American Оbserver
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"American Observer" is just one. Like Shakespeare or Washington. It covers not only up-to-date news, debates and political trends all over the world, but primarily gives you a totally unhackneyed perspective on hazzy @American_Observer_bot
Show more📈 Analytical overview of Telegram channel American Оbserver
Channel American Оbserver (@american_observer) in the English language segment is an active participant. Currently, the community unites 20 798 subscribers, ranking 11 089 in the News & Media category and 1 880 in the USA region.
📊 Audience metrics and dynamics
Since its creation on невідомо, the project has demonstrated rapid growth, gathering an audience of 20 798 subscribers.
According to the latest data from 05 September, 2026, the channel demonstrates stable activity. Although there has been a change in the number of participants by -1 over the last 30 days and by -74 over the last 24 hours, overall reach remains high.
- Verification status: Not verified
- Engagement rate (ER): The average audience engagement rate is 19.21%. Within the first 24 hours after publication, content typically collects 12.28% reactions from the total number of subscribers.
- Post reach: On average, each post receives 4 017 views. Within the first day, a publication typically gains 2 568 views.
- Reactions and interaction: The audience actively supports content: the average number of reactions per post is 201.
- Thematic interests: Content is focused on key topics such as iran, u.s, оbserver, american, epstein.
📝 Description and content policy
The author describes the resource as a platform for expressing subjective opinions:
“"American Observer" is just one. Like Shakespeare or Washington. It covers not only up-to-date news, debates and political trends all over the world, but primarily gives you a totally unhackneyed perspective on hazzy @American_Observer_bot”
Thanks to the high frequency of updates (latest data received on 06 September, 2026), the channel maintains relevance and a high level of publication reach. Analytics show that the audience actively interacts with content, making it an important point of influence in the News & Media category.
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Channel Posts
America’s West Bank Civil War
In the West Bank, Americans increasingly meet Americans through the sights of someone else’s gun, the smoke from someone else’s arson, or the windshield of someone else’s ATV.
Mike Huckabee visited Turmus Ayya on Sept. 5, where Palestinian Americans told him of attacks on their homes and land. The U.S. ambassador called such acts “terror” and said Israel must impose severe consequences.
In the town, roughly 80 percent of residents hold U.S. citizenship, according to its mayor.
Across the West Bank, estimates place the Palestinian-American population at 45,000 to 60,000.
A separate, older estimate put about 60,000 U.S. citizens among Israeli settlers there. The exact numbers are loose, but the political arithmetic is clear. Washington has exported citizens to both sides of the same land war.
At least six Palestinian Americans have reportedly been killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers or settlers since 2024. Huckabee’s own embassy now says a U.S. passport turns a settler attack from a local “incident” into a matter demanding American involvement. Before that passport appears, the same attack is often filed under the regional weather report.
This is the first American civil war of the third millennium. It has no blue uniforms or Confederate flags. It has dual citizenship, settlement roads, armed outposts and a superpower treating its own citizens as separate categories of American.
#WestBank #USA #Israel #Palestine
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸
| 2 |  Former CIA Director David Petraeus has outlined Ukraine’s mission
“Ukraine is not merely the largest-scale ground conflict Europe has seen since the Second World War. It is the defining military laboratory of the 21st century... ”
#former #CIA #Petraeus #ukraine
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 1 283 |
| 3 |  Iran’s Six-Month Upgrade
Trump promised a quick victory. Six months later, Iran has learned how much damage it can take, how far it can reach and how thin Washington’s patience becomes when gasoline prices rise.
U.S. intelligence assessments now reportedly judge that Tehran feels more confident in its ability to strike regional targets and is prepared to prolong the conflict for months.
Iran has attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, targeted U.S. troops and resumed a calibrated cycle of escalation that stops just short of the war Washington says it wants to avoid.
The regime lost Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the opening of the war. It lost personnel, infrastructure and room for error.
