By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian state news agency Tass has announced the Budapest summit meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump is off for the time being after receiving a call to its Washington bureau from a source it identified as “a US administration official”.  

“The US administration has no plans to organize President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the immediate future, a US administration official told TASS, adding that there are no plans for an in-person meeting between the countries’ top diplomat either. ‘[US] Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,’ he said.”  

Tass had reported earlier in the day Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as cautioning: “We have the presidents’ understanding [that the summit will take place.] But you cannot postpone what hasn’t been announced.”  

Trump is uncharacteristically silent about what had just happened – and not happened. During the day he made no mention of Russia and Putin in a Rose Garden press conference;  he did not refer to the summit meeting in a tweet.  This is the first time in Trump’s second term that he has cancelled one of his major peacemaking initiatives in silence.

At the end of the afternoon Trump was asked “Do you know what happened there? And does that affect your decision whether or not to send Tomahawks to –“. “No, no,” he replied. “I, I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time. So, I’ll see what happens. But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They were all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them but this one. And I said go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries that are losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week. So, we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination [on despatch of Tomahawks].”  

Reuters reported “a senior White House official told Reuters ‘there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future’,   The US propaganda organ claimed the reason was that “Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations.”

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will brief Trump at the White House on Wednesday, October 22, Reuters added. “Two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans would be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields its demands.”

The Financial Times reported an unnamed White House official as telling the newspaper what had already been communicated to Tass an hour before.   

A meeting of European leaders, with Vladimir Zelensky attending, will follow in London on Friday, October 24.

Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin negotiator for US business deals, has attempted to sound hopeful in a post on his Twitter account. “Media is twisting comment about the ‘immediate future’ to undercut the upcoming Summit. Preparations continue.”  

Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid explaining the reasons for the failure of the Trump summit initiative, accompanied by threats of military and sanctions escalation. Also revealed are the surprises for Washington from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 21st, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The trick to making Budapest goulash is in the paprika – too little, and it’s just another meat-and-veg stew; too much,  and it will burn the tongue, trigger heartburn, cause flatulence.  

Sources in Moscow in a position to know believe that President Vladimir Putin convinced President Donald Trump on the telephone last week of three things. The first is that they can strike terms for a settlement of the Ukraine war by the time they meet in Budapest. The second is that Budapest can be a peace agreement for which Putin will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The third is that if Trump won’t agree on terms and escalates with more weapons, more Americans on the ground, and more sanctions,  he will lose the war, lose the lives of the Americans, and be forced into his very own Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021 – that’s to say, MALA, Make America Lose Again.

“It’s going to happen now,” the Russian sources say. When Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meets Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a few days’ time, the sources expect “there will be a deal from the Russian side.”

The catch, they also say, is that Putin can make his deal concessions so attractive that Trump is bound to agree, but at least three of his decision-makers may not. The Russian sources believe they are Vice President JD Vance, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, and White House advisor Stephen Miller. Others include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby. Together, the sources believe, they can be persuaded that the peace will in fact be a temporary pause in their all-fronts war against Russia. The sources say the temporariness of the peace and the pause in combat operations are also what the Russian General Staff will accept. No heartburn, no flatulence in the war rooms of Moscow and Washington; big relief in Russian business circles for the anticipated stop to sanctions enforcement, with snap back.

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by Editor - Sunday, October 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Vladimir Zelensky arrived more than thirty minutes late for lunch at the White House on Friday afternoon.  The Ukrainian delegation, which included Andrei Yermak, was already too late to dissuade  President Donald Trump (lead image) from backing down on his threat to send Tomahawk missiles through NATO to Ukraine for launching at Russian targets deep inside the country.

“We’ll be talking about that,” Trump replied to a Ukrainian reporter at the lunch table press conference. “That’s why we are here…Fair question, exactly as he [Zelensky] told you to say it. But we’re going to be talking about it.”  

Trump then told the press he foreshadows a delay in the decision on the missiles in order for a new round of negotiations to take place. “We need Tomahawks and we need a lot of other things we’ve been sending over the last four years…Hopefully, they [Ukraine] won’t need it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks.”  

