Hang them up Vlad, let a young general take command.
Putin's failure in Ukraine has emboldened the terrorist regime in Kyiv.
Zelensky is running around the world acting like he's some action hero in a Hollywood blockbuster. All the attention and power has gotten to his head. He should have been assassinated many moons ago.
Putin has given this cokehead too much rope.
Russia needed a warrior to lead it during this turbulence, not a lawyer and a former intelligence operative who conducts "special operations" and doesn't call things by their real names.
Now is not the time for that.
The threat from Ukraine cannot be dismissed or contained. Ukraine has proven to be a danger not just to Russia but to the whole world.
It is not solely a Russian problem anymore.
Arms smuggling. Blowing up pipelines. Terrorist financing. Exporting mercenaries everywhere. Money laundering. Human trafficking. Go down the list. It is engaged in crime after crime.
Ukraine has become a global headache.
Russia has to bring order and security to that wasteland or else the whole world will suffer.
You wasted a lot of oil money on stupid stuff. You threw a lot of useless parties. Still, it wasn't all bad. Your boy Osama made a name for himself, helping to bring down two empires. Outstanding work.
But the bill has come due. Money can only buy you so much in this world. Blood can buy you more. Especially fresh blood. That's what the Houthis represent. They're injecting much needed warrior energy in the Arabian peninsula.
The future belongs to them.
Leave the scene honourably. Do not drag out your defeat.
Saudi oil is offline at all principal refineries as Ansarullah strikes from the south and IRI strikes from Iraq. https://t.co/TV1yAZSQtR
BREAKING: 🇸🇦🇾🇪 Jazan refinery storage facility in Saudi Arabia is still burning and the fire continues to spread 3 days after the Yemeni strikes pic.twitter.com/DUelSI3y9p
Its history is hard to navigate and understand. You've got Ukrainians, whose ancestors were called Ruthenians, Cossacks, Tatars, Russians, Jews, Poles. Plus four monotheistic religions are cohabitating on the same plain: Christian Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.
The Catholic Poles were mistreating the Orthodox Slavs, using the Jews to do their dirty work, which in turn caused resentment towards them and led them to be targeted in rebellions. The Tatars and Ottomans were raiding and pillaging everybody, taking Christians and Jews as slaves.
And then there's the Tsar in the background of it all.
When history gets this complicated I try to focus on historical personalities. Reading about a singular leader, a rebel, a military hero, a king, helps narrow your gaze and allows you to see more clearly. It brings into focus the many lenses of history. Otherwise you just get overwhelmed.
It's clear that Ukraine has always been a trouble spot. Everyone wants a piece of it. Its national identity is newly constructed and still contested to this day. Its history is marked with massacres and misrule by various rulers and rebels. It doesn't know its true destiny as it is constantly being pulled between East and West.
It is a buffer state, it is bait, it is a wild beast, it is many things in one.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and especially since the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, it has become a failed terrorist state. Its only purpose today is to make war on Russia. And it is doing badly at that.
Zynoviy Bohdan Mykhailovych Khmelnytsky of the Abdank coat of arms (c. 1595 – 6 August 1657) was a Ruthenian nobleman and military commander of Zaporozhian Cossacks as Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, which was then under the suzerainty of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He led the Cossacks to victory in a successful uprising against the Commonwealth and its magnates (1648–1654) that resulted in the creation of an independent Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine.
. . .Khmelnytsky had a crucial influence not only on the history of Ukraine, but also affected the balance of power in Europe, as the weakening of Poland-Lithuania was exploited by Austria, Saxony, Prussia, and Russia. His actions and role in events were viewed differently by different contemporaries, and even now there are greatly differing perspectives on his legacy.
. . .A different image of Khmelnytsky emerged in England, which was at the time engulfed by its own revolution. It is claimed, that Oliver Cromwell saw the hetman as a possible ally against the Catholics, and even addressed him in a letter. A dedication supposedly stemming the Lord Protector described Khmelnytsky as "by the Grace of God generalissimo of the army and ancient Greek religion and Church, master of all Zaporozhian Cossacks, dread and exterminator of Polish nobility, conqueror of fortresses, eradicator of Roman priests, persecutor of pagans, Antichrist and Jews".