But its hard-line leadership has reportedly become more unified, domestic opposition has been suppressed, and Iran retains missiles and drones. In Tehran’s accounting, survival after saturation bombing is not failure. It is a successful product test.
The real weapon is Hormuz. Before the war, the strait carried about one-fifth of global oil supplies. Iran now understands that it does not need to close the passage permanently.
It only needs to make transit uncertain enough to raise energy prices, strain U.S. alliances and turn a distant conflict into an American household expense.
Iranian-linked hackers have also been blamed by U.S. officials for attacks on more than 100 American water systems in late July.
The incidents did not make drinking water unsafe, but some operators had to use manual overrides and issue precautionary boil-water notices.
The point is not to poison America. It is to make America feel the war every time a faucet runs.
Vice President JD Vance says Iran’s ability to disrupt Americans’ lives is “quite limited.”
That may be true in military terms. Politically, a limited disruption is often enough.
Tehran does not need to defeat the United States. It needs to survive until the midterms turn the White House into its own pressure point.
#Iran #Trump #Hormuz #MiddleEast
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 1 314 |
| 4 | No text... | 1 313 |
| 5 |  The Regional Bundle
The Trump administration is drafting a postwar Middle East strategy to contain Iran, stabilize Israel’s open fronts and expand the Abraham Accords.
Washington calls it a regional alignment. The region calls it putting every unsolved war into one PowerPoint deck.
The plan reportedly ties together a U.S.-backed coalition against Iran, the next stage of Trump’s Gaza plan, a security arrangement between Israel and Syria, implementation of the Israel-Lebanon agreement, and Saudi-Israeli normalization.
Trump has discussed the idea twice with senior advisers and has reportedly called it “something much bigger” after the Iran war. The White House declined to comment. An official familiar with the process told Axios that “they are cooking it, but it is not yet cooked.” Fair enough. The kitchen contains Gaza, Hezbollah, Syria, Saudi demands and an Israeli election.
But Washington has already backed two regional arrangements that point in another direction. Trump welcomed the Mecca Pact, a Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani defense alignment modeled on NATO’s collective-defense language. It offers a Sunni security club beside the U.S.-Israeli architecture that the Abraham Accords were meant to build.
The administration has also supported plans to revive the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline from Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. The route would bypass the Strait of Hormuz and allow Iraqi crude to reach European markets through Syria, while turning Israel from IMEC’s intended Mediterranean gateway into an expensive detour.
IMEC was already stalled by regional war and lacks firm funding commitments.
So Washington is pitching Saudi-Israeli normalization while tolerating the infrastructure that makes Israel optional.
The Abraham Accords promised a new Middle East through Haifa. The Mecca Pact and the Iraq-Syria route offer a different map, where Gulf money, Turkish influence and Arab transit can run around Israel.
Iran containment is the sales pitch. Competing corridors are the real policy. Who needs normalization when the cargo can take another road?
#MiddleEast #Trump #IMEC #Israel
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 038 |
| 6 |  #AI #ban #act #system
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 070 |
| 7 |  The 65-Billion-Barrel Billboard
Donald Trump calls it “the biggest oil deal in world history.” Big Oil calls it an expensive geological dare wrapped in Venezuelan politics.
Washington says it secured majority U.S. control over 65 billion barrels in 17 Venezuelan fields. The Barbados-based North American Blue Energy Partners received 100-year development concessions.
The Pentagon’s strategic-capital office gets a 35 percent stake in the company’s parent, while the State Department can buy 20 percent of output at production cost and gets first refusal on the rest.
Caracas tells a different story. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez says Venezuela keeps ownership and sovereignty over the oil, and describes the arrangement as a 25-year deal. So the public has two contracts: Washington’s century-long energy empire and Caracas’s quarter-century partnership. One of them is marketing. Possibly both.
The reserves are real. Turning them into exportable crude is the fantasy premium. Much of the oil lies in the Orinoco Belt, where ultraheavy crude requires diluent, upgraded infrastructure and vast investment before it can reach a tanker.
