
Emmy-winning journalist Contributing writer - @ForeignPolicy Substack - https://xitter.cf/t.co/t6yCsfLdVs [email protected]
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Joined April 2009
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"We should stop working on the assumption that America will always protect us. In doing so, we may give the alliance its best chance of enduring — with Europe as a partner, not a patron."
My latest @substack post
lukemcgee.substack.com/p/the…
Luke McGee retweeted
The brutality of this is horrendous. So many good reporters have lost their jobs as part of a drive to integrate AI into the newsroom. Artificial intelligence simply cannot replace the experience gained through years of front-line reporting. I know there is a deep sense of betrayal among some of my former Telegraph colleagues. My heart goes out to them.
About a Hundred Telegraph Staff Get 90 Minutes Notice Before Being Sacked order-order.com/2026/10/23/a…
While obviously taking with an appopriate level of scepticism, this would be welcome news. People have been eating grass and weeds to stay alive here do to Russia blocking off access in and out the city.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c60q…
Luke McGee retweeted
Instead of a thousand words. A six years old Vlad stands near his mother's grave. She was murdered by russians in Bucha. April 4, 2022.
This is so interesting. Burnham really has landed well from his bounce.
🧵Tracking latest forced choice PM heads to heads
🌹Burnham wins handily against all alternatives, closest but still clear against Badenoch, overwhelmingly against Polanski.
🌳Badenoch beats the other 4 leaders.
➡️Farage only wins against Polanski
🌍Polanski now loses all of the head to heads
Lowe above Farage/Polanski but caveat of much lower name recognition.
Luke McGee retweeted
Bucha. It was a genocide, recognized by everyone. They buried hundreds of people. They tortured people. We found the grave. There were, I believe, around 500 people. When we liberated those towns near Kyiv, there emerged this, you know, this kind of hatred for the Russians, right at that moment. Not even at the moment when they started the full-scale war. Back then nobody understood what it really was yet. People understood what this war was and what Putin did personally when we found those mass graves of tortured adults, children. I mean they didn't just kill them, they tortured and killed them.
When we liberated Bucha, I said, bring every journalist here. Don't touch anything, just bring the journalists. The whole world simply has to see this. Imagine finding a mass grave in the U.S. or in Britain, God forbid, with 500 tortured people, adults, kids, dogs, animals shot dead. I mean, they held hunting sprees there from military vehicles. People were running, they were shooting, just hunting, playing games. They literally just played with people, like slavery. So how, after this, can you listen to Putin? And how, after this, can you forgive?
From The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett. (2/3)
Luke McGee retweeted
"OMG, BREAKING NEWS!💥❗️💥❗️ Ukraine lost, it's done, Zelenskyy agreed to freeze the frontline." - said every russian shill or idiot in the last two days.
Zelenskyy and Ukraine accepted an unconditional ceasefire in March 2025, and since then the offer has been on the table. russia keeps refusing it.
Zelenskyy reminds people about it often in his public speeches, and military analysts, OSINTers, journalists, and interviewers occasionally bring it up. Hell, I remind people about it all the time. Why? Because russian propaganda (and Trump for some reason) likes to say that Zelenskyy is refusing a "peace deal," so this is a piece of information they like to overlook. Or pretend it doesn't exist.
But it does. Ukraine has been proposing to freeze the frontline and move to diplomacy for years. Russia demands we surrender the rest of the Donbas, a land with our people in it, the most fortified part of Ukraine, and the gateway to starting the siege of Dnipro, Kharkiv, and the rest of Ukraine, just to START diplomacy.
Yes, not to end the war, just to start the talks. In which they are going to demand the same things they demanded in Istanbul: no military support, no army for Ukraine, no equipment, no alliances, essentially no independence and no power to resist further aggression.
When Ukraine inevitably refuses to surrender in a war it hasn't lost, russian propaganda will declare we refused a "peace deal" and the russian army will proceed with its aggression, except now beyond the most fortified part of Ukraine.
Needless to say, no one will ever agree to this scenario, so freezing the frontline and moving to diplomacy is logical, and Ukraine agreed to that years ago.
!!!
The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
Luke McGee retweeted
He’s angry because deep down he knows he’s being had and can’t deliver and it will cost him in a few weeks.
Trump: We were in the midst of negotiating and a lot of stupid people said why aren’t you putting Russian sanctions—
Collins: But you said you didn’t give anything for his release
Trump: If I didn’t do that, you wouldn’t have him coming back.
Collins: So you did give something.
Trump: You don’t know anything. You’re fake news CNN.
Collins: You’re saying you lifted the sanctions in exchange for his release?
Trump: You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a low IQ person. You’re a dummy.
Luke McGee retweeted
After multiple waves of ballistic missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital in the early hours of this morning, and another ballistic missile air raid alert sounding a few minutes ago, Kyiv remains defiant and unbreakable.
Luke McGee retweeted
US President Donald Trump ordered to sit for deposition in his defamation case against BBC by 11 December bbc.in/3U62LVH
Luke McGee retweeted
NEW: Rosneft deep dive by Bloomberg News
+ Officials at Russia’s largest oil producer are concerned that even a few more months of the war with Ukraine could leave lasting damage across the business.
+ One of Rosneft’s biggest refineries, Ryazan, has been shut for more than half the time since it was first hit by Ukraine in May and has run well below full capacity when operating, according to damage assessments seen by Bloomberg.
+ Another, Syzran, has spent much of the past six months either completely shut or operating at less than a third of capacity, according to data reviewed by Bloomberg. The Tuapse refinery has been offline since April.
+ Ukraine is conducting repeat strikes on the refineries as soon as repairs are completed or nearing completion. The need to repeatedly repair damaged equipment is straining operations and causing costs to pile up to levels that Rosneft officials have privately warned cannot be sustained long-term.
+ Some plants have deliberately slowed repairs as a result, stretching work that should take days into weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
+ Efforts to protect the facilities with shipping containers, nets and steel cables have proved ineffective against swarms of drones, company plans show.
+ The damage is particularly difficult to repair when strikes hit complex secondary units, whose parts would previously have been sourced from the West. It means relying on Russian-made copies and Chinese imports that can take months to obtain and are not always compatible with existing machinery.
+ It’s put Rosneft into financial trouble. Even before the ramping up of Ukraine’s drone campaign, the company saw a “perfect storm” for its finances. Since then, its profits are down and debt is rising despite what should have been a big windfall from the Iran war.
+ Moscow Credit Bank, which is linked to Rosneft, is showing signs of distress with $8 billion of problem loans. It highlights how both Russia’s energy and banking sectors are coming under strain at the same time, a dynamic causing concern to Russian finance officials.
All this and much more in the full story here: bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Luke McGee retweeted
More reporting suggesting that Musk does indeed have his finger on Starshield's operability. Quite a lot of power for a ketamine-addicted trillionaire in bed with hostile foreign regimes. You might even say this endangers U.S. national security. wsj.com/world/trump-called-m…
"US conventional withdrawal would weaken Europe’s ability to defend itself below nuclear threshold while simultaneously eroding the credibility of the US nuclear guarantee. It is a double-edged experiment that undercuts both pillars of deterrence"
foreignpolicy.com/2026/10/21…
France reports first human case of livestock virus Shamonda reuters.com/business/healthc…
There is some distance between saying thank you and white washing war crimes.