In Ukraine during Khmelnytsky's time the hetman's name was interpreted as a sign of his divine mission to liberate the country. In a poem printed as an appendix to the Zaporozhian Host registry of 1649 he was mentioned along with Petro Mohyla as a protector of Christianity and benefactor of Rus'. During the hetman's entry into Kyiv, students of the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium welcomed him as "Moses" and "liberator from Polish slavery". Many dumas which emerged after the uprising depicted the hetman in a similar way, but other songs presented a negative attitude, condemning Khmelnytsky for his cooperation with Tatars. A negative point of view on Khmelnytsky's rebellion as a cause of human suffering is presented in the Eyewitness Chronicle. History of the Ruthenians contains passages blaming the hetman's union with the tsar for leading his people into an even worse slavery.
In modern Ukraine, Khmelnytsky is generally regarded as a national hero. A city and a region of the country bear his name. His image is prominently displayed on Ukrainian banknotes, and his monument in the centre of Kyiv is a focal point of the Ukrainian capital. There have also been several issues of the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky – one of the highest decorations in Ukraine and in the former Soviet Union.
However, despite this positive appreciation of his legacy, even in Ukraine, is far from being unanimous. He is criticised for his union with Russia, which, in the view of some, proved disastrous for the future of the country. Prominent Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, was one of Khmelnytsky's most vocal and harsh critics. Others criticize him for his alliance with the Crimean Tatars, which permitted the latter to take a large number of Ukrainian peasants as slaves, as the Cossacks as a military caste did not protect the kholopy, the lowest stratum of the Ukrainian people. In 1649 alone, Crimean Tatars plundered up to 70 Ukrainian towns and hundreds of villages, taking as many as 40,000 inhabitants as slaves. Contemporary witnesses claim that members of Cossack starshyna directly oversaw that process, acting on hetman's orders. In 1653, the events repeated on an even bigger scale, with the khan receiving permission to take 100,000 captives in exchange for peace with Polish authorities. Folk songs gathered by 19th-century Ukrainian author Panteleimon Kulish in Khmelnytskyi's native region of Cherkasy cursed the hetman, depicting him as an ally of the Turks, who facilitated the enslavement of local inhabitants.
On balance, the view of his legacy in present-day Ukraine is more positive than negative, with some critics acknowledging that the union with Russia was dictated by necessity and an attempt to survive in those difficult times. In a 2018 Ukraine's Rating Sociological Group poll, 73% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive attitude to Khmelnytsky.
Video Title: Khmelnytsky's Revolt 1648: The Man Who Broke Poland and Made Russia. Source: Chronicles of Power. Date Published: April 4, 2026. Description:
In 1647, a fifty-year-old Cossack officer had his land stolen, his son beaten half to death in a marketplace, and his intended wife forcibly married by a neighbor who had friends in high places. He went to court. The courts sided with the magnate. He went to Warsaw. Twice. The king gave him a royal charter. Nobody enforced it.
By Christmas 1648, he rode into Kyiv while crowds called him "Moses, savior, liberator of the Rus people." He had destroyed three Polish armies in less than a year. He controlled most of Ukraine. He was the most powerful man in Eastern Europe who didn't have a throne.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky never set out to reshape the map of Eastern Europe. He set out to get his land back and recover the woman who had been taken from him. What happened instead was that a private grudge became a rebellion, the rebellion became a revolution, and the revolution is still unresolved today.
We'll follow the full story — the Cossack military system that beat the best cavalry in Europe, the Crimean Tatar alliance that made every victory possible and sabotaged every decisive win, and the council at Pereyaslav in January 1654, where Khmelnytsky asked Moscow for protection and the Russian envoy refused to swear a reciprocal oath. The tsar's word was sufficient. Subjects don't receive oaths from sovereigns.
Khmelnytsky accepted. He needed troops. Two years later, Moscow made a separate peace with Poland without telling him.