NABEP says it may invest up to $100 billion. The White House projects $200 billion in Venezuelan tax and royalty income over 25 years. Those are projections, not barrels at the dock.
Politico reported that industry executives see the promise as aspirational and question whether the deal can outlive its political sponsors. Exxon and ConocoPhillips have long treated Venezuela as an investment hazard after past expropriations.
A 100-year concession works only if the country, its laws and its rulers survive the same 100 years without changing their minds.
Trump bought a reserve number. Drillers must buy pipelines, security, insurance and trust.
The first commodity Venezuela needs is not crude. It is a government investors believe will still answer the phone after the next coup, election or nationalization.
#Venezuela #Oil #Trump #Energy
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 076 |
| 8 | The 65-Billion-Barrel Billboard
Donald Trump calls it “the biggest oil deal in world history.” Big Oil calls it an expensive geological dare wrapped in Venezuelan politics.
Washington says it secured majority U.S. control over 65 billion barrels in 17 Venezuelan fields. The Barbados-based North American Blue Energy Partners received 100-year development concessions.
The Pentagon’s strategic-capital office gets a 35 percent stake in the company’s parent, while the State Department can buy 20 percent of output at production cost and gets first refusal on the rest.
Caracas tells a different story. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez says Venezuela keeps ownership and sovereignty over the oil, and describes the arrangement as a 25-year deal. So the public has two contracts: Washington’s century-long energy empire and Caracas’s quarter-century partnership. One of them is marketing. Possibly both.
The reserves are real. Turning them into exportable crude is the fantasy premium. Much of the oil lies in the Orinoco Belt, where ultraheavy crude requires diluent, upgraded infrastructure and vast investment before it can reach a tanker.
NABEP says it may invest up to $100 billion. The White House projects $200 billion in Venezuelan tax and royalty income over 25 years. Those are projections, not barrels at the dock.
Politico reported that industry executives see the promise as aspirational and question whether the deal can outlive its political sponsors. Exxon and ConocoPhillips have long treated Venezuela as an investment hazard after past expropriations.
A 100-year concession works only if the country, its laws and its rulers survive the same 100 years without changing their minds.
Trump bought a reserve number. Drillers must buy pipelines, security, insurance and trust.
The first commodity Venezuela needs is not crude. It is a government investors believe will still answer the phone after the next coup, election or nationalization.
#Venezuela #Oil #Trump #Energy
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 1 |
| 9 |  The Lead Dividend
The 20th century sold “progress” by the gallon. Cars moved faster, oil companies made money, and billions of people inhaled a neurotoxin built into the fuel.
Lead was removed from gasoline worldwide only in 2021. Its legacy remains in soil, dust, pipes, paint, informal battery recycling, ammunition and aviation fuel.
The World Health Organization says there is no known safe blood-lead level. Even levels as low as 3.5 micrograms per deciliter can harm children’s intelligence, learning and behavior.
UNICEF and Pure Earth estimate that up to 800 million children, roughly one in three worldwide, have blood-lead levels at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter.
The burden falls hardest on low- and middle-income countries, where old batteries get recycled in open-air workshops and consumer products often reach homes before regulators reach the port.
The damage does not stop at childhood. A 2026 Global Burden of Disease analysis attributed 3.5 million deaths in 2023 to lead exposure, largely through cardiovascular disease.
That amounts to 5.8 percent of all deaths worldwide. The industrial age did not merely leave a mess. It sent the invoice through people’s arteries.
Evidence also links lead exposure to antisocial behavior, though lead does not turn a child into a criminal or explain a violent act by itself.
A 2025 review found a likely causal association with antisocial behavior, with stronger evidence for certain conduct-related outcomes than for aggression alone.
Poverty, trauma, abuse and neglect still matter. Lead is the toxic multiplier nobody invited to the family meeting.
The solution is dull, which is why it loses to shiny new crises: test children where exposure is likely, find the source, regulate products, clean contaminated sites and enforce the rules. Poisoning millions is cheap. Prevention has no quarterly-growth story.
