According to Czech President Petr Pavel, a full half of the Kiev-supporting Western coalition has quietly abandoned Prague's flagship initiative to jointly procure artillery ammunition for Ukraine's military.
Pavel said that while 18 countries participated last year, only nine are still making financial contributions now. "This initiative has been delivering up to 50 per cent of all large caliber ammunition to the Ukrainians, so in this sense it cannot be replaced easily by anything else," the FT on Tuesday quoted the Czech president as saying.
via GlobesecIt's unclear precisely which precise countries have dropped participation, but reports indicate that Germany and some Scandinavian countries remain involved.
But the program is now teetering on life support as donor fatigue morphs into outright abandonment, and also as the Ukraine conflict has mostly slipped from driving world headlines, as attention has turned to the US-Israeli war in Iran instead, alongside the Hormuz Strait standoff and global crude crisis.
When Pavel first launched the initiative in 2024, 18 countries - including Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands - enthusiastically led the way and jumped on board.
But he conceded this week, "The initiative is still working, but the new difficulty is that only about nine member states are contributing financially."
NATO officials have confirmed to Reuters that as of February, the scheme had only managed to crawl to €1.4 billion ($1.62 billion) in total funding, which is less than a third of the €5 billion Pavel originally projected.
Ukraine has struggled with persistent artillery deficits since early 2022, while Russia has been well supplied, and its frontline forces are able to fire at many times the rate of Ukrainian artillery units.
As for the Czech program, which involved officials scouring the globe to source immense supplies of badly needed artillery shells, one Western official bluntly told the Financial Times: "Some countries now feel that it is strange to pay for something that is not even properly supported by the ruling politicians of the lead country."
But even as ammo efforts fall short, there's also been little appetite for getting the warring sides to the table once again, as diplomacy has long taken a backseat to finding a 'battlefield solution'.
Tyler Durden Wed, 05/27/2026 - 05:45Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
The German federal government and municipalities are the major fiscal losers of 2026. The partly dramatic collapse in tax revenues reveals two things: the transformation disaster is staggering toward its end, and citizens are being squeezed by the state like lemons until the very last moment.
No matter how you spin it, the tax party of Germany’s welfare-state engineers is over. In the first four months of the year, Germany’s total tax intake developed into a fiscal catastrophe. During that period, the federal government, states, and municipalities collected 2% less revenue than a year earlier.
Germany's tax authority.At first glance, that may sound unspectacular. In reality, however, it marks a turning point. Until now, complaints from German budget politicians merely reflected disappointment over slower growth in tax revenues - never an outright decline in state income. That has apparently changed.
Every social welfare system - and with it the entire state apparatus - has been structured around the assumption of disproportionately rising tax revenues. Where this ultimately leads can be seen in the spending behavior of the federal government. Berlin has maneuvered itself into a self-reinforcing spending spiral. The rules of prudent bookkeeping, once considered binding even for political leaders, have been discarded in the stampede of the new socialism. Federal expenditures are now increasing at an annual rate of more than 5%. Yet the federal government itself has suffered an 8.3% decline in tax revenues compared with last year.
Rightly so: decadent excess must eventually be punished. Or put differently: Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil is not merely overwhelmed by his responsibilities - he is a political gambler, much like his chancellor, a reckless counterfeiter intoxicated by delusions of political omnipotence and state-engineered possibility.
A look under the fiscal hood reveals the real damage. The dramatic collapse in tax revenues is especially visible at the municipal level. Treasurers across Germany are fighting on the front lines against the consequences of the destructive ideology of the green transformation. They are the first to notice how industrial zones are emptying out - a process that has accelerated in former industrial centers where Germany once dominated global markets in automobiles, machinery, and chemicals. Now those same regions are watching their municipal revenues implode.
The consequences are severe: in the first four months of the year, total municipal tax revenues fell by 20.4%. The permanent economic depression is destroying the business tax base — the fiscal anchor of local government finances - and is virtually forcing Berlin into additional bailout measures to stabilize municipalities.
At least we now understand the true purpose of Germany’s gigantic “special fund”: it was merely the first massive bridge loan, and many more will undoubtedly follow. The cognitive dissonance is pathological. Within the ranks of the CDU, SPD, Greens, Left Party, and FDP, politicians still believe they can somehow reach the promised shores of green utopia. Transformation has become a psychological crutch, an excuse for catastrophic failure. Even after the high priests of climate ideology quietly abandoned their own apocalypse rhetoric, Germany’s political establishment remains on course.
