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The Duran

The Duran
Host Alexander Mercouris, Alex ChristoforouOfficial Site ↗Politics & Geopolitics

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Putin's Advice to Trump; Ratcliffe's Ukraine Power Grab

Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris discuss what they describe as Ukraine's worsening military, financial, and diplomatic position. Mercouris attributes a collapsing front and tax base to Russian strikes, treats a reported Lyman counterattack as unconfirmed public-relations warfare, and says US approaches to Moscow through Ratcliffe's pressure and Witkoff and Kushner's inducements both failed. He reports that Putin told Trump the war ends if Washington stops helping Ukraine. These statements remain the hosts' claims, not independently verified facts.33:08 · 2026-09-10

Secret Plan to Destroy BRICS and Crash China w/ Ryan Perkins

A first-time guest interview broadcast September 9, 2026: Ryan Perkins, a Beijing-based geopolitics analyst (Ryan Perkins Geopolitics on Substack, ChinaIndicator on X), meeting the hosts after their recent Russia trip and fresh from the Vladivostok economic forum. Christoforou's framing sets the stakes: many assume the United States is blundering through the Middle East crisis; Perkins thinks there is a more considered strategy. The thesis, published speculatively in April as the pro-yuan hypothesis: he started writing shortly after the war began in March because the official picture didn't look right. Across ten to twenty years of policy papers, two constants held everywhere - a regime-change operation in Iran was consistently considered unlikely to succeed, and in any military operation Iran would close the strait. If both outcomes were known in advance, the closure may have been the intention: a fertilizer crisis starting at the northern hemisphere planting season, and an energy shortage created and hidden at once - long-term infrastructure destruction across the region, Venezuela, EU sanctions on Russian energy exports - with prices suppressed through financial means. The optimum synchronization of the two weapons is the September-October harvest, six months after the fertilizer shock began. Last Friday's Duran video opening with Bessent on an energy shock read to him as vindication; the incompetence narrative, he argues, is the standard bridge between a policy imperative and public acceptance in a democracy. And at the center sits Scott Bessent - a man who made billions manipulating markets for leverage over currencies. The walkthrough maps the weapon. Prices: $100 within the week, 120-125 by month's end, around $150 a barrel by year's end if supply carries on unchanged. Three targets: China primary - economic containment extending the military and political regime; fracturing BRICS solidarity; and an object warning to the global south weighing BRICS against the dollar zone's short-term safety. India is the most exposed major economy - fertilizer and feedstock through the strait, 80% of oil imports through it, a climbing import bill pressuring the rupee toward depreciation spiral. Brazil is squeezed on fertilizer (the Reuters report of Brazilian soybean farmers losing their edge - on air 'three or four weeks ago'; verified June 8, thirteen weeks prior). China's two vulnerabilities, the kind Bessent would have identified: industrial value added - the SME sector absorbed the pandemic's inflation wave and was bridged by a government package because that shock was short-term, while an eighteen-month-to-two-year squeeze leaves nowhere to bridge to; and the offshore RMB pool - half of China's oil bought in RMB (45% Saudi, 20% UAE, 99% Russian), the overflow changing hands openly in Hong Kong, Singapore and London: one currency, two exchange rates, a peg to defend with buy-backs or rate rises that preclude the SME support. The aim: an industrial recession the government cannot cushion. What can China do? It has prepared for at least ten years - fifteen, possibly twenty: renewables and EVs to energy-proof the economy; this year, swap agreements and an end to dollar bond issuance. Mercouris sharpens the danger: a currency crisis forcing a very sharp, dramatic rate increase - a societal shock given SME employment - and asks why protect the floating RMB at all. Because cutting it off is the unthinkable option: the moment the entire BRICS financial architecture starts to crumble. One tool exists (borrowing RMB against RMB bonds from the central bank); the trap's deviousness is that defending the currency excludes the pandemic-style bridge. A real dilemma. The reassessments follow. The tariff war, in this light, was less ramshackle than portrayed - a way to test vulnerabilities and map retaliation pathways, with Trump's senile-old-man persona as cover. Mercouris supplies the lineage: the offshore Eurodollar pool broke Bretton Woods; Soros broke the ERM in 1992; Bessent was active in the ERM crisis, did something similar in Japan in 2012 and in Iran this January - he has a record. Hence the hosts' probe: energy and food shocks hitting the West too, games with western stability hoping to crash China - a very big place to crash; is this a fund manager's job or a Treasury Secretary's? The objective, answered: not to break China but to create enough leverage to force a Plaza-Accord-type agreement - the 1985 sequence of revaluation, crushed exports, cheap money, bubbles, US rate rises and the deflationary decade - to slow and contain China while America reindustrializes. Which, Perkins argues, cannot happen: no blueprint exists, and the dollar's reserve status is why America de-industrialized in the first place; Germany plays the same role in the Eurozone, as Britain did in the late nineteenth century. Then the pivot-back evidence. India pressed openly for a Ukraine ceasefire (Modi at Bishkek, the Tashkent intervention), Lula likewise; the BRICS financial architecture that had momentum under Russia's presidency stalled under Brazil's (everything shifted to green issues) and went nowhere under India's - strongly suspected US pressure, since that infrastructure is exactly what would have given China options. The visible sign: India bought fertilizer aggressively on the open market - urea at roughly twice pre-crisis prices - and subsidized it to farmers, moving the Hormuz shock straight onto the government balance sheet; budget strain and rupee pressure followed: the first visible sign the trap is working. India won't announce leaving BRICS; it will behave in ways that make participation meaningless. Mercouris's Moscow account, from officials in the room: enormous 2024 payments work culminating at Kazan; Brazilian stalling, acrimony, South Africa and India siding with Brazil; the real brake being officials' personal fear of US sanctions. Radhika Desai told Perkins the same at Vladivostok. From the forum itself: Putin's speech light on geopolitics, the Q&A light on Ukraine - but the point made that Russia is happy to negotiate an ending strictly between the two belligerents: a neat get-out after Bishkek, since Kyiv won't agree. Indonesia's president was there, keen on trade and the free-trade area; Southeast Asia was the forum's focus, with Mercouris's fold on Indonesia's Soviet-era links and the new president's interest in reviving them. The close: Power of Siberia 2 is going ahead and fast-tracked - the problem is the route. The original alignment through Mongolia was 'pretty certain'; at the conference Perkins was told the delay comes primarily from the Chinese side - not distrust of Mongolia but of what might happen to Mongolia - with a new route around it into northeastern China being worked out. The name change itself (verified: renamed 'Power of Baikal' on September 2) points to the new route and to priority. The Mongolians, who had negotiated transit fees, energy-infrastructure investment and a share of the gas, take the blow. And the closing awareness point: ask any taxi driver in Beijing about the Iran war and they will tell you it is about China. That awareness, Perkins says, is not recent - it underpinned the last decade's political changes, from the constitutional continuity amendment to the socialist reorientation of education, the preparations of a leadership that understood this was coming. 'We live in very interesting times - as the Chinese themselves I believe actually do say.'58:07 · 2026-09-09

