Weitere Netzfunde in der wöchentlichen Zusammenstellung.

Europe To Assist Zelensky’s Conscription Effort

Europe welcomed millions of Ukrainians with open arms. Governments competed with one another to prove who could be the most compassionate. Nobody wanted to ask the uncomfortable question. What happens when the war drags on for years? Eventually, someone has to fight it.

Now the European Commission is proposing that newly arriving Ukrainian men of military age who are not authorized to leave Ukraine should no longer qualify for temporary protection. Existing refugees would remain protected, but the message is changing. According to the Commission, the proposal came at Ukraine’s request because Kyiv needs to preserve its ability to defend itself. Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssell said the quiet part out loud: “It is essential for us to provide Ukrainians with protection, but at the same time the war needs to be fought and won. For that to happen, it is essential that more men stay in Ukraine and fight.”

Europe is beginning to acknowledge something politicians have carefully avoided saying for years. Wars consume people. Ammunition can be manufactured, but young men cannot. Zelensky has banned military-aged men from leaving the nation.

Zelensky is forcing a generation to perish in this endless war with Russia and NATO. Recent reports indicate that 200,000 soldiers have gone AWOL (absent without leave), and for perspective, that is more soldiers than the entire UK military. Ukraine’s new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov warned that the government is hunting down two million Ukrainians who are wanted for evading mobilization.

Anm. d. Red.: Wie passt das ins Bild, dass die russischen Verluste RIESIG sein sollen, während die ukrainischen Verluste MINIMAL sind? Offenbar besteht ein Personalproblem. Woher das wohl kommt?

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Rare Earths In Kazakhstan

The United States is now chasing critical minerals because Washington finally realized that outsourcing everything to China was national suicide. Tungsten is not some luxury commodity. It is used in missile warheads, fighter aircraft, semiconductors, and defense technology. Kazakhstan has one of the largest undeveloped tungsten deposits in the world, and the project could eventually produce around 12,000 metric tonnes per year, roughly equal to America’s entire annual imports.

But here is where the story begins to stink. According to India Today, before the Kazakhstan deal was finalized, the Trump administration was prepared to back the project with up to $1.6 billion in federal financing. Within weeks of negotiations, companies linked to Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s family acquired financial interests in entities connected to the mining project.

Documents reviewed by The New York Times, as reported by India Today, show that Dominari Securities, an investment firm based in Trump Tower and partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined investors in acquiring a 20% stake in a company tied to the Kazakhstan venture. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Howard Lutnick and now overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle, helped ASP Isotopes raise $210 million. Those transactions can generate millions in fees for an investment bank.

This is exactly why people no longer trust government. They are told every deal is about national security, then the same political families and connected banks somehow appear near the money. The article reports that companies connected to the Trump or Lutnick families have financial interests in at least 14 mining ventures pursuing projects backed by the U.S. government, involving more than $8.9 billion in federal financing or regulatory approvals. That does not prove illegality, but it absolutely raises the question every taxpayer should ask, who benefits?

The White House denied wrongdoing, saying, “The only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people.” Eric Trump said he was “a passive investor with absolutely no management role.” Fine. Then disclose everything. If taxpayer financing is involved, if federal approvals are involved, and if the sons of the president or commerce secretary are financially positioned around the deal, the public has every right to demand full transparency.

This is how empires rot. Strategic resources become political prizes. Government financing becomes a pipeline for insiders. The public is told it is all for national security while the connected class quietly buys into the projects before the money flows. I have no problem with America securing tungsten. I have a problem when those close to power appear positioned to profit from government-backed deals.

The deeper trend remains clear. The world is moving from globalization into resource nationalism. Critical minerals are the new oil. China controls too much of the supply chain, and the United States must rebuild access to strategic materials. But if Washington turns that necessity into another insider enrichment scheme, then it will only accelerate the collapse in confidence. The resource war has begun, and the political class is already circling the spoils.

