Friday Bite 12 December 2025

A Looking Glass War

“The Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the [Ukraine] war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition,” US National Security Strategy, 5 December

“This obsession with infallibility and conviction that everything Europeans do stands head and shoulders above the traditions, norms, and laws of the rest of the world is among the reasons why President Trump and his associates increasingly speak about a profound crisis within the EU and the fact that it is heading in a direction that is clearly at odds with the realities of a multipolar world.” Sergey Lavrov, 10 December, Moscow.

“The majority of European Union countries take a frankly destructive stance on the Ukrainian issue. Having invested any political capital they may have in waging war on Russia through the hands and bodies of Ukrainian citizens, they continue in hopeless political blindness to entertain the illusion of somehow defeating our country. As the president [Putin] emphasized, we do not intend to go to war with Europe, we don’t even entertain such thoughts, but to any hostile steps, including the deployment of European military contingents in Ukraine and the expropriation of Russian assets, we will respond. And to this response, we are already prepared.” Sergey Lavrov, 10 December, Moscow.

“The UK and other allies must prepare for the scale of war our grandparents or great grandparents endured… We are Russia’s next target… time is not on our side… Conflict is at our door.” Mark Rutte, Secretary-general NATO, 11 December

WE ARE LIVING in a world of double-speak in which those with the least humanity and integrity have the loudest voices. Listening to Sergey Lavrov speak at Government Hour at the Federation Council of the Federation Assembly in Moscow last Wednesday, I almost believed that Europe was aggressively threatening Russia’s borders and bent on backing the neo-Nazi government currently in power in Ukraine – a government Donald Trump had had to remind that it had obligations under international law to protect human rights…

We are in a looking-glass world where the opposite is the reality.

This week’s Friday Bite is once again truncated, and for the same reasons, but I did want to go on record and say that we are at one of the most perilous points since the end of World War II. There have been others, most notably the stand-off between Russia and America over Cuba in 1962 and when the Soviet early-warning system detected an incoming missile strike from the United States, which was the result of a computer malfunction (1983).

As Lavrov said, Russia has no wish to go to war with Europe but it is watching and waiting for signals that it may have to marshal its forces. The UK and Europe most certainly don’t want to go to war with Russia. However, in this Neptunian climate where actions are so easily misinterpreted or unintended events happen, it is easy to see how war can start by default.

The above chart represents the time Sergey Lavrov began his speech to the Federation Council on Wednesday, and it serves to display the alignments we are living under. Mercury was within minutes of an opposition to Uranus while Mars had just squared Saturn and was on its way to square Neptune. Neptune had just turned stationary-direct. (You see what I mean about a Neptunian climate. Neptune may be the planet of the divine but it is also the planet of illusion-delusion.)

Mercury and Uranus were making their third and last opposition to each other since 29 October. During the past six weeks intense negotiations have been taking place on a peace proposal for the Ukraine-Russia conflict. First, we were shocked by the leaked discussion between Steve Witkoff (Trump’s special envoy) and Yuri Ushakov (Kremlin advisor) that revealed the symbiosis between Russia and the United States administration. It was nothing less than treasonous. However, with the recent publication of the US National Security Strategy, it is clear, written in black and white, that this administration’s sympathies lie with Moscow, not Ukraine. And this week, Lavrov was unequivocal about Russia’s intentions should Europe take further steps to support and protect Ukraine and its Eastern borders.

You may note that the Mercury-Uranus opposition is squaring the Moon in Virgo, which synchronistically is Russia’s natal Moon.

Between now and the beginning of January, Mars, Venus and Mercury will square Saturn and Neptune, so this climate of suspicion and anxiety is going to persist. And we must simply wait and see who, if anyone, is going to blink first.

You may also notice that the Cradle formation that we have seen several times this year is in charge yet again: this alignment is made up of three sextiles (Uranus sextile Neptune-Saturn sextile Pluto) and an opposition (Mercury opposition Uranus). A cradle serves as a resting place for a baby; symbolically, something as yet not fully-formed is being cradled.

I may have already mentioned this, but Neptune, Uranus and Pluto have been in this mini-grand-trine formation before, albeit in different signs: Uranus was in Gemini, Neptune in Libra and Pluto in Leo between 1941 and 1945, almost the entire span of World War II. And while this does not imply that we are indeed heading into another world war, the times we are living through resonate with the division, conflict, fear and anxiety prevalent in the nineteen-forties. Even the rise of neo-Nazism and the constant references to Hitler are a resonance with that era.