U.S. Carrot and Stick Strategy to Save Ukraine

A host-only Duran episode broadcast September 8, 2026, two days after the Kremlin confirmed Putin's three-hours-ten-minutes meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and the envoys' onward leg to Kiev. Christoforou's opener sets the scorn: a complete clown show — Zelensky turning the Kiev meeting into a movie-promotional press tour, saying no compromises, no withdrawal from Donbas, give me Patriots, give me money, give me weapons. Mercouris's verdict on the diplomacy question: it wasn't diplomacy at all. Witkoff and Kushner are friends of the president, not diplomats; diplomacy is a skilled, complex operation needing discretion, care, attention to detail and small steps. The context that explains the trip: over the summer the war took a catastrophic turn for Ukraine — Black Sea coast cut off, landlocked, the economy imploding (about 60 billion by end-2026 in the hosts' backchannel), out of air defenses, pounded day and night, the Russian army advancing everywhere and purposefully, with Donbas possibly falling within weeks or months — some say by January-February 2027. Washington does not want that debacle on its hands, so it is trying to find some means to get the Russians to stop. The anatomy of the attempt is the first segment's core. First the stick: CIA Director Ratcliffe went to Moscow to play the hard man — the situation will get much worse for you unless you do a deal now — and it failed and apparently backfired: Putin and Lavrov refused to meet him, US media report the Russians reacted badly to the threats and escalated as soon as he left. Then the carrot: the sanctions czar brought along, the glittering business opportunities, Bessent telling the Russian finance minister Siluanov at the G20 that sanctions will be lifted once the war ends — the ceasefire, buffer zone, then relief fairy tale. The Russians didn't move. Putin was immensely polite — which irritates many people in Russia — and criticism of Dmitriev is starting to appear in the Russian media itself. And the answer was demonstrated rather than stated: missile and drone strikes on Ukraine while the envoys sat in Moscow, some very close to Boryspil airport; no direct flight to Kiev made possible, so Warsaw and the train — and then Zelensky's no-compromises circus for two men who came empty-handed. Where next? Washington keeps pushing the trilateral meeting — Ratcliffe had suggested one; a Trump call to Putin is in the air — but Putin rejected it again at Bishkek: these people want personal meetings and are threatening us with terrorism at one and the same time. The administration's real problem is that it has nothing else: money for Zelensky is politically toxic, the US has no weapons to spare. And the politeness itself is a trap: the Americans will misread Putin's good wishes to Trump as room to push further — realistically, that is not going to happen. The second segment dissects what the meeting was and what Washington thinks it would get. Trump, on Mercouris's reading, genuinely believes a deal forms in five or ten minutes because he is present in the room. From the Russian point of view the format has two fatal flaws: it legitimizes Zelensky — Putin and Trump are both legitimate presidents, so seating Zelensky alongside accepts him as a legitimate party to negotiations — and it builds a two-against-one squeeze: Trump and Zelensky together demanding a ceasefire, some mechanism to make the Russians stop. The Russians won't stop. Per the Kremlin website as the episode has it, Putin's introductory words read: we're advancing all across the front line, and we are going to win — and Ushakov's summary said the same, his 'the Russians', not just Putin, suggesting military people in the room. Most of the three hours ten minutes was the Russians walking the Americans through the front — over the heads of two men who don't know Kramatorsk from Sloviansk — followed by an informal dinner, possibly sandwiches; Christoforou's jab: they've been doing that through eight meetings with Witkoff now, and they're still not understanding it. Meanwhile Washington is also enlisting Modi, Tokayev and Lula to press Putin — the Europeans nowhere to be seen. The military rundown that follows is the reference map: terrible in every single place. The Russians are storming a village confusingly also called Dobropillia, southwest of the town; if it falls, Dobropillia sits in a cauldron with no access roads — opening the way to encircling Sloviansk and Kramatorsk from the south, with the settlements between Oleksiyevo-Druzhkivka and Druzhkivka just captured, another encirclement in the northeastern Kharkiv region that should never have been allowed, and Orekhov in effect encircled and about to fall. A crisis right across the battlefronts — while Witkoff and Kushner probably still believe the Western media's stalemate story; by the time they understand, it will be too late. Donbass will fall. Ratcliffe and the Pentagon understand it — hence the bribes. Folded in, the Zelensky read: his weapons-and-money talk is a man trying to get through this winter to mid-2027; he is preparing his exit within six months to a year. And the closing fact-check: ISW's map and statement that Putin gave the military a directive to capture 15 or 12 settlements within a certain deadline — complete fiction, in the hosts' word, from the Nuland-Kagan family's institute that does this all the time. Putin has never expressed any deadlines in public to anybody anywhere at any time; the pattern runs the other way — the West makes up deadlines, attributes them to Putin, and scores Russia against them. The Russians don't operate that way, and never will.20:50 · 2026-09-08

