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President Biden’s southern border crisis continues to spiral out of control. The latest comes as a reconnaissance helicopter monitoring a group of migrants illegally crossing the border crashed on Friday afternoon, killing two US National Guard members and a Border Patrol agent and injuring a fourth person.

A statement from the Defense Department’s Joint Task Force North said the Eurocopter UH-72 Lakota crashed around 1450 local time while it was “conducting aviation operations” near Rio Grande City, Texas. 

On X, Fox News’ Bill Melugin posted horrific images of the mangled helicopter that appears to have fallen out of the sky. 

BREAKING: Per sources, there are “multiple fatalities” after a federalized National Guard helicopter w/ 3 National Guard soldiers working under federal Title 10 orders and a Border Patrol agent on board crashed in the RGV in La Grulla, TX this afternoon.
They were not working… pic.twitter.com/axsHqMXFwr

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 9, 2024

For the pilots out there, when a mechanical failure occurs, autorotation can be applied as a last-ditch emergency maneuver to glide the helicopter to the ground. However, altitude is needed.

Melugin also posted on X a video of what appears to be Mexican cartel members laughing as the helicopter crashed. 

BREAKING: Per Border Patrol source, cartel members were watching the helicopter on their drone when it crashed, then they zoomed into the crash site and laughed about it. Posted on cartel social media. The La Grulla area sees frequent cartel activity via drug & human smuggling. pic.twitter.com/WC9IhFolat

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 9, 2024

The cause of the crash is under investigation. 

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock)

Wall Street titans appear to be having an increasingly hard time reconciling the conflicting goals of progressive activism and shareholder returns.

Until recently, many banks, asset managers, and insurers portrayed these goals as complementary, asserting that climate risk is financial risk and that the competence of management can be assessed by its commitment to social justice goals.

Today, however, those narratives are rarely heard.

BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and State Street recently exited from Climate Action 100+, a coalition of the world’s largest fund managers that pledges to “ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take necessary action on climate change.”

On the heels of that exit, 16 conservative state attorneys general have demanded answers from BlackRock’s directors regarding the firm’s continued membership in other similar groups, which they assert could be a conflict of interest with its fiduciary responsibility to investors.

“We applaud BlackRock’s reevaluation of its status [with Climate Action 100+],” the attorneys general wrote in a Feb. 27 letter to BlackRock’s directors, “but we also note that BlackRock remains a member of other groups such the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative (NZAM), the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), and Ceres.”

Republican state officials praised a recent trend of banks’, fund managers’, and insurance companies’ departures from climate clubs. However, they question whether the Wall Street firms are actually changing direction or simply changing optics.

“I’m afraid nothing has really changed other than the public’s stance,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told The Epoch Times.

“But what really concerns me is that, if what these groups and these asset managers were doing was so righteous, why are they running from it now?”

Mr. Knudsen led the efforts to draft the letter to BlackRock directors.

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia also signed the letter.

Power in Hands of a Few

At the center of the controversy is that so many corporate shares are owned by a relatively small number of financial firms.

According to a 2019 study in the Harvard Business Review, institutional investors—asset managers, insurance companies, banks, and state pension funds—owned 80 percent of the shares in the S&P 500 index of the United States’ largest companies.

“One of either BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street is the largest shareholder in 88 percent of S&P 500 companies [and] they are the three largest owners of most DOW 30 companies,” the report states.

(Top) A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on Feb. 23, 2024. (Bottom) The JPMorgan Chase & Co. company logo is displayed on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

This concentration of power has raised concerns, particularly when the firms pledge to work in unison to target fossil fuel companies.

Critics argue that the issue is not only how institutional fund managers invest clients’ money, but also how they vote the corporate shares that they own on their clients’ behalf.

Climate Action 100+ has boasted of having a 75 percent success rate in compelling target companies to get on board with the net-zero agenda.

Although many financial firms have also been pursuing climate and social-justice goals and are also members in climate-activist alliances, BlackRock has been a lightning rod for criticism on this issue, largely because of its size and outspoken support for those goals.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management company, with about $10 trillion in assets under management.

“They’re involved in a lot of pension systems, and a lot of state investment systems, and I think they’re getting the most attention because they’ve got the most assets,” Mr. Knudsen said. “But I think other similar groups should take notice of this, and we’re hoping they do.”

BlackRock said it’s in the process of reviewing the letter from the attorneys general but disputes the allegations of conflicts of interest.

