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Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin on Sunday that Moscow and its allies now controlled all of Ukraine’s Luhansk region after capturing the last major city, Lysychansk. (cut) The ministry had said earlier on Sunday that its troops had captured the villages surrounding Lysychansk, encircling the area, and were fighting inside the city. Calls to the Ukrainian General Staff and Defence Ministry went unanswered. The ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Russian navy appears to have accidentally blown up one of its own ships in the black sea in the latest blunder for Putin's forces. A landing craft is reported to have exploded when it hit a Russian sea mine near Mariupol. The crew is said to have survived the friendly-fire incident, but the reputation of Russia's naval commanders is not so unscathed. 'Near Mariupol, a landing craft of the Black Sea Fleet D-106 blew up on a mine,' said a Telegram channel related to the Russian navy. 'Waiting for a confirmation of this suicidal goodwill gesture,' said the Twitter...

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern...

Germany took emergency measures on June 19, 2022 to secure its energy supply in the face of recent drops in Russian gas deliveries, including a “bitter” use of the most polluting energy, coal. BERLIN—Germany will restart coal-fired power plants and offer incentives for companies to curb natural gas consumption, marking a new step in the economic war between Europe and Russia. Berlin unveiled the measures Sunday after Russia cut gas supplies to Europe last week as it punched back against European sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The steps, part of a broader strategy initiated after the invasion of Ukraine,...

A document released by a news outlet on Tuesday reportedly shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered that his government destroy all the documents related to the nation’s biolabs being run in collaboration with the Hunter Biden-connected firm Metabiota. NBC may have actually caught this destruction on camera. ...

As the situation in Donbass (East Ukraine) worsens for Ukrainian forces, as reports are now leaking from Kyiv that Ukraine is losing 1,000 troops a day, the State Department has essentially admitted American mercenaries have been captured by Russian forces in-country. Alexander John-Robert Drueke, 39, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, from Hartselle, Alabama are currently “missing” from the battlefield, however, their precise fate is as yet unconfirmed, according to a State Department official, reported Zero Hedge.White House national security spokesman John Kirby didn’t confirm the reports, but strongly hinted that it’s the administration’s belief they were...

Colllapse of Ukrainian military and US foreign policy. Speaker notes that top economic advisors need to attempt to explain nature of reality to Breadline Joe Biden and if he ignores them (most likely case), resign and take their case to the world. Present policy is not worth sacrificinig the United States over.

Russia has "strategically lost" the war in Ukraine and is a "more diminished power", the head of the UK's armed forces has said. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Vladimir Putin had lost 25% of Russia's land power for only "tiny" gains. And while Russia may achieve "tactical successes" in the coming weeks, he said any notion the war had been a success was "nonsense". Admiral Radakin, who is the UK's chief of defence staff, said Russia was running out of troops and advanced missiles and would never be able to take over all of Ukraine. -snip- Admiral Radakin said: "This...

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced another $1 billion in military aid for Ukraine on Wednesday, following the third meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group of about 50 nations supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia. “I’m especially pleased to be able to announce today that the United States will provide an additional $1 billion security assistance package for Ukraine,” Austin said at a press conference at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the members of the group met.

Chechnya's strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov has raised and dismissed a rumor about Russian President Vladimir Putin's health. In an audio recording posted Wednesday to his Telegram social media channel, Kadyrov said that he had "read that our president had fallen into a coma" and that "they are looking for a replacement right now." Since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, there has been much speculation about whether the Russian president is ill. Scenes of him gripping the edge of a table on April 21 during a meeting with his defense minister Sergei Shoigu added to the rumor...

President Biden said the United States "has never seen anything like Putin’s tax on both food and gas," after the Labor Department announced Friday that inflation hit a new four-decade high in May. The Labor Department said Friday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price for everyday goods, including gasoline, groceries and rent, rose 8.6% in May from a year ago. Prices jumped 1% in the one-month period from April. Those figures were both higher than the 8.3% headline figure and 0.7% monthly gain forecast by Refinitiv economists. The president, from the Port of Los Angeles...

