Elon Musk’s X Faces Axe from Anti-Terror Group | How a Finnish Neo-Nazi Shared Arson Manual Before U.K. Riots, and more

Advancing these myths ultimately worsens Ukraine’s security, because it takes off the table the best option for ending today’s devasting war: a negotiated settlement in which continued Ukrainian neutrality is accepted in return for leaving it sovereign and militarily strong, capable of fending off future Russian assaults.

For starters, Russia is categorically unwilling to countenance any endgame that involves Ukrainian accession to NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin waged his bloody war of conquest for many reasons. But one driver was his fear that Ukraine was slowly inching towards membership in the alliance.
In 2008, NATO offered Ukraine a Membership Action Plan, formally putting it on the path to membership in the alliance. That same year, US ambassador to Russia (and now CIA Director) William Burns presciently warned that membership was Putin’s ‘brightest of all red lines.’
But Putin understands an inconvenient reality: NATO will never admit a state at war with Russia, since that would oblige the alliance to also declare war on Moscow. One reason for his attack was to take membership off the table—beginning in 2014 with seizure of Crimea and covert operations in the Donbas, not in 2022 with the full assault.
Since NATO membership can only happen when the war ends, those advocating Ukraine’s accession are actually prolonging the fighting—reminding Putin that if he allows the guns go silent, he may be forced to swallow an intolerable outcome.
But even if Ukraine were able to join NATO, it would not get a reliable shield. In fact, there would be serious questions about the credibility of any pledge to defend it. NATO’s Article 5 has been described by President Joe Biden as a ‘sacred commitment’ to ‘literally defend every inch of NATO.’ Such a promise to fight what could become a nuclear war against Russia was made credible in the Cold War by the belief that the US might be willing to ‘trade New York for Bonn’, as was said at the time, bolstered by US operational planning to use nuclear weapons in the defense of Europe.

MI5 Could Scrutinize Tommy Robinson Funding and Checks ‘May Extend to Farage’  (Oliver Wright, The Times)
The security services will be looking “very carefully” at who has funded the far-right leader Tommy Robinson, a former MI6 officer has said, after fears were raised that Russia had stoked the riots in the UK.
Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk, said organizations such as MI5 would be looking into the background of people seen to encourage rioting to check whether they had links to the Putin regime.
He said this could extend to elected politicians like Nigel Farage, who queried whether the Southport knife attacker might have been “known to the security services”.
“I think the security service will be looking very carefully at the instigators of these activities, including people like Tommy Robinson, even conceivably Nigel Farage, who incidentally said that we were being misinformed by the government about Southport,” he told Times Radio.
“They’ll be looking at things like their travel movements, who they’ve been in touch with, monetary transfers and so on, because that will reveal or not, as the case may be, a pattern of behaviour which can lead to some conclusions about the degree to which Russia has been interfering in this situation.”

Exposed: How a Finnish Neo-Nazi Shared Arson Manual Before Riots  (Emma Yeomans, The Times)
A Finnish neo-Nazi shared instructions to commit arson and urged people to file false reports in order to waste police resources during the riots last week.
The man in his early twenties, whom The Times is not naming, can be revealed as an instigator of the far-right action last week. He helped run a group chat on the app Telegram, where tens of thousands of people shared ideas for riot locations and hateful content about immigrants and Jewish people.
Social media sites have come under increased scrutiny since the stabbings in Southport. Misinformation about the suspect spread quickly, as well as locations for possible protests and incitement for riots.
The individual is understood to live in southern Finland and began posting extreme right-wing content online as a teenager. According to police records unearthed by journalists at YLE, the Finnish public broadcaster, he was previously investigated by Finnish police for making an illegal threat. He became an administrator for the Southport Wake Up group on Telegram, which became connected to the riots.

Tim Walz Has Always Been Consistent on China  (Paul Musgrave, Foreign Policy)
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s elevation to the national stage as running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has suddenly put him in the spotlight. Walz had a low national profile until a successful behind-the-scenes strategy led him to be considered for Democrats’ suddenly vacant second spot.
One of the striking elements of Walz’s biography is his unusually deep connections to China. Walz first visited the country in 1989, just months after the Tiananmen Square protests, and returned to the country some 30 times afterward. As an educator and then a small business owner, he facilitated student groups’ trips to China. As a legislator, he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country, and co-sponsored resolutions urging the release of democratic activist Liu Xiaobo and remembering the Tiananmen Square victims.
Not all the attention to Walz’s China record has been positive. Republican and conservative figures have sought to portray Walz’s China ties as dangerous. On X, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio accused Walz of being a Chinese asset—“an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders”—who would “allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”
But Rubio’s attack has it precisely backward. Walz’s record is that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation. Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles—published well before Walz had any political ambitions—demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers.