Oops … he did it again.
Sanctions are back on the menu, boys!!!
But who are said sanctions really against?
If you’ve been reading these digital pages for any length of time, you’ll know I’ve long tracked what I refer to as the curious case of intermittent escalation—a deliberate cadence designed not to destroy, but to dismantle the unipolar illusion brick by narrative brick.
And now, as if scripted to affirm the patterns I’ve been mapping since the dawn of this conflict in my Righteous Russia series back in 2022, President Donald Trump has greenlit a fresh sanctions package targeting Russia’s oil titans, Rosneft and Lukoil.
Yes. Read that again.
“President Donald Trump has greenlit a fresh sanctions package targeting Russia’s oil titans, Rosneft and Lukoil.”
(Did you guys read my last Brief on the Multipolar Margin Call? You really, really should, because this timing is just … chef’s kiss.)
On the surface, the optics are dramatic and somewhat disappointing for many who were sitting on pins and needles waiting for the Peacemakers World Tour to touch down in Budapest sometime soon: “tremendous” measures, as Trump himself dubbed them, ostensibly aimed at choking the Kremlin’s war machine by pressuring its lifeblood exports, which funnel billions into Moscow’s coffers and flow to buyers like China, India and Turkey.
But peel back the layers, and this move slots neatly into the alternating pattern I’ve chronicled for years—one where apparent escalations serve as narrative deployments, heightening tensions in the Collective Mind while accelerating the pivot toward decoupling and multipolarity on the Actual front.
Make no mistake: these sanctions, while splashed across headlines as a seismic shift in Trump’s approach are largely toothless in their bite—at least on Russia herself—much like the waves of restrictions the West has hurled at Russia since the Special Military Operation kicked off.
As I argued in ‘Righteous Russia - Part 7,’ the Hegemon’s economic salvos—freezing assets, capping energy prices and severing SWIFT access—were meant to cripple the Bear, but instead, they’ve boomeranged spectacularly, exposing the EU’s self-inflicted wounds while fortifying Russia’s resilience.
Russia’s ruble, once teetering stabilized through gold-backing, BRICS alliances and very recently, its commitment to settling international trade using decentralized alternatives like Bitcoin; its economy, projected to crater outpaced G7 growth as sanctions inadvertently turbocharged dedollarization and Eastward pivots.
As for these latest hits on Rosneft and Lukoil?
They’ll disrupt global fuel flows and hike prices for the West’s consumers, sure, but Moscow’s already “immune,” as the Kremlin has maintained and as Trump has recently acknowledged, with rerouted exports and alternative markets insulating the core.
This follows the mutual decoupling template and the economic war I’ve been writing about all along, wherein Putin’s own war against the Russian Oligarchy wasn’t meant to squeeze the Russian people, but to liberate them from a predatory corporate class who subsisted on the very lifeblood of the nation itself—specifically in the form of its natural resources.
Now that Trump, Xi and Narendra Modi are following suit, each seemingly taking turns sanctioning the biggest energy conglomorates and rare earth miners and refiners—not to mention globalist tech companies—of the other, the mandate and the practical need for on-shoring and multipolar pivots has never been stronger.
In other words, the economic decoupling in process isn’t against one another, but against Globalism itself, which is represented by shadowed, nationless nation states masquerading as corporations, a practice taken right out of the Prussian Playbook.
(And if you’re still unfamiliar with that playbook, I’d suggest spending a weekend or two doing a deep dive into the Prussiagate series by
, which will help tremendously with recognizing the mechanistic—and admittedly, rather genius—construction of what we call the System of Systems around these parts, and just how long it’s been in the offing.)This is the same Globalist Oligarchy I’ve been writing about in various forms and in various contexts—and yet, all orbiting the same Macro war between the forces of decentralization and its opposite—in the pages of both Righteous Russia and Doomed Dynasty, wherein I’ve argued that Trump, Putin and Xi aren’t trying to squeeze each other … they’re mutually squeezing the very corporations that have subjugated their respective populations by levering them against each other, while attempting to isolate players who don’t come to the globalist game board with hat in hand.
Furthermore, the fact that China and India are seemingly responding to the latest US sanctions package on Russian energy by reducing their own purchases only serves to further the mercantilist, nationalist stance being adopted and publicly projected by all … which is to say, the multipolarity, or the sovereignty.
This development and its obvious and far-reaching impact on companies who’ve made their billions on international trade rather than national development sheds further light on the somewhat embarrassing baited narratives circulating in the ether of late about supposed power struggles within Xi Jinping’s cabinet, which I framed as just the latest temper tantrum thrown by the very ‘Tigers and Flies’ Xi has been in the midst of rooting out and systematically purging for well over a decade, and who seemingly don’t take kindly to … policy changes on Russian oil conglomerates?
