New Year Starts, Same Old US Proxy War Continues

January 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While the United States government poses as “pursuing peace” with Russia regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is now admitted that the US is overseeing a “supercharged” campaign targeting “Russian oil facilities and tankers” aimed at crippling Russia’s economy and its fighting capacity. 

The revelation should come as no surprise. The campaign of long-range aerial drone strikes conducted deep inside Russian territory as well as maritime drone strikes taking place both within the Black Sea and far beyond it - in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of West Africa - requires intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR) only the US possesses.

Not only has the US made essential ISR available for these attacks, but both the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and at least the US Navy have been implicated in assisting directly in these attacks. 

A New York Times article from early 2025 titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit in regards to repeated maritime drone strikes carried out across the Black Sea that: 

…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.

If Ukraine was incapable of conducting their own maritime drone strikes along the coasts of Crimea, it most certainly would not have been able to conduct strikes much further abroad, meaning that more recent strikes carried out far beyond the Black Sea almost certainly required as much or more direct US involvement. 

This has now been confirmed by a more recent NYT article. 

Titled, “The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership,” the article at first attempts to portray the administration of current US President Donald Trump as undermining Ukraine amid continued conflict with Russia. But the article then admits that just beneath the facade of “peace negotiations,” the US has actually escalated what has always been a US-instigated and US-led proxy war against Russia fought merely through Ukraine. 

The article admits: 

“Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither. 

But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin’s war machine.”

This dovetails with reports from October 2025 that US intelligence agencies were assisting Ukraine in aerial drone strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russia. The NYT article also mentions “tankers,” implicating the US in the series of recent maritime drone strikes carried out on Russian-linked tankers worldwide. 

The NYT article explains further: 

“In June, beleaguered U.S. military officers met with their C.I.A. counterparts to help craft a more concerted Ukrainian campaign. It would focus exclusively on oil refineries and, instead of supply tanks, would target the refineries’ Achilles’ heel: A C.I.A. expert had identified a type of coupler that was so hard to replace or repair that a refinery would remain offline for weeks. (To avoid backlash, they would not supply weapons and other equipment that Mr. Vance’s allies wanted for other priorities.)”

And that: 

“The energy strikes would come to cost the Russian economy as much as $75 million a day, according to one U.S. intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. would also be authorized to assist with Ukrainian drone strikes on “shadow fleet” vessels in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Gas lines would start forming across Russia.”

In other words - the US launched attacks on Russian energy production inside Russia as well as conducted maritime drone strikes on tankers moving Russian hydrocarbons wherever the US could find them - all of this politically laundered through Washington’s Ukrainian proxies - attacks Ukraine itself would be incapable of conducting on its own. 

President Trump Helped Start War with Russia, and is Helping Escalate it 

While US President Donald Trump has repeatedly depicted the ongoing conflict in Ukraine as “Biden’s war,” it was actually precipitated and prosecuted by a combined effort spanning the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations. 

It was under the Obama administration that the US violently overthrew the Ukrainian government after years of attempted “color revolutions” stretching all the way back to 2004. 

It was under the first Trump administration that lethal military aid began flowing publicly from the US to Ukraine - a policy option the RAND Corporation in its 2019 paper “Extending Russia” admitted would likely lead to, “more Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence,” policymakers hoped in turn would overextend Russia in the same way America’s proxy war with the Soviet Union had in Afghanistan. 

US Seeks Greenland Grab as Pursuit of Primacy Accelerates

December  30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - All under the guise of “pursuing peace” in a proxy war the US itself engineered and is for all intents and purposes fighting against Russia simply through its Ukrainian proxies, the US continues setting the stage for wider and more dangerous escalation - both in terms of expanding an emerging global maritime blockade against Russian, Iranian, and even Chinese maritime shipping, as well as in terms of preparing Europe to feed itself into Washington’s proxy war as Ukraine’s fighting capacity collapses. 

Continued (and now renewed) US interest in seizing Greenland from Denmark serves to accomplish both of these objectives. 

A New Base for Wider Proxy War with Russia 

Existing US military bases in Greenland are located closer to Moscow than any other US military base outside of mainland Europe (including Turkiye) and the UK.

