This week, RT also looked at two dramatically different elections in Russia and Germany, and a suspicious Ukrainian corruption case<\/p>\n
Britain turns up the war rhetoric
\nAnyone paying the slightest attention to the news this week could be convinced that the UK is preparing for a direct and imminent war with Russia. Retired generals are telling the public to get \u201cpsychologically prepared\u201d for conflict; Labour Party thought leaders are suggesting that dissidents and Russia sympathizers be \u201clocked up;\u201d and former Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg is openly telling British men and women that they \u201cmay have to die\u201d \u2013 right after calling the English a \u201cmongrel race\u201d with no historic claim to their own homeland.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sky News premiered the first episode of \u2018The Wargame\u2019 on Monday \u2013 a bizarre reality show in which real politicians and military chiefs game out a hypothetical Russian invasion for the cameras.<\/p>\n
With the threat from Russia rising in the real world, a new series from Sky brings together former ministers and military chiefs to test what might happen if the UK faced an attack.Watch the new TV Show ‘Wargame’ on Sky and NOW from 21 September pic.twitter.com\/b9RcuqLHwF\u2014 Sky News (@SkyNews) September 19, 2026 <\/p>\n
\u201cBritain\u2019s elites,\u201d\u00a0RT columnist Tarik Cyril Amar concluded, \u201cwant you ready to die for a war they keep imagining.\u201d
\nTalking heads on the continent were equally hysterical, with Spain\u2019s El Mundo claiming that Russia could launch drones at France, Italy, or Spain from ships in the Mediterranean. The fact that the report cited Lithuania\u2019s fanatically anti-Russian government \u2013 which in turn cited the CIA \u2013 should have been the first sign something was amiss.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
Italy and France debunk reports CIA issued \u2018Russian drone threat\u2019 warning<\/p>\n
It took Finnish President Alexander Stubb to step in as the voice of reason, stating on Wednesday that there is \u201cno imminent military threat right now\u201d from Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto followed suit on Thursday, with Crosetto declaring that El Mundo\u2019s story \u201cserves no one\u201d and only adds \u201cfuel on the fire.\u201d
\nPresident Vladimir Putin has stressed that Russia has no interest in war with NATO. The UK\u2019s escalation remains rhetorical for now: The British military is in no way prepared to wage war, and nobody in London has ordered extra forces to Eastern Europe. If war were to break out, however, it\u2019s not clear whether the UK could count on the US to join in. As RT explored on the weekend, Europe takes on all the risks and costs of fighting Russia under NATO\u2019s new \u2018NATO 3.0\u2019 doctrine.\u00a0
\nUN-diplomatic behavior
\nFor Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, this week\u2019s UN General Assembly was an opportunity to demand more from his Western backers: more money, more weapons, and more sanctions on Russia.\u00a0
\nAsked whether he\u2019d travel to Moscow for peace talks, however, Zelensky said he\u2019d only visit the Russian capital \u201con a f**king missile.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zelensky DOES answer reporters asking when he\u2019ll be heading to Moscow for talksHe COMPLETELY loses his temper as he walks away:’On a f*cking missile’ https:\/\/t.co\/poqL8qA9Ff pic.twitter.com\/f01pupjrnG\u2014 RTRussia (@RT_Russia_) September 23, 2026 <\/p>\n
In what\u2019s become a familiar pattern, Ukrainian forces hammered Moscow with waves of attack drones on Sunday morning, before Zelensky arrived in New York to plead for a ceasefire ahead of Russia\u2019s inevitable retaliation. Backed by 51 of its allies, Kiev demanded an \u201cimmediate and unconditional ceasefire,\u201d which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov promptly refused.\u00a0
\n\u201cWe are not going to have a pause in our special military operation,\u201d Lavrov told the UN Security Council. \u201cEurope, whatever it thinks, just wants to get a pause and it wants to use it to pump the Kiev regime with weapons.\u201d
\nA tale of two elections in Russia and Germany
\nZelensky\u2019s weekend drone attack, deemed \u201cunprecedented\u201d by Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, tageted voting in Russia\u2019s State Duma election, but it did little to suppress turnout, which hit a one-decade high of 57%. Putin\u2019s pre-election appeal to patriotism translated into a bump in support for his United Russia party, which went from 49% to 58% of the vote, followed by the Communists and Liberal Democrats.
\nCuriously, as political scientist Vladimir Kornilov noted for RT, Kremlin-watchers in the West called the election \u201crigged,\u201d but only after the wave of protest votes against United Russia which they had promised never materialized.<\/p>\n
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The revenge of the East: The end of West Germany has finally come<\/p>\n
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, however, suffered the full wrath of the German electorate over the weekend, as his Christian Democrats (CDU) suffered a historic loss to the right-wing AfD in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and trailed the Left Party in Berlin. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a former CDU stronghold and home of ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s district, Merz\u2019s party failed to meet the 5% threshold to enter parliament.