“BlackRock and its funds’ Boards of Trustees act in full accordance with their fiduciary obligations and in the best interests of all fund shareholders,” Christopher van Es, director of corporate communications at BlackRock, told The Epoch Times.

BlackRock has also refuted the charge that it has disinvested from the oil and gas industry.

In December 2022, Dalia Blass, BlackRock’s head of external affairs, testified before the Texas state Senate, “We participate in Climate Action 100 to engage in dialogue with other participants, market participants, [and] governments so that we understand issues that are relevant to our clients.”

Ms. Blass denied that BlackRock pressured companies to go along with the alliance’s climate agenda.

Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican, responded: “BlackRock’s website says, ‘We have joined Climate Action 100 to help ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take necessary action on climate change.’”

Texas state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst told BlackRock at the hearing that she prefers Texas not to do business with the firm because it and the Lone Star state have “different goals.”

“Maybe you can’t serve two masters,” she said.

Read more here…

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Frankfurt has become the first German city to hang Ramadan lights at a cost of over €50,000 euros to honor the fact that 15 per cent of its population is now Muslim.

On Monday morning, trucks began arriving on behalf of the city government to unload the stars and crescents, connecting them to the city’s power grid to honor the festival, which runs from March 10th to April 9th.

The lights are similar to those that were displayed in London’s Piccadilly Circus last year.

NEW – Frankfurt am Main is the first city in Germany to introduce Ramadan lighting. So far, Germans have only known religious illuminations from Christian Christmas — BILD pic.twitter.com/23OZMoHCcI

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 5, 2024

The lights are a result of lobbying from the Greens, the SPD and the ‘Green Department for Diversity and Anti-Discrimination’ (yes, that’s an actual thing), who passed a motion in parliament last year.

“Since the proposal, which was not widely publicized, things have also been quiet within the town hall. Many politicians in Frankfurt are therefore completely surprised by the construction,” reports Bild.

Frankfurt’s mayor Nargess Eskandari-Grünberg said, “They are lights of togetherness, against reservations, against discrimination, against anti-Muslim racism and also against anti-Semitism.”

What they have to do with anti-Semitism wasn’t clarified.

The lights cost between €50,000 and €100,000 euros, meaning they may have even cost more than the annual Christmas lights.

Thanks to mass immigration, Frankfurt now has a Muslim population of between 100,000 and 150,000 people, making up almost 15 per cent of the total population.

As far back as 2015, 51.2% of the population of Frankfurt had an immigrant background.

Just by sheer coincidence, federal government statistics show that in 2018 there were 14,864 crimes per 100,000 citizens in Frankfurt, making the city the most dangerous in Germany.

The city occasionally enjoys riots, such as one in 2020 when hundreds of migrant men threw bottles and stones at police officers.

„#PartyundEventszene“ wieder aktiv: Randalierer verwüsten letzte Nacht #Opernplatz in #Frankfurt! Was muss noch passieren, damit der Schutz der Bürger und ihres Hab und Gutes endlich wieder in den Vordergrund gestellt wird? Es muss endlich konsequent durchgegriffen werden! #AfD pic.twitter.com/MDMkzXApqa

— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) July 19, 2020

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Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Ukraine has announced that its fired defense chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhny, has been appointed to what’s widely considered one of the country’s most important diplomatic positions – he is now the new ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Zaluzhny, while enjoying widespread popularity within military ranks, was controversially removed by President Zelensky in February amid a broader shake-up in miliary and government leadership, at a moment Ukraine forces have been in retreat, outmanned and outgunned by superior Russian forces.

Zelensky had said at the time he needed men who are “convinced of victory” against Russia. Zaluzhny had attracted controversy after several interviews with Western press wherein the top general gave a realistic, and thus negative, assessment of the battlefield situation. 

General, and now ambassador, Valerii Zaluzhny. via Reuters

For example back in November Gen. Zaluzhny riled the Zelensky administration and external allies by being the first top official to paint a very negative and grim picture of how Ukraine’s military was fairing on the battlefield.

He made the remarks to The Economist and the admission quickly caught the eye of other major publications, most notably The New York Times, which underscored at the time, “His comments marked the first time a top Ukrainian commander said the fighting had reached an impasse…”.

Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, seen as more loyal and willing to keep his mouth shut, and with a reputation for being willing to sacrificing troops no matter how impossible the task set before him.

Zelensky in making the announcement of Zaluzhny’s reappointment on Thursday stated that the general “told me this is the direction he would like to take — diplomacy.” Zelensky added that this means “Our alliance with Britain should only strengthen.”

