Ukrainian President Zelensky is undertaking a dramatic cabinet reshuffle, at a moment Kiev sees itself as having military momentum against Russia with its non-stop drone assaults on Russian energy sites.
The country's Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko has confirmed Sunday her shock resignation, which has come as a major surprise to many lawmakers and unleashed speculation about what's behind it. She has held the office since July 2025, and helped spearhead major reconstruction funding deals with the United States and Europe.
US Treasury imageSvyrydenko announced on social media she was "proud to have had the honor of leading the government during one of the most difficult periods in Ukraine’s modern history."
She further described that she discussed "next steps" with Zelensky but without providing any details. "I remain ready to serve the Ukrainian state and carry out every task aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s position, defending our national interests and bringing a just peace closer," she said.
According to a backgrounder on Svyrydenko:
Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s former economy minister, was named prime minister in July 2025 at the age of 39 after playing a lead role in securing a mineral agreement between Ukraine and the U.S., seen as an important way of tying U.S. interests to Ukraine’s security.
...He also said he had offered Svyrydenko the opportunity to lead “a new, important area” in Ukraine’s relations with a key international partner.
One unnamed Ukrainian lawmaker conceded to national media that "It's a strange situation" given that "Cabinet resignations are generally a last resort."
The official continued, "They're usually something you would expect in the fall, when the political season begins, and people expect some political changes, since there are no elections."
"Maybe there are some extraordinary reasons for the reshuffle... It looks like a preemptive move," the person added, while expressing that lawmakers sees no obvious reason behind the prime minister's removal.
Zelensky in a statement suggested a broader government overhaul is underway. "Ukraine is changing its political strategy."
Refusing to have an election but has announced more shake ups than the election he has had.
— бенедикт//Benedikt (@BenediktSuarez) July 12, 2026"The Cabinet of Ministers needs to be renewed," Zelensky said. "Each priority area of foreign policy will be assigned to a specific person with substantial experience who is capable of implementing what we agree on at the leaders’ level and what the Ukrainian people expect," he described further of an impending reshuffle. Who is next on the chopping block?
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 04:15French political figure Éric Zemmour is arguing that robotics represents the true economic future of France, offering a technological solution to labor shortages in factories and farms rather than relying on mass immigration.
“Robotics is the economic future of France. Robots will provide our factories and our farmers with the arms they are missing. France can choose technology rather than migratory submersion through work. For an eternal, powerful, and sovereign France in modernity: more robots, fewer immigrants,” wrote Zemmour on X.
Zemmour’s post directly references an interview conducted by French outlet Le Journal du Dimanche with Éric Marchiol, Renault’s director of industrial metaverse and quality.
In the interview, Marchiol detailed Renault’s development of Calvin, a new humanoid robot created in partnership with French company Wandercraft. Designed for industrial environments, Calvin is compact, capable of handling heavy loads of up to 40 kilograms (88 pounds), and adaptable to real factory conditions — such as navigating uneven packaging or small steps on assembly lines.
Renault already operates around 11,000 traditional industrial robots and 8,000 autonomous guided vehicles. The Calvin robot represents the next generation: more flexible, intelligent, and space-efficient than older fixed-arm systems. The company is testing it for repetitive, physically demanding tasks like tire handling on fast-moving production lines.
Marchiol emphasized that robotization is essential for competitiveness: “Without automation and without robotization, there is no more competitive industry.” He noted France currently has about 190 robots per 10,000 workers — significantly behind China at 380 and Germany.
The goal, he said, is to deploy these humanoid robots widely across Renault and its suppliers within the next four to five years, targeting difficult-to-fill, physically strenuous jobs.
Robots over mass immigrationAs Remix News has extensively reported over the last years, automation, robotics, and now artificial intelligence are increasingly seen as the primary solution to labor shortages, and mass immigration may even hinder the development of these technologies. Western employers, instead of developing this groundbreaking technology to work in factories and agriculture, are often still relying on human labor promised to them by Western liberal leaders. Often, this human labor comes with enormous welfare and cultural assimilation costs.