And keep in mind, this is ALL occurring against the backdrop of Trump and Putin continuing to signal large scale joint economic and energy projects between these great nations to be enacted and accelerated in the near future, which is only a contradiction if you think said sanctions war is against one another, and not the very Prussian Powers that have been holding such joint projects back in the interest of private profits over national abundance dating all the way back to the 1800s and the lead-up to the American Civil War, which was arguably engineered specifically to prevent the Sovereign Alliance from manifesting at the time.
But then, that’s a dig for another day.
Systems and Sovereigns, people.
That is the name of the game, and it should inform your reading of all actions, threats and non-threats in this War of Stories, not just ‘even when,’ but perhaps ‘especially when’ you bump up against what seems to be a contradiction at first glance.
Again, this sanctions package—which in turn provoked a predictable and dramatic response from Russian ‘Bad Cop’ Dmitry Medvedev—is narrative escalation at its finest, building tension to expose the warmongers’ contradictions without tipping into the very irreversible kinetic chaos Medvedev has been warning about all along … of course, when he isn’t calling the US Military a “black cat in a dark room,” hinting that he knows exactly how ‘real’ said escalations truly are.
Bolstering this ironically contrarian view on the end of the world narrative that’s spinning up for the umpteenth time—and that will no doubt escalate much further from here—is the same-day counternarrative from Trump himself, refuting mainstream media hysteria over alleged US-sanctioned kinetic escalations against Russia.
To wit, as reports swirled of Ukraine’s strike on a Russian chemical plant in Bryansk using British Storm Shadow missiles—penetrating air defenses with what some claim requires US targeting data—Trump took to Truth Social to dismantle the Wall Street Journal’s “FAKE NEWS” narrative that the White House had greenlit long-range missile assaults deep into Russian territory.
“The U.S. has nothing to do with those missiles,” he declared, echoing his administration’s earlier blocks on such strikes.
Which makes one wonder … who did?
Call them British. Call them Ukrainian. Call them the Invisible Enemy, if you like.
But don’t call them Sovereigns.
This isn’t chaos; it’s controlled exposure, underscoring that while economic optics ramp up, the Sovereign Alliance—Trump, Putin and Xi—steers clear of true red lines, using these feints to hasten the multipolar reset while teasing out their upcoming meetings that do in all honesty feel a bit more climactic than those they’ve shared in the recent past, but that were no doubt—at least in my estimation—planned in the very distant past.
Layer in the broader economic decoupling, and the picture sharpens.
What we’re witnessing, then isn’t unilateral aggression, but rather a mutual, choreographed unwind between the US, China and Russia—a pincer of tariffs, export bans and reshoring that purges globalist entanglements from all sides.
My friend
and I discussed this in a recent conversation about my Multipolar Margin Call concept.Trump’s 100% levies on Chinese EVs and soybeans, paired with Beijing’s rare earth restrictions and Russia’s BRICS-fueled commodity trades aren’t just trade wars; they’re margin calls on an overleveraged system, which will ultimately result in—and already is accelerating—the very sovereign reclamation all three leaders built their respective platforms on, two of them long before Trump came down that golden escalator a decade ago.
The US builds strategic reserves and domestic fabs; China advances tech sovereignty; Russia hoards gold and oil.
This multipolar mesh inverts the Hegemon’s scarcity playbook into abundance, with backchannel accords ensuring the dance stays narrative, not nuclear, accelerating a world of cooperative competition where nations thrive as sovereigns, not subjects.
Trump’s recent masterful navigation of the Middle Eastern Kobayashi Maru drives this vision home, and demonstrates that it’s not only possible, but probable to see play out in the months and years ahead writ large across the global—and increasingly multipolar—battlespace.
Which I wrote about both at the time, and quite a long time before it.
The Impossible Task
This piece is a thematic follow-up to ‘Rage and Serenity,’ and seeks to turn a statement into a question, one that may just be able to transform doom into hope … if enough of us ask it.
Paralleling this macro realignment is the micro fracture within the EU itself, where Slovakia and Hungary continue their reluctant tango in the sanctions saga, a seeming Micro that I’ve been tracking all year, and one I think could create shatterpoints that are as far-reaching then as they are subtle now.
To wit, lost in the noise of soft—and threatened hard—wars between the true titans on the game board, just this week, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico lifted his veto on the EU’s 19th sanctions package—targeting Russian liquefied natural gas imports by 2028—under mounting pressure from Brussels, clearing the path for approval on the eve of a key summit.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban, long a veto-wielding thorn himself followed suit in this round, despite both nations’ pragmatic outcries against measures that boomerang on European energy security and economies.
This pattern—oppose, drag feet, then concede under duress, all while mirroring Donald Trump’s moves the whole way through the narrative—stretches back to 2022, where these ‘peripheral’ states continually voice the sanity the bloc ignores: sanctions hurt the sanctioners more, inflating costs and eroding cohesion while Russia pivots Eastward unscathed.