There has been widespread speculation that the Ukrainian president needed to give Zaluzhny an important, highly visible post in government in order to appease far-right loyalists of the former defense chief – perhaps on fears there could have been attempts at mutiny and unrest within military ranks.

Ukraine has for months also struggled with the question of how to tap more manpower. Military recruiters are extremely unpopular and a new broader mass mobilization drive would likely spark unrest in the streets.

Families are worried over their men being recruited and sent to the front lines, which many view as essentially a death sentence. In some cases violence has broken out when military recruiters visit towns and villages already depleted of able-bodied men.

Authored by Michael Brenner via ScheerPost.com,

Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle.  For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

Some clues for these abnormalities are provided by their most recent responses as deteriorating conditions tighten the vise – on emotions, on prevailing policies, on domestic political worries, on ginger egos. Those responses fall under the category of panic behavior. Deep down, they are scared, fearful and agitated. Biden et al in Washington, Macron, Schulz, Sunak, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen. They lack the courage of their stated convictions or the courage to face reality squarely. The blunt truth is that they have contrived to get themselves, and their countries, in a quandary from which there is no escape conforming to their current self-defined interests and emotional engagement.  Hence, we observe an array of reactions that are feckless, grotesque and dangerous. 

Feckless

Exhibit 1 is French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed plan to station military personnel from NATO members within Ukraine to serve as a tripwire. Arrayed as a cordon around Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev they are meant to deter advancing Russian forces from moving on those cities for fear of killing Western soldiers – thereby risking a direct confrontation with the Alliance. It is a highly dubious idea that defies logic and experience while tempting fate. France long has deployed members of its armed forces in Ukraine where they programed and operated sophisticated equipment – in particular, the SCALP cruise missiles.  Scores were killed by a Russian retaliatory strike a few months ago that destroyed their residence. Paris cried ‘holy murder’ for Moscow’s unsporting conduct in shooting back at those attacking them.   It was retaliation for the French participation in the deadly bombing of the Russian city of Belgorod. Why then should we expect that the Kremlin would abandon a costly campaign involving what they see as vital national interests if uniformed Western troops were deployed in a picket line around cities?  Would they be intimated into passivity by spiffy uniforms assembled under outsized banners inscribed with the slogan: “DON’T MESS WITH NATO”?

Moreover, there already are thousands of Westerners bolstering the Ukrainian armed forces. Roughly 4 – 5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces. It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming – perhaps pulling the trigger on – weapons that kill Russians. In addition, the CIA has established a massive, multipurpose system able to conduct a wide range of Intelligence and operational activities- independently as well as in conjunction with the Ukrainian FSB. That includes tactical Intelligence on a day-by-day basis. We don’t know whether they had a role in the campaign of targeted assassinations inside Russia.

A critical role also has been played by Britain. Their specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. Too, MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure. The principal lesson to be drawn from this overview is that the positioning of European troops at key sites as human hostages in not wholly original. Their presence has not deterred Russia from attacking them in the field or, as in the French case, hunting them down in their residences.

Feckless: Exhibit 2 is the American airdrop of a paltry load of humanitarian aid in the sea off of Gaza. This bizarre action overlaps the silly and the grotesque. The United States has been the major accomplice in the Israeli ravaging of Gaza. Its weapons have killed 30,000 Gazans, wounded 70,000+, and devastated hospitals. Washington has actively blocked any serious attempt at aid by the UNWRO in withholding the funds necessary to finance its operations, while staying silent as Israel blocks entry points from Egypt and massacres residents awaiting the arrival of a food convoy. Furthermore, it has vetoed every attempt to end the carnage through ceasefire resolutions of the UN Security Council. This absurd gesture of kicking pallets out an airplane hatch simply underscores American disregard for Palestinian lives, its contempt for world opinion and its shameless subjugation to dictates from Israel.

Feckless: Exhibit 3 is provided by Rishi (Sage) Sunak, interim Prime Minister of the U.K. An ardent backer of Israel, he consistently has criticized Peace demonstrations protesting the assault on Gazans as obstacles to achieving a long-term ceasefire and political settlement. In this, he continues the long tradition of British fealty to its American overlord. Last week, he escalated the attack in denouncing them as tools of Hamas who have been taken over by terrorists – terrorists who threaten to tear the country apart. He likened it to ‘mob rule’ – as punctuated by the electoral victory of maverick George Galloway who crushed the Tories (and Labour) in a by-election. No evidence, of course, as to how half a million peaceable citizens are a Trojan horse for Muslim jihadis. This fecklessness is recognizable for those familiar with the haughty manner cultivated by the English upper crust – infecting even an arriviste in those exalted circles whose origins were in the Indian Raj. Condescension toward the lower ranks, instruction as to where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lie. That attitude often is laced with cute disparagements of groups or nationalities that don’t conform. The fact that Sunak himself is unabashed at now making snide accusations – however implied – about Muslims demonstrates the durability of cultural prejudices along with the historical openness of England’s upper class to those with money or cachet. These days, even a rishi. I suppose that’s social progress.

The dangerous element in Sunak’s unbecoming demagoguery is not its aggravating effect on the West’s culpability in the Palestine. The regional protagonists, as well as the rest of the world, smile at Britain’s grand rhetorical flourishes knowing that it counts only as America’s Tonto. Rather, it opens a breach in the country’s dedication to free speech and assembly. For it comes close to saying that any public disagreement with HMG’s policy is tantamount to treason.

Grotesque

Insofar as violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is concerned, it is fair to say that the Western governments’ complicity via its arming and unqualified backing for Israel’s gruesome actions constitutes grotesque behavior. To single out individual elements among individual governments is superfluous. The entire episode is grotesque. So it is seen by nearly the entire world outside the countries of the collective West. That represents about 2/3 of humanity. Still, our nations’ political elites appear oblivious and/or disdainful of that judgment. It matters little to them that they are seen by the ‘others’ as inhumane, arch hypocrites and racists. Those strong impressions are reinforced in many places by traumatic memories of how they themselves were subjugated, trodden upon and exploited over the centuries by people who righteously instructed them on the superiority of Western values – just as they do today.    

There are actions that manifestly represent a clear and future danger of an expanding war in Europe. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s belligerent Secretary-General, boldly stated last week that the Western allies should give Ukraine the green light to use the cruise missiles they have acquired to attack targets in Russia proper. Those weapons include the Storm Shadow, the Scalp, the long-range Tauras that Germany may soon dispatch and similar hardware to be provided by the U.S. (perhaps launched from the F-16s already arriving). Such a drastic move has been hinted at by other Western leaders, and pushed by hardline factions in Washington. Putin has warned that such escalation by the West – as with the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.

Taken together, the actions by Western leaders – supported by their nations’ political elites – are indicative of a behavior pattern that has parted ways with reality. They derive deductively from dogmas unsubstantiated by objective fact. They are logically self-contradictory, impervious to events that shift the landscape, and radically unbalanced in weighting benefits/costs/risks and probabilities of success. How do we explain this ‘irrationality’? There are background conditions that are permissive or encouraging of this flight from sound reasoning. They include: the nihilistic socio-cultural trends in our contemporary post-modern societies; their susceptibility to collective hysteria/overwrought emotional reactions to unsettling events – 9/11, Islamic terrorism, the fable about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election among other political matters, the conjuring of the menacing Chinese dragon, scary predictions of inevitable war with the PRC, outlandish claims that Putin is planning to launch an all-out campaign to conquer Europe up to the English Channel. The last two are fed by the free-floating anxieties, i.e. dread, engendered by the earlier bouts of mass psychopathology. Those allegations, in fact pure fictions, have gained currency among senior military figures, heads of government, and among strategic ‘thinkers.’

Back to the ingredients of panic. We noted fear – of both the identifiable and the unknown, and sub-conscious feelings of insecurity. Those feelings derive from a matrix of disorienting shifts in the global environment inhabited by Western societies. They, in turn, grow in reciprocation with unsetting domestic developments. The outcome is two-fold: a stultifying of any reasonable debate about dubious policies – leaving premises and purposes untested, and opening opportunities for willful persons or factions who harbor audacious objectives of remaking the world’s geo-political space according to American hegemonic specifications. To that end, our leaders manipulate and exploit conditions of emotional disorientation and political conformity. The outstanding example are the so-called ‘neo-cons’ in Washington (who number Joe Biden as a comrade-in-arms) who have crafted a network of like-minded true believers in London, Paris, Berlin and at both ends of Brussels.

What of the puzzle we noted as to the near complete absence of feelings of guilt or shame – especially over Gaza, of being humiliated in the eyes of the world? In conditions of nihilism, matters of conscience are moot. For the implicit rejection of norms, rules and laws frees the individual self to do whatever impulses or ideas or selfish interests impel it. With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology obviates the requirement for experiencing shame. That is something that can only exist if we subjectively are part of a social grouping wherein personal status, and sense of worth, depend on how others view us and whether they grant us respect. In the absence of such a communal identity, with its attendant sensitivity to its opinion, shame can exist only in the perverse form of regret that one has been unable to meet the demanding, all-consuming need for self-gratification. That applies to nations as well as its individual leaders.