AfD Wins Big, CDU Collapse, Merz is Finished

A host-only episode broadcast September 7, 2026, the day after the Saxony-Anhalt state election. Christoforou's opener puts the result on the table: the AfD the big winner. Mercouris's answer becomes the episode's spine: absolutely a huge victory — they outpaced even the most optimistic estimates, most polls capping them at 43% and they got almost 44, on a record turnout of over 77% — a tidal wave in regional terms, in a state he is careful to say is no economic powerhouse: around 2 million people, no enormous industries. The mirror half is a total collapse of Chancellor Merz's CDU — from about 36% in 2021 to just over 17%, the vote more than halved — in what was always its safest ground: the conservative south of the former East Germany, the party of reunification, the party of Helmut Kohl. Impossible, he says, to read as anything other than a massive repudiation of Merz, of his government in Berlin, and of the entire German political system. The structural heart of the segment is the firewall arithmetic. The AfD has been delivered what is for them the perfect result: just short of a majority — three seats short — only because the smaller parties all cleared the threshold: Die Linke (in East Germany the legacy party of the former ruling communist party), the Greens, and Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW. The AfD has much more than twice as many votes as the next biggest party, the CDU — so applying the firewall now means a broken, discredited, deeply unpopular CDU forming a government with parties identifiable with the former ruling communists: which would be seen across Germany as a grotesque establishment stitch-up, an inversion of democracy. Hence the paradox: this is almost the optimal result for the AfD. If it forms a government, the firewall has collapsed (Christoforou, flatly: the firewall is over). If it is denied, it becomes the party that was ripped off — the corrupt elite ignoring the will of the people — and gains even more support. The near-term chess: the BSW has indicated it might tolerate an AfD government, though an uncomfortable partner the AfD is unlikely to cut deals with; a drift of CDU parliamentarians to the AfD is not impossible, though they would be slated for it inside the CDU. And in Berlin the end-game: growing hostility to Merz specifically, an anti-Merz faction forming inside the CDU itself, about a fifth of Germans in polling no longer expecting him to be chancellor beyond the end of the year — against the German norm under which even the unsuccessful Scholz limped on to the election he lost — so a very high chance, Mercouris judges, of the end of Merz within the next few weeks. The second segment takes the CDU's options apart. Dumping Merz is the smart thing, but whoever takes over inherits a country needing major shifts in economic and foreign policy that they will not make. The arithmetic has already reversed: the last Bundestag election's CDU 28% against AfD 20% is now CDU down to 21%, possibly below 20, against an AfD polling 28% and very likely to go above 30. Christoforou probes the maximum cosmetic package a new leader could offer — deal with immigration, stop the money to Zelensky, while still hating Russia, still pouring money into NATO and Rheinmetall. Mercouris's answer: it doesn't address the core problem. For most Germans the CDU is now the party that embraced mass immigration — Merkel in 2015 basically invited people from Syria and the Middle East, started the whole thing, did it on purpose — and you cannot go back in time and blame it all on Merkel. Nor will the party loosen its link to Brussels and the EU: no cheap Russian energy, still committed to the arms buildup, debt still piling up. What is on offer is Merz's policies slightly diluted, without Merz. The prediction: a more personable, more amiable, less arrogant successor; a bump in support for a few months; then an even faster fall as Germany sees the CDU has no real answers — which by the way is also true. The parallel is Britain: exactly the Labour trajectory, remove the arrogant, aloof, complacent figure (Starmer, now out of Parliament and actively pursuing election as NATO Secretary General), bring in the more engaging Andy Burnham, change nothing, watch the public drift away again — to Reform there, to the AfD here. The radical alternatives fail too: the SPD, dying in its former heartlands, banks increasingly on banning the AfD, but every AfD win makes that harder; and the smear route has visibly backfired — in Mercouris's own view the timing of the Leipzig drone incident was partly intended to damage the AfD, and the we-can't-share-intelligence-because-they're-controlled-by-Moscow line increased AfD support, exactly the opposite of what Berlin hoped. The verdict: the establishment limps along, rotating chancellors, changing nothing of substance, fingers crossed for a political crisis in Moscow — Christoforou's sark: the UK method. The closing question returns to Alice Weidel: Orbán or Meloni — does she stand firm on her policies under Europe's globalist pressure, or fold like Meloni folded and become a good law-abiding globalist? Mercouris first grants the caveat their German viewers regularly write in with: the AfD isn't as radical as it appears — its program against the CDU's doesn't differ that much, it is also a neoliberal party supporting much of the neoliberal consensus, and its politicians are politicians. But two things do distinguish it: a much more radical, harder immigration line than any other party — and a different Russia line altogether: end the conflict, get Russian gas moving west to Germany again, undertake some kind of rapprochement. Not an easy position to hold these past years, but they stuck with it, and it is now paying electoral dividends as more and more Germans understand what a disastrous thing cutting off all that gas was. The payoff argument: the anti-Russian war policies associated with Merz are so unpopular that an AfD government reversing them would be cutting with the political grain — popular, electorally successful — something a German government could probably pull off alone in Europe. And the last marker: Weidel's AfD is now talking about quitting the euro — whether they would is another question, but at least they are talking about it. Who else in Germany is?29:07 · 2026-09-07