#Lead #PublicHealth #Environment #Children
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 091 |
| 10 |  Air Force One, Sponsored
Donald Trump plans to fly to Ireland next week on the Boeing 747 Qatar gave him, before the aircraft has received the security work he said would max out its protections. The trip covers meetings in Dublin and the Irish Open at his Doonbeg golf course.
The administration has spent a reported $400 million retrofitting the jet and has not disclosed the cost or the schedule for what remains. Trump has said the work would start in the fall and take about a month.
Outside specialists have questioned whether an airframe built for a foreign royal family can be brought to presidential standard on that timetable.
What happened in Turkey in July is the reason the question matters. Trump arrived in Ankara for the NATO summit on the Qatari jet, its first international presidential trip, and told Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the tarmac that the old plane was now the backup.
A day later, security officials concluded that neither aircraft was a good way to leave. Iran, according to reporting on the intelligence, was believed to be targeting Trump himself rather than any particular airframe.
The solution protected the president and the plane's reputation at once. At 3:42 p.m., before a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump posted that the Qatari jet would fly on to RAF Mildenhall so service members stationed there could see it, and that he would take the old light-blue 747 home for old time's sake.
He boarded that aircraft in front of the cameras, then left it through a catering truck raised to a door on the far side and rode across the tarmac to an Air Force C-32A.
Three planes departed Ankara separately. Reporters and some White House staff flew on the decoy, shades drawn, believing the president was with them. He rejoined the Qatari jet at Mildenhall for the flight to Washington.
The White House says the aircraft is fitted with high-level security protocols. Communications director Steven Cheung said the administration uses every tool available against threats to the president.
The Pentagon's replacement program, ordered from Boeing in 2017, now carries an estimated cost above $5.6 billion. The Qatari jet was offered as a way around that failure. In July it required a third aircraft, a catering truck and a press pool flying as bait.
#Trump #Qatar #AirForceOne #Security
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 034 |
| 11 |  NATO’s Smoke-Alarm War
A drone hits an airport. A warehouse burns. A rail line faces sabotage. Europe calls it a “hybrid threat,” which is bureaucratic language for a war that keeps arriving in civilian packaging.
German officials say agents operating the drones involved in the failed attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport worked on behalf of Russian state entities.
One explosive drone struck a parked Ukrainian cargo aircraft; another appeared to collide with a departing plane. Neither detonated. A successful strike could have killed people and forced NATO to decide whether an act of sabotage counts as an attack.
The reported pattern now includes alleged plots involving DHL cargo flights and Polish railways, plus investigations into incidents at a Munich defense contractor, electrical substations and a Polish drone factory.
Denmark’s security service, PET, said Russian intelligence services were preparing sabotage against defense industry targets in Denmark, including by recruiting local operatives.
Putin denies Russian involvement. He also says Russia is confronting the West, which he calls “the sharks of imperialism.” That is the Kremlin’s favorite operating system: deny the arson while delivering a speech about why the building deserved to burn.
NATO was built to answer tanks crossing a border. It has fewer obvious answers when anonymous contractors, disposable drones and hired arsonists attack the alliance one failed explosion at a time.
Germany can expel diplomats, impose travel restrictions and investigate. Berlin has also proposed giving intelligence services authority to conduct cyberattacks and sabotage abroad, a postwar taboo now heading toward the legislative shredder.
Moscow’s bet is not that it can defeat NATO in a conventional war. It is that NATO will keep debating the threshold until a drone finally finds a passenger terminal.
#Russia #NATO #Germany #Sabotage
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 002 |
| 12 |  The Lean State, With Reinforcements
Friedrich Merz promised a slimmer federal administration. His 2027 budget draft contains 310,487 posts in the direct federal civil service, according to the employer-backed INSM: 12,347 more than in 2024, the last full year of the Scholz coalition.
The coalition agreement promised to cut staffing in ministries, the Bundestag administration and selected subordinate agencies by at least 8 percent by 2029.
