The paradox of flows

1/7 · ANALYSIS · 15 July 2026

Israel allowed and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas for years — a month before October 7 it asked for more

The mechanism: how it worked, materially

From 2018 until October 7, 2023, Qatar transferred cash to Gaza — physically, in suitcases, through the Israeli Erez crossing — peaking at around $30-35 million a month. The first shipment, $15 million, arrived in November 2018. According to Israeli sources, Qatar itself asked Netanyahu to put his funding requests in writing, anticipating he might later deny authorizing them. He did not: the Israeli security cabinet meeting that approved the mechanism, in August 2018, is documented, as is the cross-agency support maintained over the years by the IDF, military intelligence, Shin Bet, Mossad and the National Security Council.

The strategic logic: why, not just how

Netanyahu publicly justified the operation as humanitarian necessity — "preventing a disaster in Gaza." But his own March 2019 statement at a party meeting reveals a different calculation: keeping Gaza under Hamas and the West Bank under the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would prevent any unified Palestinian national movement — and therefore any real possibility of a Palestinian state. Retired Israeli general Shlomo Brom summarized the logic: "One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide the Gaza Strip from the West Bank." The choice had a precise origin: after the 2014 Gaza war, Netanyahu rejected a Saudi offer to rebuild the Strip by removing Hamas and replacing it with the Palestinian Authority — a deal that would have normalized relations with Riyadh — opting instead for the Qatari funding channel, despite repeated Mossad warnings.

How the money reached the weapons: the fungibility mechanism

Between 2012 and 2018 Qatar funneled roughly $1.1 billion into Gaza, officially earmarked for state salaries, fuel, and humanitarian aid. No one claims those funds went directly to Hamas's military wing — but, as a retired senior CIA analyst explained to the New York Times, "money is fungible: anything Hamas didn't have to pay out of its own budget freed up its own funds for other things." It's the same principle by which funding an organization's civilian expenses lets it divert its own resources to whatever that external funding doesn't cover — in this case, according to a Shin Bet investigation published in March, the tunnel network and arsenal used on October 7, 2023.

The attempt to bury accountability

In June 2022, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen publicly called the Qatari channel "a blessing." A month before October 7, in September 2023, Israeli officials met with Qatar's envoy to Gaza, Mohammed al-Emadi, to ask not for a reduction but for an increase in transfers. After the attack, Netanyahu blocked the formation of a state commission of inquiry into the political-security failures that made it possible, and removed Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who had requested that commission — a removal Israel's Supreme Court ruled "unfair and unlawful."

Legal commentary

This episode does not constitute a single isolated violation of a specific treaty, but falls within the general obligation of states to prevent the financing of terrorist organizations, enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001). Here the obligation was not violated through negligence, but knowingly suspended for declared political calculation — according to the Israeli prime minister's own admission, not an external reconstruction.

Implications — symmetry test

This site has already condemned, without exception, the financing of non-state armed actors when that financing turned against the sponsors themselves or against third-party civilians. In Yemen: 73 UN staff still arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, as Hodeidah bleeds again, we documented how Iran, through the Houthis, supports a proxy that now acts according to its own autonomous agenda — attacks on commercial shipping, missiles against Israel — well beyond Tehran's original mandate. In Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians, we showed how Russia uses a paramilitary actor — the former Wagner Group — that commits systematic violations without Moscow answering for it directly.

The same standard applies here. The fact that October 7's ultimate victims were Israeli citizens does not exempt Israel from having chosen, knowingly and for declared political calculation, to financially fuel the organization that then carried out the massacre — nor from having subsequently tried to obstruct the accounting of its own political responsibility for it. A note of methodological honesty: the history of US sponsorship of proxies that later turned against their own sponsors (from the Afghan mujahideen onward) would deserve the same treatment — a piece of its own, with facts verified one by one, not yet published on this site.