Raisi's BRICS Legacy Shapes Iran's Future as War Resumes

A host-only episode broadcast September 6, 2026, as US-Iran military operations restart around the Strait of Hormuz. Christoforou's opener sets the dueling numbers: the administration claiming 30 to 40 ships out a night against roughly 140 when the Strait was fully open, tracking services saying about 10 — while Trump posts about Hormuz daily on Truth Social, down to renaming it the Strait of Trump. Mercouris's answer becomes the episode's spine: some ships have indeed been getting through on the southern route, and he cannot imagine that happening without the Iranians knowing and in some way green-lighting it. Iran, once again, is a very complicated country: the hardliners — concentrated in the IRGC but present in other agencies too — want confrontation, want the Strait kept completely closed as leverage, and hardly conceal their objective of pushing the Americans out of the Persian Gulf entirely. Against them stands Pezeshkian, responsible for an economy of very high inflation, budget deficits and falling incomes, who has just said in a speech that this is the moment to end the war: Iran is ahead on points, the political system is intact, make the deal while strong — meaning a return to something like the MOU with the Strait reopened, a view parliament speaker Ghalibaf shares, with sympathizers in the military and possibly inside the IRGC. The mechanism of the collapse: an informal arrangement had the Omanis letting ships through and the Iranians looking the other way, a first step toward gradually normalizing and returning to the MOU — until Trump, as so often, couldn't restrain himself: the Truth Social posts that the United States controls the Strait, the remarks suggesting no mood for compromise. The arrangement fell apart, the hardliners in Tehran regained the ascendancy, ships in the Strait were struck, and the fighting in effect resumed. Mercouris's own judgment: as of this recording the Strait of Hormuz is completely closed again — without some degree of Iranian complicity, no ship can pass. It is as simple as that. Christoforou pushes back that the MOU was never realistic or workable — the US wanted nothing to do with it, and Israel is never going to allow that type of deal — which draws out the diagnosis Mercouris really wants to make: the fundamental problem within Iran is that the entire discussion is exclusively centered around the United States. Deal with the Americans to rebuild the economy, or fight them and accept decades of hardship — and almost nobody in the upper reaches of the system is prepared to think of the alternatives: developing BRICS, strengthening relations with China, building stronger relations with Russia. The counterexample is Ebrahim Raisi, who thought in exactly those ways — brought Iran into BRICS, had close relations with the Chinese and the Russians, and on whose watch military contacts between the Russians and the Iranians began to grow and even burgeon — until he died in a helicopter accident, the nature of which has never been fully clarified, after which the whole discussion reverted, as if by default, to deal-or-fight. On the military question the verdict is ultimately probably not: the IRGC and Iran can wreak devastation across the Middle East — pipelines, energy facilities, desalination plants, a massive humanitarian crisis — but the United States is a superpower and Iran is not. Their own earlier prediction, that a war lasting longer than a week would swing the pendulum toward Iran, proved right; an indefinite war of choice would swing it gradually back to the Americans. By contrast, the hardliners are absolutely right that the Americans cannot be trusted and their long-term deals will be broken — which is precisely why the non-US options matter. Christoforou then reframes the whole war economically: all the fighting is about Hormuz because it holds the key to the entire war — if the US can get ships through, or make it appear ships are going through, the price of oil, interest rates and market risk stay moderated. Trump the salesman can take one ship and turn it into 30 or 40, and parts of the public, the financial institutions and the market will believe him — which is what Trump and Vance are trying to do. Iran's mirror-image logic: keep Hormuz closed to inflict pain on the US and the global economy until the US retreats. Mercouris's rejoinder: the wiser long-term game is to step out of the Hormuz paradigm altogether — the leverage it gives traps Iran in a confrontation with the United States. The Raisi chapter closes the argument: the Financial Times investigation — which Mercouris takes completely seriously, judging it based on real information obviously provided by a Western intelligence agency — shows the Russians have been providing Iran technical and military assistance to build up its defenses, with the timeline going all the way back to Raisi's presidency ('that's why they took him out'). Because of Raisi's connections food and gas come from the north; BRICS states like China might help stabilize Iran's financial system; probably because of his role Iran improved its ballistic missile and drone technology — but Iran is resting on the benefits of his policies without building on them, slipped back into the false choice of a US deal or indefinite war with the Strait permanently closed. Christoforou's closing middle ground — a deal understood to be broken, buying five to ten years of buildup, a Minsk-type deal that Merkel said gave Ukraine time to build its military and that on the Russian argument gave Putin time to prepare for sanctions — draws Mercouris's assent: a coherent and intelligent policy, but one requiring the ground prepared carefully, with the president, prime minister, cabinet and military flowing constantly to Beijing, Moscow and the like to explain: we know the deal will be broken, we have a year at most — not five — we need time and help, do we have your support? Quiet contacts like Pezeshkian meeting Xi Jinping and Putin at the BRICS summit in Bishkek are never enough. And at the moment, he just doesn't see it.23:00 · 2026-09-06