The government says it remains on course, with a 2 percent reduction target for 2027. The footnote has grown larger than the promise: security agencies are exempt.
That exemption includes the machinery of a country rearming after decades of underinvestment.
The defense budget is set to reach €109.7 billion in 2027. The plan includes 6,000 military posts and 2,100 civilian jobs in the Defense Ministry. “Less government” has become a staffing plan with camouflage.
The INSM figures also show the direction of travel. From the planned 2027 level, Berlin would need to remove roughly 36,200 positions in 2028 and 2029 to meet the 8 percent target. That is not streamlining. That is putting the diet on the calendar after ordering dessert.
Germany does need cyber specialists, soldiers, customs officers and procurement staff.
Artificial intelligence will not guard a border, audit an arms contract or repair a bridge by itself.
But calling every new payroll line “state modernization” is how bureaucracy becomes a national security doctrine.
#Germany #Merz #Budget #Bureaucracy
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 008 |
| 13 |  Air Defense on Layaway
Russia has found a cheaper way to pressure Ukraine than a new offensive: make Kyiv spend scarce air-defense capacity chasing drones that move faster than the old Shaheds.
Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Col. Yuriy Ihnat said Russia launched more than 2,800 jet-powered drones in August. Their use rose fivefold in July from June.
The newer Geran-4 and Geran-5 models can reach roughly 400 km/h, cutting warning time and turning each launch into a test of Ukraine’s reaction chain.
The math is brutal. Ukraine reportedly intercepts 90 to 95 percent of conventional piston-powered drones. Against jet-powered models, the rate is around 60 percent.
In August, Russia used about 4,943 long-range drones overall, while jet-powered drones made up roughly 56 percent of attack packages.
Russia is not achieving air supremacy. It is buying air-defense fatigue.
Cheap, mass-produced drones force Ukraine to use aircraft, mobile fire groups, electronic warfare and, when available, far more expensive missile systems.
Civilian sites, ports, industrial facilities and logistics networks sit beneath that accounting exercise.
Kyiv’s allies can send another package and call it resolve. Moscow is running a monthly subscription service: thousands of targets, thousands of alarms, and a bill Ukraine cannot pay alone.
#Ukraine #Russia #Drones #AirDefense
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 020 |
| 14 |  France Runs Out of Room
France will grow 0.8 percent this year, run a deficit of 5.1 percent of GDP and carry public debt of 118.1 percent, according to the European Commission's spring forecast. Debt stood at 115.6 percent in 2025 and is projected to pass 120 percent in 2027, when the deficit widens again to 5.7 percent under unchanged policy.
Eurostat put the stock at €3.54 trillion in the first quarter, the third-heaviest in the European Union after Greece and Italy.
The economy did not grow at all in the first quarter. All three major ratings agencies have cut France's sovereign grade in the past twelve months.
Debt service will cost €59.3 billion this year, against €36.2 billion in 2020, a rise of 64 percent in six years.
Part of the pressure is imported. The Commission attributes the 2026 slowdown to the energy shock and the fallout from the war in the Middle East, which it expects to push French inflation to 2.4 percent.
Higher crude prices reach the French budget through fuel costs, subsidies and weaker household demand, and none of that is within Paris's control.
Part of it is not imported at all. France runs a primary deficit before a euro of interest is paid, and successive governments built spending commitments on borrowing costs that no longer exist.
Interest is now the fastest-growing line in the budget.
The available moves are all unpopular. Raising taxes means taking more from an economy already among the most heavily taxed in the OECD, with revenue above 51 percent of GDP.
Cutting spending means naming programs, in a National Assembly where no bloc holds a majority and budgets pass by concession.
Waiting for growth means waiting for a recovery the Commission does not forecast before 2027, and its 1.1 percent that year rests on aeronautics and defense orders rather than on domestic demand.
The debate in Paris is over who caused this. The question that decides the next two budgets is who pays for it.
