Enslave
Profiteer
Rule
Don’t go there!
Perhaps ironically, one of the most famous 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse paintings is by a Russian:
- Pestilence (on a White Horse -> COVID !?)
- War (on a Red Horse -> PUTIN !?)
- Famine (on a Black Horse -> HYPERINFLATION !?)
- Death (on a Pale Horse -> TOO LATE !?)
- Meduza
- DW
- Ahead
Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have been advised to stop using Max — the Kremlin-backed “national messenger” app designed to replace Telegram — because it is not secure enough, the independent outlet Mediazona reports. The guidance comes as federal authorities have been throttling Telegram since summer 2025, triggering a backlash from pro-war commentators who say the app remains soldiers’ most reliable means of frontline communication. The Federal Security Service (FSB) has warned separately that Ukrainian forces can intercept Telegram traffic.
Russia has reportedly issued a “stop-list” to military recruiters, banning citizens from as many as 43 countries from enlisting to fight in Ukraine, according to the independent media outlet iStories.
On February 5, 2025, reports emerged that Russia had arrested Ivan Semenikhin, an operative with the Interior Ministry’s criminal investigations department, and charged him with treason. The details of the case haven’t been made public; treason prosecutions in Russia are classified and heard behind closed doors.
Two Russian satellites have spent years quietly maneuvering along Earth’s geostationary belt — the ring of orbits 36,000 kilometers (roughly 22,370 miles) above the equator, where satellites appear stationary relative to the planet. There, they park alongside Western commercial spacecraft and, by most expert assessments, intercept their transmissions. An investigation by the Financial Times in early February 2026 revealed that European military officials now fear the satellites could do more than eavesdrop — that the intelligence gathered could enable Russia to interfere with, or even seize control of, satellites that provide communications and television broadcasts across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. The two spacecraft — known in open sources as Luch and Luch-5X, and internally as Olimp and Yenisei-2 — have a paper trail connecting them to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), a mission profile that evolved in lockstep with the war in Ukraine, and a habit of tailing the very satellites that Western militaries depend on.
It’s no secret that Russia relies on high salaries and sign-on bonuses to recruit more soldiers to fight in Ukraine. Despite staggering battlefield losses, an estimated 30,000 men still enlist every month. But after four years of full-scale war, the cost of finding volunteers is only rising steadily, and the burden is falling on Russia’s regions. On a recent episode of The Naked Pravda, deputy editor Eilish Hart explored the big questions behind Russia’s ongoing recruitment numbers with Dr. Janis Kluge, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin. The following Q&A, based on that interview, has been edited for length and clarity.
2026.02.21
A junior resource company’s place in the food chain is to acquire projects, make discoveries and hopefully advance them to the point when a larger mining company takes it over. Discoveries won’t be made if juniors don’t have boots on the ground, if they aren’t out in the bush poking around and busting rocks.
Indeed, juniors have one of the toughest jobs in the industry. Finding and advancing new projects is difficult and capital-intensive.
Continue reading Boots on the ground – Richard Mills at Ahead of the Herd.
By Bob Moriarty – 321Gold
Silver North is located in the Yukon with their Haldane Silver Property deep in the Keno Hill Silver District. Today the company reported the highest-grade hole they have ever drilled. Boring, boring, boring. Who would be interested in buying an ultra-high-grade silver company with silver at $80 an ounce?
Read More
Continue reading Silver North Hits Best Hole in Their History in Yukon at Ahead of the Herd.
2026.02.15
Rick Mills, Editor/ Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:
Louis, you’ve been in the exploration development business for many years. Could you please tell us where your knowledge base lies and a little bit about yourself.
Louis Martin, Harvest Gold Senior Technical Advisor:
Sure. I guess we can move quite a ways back. I was born in a mining town up in northern Quebec, my parents worked there so I was actually born into the industry.
2026.02.13
Gold and silver’s dramatic pullback on Jan. 30 was supposedly predicated on the notion that Trump’s pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, is a fiscal hawk who has previously criticized quantitative easing, wants to unwind the Fed’s massive balance sheet, and may not lower interest rates as Trump has long criticized Powell for failing to do.
But a deeper reading into Warsh reveals that he is not the hawk many think he is, and in fact is likely to move the Fed in lock step with the President’s low-interest-rate, low-dollar desires.
From Bloomberg
Donald Trump clearly relishes sending the US military to flex his prerogatives around the world. He removed Venezuela’s president and has hinted he’d do the same in Colombia, suggested he’ll deploy troops to hunt drug cartels inside Mexico, vowed to seize control of Greenland “whether they like it or not,” put himself at the center of Gaza’s uneasy future, escalated his pressure campaign on Iran’s embattled regime and boasted about a plan to go into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing.”
Yet Trump has been comparatively quiet about how much his ever-multiplying foreign adventures will cost—and who’ll get stuck with the bill.
Continue reading Trump’s Foreign Adventures Will Cost Taxpayers Billions at Ahead of the Herd.
2EMMA Featured Stories
Mandela’s Kiss Endures
The 2024 Global Elections Super-Cycle
Stay tuned for continuous updates on elections around the world. Click on a country for the latest elections data and analysis.
- Number of national elections to be held in 2024 18 of 68
- Overall turnout (based on registered voters) 63%
- Total number of ballots cast in 18 elections 467,094,737
Pulled conclusions from pooled data compilations
Using some of the world’s largest companies by market cap & some of the most quoted indices + two most sung alternatives: data for this millennia where available
- At 134x, Apple is the absolute stock price growth winner; with Amazon at 45x and Google at 32x
- Despite the lack of interest or dividends, gold at 6.6x looks good compared to any other stock or index!
- Barrick Gold on the other hand seems to be poorly correlated to anything including the gold metal itself!?
- But Barrick is the only stock producing negative correlations with most of the indices including a relatively high -0.77 with the Euronext100 index
- If one wast trying to get something totally uncorrelated on purpose- it would be hard to beat: gold and the Euronext100 index at -0.03; or Barrick and the Hang Seng index at 0.04; or gold and Merck at 0.16; or BTC and the FTSE index at 0.19
- Correlation against a basket of indices & alternatives is best in Disney and Google (0.81-0.82), albeit at different growth multiples
- If an average historical P/E is somewhere in the 20x range, then the current S&P quoted average which is in high 30s is as warned high, BUT: only Amazon and Visa seem to be widely out of range (justified by growth in online transactions?), with many below current & historical averages
- In the current world of no interest & no inflation, maybe the higher P/E averages are justified..? For how long, that is a different question…
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