He died trying to undo what he had created.
The Soviet Union called him a liberator who united Ukraine with Russia. Ukrainian nationalists call him the founder of their state. Polish historians call him the man who ended Poland's golden age. Jewish communities remember the massacres of 1648 as one of the worst catastrophes in their history before the twentieth century. Every description is accurate. None is complete.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, anti-Bolshevik exiles from the former Russian Empire, known as “White emigres,” contributed extensively to the making of German National Socialism. This book examines the formative political, financial, military, and ideological influences that White emigres exerted on Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist´movement. This study of White emigre´ contributions to Hitlerism demonstrates that National Socialism did not develop merely as a peculiarly German phenomenon. National Socialism arose in the early post-World War I period (1918–1923) from an international radical right milieu in which embittered volkisch ¨(nationalist/racist) Germans collaborated with vengeful White emigres in an anti-Entente (Britain and France), anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle.
. . .Russian authorities only admitted to possessing files looted from Germany and declassified them in 1991 after the Soviet Union had collapsed. Historians were allowed to investigate the huge archival collection at the Center for the Preservation of Historical-Documentary Collections, which had become part of the Russian State Military Archives by the time I examined materials there in 1999–2001. I was temporarily denied access to the former Center in March 2001, likely as part of the chilled American–Russian relations that arose after the February 2001 arrest of the FBI operative Robert Hanssen as a double agent for both the Soviets and the Russians.
In its heyday, the former Center contained large amounts of files dealing with National Socialist–White emigre´ collaboration, including reports from Hitler’s Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police, commonly known as the Gestapo) and the Reichskommissar fur die ¨ Uberwachung deroffentlichen Ordnung (State Commissioner for the Supervision of Public ¨Order), the secret intelligence office of the Weimar Republic that reported on political developments and observed foreigners in Germany. Regrettably, many State Commissioner files, most likely including one devoted specifically to Aufbau, have long been housed at the Sluzhba vneshnoirazvetki (Foreign Intelligence Service), where historians are not allowed to examine them. As a further hindrance, Russian authorities “temporarily” transferred the remaining State Commissioner documents there during the summer of 2001,fortunately after I had examined them thoroughly. I believe that I am the last Western scholar to investigate these valuable materials.
. . .Chapter Two is divided into two parts. The first section focuses on the Ukraine in 1918 as the theater of the first large-scale anti-Bolshevik German–White military collaboration. The German–White anti-Bolshevik interaction in and just outside the Ukraine established a precedent for further cooperation between rightist Germans and Whites/White emigres´ both in Germany and abroad, notably as conducted in the Baltic region the following year. Many White officers who served in the Ukraine under German occupation went on to join Aufbau and to foster the National Socialist cause, including General Biskupskii, Colonel Vinberg, Colonel Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, and Lieutenant Shabelskii-Bork.
The second segment of Chapter Two deals with the Ukraine’s role as a transfer zone for White ideology to postwar volkisch ¨ German circles in general and to Hitler in particular. During the winter of 1918/1919, German military personnel evacuated thousands of White officers from the Ukraine. One of them, Shabelskii-Bork, carried The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with him to Berlin. Once there, he gave the fabrication to the volkisch¨publicist Hausen for translation and publication in German. The Protocols’ warnings of an insidious Jewish plot to achieve world domination through both insatiable finance capitalism and revolutionary turmoil greatly affected volkisch ¨ Germans and White emigres, including Hitler’s mentors Eckart and ´Rosenberg. They in turn influenced Hitler’s anti-Semitic views. Hitler used the Protocols as a blueprint of Jewish schemes to conquer the world, notably through the use of starvation as a means to subjugate nationalist majorities.
China is drafting a plan to spend roughly 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over five years on a nationwide web of AI data centers. The goal is for at least 80% of the underlying technology, AI chips included, to be sourced from domestic suppliers such as Huawei, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the discussions.
Data centers are a key part of China’s broader plan. By one estimate, China will more than double the amount of electricity it uses at data centers by 2030. Another estimate suggests the sector’s energy use could triple to as much as 600 terawatt-hours—more than the whole country of Germany uses now.