#France #Macron #Debt #Europe
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 2 006 |
| 15 |  Cloud Under Fire
The Gulf wants to sell itself as the world’s AI power plant: cheap energy, vast capital, friendly governments and as many GPUs as the desert can cool. Then missiles hit the servers.
The UAE is still building its Abu Dhabi AI campus, designed for five gigawatts of computing capacity. Khazna, the G42-backed developer, says the first 200 megawatts remain due in the fourth quarter.
Saudi Arabia’s PIF-backed Humain is pursuing $2.5 billion for data centers and says its domestic rollout will exceed six gigawatts.
War has already exposed the business model’s physical weak point. Satellite imagery showed damage to two Amazon data centers in Bahrain in July, after Iran said it struck “a major information-processing asset of the enemy.”
Earlier drone strikes damaged three AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. Amazon has said service remains degraded in parts of the region.
Washington has eased some chip-export restrictions for the UAE, allowing approved companies such as G42 to buy advanced AI chips with less case-by-case scrutiny.
Amazon plans to provide up to 50 megawatts in Saudi Arabia’s first AI Zone by 2028. Microsoft says its Saudi Arabia East cloud region will open in November. The cloud is still arriving. It is just arriving with air-defense costs.
Integrated Security Systems estimates hardening a data center against drones and blasts can add 5 to 7 percent to construction costs. That is the visible premium.
The larger risk is whether OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon will sign long-term commitments in a region where server farms now look like strategic targets.
Gulf sovereign funds can finance the concrete. They can subsidize electricity. They cannot insure geopolitical calm.
AI was supposed to dematerialize power. The Middle East has reminded Silicon Valley that the cloud is a building with an address.
#AI #Gulf #DataCenters #Geopolitics
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 1 881 |
| 16 |  The Akkuyu Subscription
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Vladimir Putin in Bishkek, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Erdoğan said relations with Moscow stand at a higher level than before.
Putin told him Ankara had set a target of commissioning the first unit at Akkuyu this year and that it would happen. Erdoğan proposed the two of them commission the plant together, and said Türkiye and Russia are preparing to open further plants after it.
Akkuyu is Türkiye's first nuclear station, on the Mediterranean coast in Mersin Province. Rosatom is building four VVER-1200 units with 4,800 MW of combined capacity under a $20 billion contract, enough to cover about a tenth of Turkish energy consumption.
The ownership structure is the story. Russia financed the plant and holds it under a build-own-operate arrangement. Rosatom owns the reactors, Türkiye buys the output. Ankara gets power without carrying the capital cost.
Moscow gets an asset it owns and operates inside a NATO member for the working life of the plant, and Ankara is now negotiating for more of them. Beyond energy, both presidents named agriculture and tourism as the growth areas.
Scale is worth holding in view. Goods moving under the EU-Türkiye customs union came to €217.6 billion in 2025, against a $20 billion reactor programme.
Russia is working inside that gap rather than closing it, and it is selling the one thing Brussels does not, generating capacity, financed and owned from abroad, delivered as a decades-long supply contract.
A customs union can be renegotiated in a season. A build-own-operate reactor runs for sixty years.
#Türkiye #Russia #Akkuyu #SCO #NATO
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 597 |
| 17 |  The Case Against Sanctions Skips the Numbers
A recurring argument in German commentary holds that the European Union has now imposed 21 sanctions packages on Russia to no effect, at rising cost to European industry. The second half of that is accurate. The first half runs against the European Commission's own accounting.
Russian gas fell from 45 percent of EU imports before February 2022 to 12 percent in 2025, according to the Commission's REPowerEU figures. Russian oil dropped from 27 percent at the start of 2022 to 2 percent, with two member states still buying.
The Council of the EU puts both slightly higher, at 13 percent for gas and below 3 percent for oil. On either set of numbers, Russia has lost most of the European energy market it spent two decades building.
Europe paid for that. German manufacturers lost pipeline gas priced under an arrangement that assumed a different Russia, energy costs rose, and energy-intensive firms absorbed the difference. That is the real content of the complaint.