On 21 December, Ascension Day and the Winter Solstice, they will be gathering to witness Earth’s ascension to a spiritual fifth dimension. People will be celebrating and experiencing the dawn of the New Earth Consciousness. We can but hope that this divine energy reaches and lifts up those who are in earthly power over our destinies, and instead of marching irrevocably to war, open up a real pathway to peace.

Friday Bite 5 December 2025

A Poisoned Chalice

THIS IS GOING to be a mini-Friday Bite because I am in the middle of writing my twelve year-ahead forecasts, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty going on in the world worthy of astrological comment. Actually, I waited until today to start writing the 2026 Overview because I wanted to see what role the full moon in Gemini would play in global affairs, particularly the war in Ukraine.

In the last couple of weeks (since the new moon in Scorpio) diplomatic efforts to secure a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia have intensified. Today’s full moon, with its theme of closure and completion held the promise of such a deal but it also had the potential to up the ante. And we have no peace deal. What we have instead is President Putin doubling down on his maximalist demands, threatening to go to war with Europe and consolidating his position as India’s ally, which in turn strengthens Russia’s premium position in the developing new world order.

I don’t know about you, but I find something deeply offensive about Putin strutting about on red carpets in foreign countries while he continues to massacre the innocents in towns and cities the length and breadth of Ukraine.

Let’s back up. Over the course of the past fortnight Steve Witkoff and team Trump have been negotiating terms for the end of the war in Ukraine. Witkoff has travelled to Moscow six times in recent weeks and meetings between the US and Russia have been held in Saudi Arabia and Miami. And if it hadn’t been for the Ukrainian delegation turning up uninvited in Miami there would have been no consultation with Ukraine at all. The 28-point peace plan, nothing less than a Putin wish list – indeed, The Guardian revealed that parts of the plan appeared to have been originally written in Russian – was reduced to 19-points after the meeting with the Ukrainians so that by the time it was wafted in front of Putin there was no longer anything to talk about. According to Putin, speaking in Kyrgyzstan a week ago, Russia will continue to attack Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian dies”.

In February this year when Trump ambushed President Zelensky in the Oval office, we were shocked. No longer, apparently, was America behind Ukraine in its attempts to defend itself against an aggressor. Since then, the pendulum of support has swung back and to, but in the last couple of weeks it is clear that the United States believes the only way for the fighting to stop is to give Putin everything he wants and for Ukraine to surrender.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Heather Cox Richardson is one of several journalists to have reported on the relevance of the “Mariupol Plan” to current US efforts to appease Putin. The “Mariupol Plan” was put together in 2016 after Russian operatives told Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, that they would help Trump win the election in exchange for Trump’s “looking the other way” as Russia took control of Crimea. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) thus headed out to Tuesday’s meeting in Moscow with the intention of offering Putin US recognition of Russia’s (illegal) annexation of Crimea and most of the four other eastern oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

That puts rather a different complexion on it all, doesn’t it. And it certainly explains why the astrology looks like this.

The above chart of the full moon is set from the perspective of Moscow, but, of course, all the degree numbers are the same everywhere in the world; only the angles and the house positions of the planets change.

The full moon at 13 degrees of Gemini-Sagittarius precisely squares the nodal axis, so we know karma is in the mix. What happens at this time has a long and complicated past and the actions taken will set more karma in motion. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction (25 and 29 degrees of Pisces respectively) is conjoined to the United States IC and squaring Putin’s Mars in Sagittarius. The full moon itself flanks the US’s Ascendant-Descendant axis, trines and sextiles Putin’s Sun, picks up Russia’s Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, Ukraine’s Midheaven and Neptune, Zelensky’s Mercury (chart ruler) and Donald Trump’s Chiron.

It’s a very important full moon.

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which has been in play since the end of March and will reach exactitude on 20 February next year, is not only a portent of the end of regimes but it is a combination that rewards actions of the highest calibre and consciousness and punishes those of the basest. And the actions of Putin, with his Mars squaring the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and the US with this duo conjoined to its IC – the roots of the nation and the foundations of the future – fall a little short of the highest calibre and consciousness. Putin’s aggressive actions (Mars) are likely to end in failure and ignominy while the US, under the Trump administration, is in danger of falling apart at the seams and certainly losing its integrity.

We may have to wait until February and the solar eclipse in Aquarius to see the ramifications of these developments.