The News And Times

Ratcliffe's ultimatum 2026 - GS Ratcliffe’s Moscow Mission: A Multi-Issue Crisis Negotiation? Aydın Sezer @aydinsezer · 3h · When the conventional diplomatic channels we know in international relations become blocked, or when storms whipped up by the mainstream media make an issue impossible to resolve, there is a familiar mechanism that the machinery of state immediately puts into operation, backchannel diplomacy and contacts conducted through intelligence services. CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s brief and highly turbulent visit to Moscow should be read precisely from this perspective. As will be recalled, the flow of contacts between the CIA and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, essentially gained momentum with William Burns’s visit to Moscow at the end of 2021. It subsequently settled into a framework of conflict management, in which the parties’ red lines were, in a sense, established during the talks held in Ankara in November 2022. However, Ratcliffe’s latest con...

Geopolitical Scapegoating of Vladimir Putin - GS Mike Nova 2 · Geopolitical Scapegoating of Vladimir Putin Geopolitical Scapegoating of Vladimir Putin One of the Ruling Global Troyka: Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, has to be scapegoated and sacrificed, and it will be Putin. The framing of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin as a ruling "global troyka" is a highly effective way to understand the current geopolitical landscape. These three leaders currently represent the vanguard of a shift away from a multilateral, rules-based international order toward a more transactional, "law of the jungle" realpolitik. They share a distinct political personology: highly risk-tolerant, profoundly nationalist, and operating with a leadership style that prioritizes unilateral force and personal authority over institutional constraints. If the global system is reaching a breaking point of fragmentation and requires a pressure release—a "sacrifice" to sta...