Out of Money, Out of Missiles: Zelensky Exit Plan as Trump Faces Ukraine Defeat

A host-only war-economy episode broadcast September 5, 2026, three days after Ukraine's failed ~500-drone strike on Moscow airspace. Mercouris's opening diagnosis: the madness gripping Kiev and the collective West is the product of a gathering slow-motion collapse — front lines, the war in the sky, the economy — and of the belated understanding that the war is lost, now that every miracle (scaring or bribing Russia, a new weapon, the drone offensive, sanctions, a crisis in Russia, Putin falling) has failed to arrive. The Leipzig An-124 drone incident has been spun into a Russia-waging-hybrid-war narrative with escalation demands — the Russian House in Berlin closed, EU dissent-suppression talk — while Zelensky campaigns to close Russian airspace via the UN and against the Rasvet satellite system. On the ground: a Ukrainian force trapped in Kharkov region, Orekhov's resistance near collapse, Dobropillya lost, a conclusive Russian victory north of Slavyansk, Kiev attacked day and night, air-defense missiles exhausted, a deep budget crisis — and a two-day public gunfight between the intelligence and security agencies, partly over closing money flows. The money chapter: Zelensky asks 36 billion for his administration and 27 billion for the military; Europe would welcome the military money back into its industry but the administration money reads as pure corruption. The UK defense ministry is broke and cutting training; Germany is crumbling — Volkswagen in big trouble — with the blame pinned on Merz and the globalist elite for cutting Russian trade and cheap energy. There is nothing to buy anyway (no interceptors, no Patriots, the US has nothing to sell), and Trump now wants the Europeans to pay for all the weapons Biden gave free — a bill expected around 300 billion, lowballed if anything. The 90-billion-euro loan, dissected at length: bonds with no repayment date — repayable when Russia is defeated and pays reparations, 'which is to say never' — never placed, never raised; the loan 'properly speaking does not exist'; Germany's advances aside, it would not have covered one year of costs, let alone two. The strikes chapter: Geran drones now hitting western-central Ukraine, a warning strike near Kiev's central railway station — the node the Europeans use to arrive and Zelensky to leave — 500 locomotives reportedly destroyed, and the Poland rail link identified as the devastating checkmate cut should the airspace campaign continue. The ~500-drone strike toward Moscow, launched right after Zelensky's warning in hopes of closing the airports even for an hour, failed entirely — none got through. The Washington chapter: Europe is lost in the hosts' judgment; inside the United States the rational camp shrinks by the week. The emblem is the Ratcliffe scandal — the CIA director's 35-minutes-to-live figure pulled, the hosts say, from one small rumor-and-hyperbole Telegram channel citing an article nobody could find. Driscoll is gone; Bessent dislikes Kiev and Zelensky (the screaming-at-the-Treasury-Secretary account) but has not broken through; the Ratcliffe-Kellogg-hardliner axis — Blumenthal, Cotton, Graham gone — has won the internal battles, which is why Trump sits where he sits in what is now his war. The endgame chapter: nothing short of a coup removes Zelensky; the Europeans keep him (they bought off Fedorov's elections push with an Italian job), the SBU and men with guns protect him, and the true threat is Biletsky returning from a trapped Azov to launch a coup. His own plan: hold on, keep the money flowing, pay off enough people, then the last train with cash-bulging suitcases, French bodyguards, a government in exile probably in France that the Europeans will fund as a revenue stream. After Kiev — even Lvov — falls, the conflict continues: no insurgency (a nation of pensioners is the wrong demographic), but a dirty war of assassinations — another officer killed in Saratov by the Engels air base — with Russia mirroring every attack with a bigger one.41:01 · 2026-09-05

