China's SCO Summit Highlights West's Growing Ideological Isolation, + Zelensky's Desperate Gambit

Last week Zelensky made the curious decision to open up the borders to Ukraine’s 18-22 year old males. The decision was met with both approval and disgust in different quarters of the country:

"We say:" Those who are not in the army, you are 18-22, you can leave the country, no one is holding you, you are cool guys." And we go back to the army, we say: "You are slaves. Listen to what you will do and when, how much you will fight in this army, " said the deputy of the Kiev City Council, an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Pogrebissky in an interview with a Ukrainian TV channel.

The bigger question is why did Zelensky “liberate” such a vital age group at a time when manpower is at critical lows on the front? Astute observers have noted it wasn’t simple coincidence that the decision came mere weeks after the NABU investigations and decision reversal. More importantly, it came weeks after Ukraine’s youth took to the streets in protest against Zelensky, in what appeared at times to be a new Maidan in the making.

The natural conclusion, then, is that Zelensky was forced to loosen the check valve on society, letting off some pressure from himself and allowing the most dissenting and anti-war 18-22 year-olds to flee the country so that they’re not able to form up a rebellious vanguard to create a political headache for Zelensky.

Even Le Monde leaned toward this natural angle:

The timing of the new regulation is not insignificant. It comes just over a month after the Ukrainian government tried to strip two anti-corruption agencies of their independence, on July 22. Thousands of young people protested in several Ukrainian cities for days, until the presidency backtracked and passed a law restoring the agencies' autonomy.

The fact that Zelensky himself raised the issue of allowing 18- to 22-year-olds to leave the country, on August 12 during a youth forum, was a strong political signal. "I think the president was trying to make amends with the younger generation by granting them some benefits," said Sovsun. MP Bohdan Yaremenko, a member of Zelensky's party, shares this view: "There will probably be more similar actions in the future to reach out to young people."

It’s interesting that the 18-22 cohort was chosen, whereas 23-24 year olds are still prohibited from leaving given that they’re on the cusp of the critical age of 25 to which mobilization was lowered.

Across Ukraine, there are growing signs of the lack of young males. This photo was posted by a professor at a Kiev university, reportedly showing a class overflowing with young females:

NO BOYS - NO MEN:

Andrey Dlyhach, a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, published a photo of the first-year students, showing that the overwhelming majority of the students are girls.

"You wanted to say something else with this photo, but what I see there are the consequences of 3 years of closed borders for men aged 18+," comments economist Gleb Vyshlinsky on the photo.

Other people reportedly chimed in in the comments, posting photos of similar gender disparities in their own schools across Ukraine.

There are other possible deductions to make about Zelensky’s sly decision. We can hypothesize on the following:

1. Zelensky sees the negotiations and peace track as being definitive such that he does not expect the war to last and does not see the need for the eventual tapping of the 18-22 cohort.

2. The political danger to Zelensky was so great—more so than even we know of—that he needed a boost to his image in order to restore some semblance of control. This also has to do with the quiet initiations of Zaluzhny’s political campaign—this could be Zelensky’s attempt to win back favor with society to increase his poll numbers and fortify himself against potential challengers.

3. Ukraine’s ‘recruitment problems’ are not as bad as we were led to believe, and its authorities are confident they can sustain military manpower regeneration even without the 18-22 cohort.

More than likely, Zelensky weighed the options and viewed the tradeoff as favorable. Crunching the numbers, his team likely concluded it was worth the long term risk to manpower in order to secure the short term political viability of Zelensky’s rule.

On the Ukrainian-political front, it’s obligatory to note that Trump’s two-week deadline has now expired. He had threatened some kind of consequences for Russia, and predictably there aren’t any, though he has now hinted that he has “learned something very interesting” about the war that he will reveal in the next few days—likely another made-up deflection to buy himself time.

Trump "seems to have run out of ideas regarding the advancement of the peace process" in Ukraine, as his latest two-week deadline has expired, and the meeting between Putin and Zelensky that he wanted has not taken place, writes The Times newspaper.