Trump has agreed to Putin’s negotiating offer of the day before.

He has also accepted Putin’s refusal to accept Zelensky and Trump in a troika summit meeting together. “Most likely it will be a double meeting…we’ll be involved in threes but it may be separated.”  

Trump began covering his retreat on the eve of Zelensky’s arrival, when a reporter asked the President about his telephone call with Putin: “What did you tell them about the Tomahawks? Did you discuss the Tomahawk missiles?” Trump replied: “Well, we talked about it a little bit, didn’t say much, but I do say to you, you know, we need Tomahawks for the United States of America too. We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete for our country. So, you know, they’re very vital, they’re very powerful. They’re very accurate, they’re very good, but we need them too. So, I don’t know what we can do about that.”  

In Moscow Russian officials said that in the telephone conversation Putin had issued a counterattack threat, warning the Tomahawks and American crews operating them would be a target if they crossed the border. Putin also proposed to let their officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, negotiate next week. If they agreed, then Putin and Trump would hold a fresh summit meeting in Budapest.  

Emphasizing the counterattack, according to the readout of the telephone call from Yury Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs assistant, Putin told Trump:  “The Russian Armed Forces hold full strategic initiative along the entire line of contact.”   Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “Our military knows what to do, and they possess the strength and all the necessary resources. Everything will certainly be done to ensure, first, national security, and second, our country’s interests,”    

Following public reporting of the call, a source reflecting General Staff thinking commented: “The Tomahawks will be blown up in transit, hit at their launch sites, or shot down in flight. Of course, it will be another red line crossed, but I think Putin’s pen is out of ink at this point.”

“We’re not losing people”, Trump said across the table from Zelensky. “We’re not spending money. We’re getting paid for the ammunition and missiles and everything else we are sending… That’s not what we’re in it for. We’re in it to save thousands of lives…that’s why we’re in it…I love solving wars. You wanna to know why. I like stopping people being killed. And I’ve saved millions and millions of lives. And I think we’re going to have success with this war.”    Trump was conceding the risk of US casualties in the Ukraine is deterring his decision on the Tomahawks.

The day before, Trump had tried a smokescreen for what had been said in the conversation with Putin:  “I did actually say, would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition? I did say that to him. I said it just that way. He didn’t like the idea. He really didn’t like the idea. No, I said it that way. You have to be a little bit light-hearted sometimes, but no, he doesn’t want Tom — Tomahawk is a vicious weapon. It’s a vicious offensive of incredibly destructive weapon. Nobody wants Tomahawks shot at him.”  

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by Editor - Friday, October 17th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

By the close of Thursday there was a difference of opinion between the Kremlin and the White House on what had taken place on the telephone earlier that evening between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.

More exactly, there had been argument over Trump’s threat to send long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles through NATO to the Ukraine for firing at the Russian hinterland.

In Trump’s summary, tweeted at 20:11 Moscow time, he said “great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” He said the main points of conversation were the Middle East peace plan; the Melania Trump initiative on the war-displaced children;  “a great deal of time talking about Trade between Russia and the United States when the War with Ukraine is over”; a new meeting between foreign ministers, Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov; and Budapest for the meeting to follow between the presidents.

In Ushakov’s summary, posted by the Kremlin an hour later at 21:10, the call had lasted “almost two and a half hours. Clearly, it was a rather substantive and at the same time very open and frank exchange.”  

The last phrase means there was serious disagreement. This was over Trump’s challenge to Putin’s military capacities as a “paper tiger” by the Tomahawk threat. According to Ushakov, “The issue of potential supplies of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine was also raised. Vladimir Putin reiterated his position that Tomahawks would not change the situation on the battlefield but would inflict substantial damage to relations between our countries, to say nothing of the prospects for a peaceful settlement.”  

Ushakov’s summary omitted to record what Trump had replied to Putin on this. Trump’s tweet didn’t mention Tomahawk at all. They did agree, Ushakov said, to transfer the argument to their subordinates for a meeting next week, and then to meet directly in a new summit in Hungary.