Modi, Erdogan and Tokayev Gang Up on Putin

A host-only episode on one summit: at Bishkek, in Mercouris's telling, something that closely approximated a gang-up against Putin took place — and the leader was Narendra Modi. Over the course of the Putin meeting Modi said outright that there has to be peace, all the world wants peace between Russia and Ukraine, that India is the country of Mahatma Gandhi and of the Buddha and always stands for peace, and hostilities should end as soon as possible. From the footage Mercouris reads Putin as furious — extremely angry to be lectured that way. Erdogan was talking in much the same way, and Tokayev, Kazakhstan's president and supposedly an ally, apparently said the same things; one leader — perhaps the most important one, Xi Jinping — did not. Putin's own press conference supplies the texture: the complaint that after the Black Sea action the Ukrainians went running to all their friends — the Arab states, India, Turkey — begging them to get Russia to stop; the denial of special pressure ('we merely listened to our respected friends') which, in the hosts' hermeneutic, means they did have a problem with it. The outcome: Putin conceded nothing, refused a ceasefire, had Xi's backing, and the final statement did not refer to Ukraine at all — in effect a diplomatic victory, under considerable pressure from erstwhile friends. Then the mechanism. Do Modi and Tokayev really care about a ceasefire? No — none of them care about Ukraine or about phone calls from Zelensky, whom none of them like; it is the Americans calling them and telling them to put pressure on Putin. What Mercouris learned in Moscow: some BRICS leaders and officials are afraid of sanctions — not just against their countries, against them personally — with others in these governments nervous about secondary sanctions. What particularly angered Putin was the packaging: trotting out the Buddha and Gandhi over a country perfectly prepared to use force, in a conflict with Pakistan just a year ago. The cost to Russia is rhetorical — having to talk about possible negotiations to keep BRICS and the SCO together — while Putin's press conference makes clear he no longer believes in it. And Bishkek makes BRICS look weak: since Kazan in October 2024 the payment-system arrangements (BRICS Pay and all of that) went nowhere because the members are scared of the Americans. The axis that matters inside BRICS is China-Russia, and China behaved differently: an extraordinarily long readout of the Xi-Putin meeting that did not once mention Ukraine, talk that Power of Siberia 2 is resolved with an announcement soon — and, in Mercouris's no-doubt-at-all reading, it was China that ensured Ukraine stayed out of the final statement, over the preferences of Modi, Tokayev and Erdogan. Christoforou supplies the leverage arithmetic — India needs Russian oil, Kazakhstan is going nowhere without good relations with Russia, so the leaders will say what they must to get the US off their backs — and Mercouris qualifies it: the Russians are not that relaxed, because Bishkek exposed that their erstwhile allies are not fully to be trusted. Moscow notices the unstinting support Ukraine gets versus the very conditional support Russia receives; the Russians increasingly feel they are taking on the entire collective West by themselves, never so starkly exposed as at this conference, after almost five years of explaining to friends who showed complete indifference. The counterweights: Putin's softness was itself the friends' doing — years of please-don't-go-too-hard — perhaps a wake-up call now; and in the war's first two years Russia visibly needed its friends. But the trust ledger is short: if there is any reliable ally it is China — and even more North Korea, whose full, unmatched commitment explains the extraordinary flowering of that relationship. The close is a forecast built on the winning-wars doctrine: alliances are made stable by winning. The hedging was information-war-made — the New York Times stalemate and collapsing-economy line fed doubts in India and Kazakhstan; as the reality can no longer be covered up, the Indias, Kazakhstans and Turkeys will line up behind Russia. But a decisive Russian victory changes the balance of power, so expect signs of concern in Ankara, Delhi, Astana and Brasilia: Turkey loses its strong Black Sea position to a Russia controlling the entire northern coast plus Crimea; Kazakhstan faces the giant in the north with a large part of its population fundamentally aligned with Russia; Georgia's conversations were already there; India is the different category — a very large body of opinion would quietly welcome a decisive Russian victory as a counterbalance with the United States and China. A period of readjustment follows; Kazakhstan gets over it, while for Turkey the problem is real — with the Black Sea.25:18 · 2026-09-04