In reality, Putin is presently hitting his stride as celebrated guest in Beijing where the Global South power-players are convening to showcase just how little the wretched ‘Western world’ matters anymore:

In the grand ebb and flow of the Ukrainian negotiations cycle, we’re in a kind of waning phase, with no real initiatives or urgency at the moment as all involved parties have essentially gotten fatigued from the same old copy-pasted carousel of banality and deadend options.

For now, the Euro-cabal scoundrels have reverted to more militarized saber-rattling and bellicose agitprop, as von der Leyen continued her empty provocations tour by giving a warlike speech on the Belarusian border after claiming that her flight was attacked by Russian GPS jammers.

Now, on this momentous day Russia and China have signed a memorandum on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which is meant to be the largest gas project in the world. Most notably, it redirects gas originally meant for Europe to China, sealing Europe’s fate once and for all and securing the guaranteed rise of the ‘Dragonbear’:

The deal was one of four agreements struck between Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation, Gazprom’s chief executive, Alexei Miller, told reporters.

“This will now be the largest, most ambitious and most capital-intensive project in the global gas industry,” Miller said.

Together, the projects envision as much as 106 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas supplied to China each year, according to the Interfax news agency. Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia exported more than 150 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Europe.

Glenn Diesen: Russia's pivot from Europe to Asia is now permanent with the signing of the Power of Siberia-2, which runs from the Russian Arctic to China. The gas that could have fuelled European economies for decades has instead been redirected to China.

And speaking of multipolarity, at the SCO summit in Tianjin the leaders made it known that a new world of cooperation was being ushered in with or without the West’s disturbances and sour-grapes spoiling attempts. Ever the fitting statesmen for the new era, Xi accurately declared that global governance has arrived at a crossroads.

Xi went on to propose a Global Governance Initiative based on five key cornerstones:

Xi highlighted five principles of the GGI:

• Adhering to sovereign equality

• Abiding by international rule of law

• Practicing multilateralism

• Advocating the people-centered approach

• And focusing on taking real actions

You’ll note that these are principles the UN was in theory founded on, and should have been practicing to this day. Yet the West’s malign greed and exceptionalism has perverted structures like the UN into farcical, one-sided instruments of coercion, hollow grandstanding, and pontification. Just this week, Trump’s officials banned the Palestinian authorities from traveling to the upcoming UN meeting in the US by denying them visas, a despicably unholy act.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced it is denying and revoking visas for members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September.

This is exemplary proof of how far the current structures of global governance, justice, and cooperation have fallen under the West’s decadently corrupted leadership.

We see now clearer than ever, the stark rift forming between the two sides. One side is represented by craven, deceitful politicians who increasingly defend undemocratic backslides, vast totalitarian censorship regimes, and push only war, war, war, aggression and constant provocation against other countries, operating on perpetual fear cycles like vampires to lure their doe-eyed populaces into states of total paranoia and psychic exhaustion.

The other side preaches openness and fairness, cooperation and dialogue, harmony and co-existence. The difference is now starker than ever, and we can see the ever-dwindling cabal of the Atlanticist empire desperately clinging on for dear life as a new order takes shape before them, one clearly accepted as more sane and humane by the majority of the developing world.

These are two clashing systems of ideologies: one that elevates war and domination—what Xi called hegemonism in his earlier SCO speech—to the status of national religion, while the other seeks to unite the world in mutual development, and most importantly, shared respect.

It almost feels sententious to paint the contrast in such cartoonishly exaggerated strokes—but it really is increasingly the case. When you compare the hysteric, dead-eyed, empty bureaucrats-posing-as-leaders of the West to their peers, the difference is now night and day. Most Western leaders can no longer even step in public without being heckled and shamed—or outright attacked—by their fed-up constituents; Ursula was greeted with shouts of “Nazi criminal!” as she touched down in Bulgaria yesterday, and later had to “sneak through bushes” to avoid hecklers while attending a weapons site. Compare that to images of Xi universally revered by his people at today’s parade.

The crisis-addled Euro-compradors are like slugs in a salt bath, eking out their last few slimy attempts at global relevance.

Meanwhile, the new world continues to be born to their great spite:

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