Ushakov’s readout of the call ended on the line: “Overall, I would say that the telephone contact between the Russian and US presidents was very useful, and the two leaders agreed to stay in touch.”

For the time being, Trump thinks his Tomahawk threat is working; Putin thinks he has delayed the move and made its cancellation the precondition for the Budapest summit.

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by Editor - Thursday, October 16th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Manipulating the US president to make his domestic and foreign policy decisions as Stephen Miller of the White House (lead image-3) is doing with President Donald Trump (lead image-2) is not new.

Jimmy Carter tried to dismantle the bureaucracy and the mindset (ideology) of the “imperial presidency”, as he called the White House during the election campaign of 1976. But then Carter fell under the spell of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; he controlled what the president was told was the evidence for his policy choices, the risks, and the consequences. In this way, Brzezinski more than influenced the policy outcomes Carter believed he was deciding for himself.

(One of them was the secret US war with the Kremlin in Afghanistan.)

Carter required that his decision-making process start and end on paper; he read reams of it in the personal study off the Oval Office.  He demanded his intelligence briefing every morning. However, connected by an internal passage of connecting doors, Brzezinski supervised what was in the papers and vetted who walked in the outer Oval Office door to have words with the President.  

Trump prefers pictures, screens of them, and he gets one intelligence briefing per week, followed by interpretation over lunch in the private White House dining room from Vice President JD Vance.  Miller controls the paper, especially the virtual posts, the press gaggles on aircraft in flight and airfields at takeoff and landing, and in the Oval Office. Vance coaches Trump through his misspeaking, memory failures, political gaffes.

Listen now to the way in which the method and purpose of these new men differs from anything in the history of the American presidency; and how the leaders of the European allies, the UK, and Canada exploit what they believe they know in order to get the policy decisions they want from Trump — that is, after Miller, Vance and others have decided and Trump has been persuaded.

Then once you understand, ask whether the calculations of the allies, and also of the main enemy at present, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, are misjudgements of what serves their national strategies best.

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by Editor - Wednesday, October 15th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the new podcast from Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid asks if President Donald Trump has decided to sell Tomahawk missiles to the NATO allies for attacking the Russian hinterland,  and why the allies are so keen to continue fighting the war when it is obvious the Tomahawk cannot turn defeat on the Ukraine battlefield into victory. Listen to the hour-long discussion here.  

The third question in the discussion is — what to make of Russian policy towards Palestine after the Arabs cancelled their long-prepared summit meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for October 15, and opted instead for a summit with Trump at Sharm el-Sheikh on October 13 – from which Putin was excluded?  Answer: Russian policy contradicts the US-Israeli plan for Gaza but they won’t say so in public nor will the Arabs countenance a confrontation with Trump right now. The podcast looks again at Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s attempt to explain the Russian reason to Arab journalists.

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 14th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Last week, according to the New York Times,  the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was reported to have tried to head off President Donald Trump’s escalation to frontal military attack on Venezuela and regime change in Caracas by offering  “a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.”    Reportedly, Maduro’s terms included: “all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.”

If Maduro did that, Russian sources concede hypothetically, it would amount to his revocation of Article 6 and Article 10 of the “Agreement between the Russian Federation and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on Strategic Partnership and Cooperation”.      

The first provision of the treaty calls for “joint initiatives within the framework of OPEC+, the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries and other multilateral organizations, [to] promote balanced and stable long–term development of global energy markets without using artificial restrictions and unfair competition tools”. The second proposed to “cooperate in the energy sector in such areas as the exploration and development of new oil and natural gas fields, increasing the returns of fields operated by joint ventures and reducing their environmental impact.”  

Maduro signed the instrument of treaty ratification in front of the Russian Ambassador to Venezuela on October 7.  But that was several days after Maduro had been told the Trump Administration had purported his scheme to replace the Russian oil companies  with American ones, and had cancelled negotiations on Maduro’s term sheet led by Richard Grenell.   