Zemmour, like many others, is pointing to this automation drive as the real solution to labor shortages. He wrote that Renault’s initiative as proof that France can solve its industrial labor gaps through innovation instead of large-scale immigration.
Remix News has run a series entitled “the big immigration lie” detailing the shift in thinking on immigration, with the Asian countries serving as the main counter example to Europe’s present course of open borders. Instead of embracing cheap labor and millions of culturally alien immigrants, Asian countries like Japan, China, South Korea, and Taiwan have focused on their native populations and implementing harsh immigration restrictions.
These Asians countries now lead in many areas over Europe, including AI, robotics, renewable energies, electric cars, and automation technology in factories.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock and arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet, openly said last year that the countries with xenophobic immigration policies are going to have a higher standard of living, faster productivity growth, and will be better able to accommodate the social impact of artificial intelligence advances over the coming years.
“You know, we always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking unemployment, excuse me, shrinking demographics. These countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology. And if the promise, I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but as a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries and the standard of living of individuals even with shrinking populations,” said Fink.
“And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing. And the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations,” he said.
When Fink talks about xenophobic countries, he is talking about countries like South Korea, China, and Japan, where robotics and AI are being used to deal with the demographic situation instead of mass immigration.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 03:30According to UN calculations, the world's population will cross the 10-billion mark in 2061.
However, as Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, by the end of the century, this number will have started to decline slightly, having reached a high around 10.3 billion in 2084. Leading up to this reversal, the growth of the global populace has actually been slowing down for decades, as seen in numbers by the UN Population Division. The organization celebrated World Population Day on Saturday.
You will find more infographics at Statista
While the above figures are according to the UN's medium scenario of moderate fertility, a case where global birth rates sink even more drastically would result in a reversal of population growth already around the early 2060s, at a high of just under 10 billion people on Earth.
This would result in a world population around 9 billion again by the end of the century.
Some academics believe that a global population decline at an even faster rate is possible. According to an widely cited article in medical journal The Lancet published in 2020, the world population is expected at 8.8 billion in 2100, comparable to the UN's low-fertility scenario. In case of rapid global development, the reseachers believe it could be as low as 6.3 billion by that time.
The number of people in the world exceeded 8 billion for the first time on November 15, 2022, according to UN calculations.
This was more than three times as many as in 1950. The rapid growth of the past was due to the gradual increase in life expectancy as a result of improvements in healthcare, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. It was also the result of high and consistent birth rates in some countries, for example China and India.
At present, the country adding most people to the world population is still India, while African countries like the Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia have the highest birth rates.
By contrast, the list of countries with the fastest population decline is dominated by eastern and southeastern European states, which have to contend with high emigration figures due to the wage and development gap with western Europe as well as falling birth rates.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 02:45Authored by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,
Critics may be misreading the recent NATO summit.
It looks to them as if the U.S. is unilaterally siding with Europe against Russia.
President Trump is smarter: he knows who has the winning hand, and his direct communications with his peers, Xi and Putin, are not always public.
President Trump's earliest critical instincts toward the EU and NATO still hold. While the U.S. is currently extending them some diplomatic courtesy and limited support, Europe is ultimately surrounded on all sides by powers that make it irrelevant in global influence terms. Europe has put itself into this predicament, due to its own domestic economic decline from bad policy choices. It is using war as a way to revive its fortunes. Its odds are long.
The EU is surrounded economically by the U.S. to the west; by Russia and China to the east, by a vast Arctic territory to the north that it cannot control, and by India and a rising Middle East power, Israel, to the south. Europe has no strategic maneuvering room. It has limited prospects to reemerge as a serious power, and NATO is long past relevancy, and solvency.
Since his first term, President Trump has been right about Russia, and NATO.
Being “right” means understanding Russia’s long-term economic and trade importance, and appreciating its military prowess. Along with China and the U.S., it makes up the superpower triad. Being right also means he understands that the days are numbered for the EU and NATO, and that the world has changed without them.
