“NO one will be able to conquer or break Russia,” boasted Vladimir Putin in a speech yesterday.
“We have truth, strength of arms and fortitude on our side.”
Hmmm.
Let’s unpick that gigantically disingenuous claim, shall we?
First, Putin wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him around his snarling suspiciously marbled chops.
The former KGB agent turned mafioso-style dictator lies so easily, it’s become impossible to believe almost anything he says.
Watch Piers’ explosive interviews on his Uncensored YouTube channel here
Russia’s strength and resilience were put to the test in Syria when rebels unexpectedly made a move to topple President Bashar al-Assad and his oppressive regime.
This was the same Assad and regime that Putin saved from being taken out in 2015 and had steadfastly supported ever since.
But this time, Russia didn’t have the stomach, weaponry or manpower for the fight.
Instead, all Putin would do for his fellow cowardly tyrant was offer him safe haven in Moscow.
Make no mistake, this was a massive and humiliating strategic loss for Putin.
But he had no choice, because his war against Ukraine has also turned into a disaster.
At the same time, Russia’s leader believed he could conquer Kyiv swiftly in an unlawful invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Fast forward nearly three years, due to the unwavering bravery of the Ukrainian people, and with the support of nations such as the UK and US, Putin finds himself entangled in a costly and draining conflict that diverts resources and focus away from other regions like Syria.
Meanwhile, one of Russia’s other nefarious allies, Iran, has suffered crippling defeats by Israel of its proxy terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah which still exist but appear irreparably damaged.
Little wonder that America’s president-elect Donald Trump has been crowing on social media that “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now” and urging Putin to end the war in Ukraine.
But what about his nukes, I hear you cry.
To which my response is: what about them?
We need to stop panicking every time he rattles his nuclear weapon arsenal as a threat to prevent us standing up to his bullyboy tactics, but then doesn’t do anything when we cross one of many red lines.
“He’s never going to use them,” retired US General Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, told me this week.
I agree.
Why would he when he knows it will cause his own death seconds later?
The reality is that Vladimir Putin’s rattled, on the run, fast losing his international support base, and in absolutely no position to keep pretending he’s some kind of invincible Russian emperor with an unbeatable military who will nuke us all if we dare challenge him.
Putin, as General Clark also said, only understands one thing: force.
Losing Syria was a nasty slap in the face for this nasty piece of work.
It’s time to follow through with a decisive punch in the head, one that puts Putin firmly back in his box, and I suspect Donald Trump knows this and realises there has never been a better time to throw it.
I strongly urge him to do so.
I knew Assad was a wrong-un when hacked emails between him and his wife were leaked 12 years ago, and revealed he was a fan of America’s Got Talent when I was a judge on it.
Or to be precise, one act.
He urged Mrs Assad to watch a YouTube clip of a magic act on the show, entitled ‘THE BEST ILLUSION OF ALL TIME’, in which a smirking psycho doctor used a chainsaw to apparently slice a man in two, then cackled maniacally as he wheeled his victim’s severed upper body around before revealing him supposedly back to being a full-sized human at the end.
In fact, as I later discovered, the magician used two men, one of whom had been genuinely amputated from the waist down.
It was comfortably the sickest, most twisted thing I had to endure in all my time judging talent shows.
But given what Assad subjected thousands of inmates to inside Syria’s notorious Sednaya ‘human slaughterhouse’ prison, it’s little wonder he loved it so much.
BRIDGE TOO FAR
It was amazing to see Notre-Dame reopen, even more glorious than before, just five years after it burned down.
In that same year, 2019, one of London’s own iconic structures, Hammersmith Bridge, was shut to cars due to cracks.
It remains shut to cars and will be for at least another 5yrs, if it ever is again.
In China, they’d have fixed it in a few weeks.
What a pathetic testament to how Britain’s gone from being a world-beating lion on the global stage – to a decaying snail.
Taylor’s the biggest, richest,
pop star ever… but also the most generous
Taylor Swift just ended the most successful tour in music history, performing 149 shows to 10,168,008 people and grossing £1.62 billion in total ticket sales.
That doesn’t include merchandise revenue, estimated at £676 million.
Or the movie of the Eras Tour, which grossed another £200 million.
Taylor’s new book about it all sold a million copies in three days, and Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music all just revealed she was the top-streamed artist of 2024.
But none of this is impressive as the other stat that emerged this week: Taylor gave out £154million in bonuses to everyone working on the Tour, including truck drivers, caterers, dancers, technicians, musicians, security, and make-up artists.
That means she isn’t, indisputably and by a long distance, just the biggest pop star ever.
She’s also the most generous.
SPOTYS GET MY GOAT
The BBC Sports Personality of the Year used to be about celebrating the very best of the best in British sport, the GOATs of their games.
But as with so many things in modern society, the box-ticking, virtue-signalling ‘Losing is winning!’ woke brigade have worked hard to turn it into a celebration of mediocrity.
This reached a nadir last year when the England women’s football goalkeeper Mary Earps won the big award despite the Lionesses failing in World Cup.
This year’s 6-person shortlist inexplicably failed to include Sir Mark Cavendish, our greatest ever cyclist, and the world’s greatest ever bike sprinter, who in 2024 became the greatest ever stage winner in the history of the Tour de France, at the age of 39, in one of the greatest comebacks in sporting history.
If any man epitomises the spirit of the SPOTY award, it is surely him?
In his absence, my vote goes to cricketer Joe Root, who this year became England’s greatest ever run scorer, and is without a doubt now our greatest ever batsman.
But he won’t win because GOATs don’t get the gongs anymore.
CHIPS DOWN FOR PM
GOOGLE claims its tiny new Willow computing chip took just five minutes to solve a problem that would take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion – 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! – to complete.
That’s longer than the Universe has existed.
Even Elon Musk was impressed, exclaiming ‘WOW’ on X when he heard about it.
Given that I fear it will take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for our current government to solve the problem of the UK’s immigration (legal and illegal) crisis, perhaps we should just replace the entire current cabinet with a Willow chip?
Otherwise, I have little faith that Keir Starmer will do any better than the last seven Prime Ministers from Tony Blair onwards who’ve collectively allowed this issue to spiral completely out of control.
Inexplicably, Starmer’s new ‘Plan for Change’ failed to include any pledge on immigration at all, despite it being one of the main reasons Donald Trump just thumped the Democrats in the US election.
If he doesn’t quickly find a solution to our unsustainable net migration numbers, and ongoing small boats fiasco on the border, with all the obvious extra pressure it puts on our already beleaguered public services, then I predict the only big change he will achieve is Nigel Farage replacing him in Downing Street at our own next election.
There’s an amusing irony in football fans’ fury at naughty boy referee David Coote who has been fired from the Premier League.
Obviously, the very last thing any of the indignant fans would do, as we saw so proudly at the Euros in England three years ago, is get drunk, snort cocaine, make abusive comments about clubs, managers and players, or get involved in gambling.