Assuming that open US plans to have Europe “double down” on supporting Ukraine, including expanding military industrial production and arms shipments to Ukraine as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” to actually enter into Ukraine proceed, all under a US-led “division of labor,” US military facilities across mainland Europe and the UK would run the risk of dragging the US itself into any resulting Russian-European conflict. 

This would defeat the purpose of this “division of labor.” Thus the US either reducing its military presence across mainland Europe and the UK or relocating essential operations to Greenland allows the US to provide close, but technically indirect support for European forces fighting Russia in the same way the US is currently providing close, but technically indirect support for Ukraine as it fights Russia. 

Greenland could serve as a base of operations for continued and essential US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) support, without which neither America’s Ukrainian nor its European proxies could effectively fight and successfully overextend Russia. 

With the US operating outside of most of Europe, it could project the illusion of plausible deniability amid a Russian-European conflict enough to give itself and Russia the ability to avoid escalation into a direct US-Russian conflict - an escalation both Washington and Moscow presumably seek to avoid. 

For the US, the entire purpose of waging this proxy war is to have US proxies pay the full cost of the conflict while the US enjoys the full benefits of it. For Moscow, the Ukraine conflict expanding into a European-Russian war backed by the US is still a lesser evil than a direct US-European-Russian war. 

The US Preparing a Global Blockade 

For years, prominent US corporate-financier funded think tanks have published policy papers planning blockades to strangle all peer and near-peer adversaries into submission. Chief among these adversaries is China.

A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” describes not only a strategy to cut China off by imposing a maritime blockade, but examines all potential ways in which China would seek to circumvent such a blockade and proposes measures to take (which have since been implemented) to prevent China’s success in doing so. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - a network of land routes that allow China to circumvent many of the key maritime chokepoints the US has invested decades of military expansion to threaten - is identified as one of these possible means of circumvention. The paper suggests targeting and destroying these routes, using the Myanmar-China oil pipeline as an example. 

Since the paper was published, US-backed militants have actually begun physically targeting this pipeline (and more recently here). The paper itself suggests that amid any potential open US-China conflict, the US itself could conduct military strikes against such infrastructure. 

US-backed militants have also attacked Chinese BRI infrastructure in Pakistan - particularly in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan region where US policymakers have sought to eliminate BRI projects since as early as 2011. 

The 2018 paper also mentions Russia as a key partner of China, sharing a long land border and already exporting huge amounts of energy across it to China. Russia presents a formidable challenge to US plans to strangle China through maritime blockades. Since the 2018 paper was published the US has since begun its proxy war with Russia itself - and more specifically - targeting both Russian energy production itself and Russian energy exports. 

Nominally “Ukrainian” maritime drones have begun targeting Russian energy exports far beyond just the Black Sea and have now carried out attacks in the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea, and even off the coast of West Africa.  

The New York Times itself, in a March 2025 article titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit: 

…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.

The implication is that the US is both supplying the maritime drones being used to attack Russian vessels, as well as “supporting the drone strikes” themselves through deep CIA involvement. More recent “Ukrainian” maritime drone strikes far beyond the Black Sea are almost certainly the product of US support being only possible leveraging America’s global network of military and covert action facilities. 

A New Space Race Above Earth May Determine Who Prevails Upon It

December 24, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In early December 2025, private Chinese aerospace company, LandSpace, test-launched its Zhuque-3 rocket. The rocket is designed to place payloads into Earth orbit while recovering its first stage booster, much like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system and now Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. 

The launch was a partial success. The second stage successfully reached orbit while the first stage struck the landing pad hundreds of miles downrange destroying it. Despite an obvious anomaly preventing a successful landing - industry analysts concluded the attempted landing came spectacularly close for a first attempt. 

It took Falcon 9 several attempts before successfully landing its first stage booster, and more recently, US-based aerospace company Blue Origin 2 attempts to successfully land New Glenn’s first stage.

Blue Origin is only the second company to do so after US-based SpaceX which - for years now - has routinely launched payloads to orbit with its Falcon 9 launch vehicle while recovering and reusing Falcon’s first stage boosters.

The Reusable Rocket Revolution

SpaceX has refined this process of launching and recovering first stage boosters to the extent of launching, landing, recovering, and turning around boosters for their next launch within 30 days. 

The rapid reusability of SpaceX’ Falcon 9 has already revolutionized access to Earth orbit - drastically reducing costs while vastly expanding the number of launches possible per year. Blue Origin, should it successfully repeat New Glenn’s recent success while scaling up production and its launch cadence, would expand US access to orbit even further. 

Rapid reusability allows for the deployment of vast constellations of satellites over vastly shorter periods of time. SpaceX’ Starlink constellation, a low earth orbit network of 8,000+ communication satellites improves global coverage and significantly reduces signal latency over older, less numerous existing satellite communication networks located in higher, geostationary orbits.

Such constellations lend significant advantages to the nations who deploy and have access to them. 

As demonstrated in Ukraine, networks like SpaceX’s Starlink don’t just improve civilian satellite communication, but also enhance military communication as well as providing links to long-range drones (especially naval drones) line-of-sight radio signals cannot match. 

SpaceX has provided a significant advantage to the US commercially and militarily - an advantage the US seeks to fully exploit, and do so far beyond Starlink. 

For example, the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has enlisted SpaceX and its Starlink platform to develop what is calls, "Starshield," essentially a military version of Starlink, merging its communication capabilities together with target tracking, optical and signal surveillance, as well as early missile warning capabilities. 

Between being publicly announced in 2022 to present day, nearly 200 Starshield satellites have been placed into orbit - an achievement that would have been impossible without SpaceX and its fleet of reusable launch systems - and an achievement other nations like Russia and China cannot currently match. 

Russia, China Playing Catch Up 

While nations like Russia and China have their own constellations of civilian and military satellites, neither have constellations as large as the US primarily because of limitations on how quickly launches can be conducted to place them into orbit. 

Throughout 2025, for example, the US conducted (approximately) 170 launches versus China’s 78, and Russia’s 15. 

In previous years, China had actually overtaken the US in annual launches. However, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system, this balance has been decisively tilted back in America’s favor.   

Thai-Cambodian Conflict Threatens Asian Stability by Design

December 15, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Major hostilities erupted once again early to mid-December in Southeast Asia along the borders of Thailand and Cambodia following a troubled “ceasefire” which included incidents and provocations for months since the last round of major fighting took place in July 2025. 

Despite any resulting ceasefire, the fundamental issues driving the conflict remain entirely unresolved, primarily because these issues stem from foreign interests using regional conflict to complicate both Asia’s rise in general, and China’s rise specifically. 

The Nature of the Fighting  

Fighting erupted after Cambodian land mines and small arms fire left Thai troops injured and dead early December 8 leading to spiraling violence involving heavy artillery, warplanes, drones, and intense small arms fire at locations all along the Thai-Cambodian border. 

Cambodia launched hundreds of BM-21 unguided multiple launch rocket system munitions into Thailand prompting the Thai military to respond with air and drone strikes targeting both the launchers themselves as well as local ammunition depots used for staging rockets. Positional fighting resulted in disputed territory changing hands day-to-day just as it had during the previous fighting in July. 

Amid the fighting, footage and Thai military statements indicated Cambodia was also using Ukrainian-style FPV (first-person-view) drones - there were also intercepted communications featuring English-speaking drone operators. 

This indicates that the US, either directly or through one of its many proxies, has aided Cambodia in a similar manner to its successful overthrow of the Syrian government late last year. It was admitted then that similar Ukraine-style FPV drones and Western operators aided militants in pushing back and eventually overrunning Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian forces. 

Adding further to suspicions of a US role in the recent violence is Cambodia’s own vocal, repeated appeals for US involvement as a mediator, versus Thailand’s repeated refusal to accept directives delivered from Washington. 

“Extending China”

The on-and-off border fighting disrupts peace and stability threatening the rapid rise of not only China, but the rest of Asia with it - including close Chinese partners like Thailand and obviously Cambodia itself. 