\n\u201cThe CDU will never again win a federal election,\u201d AfD co-leader Alice Weidel vowed after the results came in, declaring the AfD \u201cthe new people\u2019s party in Germany.\u201d
\nExposing the deep state media
\nGermany\u2019s mainstream parties \u2013 the CDU and Social Democrats \u2013 have dominated the country\u2019s postwar political landscape. Meanwhile, one name has dominated German media: Axel Springer.<\/p>\n
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Wired for War: German media giant Axel Springer awards Palantir\u2019s Thiel<\/p>\n
The company bearing Springer\u2019s name stirred some controversy on Thursday when it presented its annual award to Palantir founder Peter Thiel, a name synonymous with the rise of the Silicon Valley military-tech industrial complex. However, as RT explored in our \u2018Wired for War\u2019 series, Axel Springer and Palantir are cogs in the same machine: Both took funding from the CIA, and both serve the same globalist order.
\nThe connections between the Western deep state and the mainstream media run deep, and it\u2019s this murky world that RT America\u2019s Ben Swann and independent investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane expose in their brand new series, \u2018America Now: Exposing The Deep State of Media.\u2019
\nAcross four episodes, Swann and Lane lift the lid on NATO\u2019s online propaganda machine, the UK\u2019s efforts to frame dissent as disinformation, and the Ukrainian government operation recruiting US military veterans as propaganda agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Propaganda goes hand-in-hand with censorship, and it\u2019s the latter field that the EU excels in. While Springer and the covert campaigns uncovered by Swann and Lane shape pro-Western narratives, Brussels uses its Digital Services Act (DSA) to force online platforms to stifle alternate viewpoints. This week, the European Commission published dozens of reports by tech firms including Meta and TikTok, detailing the censorship measures these companies are adopting in order to comply with the DSA. The reports lay bare persistent election interference, collaboration with EU-approved \u2018fact-checkers\u2019, and the removal of millions of politically-inconvenient posts.
\n\u2018Russia\u2019s Starlink\u2019<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
The West calls it Russia\u2019s Starlink. That misses the point<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s use of SpaceX Starlink broadband service has been instrumental in keeping its forces in the fight for four years. Elon Musk\u2019s portable Starlink terminals allow Ukrainian forces to guide drones to their targets, connect to NATO headquarters, and receive real-time updates from Palantir\u2019s battlefield management software.
\nIt\u2019s an advantage that Russia has worked hard to neutralize with its own Rassvet satellite network. This week, Russian journalist Evgeny Balakin took a deep dive into the Rassvet project and discovered why the Ukrainians are desperate to destroy these satellites on the ground, before they change the balance of power in space.
\nWhat we didn\u2019t cover: Negotiating the deepfake\u00a0
\nStories of corruption and graft from Ukraine are legion and unsurprising \u2013 we\u2019ve covered a series implicating Zelensky\u2019s inner circle in depth here \u2013 but when a video emerged purportedly showing agents with Ukraine\u2019s Western-funded anti-corruption body, NABU, apparently seizing $140 million in cash from former defense procurement chief Arsen Zhumadilov, we took a closer look.
\nThe video was posted on Wednesday, on what initially appeared to be the New Voice of Ukraine\u2019s English-language website. It showed refrigerator boxes stuffed with $100 bills, with an attached note stating that they were for \u201cthe servant of the people\u201d \u2013 a reference to Zelensky\u2019s political party.<\/p>\n
The New Voice of Ukraine was founded by Dragon Capital, whose CEO, Thomas Fiala, is a majority shareholder in Ukrainska Pravda. The latter publication has reported extensively on corruption in the corridors of power in Kiev, and it is believed that Fiala\u2019s position on the board of the Association of European Business (AEB) in Ukraine offers his publications cover to run these controversial stories.
\nHowever, the website to which we traced the article carrying the cash claims was dressed-up to look like New Voice of Ukraine, but used a different URL to the actual English-language New Voice of Ukraine site. We held off, correctly, and NABU confirmed on Friday that it had not raided Zhumadilov\u2019s office. \u201cThis video is a fake, created using AI,\u201d the agency stated. The New Voice of Ukraine said that the video had been published on an imposter site, attributing the fake to unnamed \u201cRussians.\u201d
\nThere are and will be many \u201cState of Corruption\u201d stories to report on, factually, as the veil is lifted on Zelensky\u2019s regime. But as we\u2019ve learned from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry using video game footage to fake combat victories, and from the Western politicians who fell for the \u2018Ghost of Kiev\u2019 hoax, in an era of escalating rhetoric, deep state and deep fake, always double-check your sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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