Sources: The Times of Israel · The Times of Israel · CNN · Seattle Times · Haaretz · The Jerusalem Post · TIME · +972 Magazine

2/7 · ANALYSIS · 15 July 2026

The United States armed the Syrian rebellion for five years, then shut down the program as a gift to Putin

The mechanism: how it worked, materially

From 2013 to 2017, the CIA ran "Timber Sycamore," a secret program to arm, train, and fund "moderate" Syrian rebel groups against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The program operated from two operations centers — one in Jordan (Amman), the other in Turkey (Gaziantep and Antakya) — where officials from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France, and the United Kingdom shared space with the CIA. Weapons — AK-47 rifles, mortars, RPG rockets, TOW anti-tank missiles, night-vision equipment — were mostly purchased in the Balkans and Eastern Europe and shipped through Taşucu (Turkey) and Aqaba (Jordan). By some estimates, the CIA trained roughly 10,000 fighters over the course of the program, at a total cost exceeding one billion dollars.

The strategic logic

The program originated in 2012, proposed by CIA Director David Petraeus, and was secretly authorized by President Obama in 2013. Its stated goal was to weaken Assad without direct US military involvement, leaning on a consortium of regional allies — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey — who funded and armed rebel groups in parallel with the CIA, often with weapons already in circulation even before the program's official 2012 launch.

The vetting failure: where the weapons ended up

The "vetting" process for rebel groups, meant to prevent weapons from falling into jihadist hands, did not work. A three-year study funded by the European Union and the German government found that the arming efforts of the US and its allies had "significantly augmented the quantity and quality" of weapons available to the Islamic State. Officials from Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate made millions of dollars diverting program weapons to the black market. Many of the armed groups supported turned out to have ties to al-Qaeda or Salafi-jihadist networks — precisely the risk that "vetting" was meant to prevent.

The program's end: an explicit gift to Putin

In mid-June 2017, Trump decided to end the program after a meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — days before his first meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G20 in Hamburg (July 7). The Washington Post revealed the decision on July 19, quoting an official who called it an explicit signal to Moscow to improve bilateral relations. Trump indirectly confirmed the secret program's existence by attacking the Washington Post's coverage on Twitter, calling the payments to Syrian rebels "massive, dangerous, and wasteful" — effectively publicly declassifying an operation never officially acknowledged.

Legal commentary

Support for non-state armed groups engaged in another state's internal conflict raises direct questions regarding the principle of non-intervention enshrined in customary international law and the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, in Nicaragua v. United States (1986), already established that financing and arming irregular forces against a third-party government constitutes a violation of the principle of non-intervention, regardless of the nature of the targeted government.

Implications — symmetry test

This site has already documented, for Iran (Yemen: 73 UN staff still arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, as Hodeidah bleeds again), Russia (Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians), and Israel (Israel allowed and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas for years — a month before October 7 it asked for more), the same pattern: a state sponsors a non-state armed actor for strategic calculation, and that actor partly or entirely escapes the sponsor's control, with consequences falling on third-party civilians. Timber Sycamore applies the same pattern to the United States: weapons purchased with US public funds ended up, according to an independent EU-funded study, in the Islamic State's arsenal. The fact that the program was shut down not because of its humanitarian consequences or the vetting failure, but as a gesture of détente toward Russia, confirms that geopolitical logic always prevailed over the assessment of real consequences on the ground — exactly as in the three cases already documented.

Sources: The Washington Post · Reuters · Al Jazeera · NBC News · Modern War Institute, West Point · Irregular Warfare Initiative

3/7 · ANALYSIS · 15 July 2026

Four European Court rulings condemn Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Macedonia for hosting secret CIA prisons — no one in the United States has ever answered for that torture

The facts: four cases, one program

Between 2012 and 2018, the Grand Chamber and sections of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued four rulings establishing, in procedural detail, the complicity of four European states in the CIA's secret detention and torture program in the decade following September 11.

The most striking case — mistaken identity: Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen mistaken for an al-Qaeda member due to a name mix-up, was arrested at the Macedonian border on December 31, 2003, held incommunicado for 23 days in a Skopje hotel, then handed over to a CIA rendition team at the airport — where he was violently assaulted, hooded, and flown to Afghanistan to a prison known as the "Salt Pit." He remained detained there for roughly four months, until the CIA itself realized the case of mistaken identity. On December 13, 2012, the Court unanimously found the facts proven "beyond reasonable doubt," classifying the episode as enforced disappearance and torture, with direct responsibility falling on Macedonia.

