A series of meetings between representatives of the United States, Qatar and Israel have just taken place in Cairo with, aimed at working out the details of an increasingly elusive ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Hamas representatives have repeatedly been invited to join these negotiations, but they have not yet given their consent.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to drag his country into a war with no end in sight. Despite the fact that Israel razed the Gaza Strip to the ground and eliminated several Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, it did not come close to victory on either the northern or southern fronts.

Initially, the collective West was celebrating the Ukrainian invasion of Russia in the Kursk border region. This ill-advised action, so much so … that [they] soon realized was premature. When I use they—sarcastically, I mean Ukraine and NATO collectively, as it is clear that such an operation was planned by outsiders, as even Ukrainian soldiers themselves were in awe of the thought of participating in an attack on Russia—as even simple soldiers knew it would not end well.

With Joe Biden, all set to exit the White House later this year, his one-term presidency has begun to come under increasing scrutiny to determine his legacy. What sort of President Biden is/was? To what extent was he able to achieve his foreign policy goals? What characterizes his era? Unlike Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and subsequent US “exit” from the Middle East and America’s “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Biden’s main legacy is his interventionist foreign policy. These interventions, however, were unlike the direct military interventions of the Bush and the Obama administrations.

On August 10^th, the Israeli Defense Forces (a rather inappropriate name, given their recent history) struck the Tabeen School Complex in Gaza, where it is estimated around 4000 people, refugees from the fighting in other parts of Gaza, were sheltering.

The civil war in Sudan, which began in April, 2023, is on the verge of spreading to the entire Horn of Africa. With almost 10 million people internally displaced and more than 25 million facing acute hunger, humanitarian losses are already catastrophic and continue to grow. This tragedy is a result of the endless cycle of failed peace initiatives and the escalation of conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The Israeli strike that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pushed the Middle East a lot closer to a wider war than it was before July 31^st. Because Haniyeh was killed on Iranian soil during an official visit, Tehran promised military retaliation. The latter sees this as necessary to punish Israel to counterbalance the humiliation it suffered for failing to protect an official guest. But, thanks to Russia’s intervention and proactive diplomacy, clouds of a wider war have begun to disappear.

According to recent reports, Israel, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is doing everything in its power to prevent the cessation of hostilities in Gaza and is trying to provoke Iran into starting a regional conflict. Israel believes that such actions will help resolve some aspects of strategic security in the future.

In the lead up to the Ukrainian military’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, even Western headlines were dominated by reports of Ukraine’s gradual demise. Ukraine is admittedly suffering arms and ammunition shortages, as well as facing an unsolvable manpower crisis. Russia has been destroying Ukrainian military power faster than Ukraine and its Western sponsors can reconstitute it.

The ongoing tension between Iran and Israel can be understood in the context that the latter views itself as the vanguard of Western Civilization in the region. Israeli representative stated as much on 14^th August 2024, during an emergency UNSC meeting convened to discuss his country’s bombing of Al-Tabeen school that killed about 100 civilians. Israel and The West cannot foresee themselves backing down until the entire region is brought under neocolonialism.

On the evening of August 11, my companion and I were watching a Russian series about World War Two, Staying Alive, dealing with the first days of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. It’s an excellent dramatic work depicting the reality of the war and what it meant for the Soviet people. I highly recommend it. You can find it on the Internet. But what, you may ask, has this to do with anything?

It is time for Russia to fully mobilize against the nagging threat posed by the NATO-backed Ukrainian state. President Putin’s pragmatic approach to keeping NATO off Russia’s borders will undoubtedly be shifted given the recent Ukraine Army incursions at Kursk. Many of us suspected it would come to this. Russia must crush the Kyiv-NATO experiment down the tubes.