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“Russia views these not as U.S. sanctions, but Obama sanctions, so he will go and we can both decide that we don’t bear any responsibility for the actions of a jackass,” Fyodor Lukyanov told Bloomberg News. Fyodor Lukyanov is chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a Kremlin foreign-policy advisory group. Russia is displaying grace, restraint, reason and humor in this matter as Obama launches accusations against the Kremlin and inflicted retaliatory sanctions. "Russia hopes that it can ride out the storm and put relations with the U.S. on a better track once [President-elect] Trump takes office," said...

John F. Kerry was late to his own party. Staffers, journalists and other officials were gathered in the ornate Benjamin Franklin salon at the State Department on Dec. 14 for early Christmas festivities. But the secretary of State was nowhere to be seen. Kerry was on the telephone to various world leaders, trying to find out about a major diplomatic meeting — from which the United States had been excluded. The gathering, which sought to broker a resolution to the devastating Syrian conflict, took place six days later in Moscow and involved the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

"We need to take action and we will," he told US radio station NPR. Russia stands accused by the US of hacking the emails of the Democratic Party and a key Hillary Clinton aide, which the Kremlin strongly denies. Republican president-elect Donald Trump has also dismissed the claim as "ridiculous" and politically motivated.

Third-party presidential candidates have participated in acts of civil disobedience, risked arrest, been arrested and been jailed with some frequency over the past 150 years. So the fact that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein faces misdemeanor criminal charges in North Dakota stemming from a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline is hardly unprecedented. But it is politically significant. https://www.thenation.com/article/there-is-an-arrest-warrant-out-for-jill-stein/

Vladimir Putin is considering quitting as Russian President, a Kremlin expert has claimed. The 64-year-old may stand down due to 'certain circumstances' that mean he will need to be out of the spotlight next year, it is suggested. Russian political analyst Valery Solovey hinted that Putin, who welcomed the election of Donald Trump as US President, may be forced to step aside due to illness. Mr Solovey, professor at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs, said the president might need to 'avoid publicity in 2017 for several months or will appear very rarely'.

•Axelrod wanted campaign manager Jim Messina fired, but he wound up the odd man out himself• Palace intrigue led 'Axe' to refer to Messina and White House messaging chief David Plouffe as 'two strongmen running the Kremlin'• The two men resented Axelrod for getting rich by taking a percentage of the hundreds of millions spent on campaign ads •An aloof Obama stayed out of the way as his inner circle fought a political gladiator game that pushed out Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs The man most responsible for getting Barack Obama to the White House – the man who...

Recent headlines have brought attention to the seedier side of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term. This scheme, which gives every appearance of being about pay-for-play, solicited donations from foreign big-shots in exchange for access to the boss of American foreign policy. I’ll leave to others to assess the legality of this shady business—for now it’s the national security implications we need to discuss. It’s a big deal when the person who’s possibly our next president—and if polls are accurate, she probably will be—has sold access to foreign bidders before taking the oath of...

The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened. Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides. The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to...

A former analyst for the National Security Agency is calling on Hillary Clinton to explain the emerging details of her campaign chief's connection to the Kremlin. Lobbying forms made public last month indicate that the U.S. branch of the Russian bank Sberbank has retained the Podesta Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm founded by Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and his brother, Tony, in 1998. John Schindler, a security expert and former counterintelligence officer, notes that the bank's majority stockholder is the Russian Central Bank, which controls more than 30 percent of the country's banking assets.

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO...

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, DC. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO...

A massive fire raged at a former headquarters of the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow on Sunday before it was brought under control several hours later. Hundreds of firefighters and several cranes were seen battling the blaze Sunday afternoon after the fire broke out hours earlier. […] The Defense Ministry moved to a new headquarters on the Moskva River in 2014, but still kept the old building near the Kremlin. …

As Belgium and Europe mourned and condemned the senseless terrorism in Brussels, some officials in Moscow seem to be gloating. The first outcome of new terror attacks in the heart of Europe will be a more severe stance on the migrant crisis, a fresh debates over EU border controls, in particular those in the Schengen zone as well as a further rise of ultra-right parties in the EU countries. The extreme right wing politicians have already seized the opportunity to push anti-Muslim sentiment and this discourse divides Europe even more. The atmosphere of fear and division will also worsen social,...

The Kremlin has hit out at a video promoting the US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, complaining it demonises Russia’s image. “I saw this clip. I do not know for sure if Vladimir Putin saw it. [But] our attitude is negative,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. The video posted to Trump’s Instagram account attempts to cast doubt over the Democratic party frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s ability to deal with Putin and the US’s opponents in general, showing the Russian leader easily throwing an opponent in a judo bout.

A Russian TV scion with strong links to President Vladimir Putin was killed by 'blunt force trauma to the head.' Now speculation is mounting that the Kremlin could have been involved in the death of Mikhail Lesin - the founder of station RT. According to reports Mr Lesin, who is said to have fallen out of favour with Moscow, became closely linked to the FBI and was widely believed to have become an informant.

The motive and details of the operation were outlined in a memorandum compiled by the former FSB spy: ‘In order to accomplish all these aims and to get Western consent to fighting Islamic State (which was, essentially, official support for keeping the Assad regime in power), the Kremlin desperately needed the kind of justification which would generate worldwide attention and full international sympathy and approval for military action.’

Trump never wanted anything to do with Ukraine -that was the first thing that aroused my suspicions- and I remember him saying 'the Germans should be doing more', but what kind of leverage does Berlin really have in dealing from a position of weakness with the EU crumbling, Islamic invasion underway, and Russia has all the oil/gas and military power?  A bit one-sided once American walks-away. And aren't all NATO members obligated to consolidate/coordinate policy, even re. the Donbas?  The current GOP front-runner has said the trouble is Putin doesn't respect Obama -but he would Trump, of course- so he feels can...

The controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is under fire again, this time from Russia, AFP reported Friday. According to the news agency, the Kremlin angrily condemned the magazine for publishing political cartoons on the Metrojet plane crash in the Sinai Peninsula in which 224 people died, most of them Russian tourists. "In our country we can sum this up in a single word, sacrilege," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists. "This has nothing to do with democracy or self-expression. It is sacrilege," he added. The Kremlin spokesman called the cartoons "unacceptable" but said Russia would not make an...

Galina Timchenko recalls how proud she felt when the Russian news website she edited reached 3 million users per day. When she reported the figures to the website’s owner, he was horrified. “At that moment something snapped inside and I understood that this is the end, because there cannot be such an influential resource that is not controlled by the Kremlin,” Timchenko said. A month later, she was fired and a more Kremlin-friendly editor was brought in to run the website, Lenta.ru. The shakeup at Lenta.ru last year came as the government was pushing through a slew of new laws...

"The East West conflict continues as long as there is general acceptance of the unspoken but nevertheless operational assumption that the there isn't any underlying ideology of the post Cold War Kremlin and that hardly anybody - even among the Russian ruling elite - believes in anything. This assumption leads to subsequent assumption that Kremlin rulers and their entourage had thereby changed to such an extent that it no longer subscribes to any attributes of communist system."