Anm. d. Red.: Hier zeigt sich deutlich die Bedeutung der Supply Chain von Kritischen Mineralien. Egal, wie viel Geld die Schweiz für Rüstungsgüter locker machen kann, am Schluss geht es immer darum, ob die Rüstungsgüter überhaupt hergestellt werden können. Es geht um die (logistische) Machbarkeit. Umso mehr müssten die “Armeefreunde” (wie etwa Pro Militia) nicht einfach nur Geld fordern, sondern v.a. die Neutralität und Offenheit für Beschaffungen aus Nicht-Westlichen Ländern einfordern. Nur so werden wir und Produktionsunternehmen in der Schweiz in Zukunft noch jene Materialien und Komponenten erhalten, die wir benötigen.

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Das laute Schweigen der Deutschschweizer Medien

Rund 600 Persönlichkeiten aus Wissenschaft, Kultur und Politik haben Mitte Mai 2026 einen Appell an den Bundesrat gerichtet, unter ihnen auch die ehemaligen Bundesrätinnen Ruth Dreifuss und Micheline Calmy-Rey, zusammen mit Ex-Bundesrat Joseph Deiss. Sie verlangen von der amtierenden Schweizer Regierung eine klare Verurteilung der von Israel begangenen Verstösse gegen das Völkerrecht und die Durchsetzung von Sanktionen, falls Israel seine menschenverachtende Politik nicht ändert. Die Schweiz soll zudem für schwer verletzte Menschen aus den von Israel bombardierten Gebieten medizinische Behandlung in Schweizer Kliniken ermöglichen.

Weil man im Bundeshaus bis heute nicht auf das Schreiben reagiert hat, haben die Initiant:innen des Aufrufs um den Tessiner Arzt Pietro Majno-Hurst beschlossen, ihre Anliegen öffentlich zu machen. Für die Medienkonferenz am 18. Juni in Bern sind fünf Referent:innen aus Zürich, Genf und Brissago angereist.

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13-18 Days: The Practical Diesel Buffer… Does It Preclude Bombing Iran?

I am indebted to my new friend who is an energy expert, and currently working in the Persian Gulf, for explaining why the US is facing a very serious risk of a domestic energy crisis. If ignorance is bliss then I’ve spent my last 71 years happily believing that the conversion of oil to fuel for cars, trucks and planes was a simple process. Boy, was I wrong. The United States is facing a potential crisis surrounding the production of diesel and aviation fuel. According to this person, who has 35 years experience in the oil industry:

The U.S. does not have a month of freely deliverable diesel in a stress event. The headline EIA number shows 106.1 million barrels of total distillate fuel oil stocks and 3.631 million b/d of four-week average distillate product supplied, implying 29.2 days on paper. But that national inventory includes barrels in pipelines, refineries, terminals, regional storage, and operational positions that cannot all be allocated immediately to critical distribution hubs.

Operational estimate: applying a 45%-60% practical deliverability factor to total distillate stocks leaves roughly 48-64 million barrels of usable, allocable diesel-equivalent supply. At 3.631 million b/d, that is approximately 13.1-17.5 days, rounded to 13-18 days.

So let me explain how he reached this conclusion. Think of the diesel buffer as the gap between when supply stops flowing and when the economy starts breaking. Thirteen days is not a comfortable cushion — it’s essentially no cushion at all, because the economy runs on diesel in ways that cannot be deferred.

Diesel is not a lifestyle fuel. It moves every truck on every highway, powers every locomotive, runs every tractor during planting and harvest, and drives every piece of heavy construction equipment. When a family decides gas prices are too high, they drive less. When a freight company decides diesel is too expensive or too scarce, it cannot defer the shipment — the grocery store shelves just go empty. Diesel demand is largely inelastic. The economy cannot negotiate with it the way it can with gasoline.

Let’s use the worst case: 13 days. Thirteen days means that if anything disrupts the supply chain — a refinery outage, a pipeline failure, a crude supply disruption — the effects reach the real economy within two weeks. There is no meaningful time to arrange alternatives. A tanker from a replacement crude source takes longer than 13 days to arrive. A refinery turnaround takes longer than 13 days to complete. The buffer is shorter than the lead time for almost every possible remedy.