A Russian mercenary who gained notoriety for butchering prisoners of war and civilians in the Donbas has been killed fighting in Ukraine. Vladimir Andonov, 44, a sabotage and reconnaissance specialist in the ranks of the shadowy Wagner Group, was shot by a sniper near Kharkiv during a night-time mission on June 5, Russian media says. Andonov was known to Russians as 'Vakha' or 'the volunteer from Buryatia' after the region he was from, but to Ukrainians he was 'the executioner' due to massacres he helped carry out during Russia's first invasion of the country in 2014.

(Video at the link) The news here is that the Russian superyacht "Amadea" had fled to Fiji to avoid sanctions and Fiji has consented to the seizure and forfeiture of the ship to United States authorities. Amadea becomes the first Russian superyacht to fly a US flag. About the superyacht Amadea: Amadea is a motor yacht with a length of 106.1m. The yacht's builder is Lürssen from Germany who delivered superyacht Amadea in 2017. The superyacht has a beam of 18.0m, a draft of 4.1m and a volume of 4,402 GT. The Amadea features exterior design by Espen Øino International,...

Ukraine is the Holy Grail of international corruption. That $40 billion can be a game-changer for only two classes of people: First, the US military-industrial complex, and second, a bunch of Ukrainian oligarchs and neo-connish NGOs, that will corner the black market for weapons and humanitarian aid, and then launder the profits in the Cayman Islands. A quick breakdown of the $40 billion reveals $8.7 billion will go to replenish the US weapons stockpile (thus not going to Ukraine at all); $3.9 billion for USEUCOM (the ‘office’ that dictates military tactics to Kiev); $5 billion for a fuzzy, unspecified “global...

The Battle of Mariupol is over and Russia is busy proclaiming the liberation of the city. In reality, Mariupol has been murdered. This formerly bustling metropolis of almost half a million people now lies on the brink of extinction, pummeled into submission by a vicious campaign of Russian annihilation. The estimated 100,000 remaining residents of Mariupol find themselves reduced to living among the rubble without medicines, running water or electricity. With Russia in control of the city, there is no way of knowing the final death toll or assessing the true scale of the catastrophe that has befallen Mariupol. During...

MINSK. May 5 (Interfax) - It is not in Belarus' interests to unleash a war with the West, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said. "We do not threaten anyone and we are not going to threaten and will not do it. Moreover, we cannot threaten -- we know who opposes us. That's why, to unleash some kind of a conflict, some kind of war in the West is absolutely not in the interests of the Belarusian state. So the West can sleep peacefully," Lukashenko was quoted by his press service as saying in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday....

She stood in just her bathrobe in the freezing basement of the Mariupol theater, coated in white plaster dust shaken loose by the explosion. Her husband tugged at her to leave and begged her to cover her eyes. But she couldn’t help it — Oksana Syomina looked. And to this day, she wishes she hadn’t. Bodies were strewn everywhere, including those of children. By the main exit, a little girl lay still on the floor. Syomina had to step on the dead to escape the building that had served as the Ukrainian city’s main bomb shelter for more than a...

I was the first to write about Russia’s infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.Everywhere, you’ll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the “Gerasimov doctrine” — named after Russia’s chief of the general staff — poses to the West. It’s a new way of war, “an expanded theory of modern warfare,” or even “a vision of total warfare.”There’s one small problem. It doesn’t exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the — real, but different — challenge Russia poses.I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin,...

Russia has stepped up its propaganda war against Sweden by producing bus stop advertisements accusing the peaceful Scandinavian nation of being Nazis. The hybrid warfare strategy comes as Sweden prepares for NATO accession, abandoning decades of neutrality in light of Moscow's military aggression towards Ukraine. The provocation comes hot on the heels of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov's incendiary comments that 'Hitler had Jewish blood', which drew demands for an apology from Israel. The campaign has seen adverts pop up in Russia depicting various Swedish national heroes as Nazis with the slogan: 'We are against Nazism, they are not.' The...

Russian provocations in Transnistria are a direct threat to Ukraine. Moldova and European democracies must address this issue immediately. "Russia has staged a series of explosions in occupied Transnistria. Russia is apparently creating a pretext for invading Transnistria, according to a plan to seize Ukraine's Black Sea coast, announced on April 22 by Rustam Minnekayev, deputy chief of the Central Military District." Unfortunately, Transnistria has become a center of international terrorism. The Moldovan authorities are obliged to respond to Russian provocations and Russian arsenals in Transnistria, which is a direct threat to Ukraine and assistance to the aggressor during the...