeming optimism is tempered by some rather important caveats. The social media post which sparked the Fox interview actually reads: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form” (emphasis added).
But that support is precisely what European governments, beset by their own economic crisis, political turmoil, rocketing energy bills and emptying weapons arsenals, are finding it very difficult to provide.
When Trump posts that “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”, what is expressed is not so much a revival of confidence in the ability of the collective west to beat Russia, as the sound of a vigorous washing of hands in the White House.
The hollow “Good luck to all!” could not ring more cheerlessly.
Kiev’s Gleiwitz gambit: Europe on the edge of 1939 redux
In desperation, the Kiev junta has been staging false flag attacks on its neighbouring countries in the hopes that they – and all of Nato – can be dragged in as open participants in the war before it is too late and the whole Ukrainian front collapses. And all the signs are that this collapse will come very soon if no white horse comes over the hill to save the demoralised and broken remains of the Ukrainian armed forces.
According to Gerry Nolan of The Islander Telegram channel:
“History doesn’t just repeat – it mutates. In 1939, the world stumbled into catastrophe after Nazi operatives staged the infamous Gleiwitz incident: a radio station seized, a body left as ‘proof’, and a lie broadcast to justify war.
“Eighty-six years later, whispers from the battlefield suggest Kiev may be scripting its own Gleiwitz 2.0. Only this time, the stage is Nato’s eastern flank, the props are repurposed Geran drones, and the audience is a sleepwalking Europe.
“Hungarian journalists were the first to sound the alarm: several downed Russian drones, repaired at the Lorta plant in Lvov, had been transferred to Yavoriv – the Nato training ground just 10km from Poland. Their reporting frames this not as clever engineering, but as desperation.
“The defeat Ukraine faces is no longer tactical; it has metastasised into a strategic collapse. And with collapse comes the most dangerous instinct of all: to drag collective Europe down into the abyss.
“The choreography is grotesquely simple: patch up the drones, load them with warheads, fly them into Nato supply hubs in Poland or Romania under the false flag of a ‘Russian attack’. Then unleash the western media chorus, cue the Article 5 panic, and push Europe into a war it neither asked for nor can survive.
“Just as in 1939, a manufactured spark could set the continent ablaze.
“Why would Kiev take such a suicidal gamble? Because its army is broken. The reserves are spent, the warehouses of its sponsors emptied, the once-mighty ‘arsenal of democracy’ is itself teetering. For Kiev, provoking Nato’s direct involvement is not a choice, it is the last card in a deck worn thin by defeat.
“False flags become not just possible, but inevitable, when survival depends on manufacturing enemies larger than yourself.
“And drones are perfect for such theatre. Each Geran carries up to 90kg of explosives, and with minor modification, even wreckage can be made combat-ready again. Crude, cheap, devastating. Every launch forces Nato to waste million-dollar interceptors, humiliating its defences. For Kiev to turn these drones against Nato under false colours would be an act of desperation, but also of cold calculation.
“Yet the real battlefield is not the skies but the information space. Every incursion, every explosion, becomes a contested story. Was it Russia? Was it Ukraine? Or Nato itself? In the fog of narratives, perception replaces reality.
“And the west has a long tradition of manufacturing pretexts: from Iraq’s phantom WMDs to Syria’s chemical ‘red lines’. Why should Ukraine’s survival be any less dependent on deception?
“Here lies the bitter irony: while Kiev toys with Armageddon, Moscow calibrates, warns, and shows restraint. Russia signals red lines, but it is the west’s proxy that now toys with continental annihilation. Europe, once again, is the hostage – and in this hostage drama, the ransom is nothing less than peace itself.
“The echoes of 1939 are unmistakable. Then, the world stumbled into war because a lie was allowed to masquerade as a casus belli. Today, if Kiev executes its Gleiwitz gambit, Europe could stumble into World War 3 – and not by necessity, but by deception.
“The multipolar order will rise regardless; what remains in question is whether Europe destroys itself before accepting reality. History’s verdict will not be kind to those who gamble with false flags on the edge of the abyss.” (26 September 2025)