Europe Wants U.S. To Fight Russia

A host-only Thursday episode built around one thesis: Ukraine is being shattered, and Europe's answer is escalation designed to drag the United States back in. Mercouris opens with the military picture — Putin's Bishkek press-conference summary, since corroborated by swathes of other information: Orekhov about 50% under Russian control and mostly encircled, Dobropillya encircled, fighting around Lyman, the capture of Sviatohirsk (the Orthodox center, town if not monastery), Kozacha Lopan in the Kharkiv region bringing the Russians closer to Kharkiv city with Ukrainian troops apparently surrounded in the northeast — and Kyiv pounded every night. Then the desperation symptoms: Zelensky's Telegram video saying the allies were on holiday, and the X statement about closing Russian airspace — physically impossible for the biggest country in the world — reviving Fedorov's early-summer plan for mass attacks on Moscow and St. Petersburg airports, threats the Russians describe as terrorism. Europe's hardliners add their own steps: the bizarre Leipzig drone beside a Ukrainian Antonov 124 ('the dumbest false flag incident in all of history,' in Christoforou's view), Italy stopping a Cameroonian-flagged ship, Norway seizing a Russian ship in the Arctic — all, in Mercouris's reading, to create an atmosphere of escalation whose ultimate purpose is getting the United States back into the military picture, to Ukraine's rescue and Europe's, once a conflict with Russia is provoked. The wildest symptom is a many-hours gunfight in Kyiv between the state's own security services — the SBU, loyal to Zelensky, and the HUR of Budanov's earlier leadership — the SBU arresting people connected with the HUR, the HUR moving to protect them, reports of killed and injured. At the rumor's center, per Christoforou's relay: a detainee who might snitch on Budanov, and Budanov's men sent to take him back. A well-informed blogger adds the economic layer — a fight for control of the scam call centers that specifically target Western and European citizens while the EU looks completely away, with Monaco-oligarch echoes — so the reading: people worried the money flows will stop, fighting over them while the flows still continue. Then the American half of the hour: Bessent telling Fox News that Ukraine is to blame for the energy-price shock because it went after Russian refineries — met with the retort, who told them to, and who gave them the targeting and satellite data, Mr. Blinken? — plus Blinken's apparently very friendly G20 meeting with Siluanov: signs, perhaps, that the Americans are starting to shift their views. Putin's press conference supplies the frame: Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, all but calling Zelensky one; Ukraine crumbling sooner or later, no date given. The Svalbard seizure gets the episode's fullest treatment: not a military ship, not a tanker, not even a grain carrier, but a civilian passenger ship that also does scientific research, tied — we are told — to Naftogaz's $4bn lawsuit, the idea being to hand it over as compensation; a pattern of harassment alongside the Mediterranean seizure of a non-Russian ship carrying Russian oil. With Putin's piracy instruction to the Russian Navy in the background and — as far as Mercouris is aware — no court judgment justifying the seizure, symmetric seizures of European ships are all but certain, and intentional: the point is to provoke them, pressure the Americans into action, and create a direct clash between Russians and Americans — the only way now, in this reading, to prevent Ukraine going down. The last movement is the structure under the news. An American economist's article: a group within Europe — Baltic-Nordic in concentration, with Germans and Britons too — thirsts for direct confrontation with Russia and is maneuvering the United States into it; vassals, yes, but vassals sometimes manipulate their overlord, with historical examples. It is for the Americans to put their foot down — release the ship, tell Meloni's Italy to stop — except the Americans are not united: a Blinken might prefer the crisis avoided, some in the Pentagon too, others in the intelligence community as on-board as anyone in Europe, and a president prepared for extraordinary acts of duplicity towards the Russians, which is why they don't trust him. The dynamic runs both ways: the Americans would rather the Europeans fight Russia with the US behind the curtain orchestrating — Ukraine was only ever a proxy keeping Russia busy, and Europe is meant to pick up where it leaves off; for hawks and doves alike Ukraine is a functional question, the hardliners' real focus being Russia and Washington's internal battles (Ratcliffe not wanting to lose out to Bessent). If Ukraine goes down it is a blow, not an existential problem. The close: staying on the sidelines of a Russia-Europe war will be all but impossible for the United States — the weapons, the arms purchases, the intelligence assistance and the drone offensive see to that; the provocations that could actually pull the US in are tiered (Baltics and Romania couldn't matter less, Poland a little, Germany and the UK are the real risk — which is where the false-flag attempts have moved); and the leverage is real: an ambassador's phone call brings the British cabinet, and intelligence assistance switches off at the pressing of a switch, 90% of the traffic flowing in that direction.31:00 · 2026-09-03

Bond Market Warning: US Debt Crisis Is Just Starting w/ Ray Zucaro

Bond manager Ray Zucaro returns to The Duran for an episode that opens with Mercouris's tell: unusual people — personally known people with no interest in markets — are suddenly asking him about them, which has always been a sign that important things are about to happen. The first half is the anatomy of the US–Venezuela deal. Trump's August line, 'to the victors go the spoils,' frames it as imperial conquest and tribute — a signal aimed at Russia, Iran and potentially China. The terms: a hundred-year concession, one year longer than Britain extracted from China after winning the Second Opium War, twice the longest in Venezuela's history, written to benefit the conqueror; signed by an interim president past her constitutional mandate, in a deal that does not conform with the Venezuelan constitution as written — seeds of trouble reminiscent of Iran after the 1954 return of the Shah. Production has recovered from roughly 800,000 barrels at Maduro's kidnapping toward the 1.2–2 million of reports, but with the Middle East down from 20 million to 6–8 million, Venezuela was never the fill. Of roughly $15bn in revenue since the kidnapping only about $7bn has returned, while the US chokes the stream — so a quake-devastated country issues bolivars and its currency buckles, with 900 US troops in country: a contract in good faith, or the boot on top of the neck? The bond-market half is one interlocking mechanism. Japanese 10-year yields at 20-year highs near 3%, every large G7 member indebted and issuing more — and a structural novelty: AI data-center financing is flooding the investment-grade segment reserved for higher-rated governments and companies, pushing rates higher across the complex; Google had to tap Australia at 7%, expensive for an investment-grade issuer. On top of supply, Warsh's Jackson Hole message — inflation consistently above target, the employment half of the dual mandate never mentioned — has markets repricing hikes. The Treasury's few-billion attempt to tamp yields on a trillion-dollar market Zucaro calls a feeble manipulation that quickly failed, like the yen intervention: band-aids without fundamentals, from authorities who look disorganized — the Treasury now active in markets where the Fed traditionally acted, coming in with a peashooter where a bazooka is needed. The fundamentals: a 6% deficit, $40tn of debt, servicing above 3% of GDP and sucking the oxygen from the budget — the 1981 comparison fails because yields of 14% then sat on debt of 31% of GDP and a 2% deficit, not today's 120–130. Wheat up 38% year-to-date after the Middle East disruption broke the disinflation trend; raising rates into demand destruction (mortgages, credit cards, autos) builds toward a very problematic environment a year out, past the midterms. Because the Treasury has been wary of longer-dated issuance, most US debt sits at the short end the Fed controls: every 25-basis-point hike makes trillions more expensive — raising rates raises the government's own debt-service cost. The crowding-out reading the host reflects back is confirmed: IG hyperscalers suck the oxygen from the segment, raising capital costs for all IG issuers and pulling high yield up. The debt-to-GDP equation has two components and the law of large numbers makes growing US-sized GDP hard — hence AI and data centers cast as the panacea — yet construction, manufacturing, hotels and leisure outside data centers are weak, unemployment looks artificially low because participation outside COVID is the lowest since 1976, and S&P earnings show how narrow the growth slice is. Asked whether America could do a Meloni — Italy now runs a primary budget surplus under a prime minister the hosts often criticize — Zucaro answers the bigger question first: debt stocks are ultimately addressed through weaker currencies, the pre-euro lira mechanism; the dollar's role rests on market depth and derivatives, but as a store of value it has failed while the US took advantage of deep dollar markets, debt going from 30% of GDP in 1981 to 130 today. The episode's geopolitical close is Hotel California. When the UAE talked of going outside the dollar system it got a swap line; the yen intervention stopped Japan selling down its Treasuries; the empire makes sure its subjects cannot leave — so as the dollar is potentially devalued, they stay in and share the burden. The dollar's second pillar, its historical store-of-wealth role, is being chipped away by the seizure of Afghanistan's central-bank assets and now Russia's: once you expropriate reserves the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle — 'it does have a Mafioso-like racket sound to it.' On the politics, the word is entitlement: spending once given is nearly impossible to take back; DOGE and Musk's fraud hunt quietly died on the vine; in the political season only more pork is coming — a runaway freight train, with AI too narrow a portion of the market to save it. The last word on stagflation is the duck test: growth in one sector that never touches the base of the pyramid, wealth concentrated in the 1%, wheat up 38% in the bread basket — whatever the statistics say, 'it just feels very problematic here.'34:49 · 2026-09-02

