(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Do you remember when Joe Biden brought us to the brink of nuclear war by allowing the Ukrainians to fire long-range missiles provided by the United States deep into Russian territory? Unfortunately, western leaders have decided to do it again. I honestly have no idea what they are thinking. Every long-range missile that is fired deep into Russian territory brings us even closer to nuclear war.
Just think about how we would respond if someone was firing long-range missiles at New York, Boston, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. We would nuke them. Let us hope that the Russians show restraint, because western leaders are now crossing a very dangerous line.
When I first learned what German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said, I had a hard time believing it. According to Merz, all of the western nations that are providing Ukraine with long-range missiles have now given Ukraine permission to fire those missiles deep into Russian territory…
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Ukraine has been given permission to use weapons supplied by its allies to launch strikes deep inside Russia.
“There are absolutely no range limits anymore for weapons delivered to Ukraine, not from Britain, the French or from us — also not from the Americans,” Merz said at a conference in Berlin on Monday. “That means Ukraine can defend itself by attacking military positions also in Russia.”
I’ll say the same thing that I said when Joe Biden originally gave Ukraine permission to fire long-range missiles provided by the U.S. deep into Russian territory.
This is literally insane. And guess who will be picking the targets and providing the targeting information?
It won’t be the Ukrainians.
NATO is now on the verge of a full-blown war with Russia, and a full-blown war between NATO and Russia would inevitably go nuclear.
President Trump is our last hope for peace with Russia, but now it appears that he has totally lost patience with Vladimir Putin.
In fact, just hours ago he posted a message warning about “the downfall of Russia” on his Truth Social account…
I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever. I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia! Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop. This is a War that would never have started if I were President. This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not “Trump’s,” I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.
In response, the Russians tried to calm things down…
The Kremlin responded Monday to President Trump’s criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing “emotional overload” at this “very important moment.”
“We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for their assistance in organizing and launching this negotiation process,” said Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov when asked about Trump’s remarks, according to Reuters.
“Of course, at the same time, this is a very crucial moment, which is associated, of course, with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reactions.”
But if the Russians really wanted to calm things down, they would stop sending hundreds of attack drones deep into Ukraine…
Russia’s Sunday night attack included the launch of 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force’s communications department, told The Associated Press. The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types in what Ukrainian authorities said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. Overall, from Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said.
Night after night, Russia has been terrorizing Ukrainian cities with these drones.
According to Newsweek, last night’s drone barrage resulted in NATO jets being scrambled “near Poland’s eastern border”…
NATO fighter jets were scrambled near Poland’s eastern border on Monday as Ukraine was struck by a Russian missile and drone attack.
Poland’s Armed Forces said that Polish and allied aircraft had taken off amid “renewed activity of the Russian Federation’s long-range aviation carrying out missile strikes on facilities located in the territory of Ukraine.”
Of course the Russians are simply responding to what the Ukrainians have been doing.
Last week, the Ukrainians sent hundreds of attack drones into Russian territory, and at one point there was even an attempt to kill Vladimir Putin…
The Kremlin as well as Russian state media are alleging a huge, potentially conflict-altering incident which will surely escalate the war in Ukraine – an attempted attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.
A high-ranking Russian military commander on Sunday described that last week, as Putin traveled to the Kursk region for the first time since is liberation after 6+ months of Ukrainian occupation, Ukraine tried to attack Putin’s helicopter mid-flight, sending a wave of drones to swarm the flight path of the chopper.
The Ukrainians have been trying to push the Russians over the edge for a long time.
It looks like this attack on Putin may have finally achieved that goal.
Many were hoping that President Trump would be able to finally bring an end to the war in Ukraine, but now Russian media outlets are proclaiming that the peace process is almost dead…
The Russian press had declared Donald Trump’s peace deal is “dying a slow death” as a key ally of Vladimir Putin mocked Western ceasefire plans by posting a map showing almost all of Ukraine occupied by Kremlin forces. The Moscow-based daily newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets ran an editorial on current ceasefire negotiations, commenting that it believed President’s “energy charge” had “gone flat” and that it would soon become “obvious” even to Mr Trump that any deal was in its “death throes”.
The bleak assessment was reported by the BBC’s Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg during his regular dispatch covering the nation’s headlines. He added that the piece in the Moskovskij Komsomolets said: “The Trump factor was significant and strong enough to get Moscow and Kyiv to the negotiating table, but judging by the current picture, it feels like Trump’s peace plan is dying a slow, but necessarily painful death.
Meanwhile, the Russians continue to get even closer to the Iranians…
Iran’s parliament ratified a 20-year strategic partnership with Russia on Wednesday, formalizing a broad alliance that expands military and economic cooperation between the two heavily sanctioned nations, according to state media.
The move comes as nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington are in doubt, raising fears of a renewed crisis in the Middle East with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening possible military action if no deal is reached.
Nobody can deny that 2025 has turned out to be a year of war.
Now western missiles will be raining down in Russian territory, and the Russians will certainly escalate matters even more in response.
Both sides are expecting the other side to back down, but that isn’t going to happen.
We are witnessing an extremely dangerous game of chicken, and the fate of the entire globe hangs in the balance.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.