All that is supposedly needed is more time, more fear-driven behavior modification of citizens, and a fresh flood of debt. That is the narrative. How badly they miscalculated.
Without a functioning economy there are no taxes. If Germany’s political class retained even a rudimentary connection to economic reality, the conclusion would now be obvious: the state must adapt to new economic conditions. The fantasy that Germany can operate as a global welfare office has failed. Equally disastrous is the military-political experiment of financing a proxy war against Russia. And Germany’s remilitarization - currently costing roughly €110 billion annually, or 2.5% of GDP - will likewise crash against the cliffs of economic reality.
With almost visible pride, Finance Minister Klingbeil recently announced that Germany would require an additional €800 billion in debt by 2030 to achieve the coalition’s ambitious political objectives. Quite apart from the fact that these goals are driving the country and its economy into chaos, the real figure will likely exceed €1 trillion merely to keep this decaying ship afloat.
Could it be that Merz and Klingbeil are becoming intoxicated by debt itself? That the debt crisis merely provides the pretext for imposing new taxes on Germany’s middle class and effectively expropriating it? Hatred toward the native population increasingly appears to be the glue holding this catastrophe coalition together, as Labor Minister Bärbel Bas recently demonstrated. For political figures like Bas, the German population is little more than a faceless “uniform brown mass,” a chapter of history to be closed - and the worse conditions become, the more ruthlessly the tax hammer will fall.
The direction of future tax policy is already visible in the states’ revenue figures. Thanks to an 8% increase in real estate transfer taxes - effectively a tax on accumulated substance - Germany’s sixteen state governments were still able to post a combined 2.4 percent increase in revenues between January and April.
Debates over expanding inheritance taxes on business assets, along with renewed attempts to introduce a wealth tax, reveal the strategy clearly: the political class intends to compensate for its own failure by extracting the economic substance of Germany’s middle class. The first step in this confiscatory process was the restructuring of property taxes. Homeowners are the initial victims, trapped by the very immobility of real estate itself.
Payroll tax revenues - critical for every level of government - have so far remained relatively stable despite the growing weakness of the labor market. But Berlin and the state governments should not become overly optimistic. The loss of half a million jobs in the first quarter of the year should be interpreted as the first lightning flashes of a much larger crisis approaching on the horizon.
So far, the fiscal consequences have merely been delayed by inflation, the stealth taxation of bracket creep, and higher levies such as the CO2 tax. That delay, however, will not last forever.
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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
Tyler Durden Wed, 05/27/2026 - 05:00Aluminum prices in London are up nearly 17% since the onset of the U.S.-Iran conflict, as a growing chorus of top commodity desks, including Mercuria, Goldman, JPMorgan, and others, warn that the market is facing a major supply shock.
That disruption, driven firstly by Middle East smelter outages and the Hormuz maritime chokepoint, is now colliding with new concerns that China may be forced to curtail output amid energy-use and emissions inspections, according to Bloomberg.
More color from the report:
Chinese authorities are now moving to rein in that over- production as inventories swell. A smelter in Baise, Guangxi province, has already cut output of molten aluminum, Mysteel wrote, without providing estimates of volumes affected. The steel and oil refining industries will also be targeted, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a statement on May 13.
Building on production cut risks in China, as it is the world's biggest producer, there is another report from Bloomberg that Guinea, the world's largest bauxite producer, is preparing to limit exports of the ore, threatening flows to China's aluminum industry.
Mines and Geology Minister Bouna Sylla told the outlet that the West African nation will dial back bauxite exports in June after a surge in exports sparked a price slump that the government wants to correct.
"Supply mustn't exceed demand," Sylla said. "We want to regulate the quantity to raise prices back to reasonable levels."
For context, most of Guinea's bauxite is loaded on bulk carriers and shipped to China, where it's first refined into alumina, then turned into the industrial metal aluminum.
The complexity of the aluminum supply shock extends well beyond Gulf disruptions, as we outline in this note, which is why prices in London are trading around $3,673 a ton, the highest since March 2022.
JPMorgan analysts recently warned that the industry is descending into a black hole, or a "metaphorical point of no return," where the "global aluminum market will face a serious and prolonged supply outage," even if vessel flows through the Hormuz chokepoint resume in the near term.
Additional market warnings:
The great aluminum squeeze is underway. Prices are likely going higher.
Tyler Durden Wed, 05/27/2026 - 04:15