Geopolitical Lies Fuel Financial Bubble w/ Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs joins the hosts to argue that the West is living through a double crisis with a single cause: the United States and the core Western alliance that ran the world for two centuries no longer run it, and American foreign policy remains deeply programmed to protect a hegemony that no longer exists. In his telling the resulting angst manifests as compulsory grandiosity — Ukraine winning, Iran defeated, China about to collapse — and as a geopolitical bubble that has stoked a financial bubble: establishment net worths and the AI-era valuations of 'seven magnificent US companies' now depend on keeping both alive, and stoking bubbles is not a safe business. Europe's bizarre self-harm over Russian energy is read not as mere obedience to Washington but as an imperial mentality that outlived the empires — Britain donning the imperial mantle and heading to Kiev the moment a mayor becomes prime minister. Multipolarity itself he calls benign or beneficial, a positive-sum world in the spirit of Adam Smith against the zero-sum mindset of the Anglo-Saxon establishment. The episode's centerpiece is Sachs's on-air reading of Foreign Affairs — 'the psychological journal of the American strategic class' — specifically the September/October lead essay by Kurt Campbell on how alliances survive. He walks its five futures (Hobbesian multipolarity, spheres of influence with US retreat to the Western Hemisphere, a great-power concert dismissed in two sentences, partial Chinese preeminence, and allied scale against China) and delivers the verdict: this is precisely the logic of World War I, the logic of walking into war. Beside it he sets Scott Bessent's FT op-ed declaring 'economic D-Day' — from a man he calls a low-life hedge-fund guy whose claim to fame is shorting currencies — and reports that even the notoriously jingoistic FT comment section answered with derision: 'Scotty boy, go back to your hedge funds.' Mercouris supplies the historical rhyme: the one simple cause of 1914 was Britain's relative decline and its refusal of displacement — and Britain, the richest power in the world in 1914, was a US dependency by 1945; where megalomania goes, paranoia follows. From there Sachs builds the counter-case. July 1914 stood in a glory age — Keynes's tea-in-bed, passport-free world of 1910 — and the war had no deep reason, only a tick-tock narrative; today's reasons for an anti-China alliance are weaker still. China is not Kaiser Wilhelm: no war in 46 years, one overseas base at Djibouti against America's roughly 750 in 80 countries. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Bishkek — 42% of world population, 34% of output at purchasing-power parity, against the G7's 9% and 28% — marks a re-forming Eurasia that wants peace and trade, while the whole Western alliance is perhaps 12% of humanity. On Iran: the turbaned-mullahs cartoon against a 5,000-year civilization; on the dollar: economic statecraft enlarged after 2001 into payment-system enforcement — the $300 billion confiscation, extraterritorial bank threats — which fails, he argues, precisely because non-dollar settlement is mechanically easy, as Trump's 'if you don't use the dollar, we'll destroy you' tacitly concedes. The close is conditional. No entirely benign soft landing exists with debt at 100% of GDP, 6-7% deficits and a record Buffett ratio — a correction is coming, though a cyclical contraction could be modest; every great crisis (1914, the Depression, 2008's Lehman afternoon) was a choice, and rational policy-making avoids the rest. The grounds for hope are the publics, who want normalcy — disgusted with the war in Iran, uninterested in wars with Russia or China, moving with Carlson, Greene and Massie against Trump's betrayal — against the imponderables of counted ballots, the deep state and Five Eyes policy-making. Trump is ignorant and unstable but presidents don't run much; the bad news is it's in the CIA's control. Walking into World War I territory again 'would be so insane, and nobody wants it.'55:50 · 2026-09-01