The geography makes it worse. The 13-day figure is a national average, which means some regions have more and some have less. The Southeast is particularly exposed, being heavily dependent on the Colonial Pipeline, which is itself a single point of failure that demonstrated its criticality when it was shut down for six days in 2021. Six days is nearly half the total national buffer.

What about aviation fuel? Here is where the two problems collide mechanically, and why it creates a genuine bind rather than just a theoretical tradeoff.

Diesel and jet fuel are not different products from different parts of the refinery. They are competing claims on the same physical fraction of crude oil — the middle distillate cut that comes off the atmospheric distillation column in the same boiling range. Every refinery scheduling decision is, at its core, a daily argument about how to divide that fraction between the two products.

With a 13-day diesel buffer, the refinery cannot let diesel output fall. The economic and political consequences of a diesel shortage materialize too quickly and too severely. Diesel production becomes, in practical terms, the floor that cannot be breached.

Now layer in a wartime demand for military jet fuel. JP-8 is pulled from the same middle distillate fraction. The military’s operational requirements are also non-negotiable — aircraft do not fly on goodwill. So you now have two inelastic demands competing for one fixed supply of middle distillate from each barrel of crude processed.

The refinery’s response to this bind is constrained in every direction:

• It cannot simply run more crude. Crude supply itself may be disrupted — this is precisely the scenario the Persian Gulf blockade creates. And even if crude is available, refinery throughput is limited by physical capacity. You cannot run 110% of nameplate capacity.
• It cannot shift to lighter crude to get more barrels. Light crude produces proportionally more gasoline and less middle distillate. Running lighter crude when you need diesel and jet fuel makes the allocation problem worse, not better, because you are shrinking the pool of middle distillate that both are fighting over.
• It cannot get more middle distillate out of sour crude than the chemistry allows. A barrel of sour crude from the Persian Gulf typically yields around 20–25% middle distillates by volume. That fraction is fixed by the molecular composition of the oil. You can optimize within a range, but you cannot double the yield through operational choices.

Hydrogen becomes a choke point. Making JP-8 from sour crude to military specification requires substantial hydrogen — for sulfur removal, for aromatic ring saturation to meet smoke point requirements, and for freeze point management. Making ULSD from the same sour crude also requires substantial hydrogen — even more, to reach the ≤15 ppm sulfur specification. A refinery’s hydrogen generation capacity is finite. Every cubic foot of hydrogen diverted to jet fuel processing is a cubic foot unavailable for diesel desulfurization. At the margin, maximizing JP-8 production makes the diesel quality problem worse, not just the diesel volume problem.

The certification delay adds time pressure. Switching refinery configuration between maximizing diesel and maximizing jet fuel is not instant. It takes days to a week to restabilize the unit operations and certify the product meets specification. In a 13-day buffer environment, a week of transition time is not a casual cost — it represents a material fraction of the entire safety margin consumed by the act of reconfiguring production.

Under normal peacetime conditions, refineries optimise their middle distillate split based on market prices — jet fuel commands a premium, so they lean toward jet. The diesel buffer stays comfortable and the system works.

The Iran war changes all of that simultaneously in three directions at once:

• First, the diesel buffer starts shrinking. Persian Gulf sour crude — even though only 8% of US imports — supplied roughly 17% of the medium-sour grades that US complex refiners prefer for middle distillate production. That quality gap is not easily filled by Canadian heavy or domestic light sweet crude without refinery adjustment. Diesel output drops or becomes more expensive per barrel just as the buffer needs defending.
• Second, military JP-8 demand spikes. A naval campaign in the Persian Gulf, sustained air operations, and a mobilised logistics tail consume enormous quantities of aviation fuel. The military doesn’t queue behind civilian demand — it has priority. So the refinery is simultaneously being squeezed from both ends of the middle distillate barrel: the military is claiming more jet fuel from the top, and the diesel buffer is bleeding out from the bottom.
• Third, the refinery cannot easily solve this by running harder. As explained earlier, maximising JP-8 from sour crude requires pulling a lighter, narrower distillate cut. This is precisely the action that reduces diesel yield — the heavier tail of the middle distillate that would have become diesel is either lost to the vacuum unit or downcycled to fuel oil. The more aggressively refineries respond to military jet fuel demand, the faster the diesel buffer erodes.