The sites in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (suspected in the USS Cole bombing) and Abu Zubaydah (believed to be a senior al-Qaeda member) were held at a secret CIA facility in Poland between 2002 and 2003. On July 24, 2014, the Court found that Poland had violated Articles 3 (prohibition of torture), 5 (liberty), 6 (fair trial), 8 (private life), and 13 (effective remedy) of the European Convention, ordering it to pay €100,000 to each man. In 2018 the Court issued nearly identical rulings against Romania (where al-Nashiri was held from 2004 to 2005) and Lithuania (where Abu Zubaydah was held from 2005 to 2006), ordering them to pay €100,000 and €100,000 plus €30,000 in costs, respectively.

The most unsettling detail: before arriving in Poland, Abu Zubaydah had been held at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, where — as established — he was subjected to waterboarding. That facility was run by Gina Haspel, who in 2018 was appointed Director of the CIA — the same institution that had run the torture program.

Legal commentary

The ECtHR rulings establish direct violations of Article 3 of the European Convention (an absolute prohibition on torture, non-derogable under any circumstances) and the UN Convention against Torture (CAT). In all four cases, the Court found that the host states knew — or should have known — what the detainees would be subjected to, making them directly responsible for the torture suffered on their own territory, not merely for logistical hosting.

Implications — symmetry test

This site has already documented, for Iran (Yemen: 73 UN staff still arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, as Hodeidah bleeds again), Russia (Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians), Israel (Israel allowed and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas for years — a month before October 7 it asked for more), and the United States (The United States armed the Syrian rebellion for five years, then shut down the program as a gift to Putin), how geopolitical calculation systematically prevails over the assessment of real consequences. Here the pattern applies to direct torture, not an armed proxy: the United States ran a systematic torture program, four European governments — not regimes commonly targeted by this site's accusations, but Western democracies — actively collaborated in it, and the woman who ran one of the harshest sites was later promoted to lead the very agency. No CIA official has ever been prosecuted in the United States for these acts; the accountability established by courts so far falls only on the European states that hosted the sites, not on those who ordered and carried out the torture itself.

Sources: HUDOC — European Court of Human Rights · Open Society Justice Initiative · Human Rights Watch · BBC · Lieber Institute, West Point

4/7 · ANALYSIS · 15 July 2026

Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians

The facts

On June 23, 2026, near Timbuktu, a joint patrol of the Malian army and Russia's Africa Corps (the organization that replaced the Wagner Group after Yevgeny Prigozhin's death) passed through the villages of Zarho and Abakoïra, at the border of the Timbuktu and Gao regions. After the patrol passed, residents found four civilians killed: two Tuareg at Zarho and two Songhai at Abakoïra, the latter struck by a drone attack while riding a motorbike. The dismembered body of one of the Tuareg men was arranged into the shape of a swastika on the sand, his severed head placed at the center of the limbs.

Local sources and the Malian human rights collective CD-DPA confirmed that the victims were herders known in the community, with no ties to armed groups. CD-DPA's secretary general, Tilla Ag Zeini, described the incident as a violation of humanitarian law designed to terrorize the population. Neither the Malian army nor the Africa Corps has publicly commented on the incident, despite the latter posting regularly on social media after other operations.

The same day, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group JNIM claimed a separate attack on a joint army-Africa Corps convoy in the Kayes region, reporting six dead — a distinct episode but indicative of the intensity of the conflict on multiple fronts in the same country on the same day.

The political context: the military junta led by Colonel Assimi Goïta expelled French forces and ended the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA, replacing them with Russian mercenaries — a choice presented to the population as a recovery of sovereignty. As this site already reported in Burkina Faso leaves the International Criminal Court while remaining the world's country most affected by terrorism, Mali withdrew — together with Burkina Faso and Niger — from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (September 2025), explicitly removing itself from the jurisdiction of the very court that could investigate episodes like this one.

Legal commentary

The outrage upon the personal dignity of corpses and the killing of civilians without distinction from military targets violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law applicable to non-international armed conflicts. The staging would fall under "outrages upon personal dignity," prosecutable as a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute — a statute from which Mali has just withdrawn, making the risk of impunity concrete.