The conflict represents part of a strategy already documented and being applied to Russia meant to encircle and contain it through economic pressure and the creation and expansion of multiple simultaneous conflicts along its periphery.

This strategy was laid out in detail in the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia,” and included plans to provoke a deadly proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, to continue arming “Syrian rebels” who have since overthrown the Russian-backed government in Syria, for attempted regime change in Belarus, to exploit tensions in the South Caucasus, to reduce Russian influence in Central Asia, and to challenge Russia’s presence in Transnistria. 

It should be mentioned that all of these options have either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented and that the US is pursuing an identical strategy in regards to China as well. 

Earlier in December of this year, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute hosted current US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. In the talk he specifically mentioned the ongoing US strategy to maintain global primacy and to confront a rising China. 

During the talk he explicitly stated:

“…so when we look at the rise of the Chinese military, what our goal in the joint force is to create multiple, simultaneous dilemmas for ALL of the adversaries around the world, so that they are very cautious and concerned about doing something that would bring any sense of threat to the American people. “

While it could be argued that General Caine meant ”dilemmas” created by US military capabilities amid a hypothetical conflict with China, throughout the talk he repeatedly linked the concept of creating “dilemmas” to all domains of US geopolitical power, including the ongoing AI (artificial intelligence) race - well outside any ongoing US-China conflict - just as the US has done to Russia. 

In many ways the US is already pursuing an “extending China” policy as laid out in the RAND paper against Russia, but targeting China along its periphery. 

US Beta-Testing China Blockade with Attacks on Russian Energy Exports

December 6, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The incremental build-up toward an overt blockade against Russian energy exports continues with recent aerial and naval drone strikes on both Russian energy production facilities deep within Russian territory, as well as Russian energy terminals and ships used to carry Russian energy exports moving to and from them. 

The most recent incidents include attacks on tankers off the coast of Turkey in the Black Sea and naval drone strikes on the Novorossiysk Fuel Oil Terminal. There was also an apparent attack on a tanker involved in moving Russian energy exports, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa, Newsweek would report.

Western media sources have, over the course of several years now, admitted that Ukraine’s aerial and naval drone campaigns are facilitated and directed by the United States through its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany as well as through the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has assumed control over Ukraine’s intelligence services since as early as 2014, the New York Times admitted. 

The New York Times in its 2025 article, “The Secret history of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War,” would admit specifically that: 

“…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.”

Besides admittedly directing the attacks itself, the US enables such operations through the use of unique intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities no other Western nation possesses. Thus, attempts to assign responsibility to nations like the UK and France still ultimately implicate the US. 

In regards to aerial drones strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russian territory, Reuters would publish its article, “US intelligence helps Ukraine target Russian energy infrastructure, FT reports,” noting: 

“The U.S. has been helping Ukraine mount long-range strikes on Russian energy facilities for months in a joint effort to weaken the economy and force President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. 

U.S. intelligence has helped Kyiv strike important Russian energy assets, including oil refineries, far beyond the front line, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Ukrainian and U.S. officials familiar with the campaign.”

While the recent attacks on Russian energy production and exports is being presented by the Western media and even some independent commentators as being at cross purposes with US President Donald Trump’s various “peace” proposals, they are actually the manifestation of long-standing US geopolitical objectives aimed at stretching out and undermining Russia and beyond. 

Attacks on Russian Energy Production and Exports Years in the Making

This strategy was laid out years before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, aimed at “extending Russia,” eventually precipitating a Soviet Union-style collapse, and all as part of a much wider strategy of likewise isolating and containing a rising China. 

In a 2019 RAND Corporation paper literally titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” in its table of contents included both “geopolitical measures,” like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine” to trigger the now ongoing proxy war with Russia, and “economic emasures” including “hinder petroleum exports” and “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions.” 

Very clearly these policies have been implemented for years under the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations and include, first sanctions targeting the construction of Nord Stream 2 and eventually its destruction, as well as sanctions placed on Russian energy production and exports from 2014 onward. The more recent physical attacks on Russian energy production inside Russian territory with the aid of US intelligence and now strikes on tankers used to transport Russian energy exports abroad represents an escalation of these long-stated US objectives.