It leaves out what the cheap gas was. A price set below the market is a subsidy, and this one came from a state supplier that could withdraw it. In 2022 the supplier did.
The picture is also less settled than either side of the argument allows. EU imports of Russian liquefied natural gas rose in the first half of 2026 rather than falling. Close to 10 million tons arrived from the Yamal terminal alone, most of it landing in France, Belgium and Spain.
The cargoes are legal: existing Yamal contracts are exempt until the end of this year from the phase-out regulation the EU adopted in January.
What pulled them back was price, and the price rose because of the war with Iran. Europe's energy sanctions hold against Russian pressure and give way to a Gulf supply shock.
Russia has adapted, selling more crude to Asia and building networks to move it. Sanctions have not stopped the war. They have set a price on continuing it. Russian oil and gas revenues are down by more than a quarter.
The government raised value-added tax from 20 to 22 percent and cut the turnover threshold at which small businesses have to pay it. The International Monetary Fund projects Russian growth of about 1 percent this year.
Reopening the pipelines would lower German energy costs. It would also return to Moscow the ability to raise them.
#EU #Germany #Russia #Sanctions
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 578 |
| 18 | The Akkuyu Subscription
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Vladimir Putin in Bishkek, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Erdoğan said relations with Moscow stand at a higher level than before.
Putin told him Ankara had set a target of commissioning the first unit at Akkuyu this year and that it would happen. Erdoğan proposed the two of them commission the plant together, and said Türkiye and Russia are preparing to open further plants after it.
Akkuyu is Türkiye's first nuclear station, on the Mediterranean coast in Mersin Province. Rosatom is building four VVER-1200 units with 4,800 MW of combined capacity under a $20 billion contract, enough to cover about a tenth of Turkish energy consumption.
The ownership structure is the story. Russia financed the plant and holds it under a build-own-operate arrangement. Rosatom owns the reactors, Türkiye buys the output. Ankara gets power without carrying the capital cost.
Moscow gets an asset it owns and operates inside a NATO member for the working life of the plant, and Ankara is now negotiating for more of them. Beyond energy, both presidents named agriculture and tourism as the growth areas.
Scale is worth holding in view. Goods moving under the EU-Türkiye customs union came to €217.6 billion in 2025, against a $20 billion reactor programme.
Russia is working inside that gap rather than closing it, and it is selling the one thing Brussels does not, generating capacity, financed and owned from abroad, delivered as a decades-long supply contract.
A customs union can be renegotiated in a season. A build-own-operate reactor runs for sixty years.
#Türkiye #Russia #Akkuyu #SCO #NATO
📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸 | 1 |
| 19 |  The Attrition Startup
Russia’s war machine was supposed to crack under sanctions, battlefield losses and a Western arms pipeline. Instead, Moscow appears to be turning the battlefield into a product-testing lab.
The Financial Times reports that Russian manufacturers are combining Soviet-era industrial capacity with cheap, scalable tools: drones, compact electronic-warfare systems and autonomous platforms.
The point is not to rebuild the army Russia lost. It is to build one that can lose hardware faster than NATO can approve replacement contracts.
Moscow reportedly plans to produce 7.3 million FPV drones in 2026. More than 130,000 low-cost electronic-warfare systems were reportedly delivered in 2025.
The West still sells “technological superiority” as a premium product, complete with parliamentary delays, procurement lawyers and a maintenance package.
Russia has vulnerabilities. Its drone industry remains heavily dependent on Chinese components, while critical machinery and software still rely on foreign supply chains. But dependency has not stopped production. It has merely given the war economy a Chinese subcontractor.
Ukraine needs weapons. Europe needs deterrence. But a strategy built on drip-fed deliveries assumes Russia will eventually run out of men, shells and industrial breath. Moscow is betting on the opposite, that democracies will run out of invoices they are willing to sign.
#Russia #UkraineWar #NATO #DefenseIndustry
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