For the time being, there has been no ratification of the Venezuelan strategic partnership treaty by the State Duma in Moscow. When Venezuela’s Ambassador to Moscow, Jesús Salazar Velázquez, visited the Duma on October 6, ratification was discussed but not agreed.  Instead, the official Duma communiqué reported that Velazquez had agreed with Duma deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov —  a Communist Party faction leader who ranks third in the parliamentary leadership — to “express solidarity in countering Western military-political and financial-economic pressure. Both sides noted the importance of inter-parliamentary cooperation as part of bilateral interaction and discussed the possibility of holding a meeting of the Russia-Venezuela and Venezuela-Russia parliamentary friendship groups via videoconference in the near future.”  

President Putin has twice stopped short of the opportunity to express his solidarity with Maduro. On October 2, during his appearance at the Valdai Club conference, Putin acknowledged that the French commando boarding of a tanker carrying Russian oil was “piracy”. Illegal yes, but Russia is not going to be provoked, Putin said.  The French “want very much to transfer the tension from inside the country to the external contour, to excite some other forces, other countries, in particular Russia, to provoke us into some vigorous actions.”   

Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats off the coast, which began in September and have been justified in Washington as an operation against drug smugglers, have not been explicitly condemned by the Kremlin. They have been called piracy by the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad.   

At Putin’s last opportunity, in a press conference in Dushanbe on October 10, he was asked: “It has just been announced that Donald Trump did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In your opinion: should he have received it, did he deserve it, was he worthy of it?” By then Putin knew the prize had been awarded to the US backed regime-change candidate to overthrow Maduro, Maria Corina Machado. In his reply, Putin ignored Venezuela and praised Trump.

“It is not for me,” he said  “to decide who should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize… There have been cases where the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to individuals who had done nothing for peace. In my view, these decisions inflicted enormous damage on the prize’s prestige. A person comes along – good or bad – and within a month or two, boom. For what? They had done absolutely nothing. Is that how it should work? It ought to be awarded for actual merits. Consequently, I believe, its prestige has been significantly undermined. But that is neither here nor there – it is not for me to judge. Whether or not the incumbent President of the United States deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, I do not know. But he has genuinely done much to resolve complex crises that have persisted for years, if not decades. I have said this before – I know for certain: regarding the crisis in Ukraine, he sincerely strives for a resolution. Some things have worked out, others have not. Perhaps much more can still be achieved based on the agreements and discussions in Anchorage. But he is certainly making an effort, certainly working on these issues – issues of achieving peace and resolving complex international situations.”  

CCCP — cold comfort for Caracas from Putin.  

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by Editor - Monday, October 13th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Listen to Dimitri Lascaris, Slobodan Despot and me discuss the reasons why the weak and desperate governments of Europe and the UK want war with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTDuZnYwSk 

by Editor - Saturday, October 11th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When President Vladimir Putin acknowledged on the weekend (lead image, left) that for war operations, he refers to his “colleagues”, he meant, among several things,  that he has removed his restrictions on the General Staff’s conduct of the electric war on the Ukrainian battlefield as far west as the Polish border.

The record of Russia’s electric war strikes in the Ukraine began on October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; then followed on October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024.  Click to follow each stage of the electric war.   Roughly speaking, Putin agreed with the General Staff that they could target power generating plants and the power grids transmitting electricity to the main population centres.  

Triggering population evacuation from east to west, then into Poland, was one of the political goals Putin agreed.  Cutting the train lines between Poland, Lvov and Kiev was not. This allowed almost unrestricted inflow of US and NATO weapons and men to supply the eastern front, including the Ukrainian attack and occupation of Kursk region which began on August 6, 2024; also, the movement of western political and media figures to and from Kiev for escalation of the propaganda war against Russia. The open rail lines have been used to demonstrate the US- NATO line that Ukraine is winning, Russia losing the war.

Putin then accepted President Donald Trump’s proposal for a 30-day halt to attacks on the Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure; that began after their telephone call on February 12.  

Trump’s war staffs in Washington, Poland, and the Ukraine did not honour the Putin-Trump telephone agreement; it was a unilateral,  unreciprocated Putin concession Instead, they have steadily escalated their drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, including oil pumping sites, oil storages, gas pipelines and processing plants, port terminals, and oil refineries.