Implications — symmetry test

This site has already condemned elsewhere the presence and conduct of Russian-linked paramilitary forces; the same standard applies here, with no discount for the fact that the victim is a Malian herder rather than an internationally prominent figure. But responsibility is not one-directional: the patrol was joint — regular Malian army and Africa Corps together — and neither has commented on or condemned what happened. Mali's withdrawal from the Rome Statute, precisely as episodes like this multiply, is itself a political act that deserves condemnation regardless of who physically carried out the killing.

Sources: Euromaidan Press · Modern Ghana · UNITED24 Media · UA.News

5/7 · ANALYSIS · 17 July 2026

Turkish and Chinese drones for Haftar: Libya remains a theatre of UN arms embargo violations, now on both sides of the front line

The context

For fifteen years Libya has lived under a United Nations arms embargo. It was meant to be the tool with which the international community drained fuel from a civil war that has since hardened into two rival poles — a government in Tripoli, and a strongman, General Khalifa Haftar, who controls the east of the country. Satellite images published in early April 2026 by Reuters tell a more uncomfortable story: that embargo is still being circumvented today, and not by one side alone.

The facts

The photos, taken between late April and December 2025 by the company Planet Labs and reviewed by three independent experts, show combat drones parked at the Al Khadim air base, roughly a hundred kilometres east of Benghazi — squarely inside Haftar-controlled territory. The experts identify with reasonable confidence a Chinese-made drone, the Feilong-1, produced by the Xi'an-based company Zhongtian Feilong, and at least two Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, the Baykar (Istanbul) model that became well known in the wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh. Over the same period the base appears to have been expanded with new hangars, apparently built to house them.

Why this matters: the embargo these drones would violate is not an informal understanding but a binding decision of the UN Security Council — resolution 1970, adopted unanimously on 26 February 2011 under Chapter VII of the Charter, the chapter reserved for threats to peace. Since then, a panel of independent experts, established shortly afterwards by resolution 1973, has been tasked with monitoring compliance; the Al Khadim finding made its way into a draft of the panel's 2025 report, seen by Reuters. Asked for comment, neither Beijing nor Ankara responded; China had previously told the UN panel it did not consider similar components to be military equipment, saying they came from a decommissioned model used for rescue and emergency purposes.

Why the symmetry test matters here

What makes this story worth flagging for readers of this site is not so much the violation itself — violations of the Libyan embargo have been documented for years — but which side these drones turned up on. Turkey is well known as the main military sponsor of the Tripoli government, Haftar's longstanding rival: finding Turkish drones now inside his rival's own base complicates any clean bloc-versus-bloc reading, and shows that circumventing the embargo is not the specialty of one side alone. On Haftar's side, separate and already documented support from Russia and the United Arab Emirates also continues — not covered here, so as not to blur distinct episodes into a single accusation.

Where the accused stand

The Chinese government has already stated, in a separate context, that it does not consider the accusation of military-grade material to be well founded. The Turkish government and the two manufacturers, Baykar and Zhongtian Feilong, did not respond at all to requests for comment — a silence worth noting as such, not treated as an admission.

Legal comment — judgment stated as such

Fifteen years of embargo, a UN panel dedicated to enforcing it, and combat drones still arriving on both sides of the front line: it is hard not to read this as the mark of an instrument that, in Libyan practice, has ended up weighing more as a statement of principle than as a real deterrent.

Sources: Reuters · UN Resolution 1970 (2011) · UN Libya Sanctions Committee

6/7 · ANALYSIS · 18 July 2026

A billion dollars despite sanctions: how Iran keeps funding Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis

The context

For years, whenever a Houthi missile hits a ship in the Red Sea, or Hezbollah threatens northern Israel, the same question follows: who pays for this? The answer, documented by years of US financial investigations, has never changed: Tehran. What changed, in November 2025, is the figure a senior US Treasury official put on the record — and it shows how much that funding has withstood decades of sanctions designed specifically to stop it.