Fico’s survival of that seemingly-forgotten May 2024 assassination attempt only amplified his defiance, turning him into a louder herald of multipolar alternatives, yet here they are, seemingly dragged once more into the Hegemon’s fray.
So, is it capitulation, or calculated exposure?
Either way, the very reluctance and even open defiance on display by some of its eastward members spotlights the EU’s fracturing consensus, baiting overcommitment that hastens internal collapse.
So, from where I’m sitting, in the ever-shifting battlespace of the Multipolar War, where the Hegemon’s collectivist hydra thrashes in its death throes, the fractures we’ve been mapping for months are no longer just suggestions, but seismic rifts tearing through the very foundations of the EU and NATO blocs.
As the Sovereign Alliance continues its inexorable advance, then, inverting the Axis and Allies paradigm into a symphony of decentralized harmony (something I’ve been writing about extensively all year,) the Micro and the Macro are aligning broadly along the rails I’ve laid out along both Narrative and Actual grounds.
Despite breathless commentary to the contrary coming out of the Media Protectorate, the on-again, off-again nature of Ukrainian peace talks between Trump and Putin isn’t a sign of uncontrolled chaos, but rather its opposite.
I believe we’re watching the deliberate unraveling of a unipolar illusion, where the ‘villains’ we need—primarily Trump, Putin and Xi—expose the true antagonists, the warmongers peddling perpetual conflict as their empire’s lifeblood.
And yet, I believe the true (and metaphorical, of course) bloodbath is going to begin inside the house, with ‘small players’ no longer content to let the futures of their respective populations run along the whims and wiles of vampires in Brussels and Berlin.
On the Actual front, consider the shot across the bow fired just last month at Beijing’s Victory Day Parade, commemorating the 80th anniversary of triumph over fascism—a fitting stage for the modern inversion I’ve been tracking all summer.
There, amid disciplined ranks and symbolic pageantry, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the only ‘European’ leaders bold enough to attend.
As I argued at the time in ‘The Sovereign War,’ this move by Serbia (a non-member state,) and Slovakia (quite the opposite,) wasn’t diplomacy; it was a signal flare to those paying attention, illuminating how these satellite states—one ostensibly shackled under Brussels’ dominion, the other defiantly outside it—are being drawn inexorably into the gravitational pull of the Multipolar Vision, as Xi and Putin’s (and yes, to be revealed in time, and with the benefit of hindsight for most, Donald Trump’s) shared blueprint for cooperative competition, free from the coerced collectivism of the Hegemon offers sovereign nations a path to economic vitality and technological acceleration without the drag of endless debt traps or proxy wars.
Serbia, long a thorn in NATO’s side with its non-aligned stance, and Slovakia, freshly defiant post-Fico’s resurgence are test cases in this realignment, inexorably peeling away from the EU-NATO axis and moving toward a mesh of resilient partnerships woven through cooperative competition.
Layer in the aforementioned assassination attempt on Fico—a brazen strike that screamed of Deep State desperation—and you see not just a philosophical shift in the offing, but one accelerated by the very violence meant to suppress it.
Surviving that hail of bullets didn’t break Fico; it forged him into a louder canary in the collectivist coal mine, chirping warnings about the EU’s transformation into a ‘war cabinet’ while seeking greener, more peaceful pastures, ironically represented by the very ‘villains’ the Globalist Machine has cast in a script they’ve lost control of.
And so, that attempt, laced with the fingerprints of globalist enforcers only hastened Slovakia’s public pivot, mirroring the broader awakening we’ve all tracked wherein attempts to silence sovereign voices are boomeranging into amplified resolve for that very thing.
Now, zoom out to the Macro, where Viktor Orban and Hungary emerge as one of several pebbles poised to start the avalanche.
As I’ve posited in these digital dispatches, Hungary isn’t just an observer or a proposed mediator; it’s the fulcrum cracking the Economic Hegemon of the EU and the Military one of NATO—two heads of the same Hegelian, Collectivist Hydra, both fracturing under the dual pressures of the Multipolar War and the Peacemakers steering it.
Orban’s pro-peace stance, his vetoes on EU sanctions stretching back to 2022 and his overtures to Moscow and Beijing aren’t aberrations; they’re the narrative deployments baiting the system to overcommit, thereby revealing its frailties, its lack of enforcement capabilities and most obviously, its lack of consensus formation powers.
With Trump (a known Orban ally) re-ascending the public throne in 2025, the pincer tightens on both Actual and Narrative grounds, turning globalist escalations into exposures that seed peace in the place of strife.
And speaking of peace, as the kayfabian drama unfolds, with apparent escalations building tension only to eventually (and quite suddenly) resolve in a series of cascading revelations, the evidence mounts that the true Golden Age Accords have long been proposed and sealed via backchannels, secure from the Hegemon’s prying eyes.
