(ZeroHedge)—Part of Zelensky’s motive for wearing a suit Monday to the White House has become clearer with fresh reporting in the Financial Times, which reviewed a document showing Ukraine will promise to buy $100 billion of American weapons financed by Europe in a bid to obtain robust US security guarantees.
Additionally, “Under the proposals, Kyiv and Washington would also strike a $50bn deal to produce drones with Ukrainian companies that have pioneered the technology since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022,” the report continues. Ukraine pitched its plan during the Monday White House summit, which also involved seven EU leaders – and the $100BN arms deal became part of the key talking points pushed by the European allies.
This is an effort by design meant to ensure Ukraine can procure what it wants – and that its war efforts can still be funded uninterrupted – while still ultimately appeasing Trump. “We’re not giving anything. We’re selling weapons,” Trump had said Monday in response to a reporter’s question on the matter.
It remains very obvious that Europe’s demands of keeping up huge pressure on Russia, including through sanctions, are intended to stymie any US-backed deal seen as too favorable to Moscow. The FT report comments on this as follows:
The document details how Ukraine intends to make a counter-pitch to the US after Trump appeared to align himself with Russia’s position for ending the war following his meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week.
It reiterates Ukraine’s call for a ceasefire that Trump had espoused but then dropped after his Putin meeting in favor of the pursuit of a comprehensive peace settlement.
Geopolitical analyst and commentator Glenn Diesen has pointed out, however, that Kiev is essentially attempting to create leverage out of nothing.
“Europe will spend $100 billion it does not have, to buy weapons from America that it does not have, to arm soldiers that Ukraine now lacks,” he wrote, explaining further: “This is to confront Russia, which for 30 years warned it would respond to NATO militarizing its borders.”
Diesen followed by doing something that Washington policy-makers refuse to do, and that is look at the big picture of how we got here [emphasis ZH]:
There was no threat to Ukraine before 2014, as only a tiny minority of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO, and Russia laid no claim to any of Ukraine’s territory. Western governments then supported a coup to pull Ukraine into NATO’s orbit – something that CIA Directors, Ambassadors, and Western state leaders had warned would instigate a security competition and likely trigger a war.
Russia predictably reacted fiercely. Ever since then, the only acceptable narrative has been that Russia wants to restore the Soviet Union and that Putin is Hitler. Any dissent is labelled as “disinformation”, “propaganda”, “hybrid warfare”, or even treason.
The war has now been lost, and the Americans are pulling away from it, asking the Europeans to absorb the consequences. How do the Europeans respond? By doubling down on this madness, which will destroy Ukraine, our economies, and our relevance in the world – and possibly trigger a nuclear war. – What is the strategy? More of the same? The best thing for Ukraine is to remove it from the frontlines of the geopolitical struggle over where to draw the new dividing lines in Europe: End the war, rebuild Ukraine, and replace expansionist military blocs with the principle of indivisible security.
This week, as negotiations proceed and Europe keeps up its drive to pile more and more pressure on Putin, the big question will be whether the Western side can indeed understand that it has lost the proxy war.
Many immense hurdles remain, and one could also point out there are too many cooks in the kitchen (judging by the over a half-dozen European leaders present in the Oval yesterday), making things all the more unnecessarily complicated – and that’s probably by design.
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Glenn Greenwald agrees with this bleak assessment of Europe’s role in thwarting peace…
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