The facts

On November 9, 2025, John Hurley, US Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said Iran had managed to funnel roughly a billion dollars to Hezbollah in 2025 alone, circumventing a heavy package of Western sanctions. This is not an isolated case: according to the Atlantic Council, Tehran has for years provided more than $700 million a year to Hezbollah and up to $100 million a year to Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. The US State Department's own 2022 Country Reports on Terrorism states that Iran provides Hezbollah with “most of its funding, training, weapons, and explosives.” In December 2023 the US Treasury sanctioned a network that funnelled tens of millions of dollars, generated from Iranian oil sales, from the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force to the Houthis in Yemen — the same militia that has spent months threatening commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Money is not the only thing flowing from Tehran to these groups. According to a US Congressional report, Hezbollah also receives training, explosives and weapons from Iran that transit through Syria — and in turn supplies weapons and training to the Houthis, with Hezbollah commanders reportedly assisting the Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping directly. It is a chain, not an isolated relationship between two actors.

The Axis of Resistance isn’t a religious bloc — it’s a network held together by convenience

It's worth understanding what the “Axis of Resistance” actually is, because it isn't the sectarian alliance it looks like at first glance. Hezbollah is Shia, like Iran: the doctrinal closeness is real, which is why it forms the Axis's most cohesive core. Hamas, by contrast, is Sunni — a different faith from Tehran's, with a history of public rifts: during the Syrian civil war Hamas sided with the rebels against Assad, Tehran's ally, and Iran cut its funding for a period. The rebuilding of that relationship afterward shows the glue isn't shared faith but mutual convenience against a common enemy. The Houthis, finally, are Zaydis — a branch of Shia Islam distant from both Iran's and Hezbollah's — and until a few years ago were little more than a peripheral tribal militia in the poorest part of Yemen. Targeted transfers of missile technology and drones turned them into an actor capable of threatening one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

Holding Shias, Sunnis and Zaydis together under one banner takes a stronger glue than faith alone: that glue is the function the Axis serves for Tehran. It is the instrument through which Iran projects military power beyond its own borders without directly risking its own armed forces — fighters who aren't officially Iranian die in place of Iranian soldiers. It is also, historically, a deterrent: attacking Iran risks a response on multiple fronts at once, from Lebanon to Yemen. Understanding this also helps make sense of other similar cases already verified on this site: it isn't fundamentally different from a state arming a group far from its own territory to avoid exposing its own troops.

Where Tehran and its allies stand

Tehran doesn't deny this support: it openly claims it as political and ideological solidarity within what it calls the “Axis of Resistance.” A Hamas official, Ali Baraka, confirmed as much in an interview: “Iran gives us money and weapons.” But the same official was careful to add that Hamas “doesn't take orders from anyone” — an important distinction, because the United States itself, while documenting the flow of money and weapons for years, has said it has no direct evidence that Iran ordered or had advance knowledge of the October 7, 2023 attack. Funding an armed group, in other words, doesn't automatically mean commanding it — a distinction that applies to Iran as much as to any other sponsor.

Why the symmetry test matters here

This site has already verified the same pattern — a state funding, arming, or turning a blind eye to an armed group it doesn't directly control — applied to Israel, the United States, Russia, Turkey and China. Iran is no exception: it uses the same mechanism, with the same logic of deniability when things go wrong. If there is a difference, it isn't in the mechanism but in its declared function: for most governments, backing an armed group is one tactical move among many; for Iran, backing the Axis of Resistance is part of its declared political identity, not an isolated episode to deny in case of embarrassment.

Legal comment

Systematic funding of groups designated as terrorist organisations by multiple jurisdictions, including documented evasion of UN Security Council and US Treasury sanctions, raises direct questions of state responsibility for supporting non-state actors involved in attacks on civilians — a principle also recognised in International Court of Justice case law on control and responsibility for the actions of armed groups backed by a third state.

Sources: statement by John Hurley, US Treasury (November 9, 2025) · US State Department, Country Reports on Terrorism 2022 · Atlantic Council · US Treasury/OFAC (December 7, 2023) · Congressional Research Service · NPR

7/7 · OPINION · 18 July 2026

The paradox of flows: when the same hand arms its own enemy

This piece tries to answer that with a simple idea: using non-state armed groups as a tool of power is not the exception of some "bad" regime. It is an ordinary practice, used by governments that present themselves as opposites — and that accuse each other of it, while doing the same thing.