But why the delays?
Why the allowed—and even amplified—escalations?
Simple: they’re granting the warmongers enough rope to hang themselves, demonstrating with increasing clarity how the Hegemon is attempting to sabotage public overtures toward the very peaceful ends they feign to desire, all while protecting the sort of National Essential Functions my friend
documented exhaustively in the Devolution Series, albeit on a global scale.Take the collapsed Trump-Putin talks slated for Budapest this month—a venue chosen for Hungary’s neutral reliability, only to be torpedoed by EU machinations ... a theme and now a pattern many of us have been commenting on since the Special Military Operation in Ukraine kicked off, when the UK took center stage to avoid peace from being codified on that very stand.
Fico himself continues to call it out, arguing specifically that, this time around, elements within the bloc, including Poland’s saber-rattling over ICC warrants and airspace threats morphed into Narrative reasons for the proposed meeting between Putin, Trump and Zelenskyy to be called off.
Trump’s proposal for a freeze along current lines—a pragmatic off-ramp—was met with Kremlin consistency on root causes, but the real story is the EU’s “war cabinet” revealing its hand, accusing Russia of stalling while their own actions prolong the proxy bleed-out in Ukraine.
And, while frustrating to some, I believe this is the genius of the inversion between Peacemakers and Warmongers, Axis and Allies, and I think it’s obscuring a bubbling Narrative that COULD transform into a 2025-26 Actual.
As Trump pushes Hungary and Slovakia OUT of the NATO-EU straitjacket from one direction, decrying the alliances as obsolete leeches on American sovereignty, Putin appears to be lending a hand to pull them from the other, offering energy deals, infrastructure ties and a multipolar shield against collectivist subjugation, which, again was a theme of the recent SCO Summit and Victory Day Parade in China.
These nations (Hungary and Slovakia, with more to join them in the dawning light of a new sun) aren’t defecting; they’re awakening for all to see, signaling to the Collective Mind that peace through strength beats perpetual fodder status.
The implications?
A fractured EU and NATO not from without—via Trump and Putin’s overt maneuvers—but from within, as the warmongering zeal from the UK, France, Germany and Belgium alienates the ‘states’ on the periphery.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s veto power slows the economic machine while Slovakia’s defiance erodes military cohesion.
Even Poland, an eastern bulwark could waver if the costs of maintaining its collectivist status mount in the looming shadow of a renewed Russian Empire, while the Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—grow weary of being primed as cannon fodder for a hot war with Russia that no sane sovereign desires, even if the Narrative is working on overdrive to prep the mass psychological battlespace for a false flag meant to rope the west into full on war with the east, and using them as forgotten collateral.
To wit, as I was writing this very feature, another in a series of Baltic, doom-tinged headlines kept up the seasoning … ‘NATO Jets Scrambled Over Lithuania After Russian Aircraft Breach Airspace.’
Sick of the narrative that paints them as disposable pawns in a unipolar game, they might follow the pending exodus, seeking the stability of multipolar detente over Hegemonic hysteria.
And at the heart of it all lies the Ukrainian Keystone—both Actual and Narrative—the puzzle piece that once held the collectivist system together, and that now threatens to tear it asunder.
On the ground and in the Shadow War, Ukraine is a proxy quagmire exposing NATO’s impotence and the EU’s economic self-sabotage through endless sanctions that have both boomeranged while accelerating a Multipolar Pivot and Trump’s Narrative Shielding to follow suit.
And in the Mind War, it’s the ultimate exposure: Zelenskyy’s pleas for Tomahawks and aid ring hollow as Trump shifts the burden to Europe, forcing the bloc to confront its own contradictions.
So, as said Ukrainian keystone crumbles—rejected ceasefires, sabotaged summits, mounting casualties—the hydra’s heads will begin to turn on each other, accelerating the splintering into a world of sovereigns, not subjects.
The signals are aligning.
The Multipolar Renaissance is already laid out, and if you look closely, I believe you can see the tectonic plates beginning to shift as the old System shudders while the new one pours foundations that could last a century.
Trump, Putin and Xi may be the Trinity within the Sovereign Alliance and its core pillars, but the Multipolar World can only be born on the back of a full Collectivist Collapse.
And that starts one pebble at a time, as they remember themselves and the true power of their slow … and then quite sudden slides, and all they might portend.
Much like you.
Much like us.
And until that avalanche begins in earnest, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.
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The signals are definitely aligning and I like the shape of what is taking form, or becoming visible through the fog. Thanks BB. Great analysis as usual.
BB you have summed up important facts that have given me a grasp of the crazy situation our world is involved in. What an exciting time to be alive! (The Normies will have a tough time grasping the brilliance of the Sovereign Alliance.)