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Senior Fellow Alex Pollock drew my attention to an important quotation by Smedley Butler: 

1935 speech and later a book by Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC), includes  “… A racket is best described, I believe, something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make large fortunes…

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destructions, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munition makers.

So … I say, TO HELL WITH WAR.”

It is notable that very little has changed over the past century in terms of how regimes rationalize war. It was during the First World War that the term “merchants of death” first gained widespread use, and it was also during that war that the American regime also spoke often in terms of munitions spending as a benefit of war. It was all part of a war-propaganda machine dreamed up with Woodrow Wilson’s cadre. 

Unfortunately, the propaganda still works with many. It was just two weeks ago, in fact, that the Biden Administration began explicitly trying to sell US military aid to Ukraine as a scheme to “create jobs” in the United States. The administration’s statement on the war spending is virtually identical to something out of a US propaganda mill in 1950 or 1918. We would only need to change a few of the names and places. According to Biden’s handlers: 

“While this bill dispatches military hardware to Ukraine,” Biden mentioned on Tuesday, “it actually finances manufacturing within the United States in states like Arizona, where Patriot missiles are manufactured; Alabama, the home of Javelin missiles; and also Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, which are hubs for the production of artillery shells.”

There are a multitude of problems with this statement.

For one, it completely ignores the moral questions of forcing American taxpayers to pay for Kiev to send more young men into a meat grinder that is part of a conflict it is clear Ukraine will lose.

Secondly, these weapons are not accounted for and are not audited. We don’t even know where they really end up.

Third, US involvement in the war risks involving the US in an escalating conflict that has absolutely no strategic value for normal Americans. For normal taxpayers, this is all risk and no benefit. Escalation could lead to American deaths while “victory” in Ukraine doesn’t benefit Americans at all since Ukrainian sovereignty has never contributed anything at all to American taxpayers. 

Finally, there is the fact that war spending simply is not “good for the economy.” This is an old well-worn myth, but is based on nothing. Consider the process: war spending (especially spending on weapons) requires taxing productive Americans and then turning their taxpayer money into devices that will be consumed in war. Had the taxpayers been allowed to spend this money, much of that money would have been spent on things like education, capital goods, saving, and investment. Instead, that money is taxed, and then, after the bureaucrats take their cut, it is transformed into artillery shells, etc. that blow up some stuff in Ukraine for no benefit to Americans.

To imagine that this is a boon for Americans requires the most out-of-touch beltway type of thinking imaginable. 

The nuclear deterrence capabilities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are set to be significantly enhanced as the US Air Force’s newest fifth-generation fighter jet, the F-35A Lightning II, has been operationally certified to be equipped with B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs for the first time. 

“The F-35A is the first 5th generation nuclear capable aircraft ever, and the first new platform (fighter or bomber) to achieve this status since the early 1990s. This F-35 Nuclear Certification effort culminates 10+ years of intense effort across the nuclear enterprise, which consists of 16 different government and industry stakeholders,” F-35 Joint Program Office spokesman Russ Goemaere told military blog Breaking Defense. 

Goemaere said, “The F-35A achieved Nuclear Certification ahead of schedule, providing US and NATO with a critical capability that supports US extended deterrence commitments earlier than anticipated.​”

In 2021, an F-35 dropped a mock nuclear bomb at Sandia National Laboratories’ Tonopah Test Range over the Nevada desert. 

In late 2022, Germany signed a contract with the US to purchase dozens of F-35s capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Under NATO’s nuclear sharing program, Germany has about 20 B61 bombs.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The “dual-capable” stealth fighter that can now carry both conventional and nuclear weapons is replacing fourth-generation fighters in almost all NATO states that participate in nuclear sharing. The F-35’s ability to carry modernized B61-12 nuclear bombs will beef up NATO’s regional deterrence capabilities and help deter further Russian aggression. 

“This move is part of the US expanding effort in and among the US and NATO allies to counter Putin’s coercive threats to use nuclear weapons as a means to break our collective strategic resolve against Russia. Putin knows that the F-35 is more than capable of stealthily penetrating his airspace and delivering sensitive payloads,” said David Asher, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. 

It remains to be seen how Moscow will react to nuclear-capable F-35s flying near Russian borders and in the Baltic area. Russia also has a fifth-generation fighter jet, the Su-57 fighter, known by NATO as ‘Felon.’