This creates a three-way constraint with no clean solution:

• Protect the diesel buffer→ limit JP-8 output → constrain military operations
• Maximise JP-8 for military→ draw down diesel buffer → trigger civilian supply cascade before the war ends
• Try to do both→ run refineries at maximum utilisation → lose the ability to flex for any further shock, with no margin for equipment failures, maintenance, or a second disruption

The 13-day buffer is what makes this bind acute rather than manageable. With sixty days of diesel inventory, a refinery operator can tolerate shifting the middle distillate split toward jet fuel for several weeks without civilian consequences. With thirteen days, the same shift starts a visible countdown almost immediately. Now do you understand why Donald Trump signed the MoU with Iran?

If the United States decides to renew its bombing campaign of Iran, that would likely trigger the stress event outlined above. Based on that fact I believe that Donald Trump, notwithstanding his threats, will not run the risk of crashing the US economy by bombing Iran again.

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«Conex 26» bestätigt Einsatzbereitschaft der Armee – weitere Lehren für die Stärkung der Verteidigungsfähigkeit

Die Territorialdivision 2 hat die Übung «Conex 26» erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Rund 3500 Angehörige der Armee haben während vier Wochen in der Nordwestschweiz die Mobilisierung, den Einsatz in drei Arenen und die Führungsfähigkeit unter realistischen Bedingungen trainiert und überprüft. Die Übung hat wertvolle Erkenntnisse für die Weiterentwicklung von Verfahren und Strukturen innerhalb der Armee geliefert.

Anm. d. Red.: Mit anderen Worten: Die bisherigen Verfahren und Strukturen waren nicht zielführend. Worauf haben diese basiert?

Im Zentrum von «Conex 26» stand die rasche Mobilisierung sowie das anschliessende einsatzorientierte Training grosser Truppenteile in verschiedenen thematischen Arenen, die sogenannte «einsatzbezogene Ausbildung» (EBA). Diese wurde zum Ende der Übung mit einer Zertifizierung abgeschlossen. Mit dieser Zertifizierung von Ausbildungsblöcken hat die Territorialdivision 2 einen überprüfbaren Nachweis hin auf dem Weg zur Einsatzbereitschaft im Umfeld erhöhter Bedrohung erbracht.

Anm. d. Red.: Organisationen zu zertifizieren bringt meist wenig, weil die Personen – besonders in der Armee – so rasch wechseln, dass die Haltwertszeit der Erfahrung schon im nächsten WK erreicht ist.
Die “Rasche Mobilisierung” erweckt den Eindruck, dass die Teilnehmer alle völlig überrascht von der Übung waren und über Nacht sich vom Arbeitsplatz und den Familien verabschieden mussten. Da die Soldaten kaum zu den Truppen mit erhöhter Bereitschaft gehören, dürfte diese Aussage also kaum viel mit der Realität zu tun haben.

«‹Conex 26› hat gezeigt, dass unsere Verbände mobilisieren, wirken und durchhalten können. Die Zertifizierung im Rahmen der Übung war kein Selbstzweck – sie ist der Massstab, an dem wir uns messen lassen», sagte Divisionär Alexander Kohli, Kommandant der Territorialdivision 2. Zudem wurden Erkenntnisse aus Pilotversuchen im Bereich des Einsatzes der leichten Infanterie sowie der sanitätsdienstlichen Erstversorgung gewonnen.

Anm. d. Red.: Durchhalten? Durchhalten? Einen WK lang durchhalten? Habe ich etwas übersehen oder wurden wirklich Verbände über längere Zeit im Einsatz behalten und dann durch frische Truppen abgelöst?

Die Übung hat wertvolle Erkenntnisse geliefert, welche die Verteidigungsfähigkeit der Armee stärken.

Anm. d. Red.: Textbaustein Nr. 1 – Check!

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