After the Anchorage meeting with President Trump, President Putin invited his counterpart to Moscow: Trump's guarded reply was a reminder that productive relations may be welcome by both leaders, but each is also operating in and surrounded by a complex defense and foreign affairs tradition that doesn’t trust the other side. Some have called this the “crucible of belief,” and past experience is hard to overcome. Change will happen slowly.
Europe is part of that shared Eurasian landmass, and its security, but “Europe” is not a unified, single country. Even within its own limited Western sphere, it has been a region constantly engaged in rivalry and war. There was a period after Napoleon — roughly a hundred years — where relative peace was enjoyed. But the 20th century has been just the opposite: a nearly unbroken chain of war — regional, revolutionary, world, and cold — and now, a new 21st century war is increasingly seen as inevitable.
There are many political, social, and institutional explanations, but economic decline is at the heart of why the EU is determined to provoke Russia (and why it is pleading before the U.S.).
If Germany, France and the U.K. were strongly led, however, with robust domestic industrial growth, controlled borders via immigration, and with less external energy dependence, if not facing domestic energy bankruptcy, such a conflict would not be necessary, or given any serious consideration.
In recent history, one only has to review Angela Merkel’s disastrous “green energy” policy, deindustrialization, open borders, and the idling of German nuclear power, as a strong explanation. She fell completely for naive progressive ideology which asserts that oil no longer matters.
But for President Trump, the U.S. was going down the same path.
France and the U.K. are just as bad in their string of weak leaders, uncontrolled borders, domestic violence from cultures foreign to their own, and deindustrialization and outsourcing. It is little wonder that Europe’s “leaders” are now economically trapped, and are turning to war as a desperate form of economic recovery.
NATO’s putative head, Mark Rutte, was recently in the White House, pitching for war and U.S. financial backing, with slides and charts that looked more like a failed business recovery plan. The old saying “be careful what you ask for” may be relevant, as NATO is functioning as a proxy for Western Europe, and looking to the U.S. as its pre-bankruptcy sponsor. President Trump has seen this before.
There are obviously many other interests and players driving this strategy, but German-French-British decline may be the largest factor. Scandinavia is somewhat immune, especially Norway with its natural resources and capital, but it is susceptible to European political and policy contamination.
Economic historian Walt Rostow, a White House national security advisor to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, provided a powerful economic model that goes a long way to partly explain why Eurasia, and Europe, have always been unstable and in conflict. His “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” maps how countries grow in relative stages of maturity.
But it also predicts how countries will turn to war when those stages are challenged, interrupted, or allowed through poor leadership, or state interference, to stagnate or backslide. Europe has slid backwards from an advanced industrial and colonial power, to an effective open border welfare state, led by a weak political class with no plans, ideas, commitment, or national loyalties.
Russia’s Kremlin has recently announced that its Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been converted to formal war. While predicting its development is problematic, Russia's power advantage is so overwhelming that NATO can only been seen as engaging in effective suicide. Given Europe’s cultural tendency to existentialist gloom, perhaps it is understandable.
When war finally stops, as it must, it usually results in new borders, relationships, alliances, and deals being formed. NATO and Europe seem to be counting on the chaos of war as a path out of their own weakness.
The U.S. may lend some technical military support to them as a simple matter of arms sales, but this may be their own self-inflicted, poisoned chalice.
And in the end, the U.S., Russia, and China will simply resume their global dominance and power alliance. The EU will likely collapse or shrink; NATO will finally be decommissioned, and the old Atlantic Alliance will bypass Europe and align economically with Eurasia’s east and south — because that is where the power is.
That is what the stages of growth predict.
The EU is also going to be further eclipsed commercially and militarily and by a rising Israel-dominated Middle East, because they know what they want, they have a plan, and they know how to fight. European bureaucrats like Rutte, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen do not, and face an interesting fate when they finally realize that this battle is likely their last political stand.
The citizens of Europe may be relieved.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2026 - 02:00