The tone of the war decision-making process in Moscow has sharpened as the enemy attacks have escalated, their targets deeper in the Russian hinterland.

A Moscow source in a position to know says that Putin has rejected the criticism that  concessions to Trump for the sake of negotiating a peace settlement were producing no reciprocation from the Americans; instead encouraging them to escalate to test Russian vulnerability,pressure the domestic economy, and probe for Putin’s weakness.

Trump (also Vice President JD Vance) have attempted all three.

He intended to combine them when he announced on September 23 that Russia is a “paper tiger”.  Then in front of his assembly of military commanders on September 30 Trump made the attack personal. “He [Putin] should have had that war done in a week. And I said to him, you know, you don’t look good. You’re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week. Are you a paper tiger?”    

Trump has also dismissed negotiating to achieve end of war. “Problem with Vietnam,” Trump told the crew of the USS Harry Truman on October 5, “we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would’ve won easy. We would’ve won Afghanistan easy, would’ve won every war easy. But we got politically correct, ‘Ah, let’s take it easy.’ It’s, we’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand. We win — Now, we win. We don’t want to be politically correct anymore.”  

Trump also keeps repeating his personal attack on Putin — “I’m very disappointed in him.”

In answer, Putin’s approach, the President has said privately, should be: “we won’t rock the boat. We won’t be provoked.” The General Staff, the intelligence services and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have responded:  “the other side will rock the boat even harder.” The source requests that the discussion of their options which has followed should remain out of public debate.

Moscow sources acknowledge the sting in the paper tiger jibe. “The Europeans and Brits have studied Putin’s weaknesses and think they know how to defeat him. They think – and the Russian oligarchs have been telling them – there is no Kremlin secret they don’t know.”

The source dismisses pro-Russian podcasters in the US. “They think they are following the Kremlin line from RT and Sputnik which reward them by putting them on Russian TV and quoting them.” “It’s a circle jerk”, says a military source familiar with US slang.

Putin’s performance at the Valdai Club conference last Thursday  has triggered sharp internal reaction; some of it has spilled out publicly. Putin tried to explain himself in a brief interview with Pavel Zarubin on the weekend.  “I was simply honestly and frankly laying out certain situations, the essence of the issues, and how I feel about them,” the President said. This has been interpreted in Moscow as apologetic.

“Well,” Putin went on, “it’s up to my colleagues to respond. I spoke sincerely and honestly as it is; how things actually were; and how I would like to see the situation develop. Some will like this; some won’t. And I didn’t have a goal. I didn’t set out to do anything pleasing. I just tell it like it is.”   

Moscow sources point out that Putin has now followed up in two unexpected sessions with his colleagues. The Security Council was called into session on Tuesday, earlier in the week than usual.   That meeting was followed on Wednesday with a meeting between Putin and the Defense Ministry, General Staff and military commanders from the front army groups (lead image, right). “In an attempt to show its Western sponsors at least some semblance of success,” Putin began, “the Kiev regime is trying to target civilian facilities deep inside our territory. This will not help it. Our goal is to ensure the safety of the Russian citizens, as well as the safety of the strategic sites and civilian infrastructure, including energy facilities.”  

Putin’s intention was to stiffen Russian deterrence by threat of retaliation if Trump escalates by supplying the Tomahawk missile to Germany, the UK, Canada or other NATO states  for redeployment in the Ukraine; or by authorizing the Germans to fire the Taurus missile at Russian hinterland targets.  The operational strategy agreed, a source claims, is Russian readiness to fight one battlefield at a time to match Trump’s sequencing of wars on Russia’s western, eastern,  and southern fronts. It is also to accelerate the fight to the finish on the Ukrainian battlefield.

“Within six months, by the end of the winter, to consolidate control of the four regions,” one source claims.

“In a year, maybe less, maybe longer,” another source believes. “The operational strategy is to keep the line hot; keep the Ukrainians, and of course the Americans, in doubt about which direction we will concentrate our ground movements. This is operational dominance, manoeuvre control, control of the surprise factor.”