Still, it will be a small fraction of China’s overall electricity demand, which is dominated by factories. And because China has been quickly building clean energy for industry for years, it’s in a good position to quickly build more. Compare that to the U.S., where electricity demand has been flat for decades, and the sudden demand from AI is a shock to the grid.
"I do think this is an area where China has an edge,” Chan says. “Not to have too hokey of an analogy here, but on building out new power capacity, China has been working out every year for decades, for reasons not related to AI. The U.S. hasn’t gone to the gym in this space in a while.”
There are still challenges. As in other parts of the world, it’s hard to predict exactly how much demand there will be from data centers, and building new transmission lines and other capacity comes with some risk. New data centers built in more remote areas near wind and solar farms can’t serve all AI workloads; the Chinese government is currently looking at which workloads are less time-sensitive and can be handled farther away from cities. Cities can access offshore wind and some nuclear energy, though the bulk of new clean power is being built farther away from the most populated areas.
Meanwhile, the data center industry has grown to fit demand. Data center infrastructure around the globe is increasingly AI-ready, capable of processing high volumes of complicated computations and requests. Currently, the Asian Pacific and North American regions have the highest proliferation of data centers, particularly in areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, northern Virginia and the San Francisco Bay area.
Substantial investments from big tech have also signaled growth for the AI data center sector. In 2025, Microsoft plans to invest approximately USD 80 billion on data center construction and Meta is investing USD 10 billion in a new, four million-square-foot hyperscale data center development in the US state of Louisiana.
. . .The high computational power, advanced networking and vast storage systems in AI data centers require massive amounts of electrical power and advanced cooling systems to avoid outages, downtime and overload. Goldman Sachs anticipates that AI will drive a 165% increase in data center electricity demand by 2030. And McKinsey’s analysis suggests that the annual global demand for data center capacity might reach 171 to 219 gigawatts (GW). The current demand is 60 GW.
To meet these intense energy consumption and cooling requirements, some AI data centers employ a high-density setup. This strategy maximizes data center square footage with compact server configurations that perform better, are more energy efficient and contain advanced cooling systems.
For example, liquid cooling often uses water rather than air cooling to transfer and dissipate heat. It offers greater efficiency in handling high-density heat and improved power usage effectiveness (PuE)—a metric used to measure data center energy efficiency. Another cooling method, hot and/or cold aisle cooling containment, organizes server racks to optimize airflow and minimize the mixing of hot and cold air.
Given these significant power requirements, today’s organizations often seek a balance between their AI ambitions and sustainability goals. One impressive example comes from Apple, one of the world’s largest owners of hyperscale data centers. Since 2014, all of Apple’s data centers have run completely on renewable energy through various combinations of biogas fuel cells, hydropower, solar power and wind power.
Mexico is becoming one of Latin America's most dynamic data center hubs. What’s happening here is a powerful snapshot of global trends—hyperscaler expansion, skyrocketing cloud adoption, and the relentless rise of AI—all converging in a single market.
With its strategic location bridging North, Central, and South America, Mexico has emerged as a natural digital corridor for the region. The country now ranks second in Latin America for both total data center capacity and square meters of built space, trailing only Brazil.
Alberta is the dominant destination for data centre development in Canada, according to figures published in a report earlier this month by researchers Alexander Carlo and Lyndsey Rolheiser of the Schulich School of Business at York University.
While British Columbia leads the West in the number of active data centres at 27, Alberta has 167 data centres proposed versus the 20 active today. Alberta’s outsized share of active and proposed projects is underscored by neighbouring Saskatchewan, where the sum of active and proposed projects is 12, while in Manitoba, the tally is four.
The paper from York University notes that Alberta has succeeded in attracting fresh investment by actively removing the guardrails other jurisdictions have put in place. While the state of New York recently embraced a one-year moratorium on large (hyperscale) data centres and B.C. aims to restrict grid access, Alberta has an active, government-led investment strategy that aims to secure $100 billion in private investment over five years.