Calling what a rival does "terrorism" and what an ally does "national security" is convenient, but it hides the reality: almost every power, when it suits it, backs an armed force it doesn't directly control, to achieve something it couldn't achieve with its own troops. The problem isn't that this happens. The problem is when it's denied, or excused only for one's own allies.

A tool for not lumping everyone together

Saying "everyone does it" would be convenient, but it's laziness dressed up as honesty. Judging well requires one more question: what kind of violence does this support produce? There's a difference between a government that uses an armed group as a tactical move abroad, while remaining subject to a free press and independent courts at home — and a government for which violence, at home and abroad, is how it holds itself together. In the first case we're talking about a calculation, however cynical. In the second, about a system that couldn't stand without that violence.

This site has verified, source by source, six episodes that help show the mechanism from several angles. Israel let Qatari money flow to Hamas for years, funding tolerated as a tactical calculation. The United States appears twice: weapons from the Timber Sycamore programme ended up in the wrong hands in Syria, and state torture at CIA black sites in Europe, now condemned by real rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. Russia sends its own Africa Corps mercenaries into Mali alongside the local army, with civilians killed in the process. Turkey, together with China, is now militarily backing both sides of the same Libyan conflict, in violation of the UN embargo. And Iran funnelled nearly a billion dollars to Hezbollah in 2025 alone, according to the US Treasury, at the head of a network that also includes Hamas and the Houthis.

These are different governments — Israel, the United States, Russia, Turkey, China, Iran — each of which would use opposite language to describe its own foreign policy. Yet the mechanism repeats itself identically: a state actor funding, arming, or turning a blind eye to a force that doesn't answer directly to it, and that it disowns when things go wrong.

Of these six cases, Iran comes closest to the second type of violence described above — not an occasional tactical move, but a declared part of its own political identity through what Tehran calls the "Axis of Resistance": a network holding together Shias, Sunnis and even Zaydis (religious groups often at odds with each other) not through shared faith but through shared convenience against a common enemy. That's an important difference of degree from the other five cases, and it shouldn't be flattened away.

Whoever arms a group often loses it

Whoever funds an armed force rarely manages to control it fully, or for long. Every sponsor of this kind sooner or later suffers the blowback of what it created: a group trained against one enemy turns against whoever armed it, or against an ally of whoever armed it. But it would be just as wrong to think of these groups as mere "puppets." They have their own strategy, their own ideology, their own calculations — and they know how to use the money and weapons they receive to their own advantage, just as their funders use them.

The limits of this comparison

An honest comparison must also say where it stops. Otherwise it becomes the opposite of what it claims to be: instead of looking at the facts, it simply judges "the West" or "its enemies" regardless of what they actually did. Three things need to be said clearly.

First: on the practical level — money, weapons, training given to an armed group — the calculation is identical everywhere. But international law remains the only shared yardstick we have for judging everyone the same way, even though it was born in 1945 among that era's victors. Using it anyway is a choice, and we state it openly.

Second: a government that commits serious crimes beyond its own borders, but that at home allows a press capable of investigating it and courts capable of convicting it, is not the same as a government that eliminates any such check from the outset. This is not an acquittal for the first. It is a real difference, not merely a rhetorical one.

Third: similar effects — failed states, civil wars, civilian deaths — don't always come from the same causes. One collapse can come from an intervention that removes a power without calculating what comes next. Another can come from a deliberate, sustained strategy over time. Recognising that effects look alike doesn't mean responsibilities are interchangeable.

Where this site stands

We don't side with one bloc of countries to accuse another. A government's cynical calculation remains cynical even when a rival's propaganda is the one pointing it out — and that rival's propaganda remains propaganda even when, for once, it tells the truth about someone else's crime. Our job isn't to find an even-handed balance at all costs. It's to look at the facts steadily, without letting any government wash its hands using another's crimes as an alibi.

Internal sources: the six news pieces cited, published on this site with source-by-source verification. Source of the reasoning: internal working document "The Paradox of Flows," July 16, 2026 (unpublished).