“Comrades,” Putin assured the military meeting, “our shared objective remains unchanged – we must ensure the unconditional fulfilment of all goals set for the troops in the course of the special military operation.”  

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by Editor - Wednesday, October 8th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the first time, the White House has issued a piece of paper (lead image, top), signed by the President, attempting to install a form of fuhrer fascism to deter, arrest, and if need be shoot to kill any form of expression which amounts to disloyalty to the President and to his MAGA doctrine.

The paper defined that as “targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”  This includes public expression of the terms “fascist” and “anti-fascist”.  

According to the White House paper, those who speak in such language are hiding under “the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’  These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.  This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties…anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity…and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The paper, drafted by Stephen Miller, deputy chief of the White House staff, was signed by Trump on September 25. It is titled “NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7”. Its subject is “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read the Miller Memorandum in full here.  

It was followed by the Pentagon order for all US forces commanders and their staffs to assemble at the Quantico base in Virginia on September 30 to be addressed by Trump and Peter Hegseth, the Defense Secretary.  

Since May 6, they have been under the direct threat of purge. Hegseth announced he was commencing to cut by 20% the 3 and 4-star general ranks of the main forces, by 10% in other flag officers of the main forces, and a 20% cut in the general ranks of the National Guard.   No time line was announced for the cuts to be decided in two phases.

He was starting, Hegseth also claimed, “the most comprehensive review” of headquarters and operational command structures and areas of responsibility since 1986. When that takes place, there will be “a minimum of an  additional ten percent reduction of general and flag officers throughout the DOD, in conjunction with the realignment of the unified command plan.”  

The sword of Damocles wasn’t a stab in the back. “This is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high ranking officers, nothing could be further from the truth,”    Hegseth claimed in anticipation of resistance from the generals.   

None of these proposed cuts or reorganizations of commands were confirmed in the four months before Trump ordered the generals to assemble. None of the mainstream media journalists at the Pentagon nor of the alt-media military podcasters has reported a general source as admitting the link between the purge plan, the Miller Memorandum, and Trump’s summons to Quantico. The President then made this obvious.

In his speech to the assembled flag officers (lead image, bottom), Trump declared:  “we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly. After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help, we’re defending the borders of our country from now on. We’re not going to let this happen…San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live…If it’s OK with you generals and admirals…I say, they spit, we hit. Is that OK? I think so. They spit — it’s a new thing. They spit, we hit…This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved…With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come, because we will fight, fight, fight and we will win, win, win.”   

Trump also issued the loyalty warning: “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before. This is very — don’t laugh! Don’t laugh, you’re not allowed to do that! You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if want to do anything you want, you can do anything that you want. And if don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes you future.”

That was at the beginning of Trump’s hour-long speech.  Then at the end, the warning was repeated: “I’ll tell you, Pete and General Caine and all of the people that I’ve met that have been lifted up in rank. And we got many of them out of here. To be honest with you, I didn’t like doing it, but we got many of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied.”  

Viewed in Moscow, the Kremlin-supported security analysis platform Vzglyad has reported the political significance of the loyalty oath assembly in Quantico when most US experts have missed it.  This is because the Russians remember Adolf Hitler’s loyalty oath (Führereid) and what followed for Russia. Between 1934 and 1935, first for military personnel and then for civilians, Hitler ordered the state loyalty oath to be changed from the secular language, “I swear loyalty to the Reich’s constitution” to: “I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces”.  

According to Vzglyad’s writer, Gevork Mirzayan, “hundreds of American generals were offered a choice. In the understanding of liberals, the choice is between personal loyalty to Trump and loyalty to the American state. [In] July 1935, the German generals were summoned to an extraordinary meeting in Berlin and informed that their previous oath of allegiance to the Weimar Constitution was invalid and that they must take a personal oath to the Fuhrer. ‘Most of the generals have taken a new oath to retain their positions,’ retired General Ben Hodges commented on the Quantico meeting.”   

The Russian interpretation is not placed between the lines. This is a message directed by a leading policy medium at the Kremlin, not a message from the Kremlin to the audience outside the Kremlin wall.

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by Editor - Sunday, October 5th, 2025
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