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A senior Ukrainian intelligence official warned about the threat Moscow poses on other nations in Europe, saying "the Russians will take the Baltics in seven days" if allies don't stand up to Russia now. The comment was made by Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence directorate (GUR), during an interview with The Economist published on Thursday. The alarm has been sounded before about the potential of Russian President Vladimir Putin looking to start conflicts in the Baltic states. Earlier this year, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote that the Russian leader appeared to...

Russia has blamed the "hostility" of Baltic states for them severing most of their ties with the country. "Because of the openly hostile line of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, all interstate, interdepartmental, regional and sectoral ties with Russia have been severed," said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharov on Sunday. She warned Moscow would respond with asymmetric measures, though did not specify exactly what the Baltics had supposedly done. "We will also respond to the hostile actions of the Baltic states with asymmetrical measures, primarily in the economic and transit spheres," Zakharov detailed. Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has...

Nato must be ready for Russia launching an “existential” war against the Baltic states “masked by a blizzard of disinformation”, ambassadors from the three countries have warned. Writing exclusively for The Sunday Telegraph, the top diplomats to the UK from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said that Russia could “pivot quickly” from Ukraine to invade the Baltic. And they said that Vladimir Putin’s brutalisation of Ukraine is evoking the three countries’ “darkest memories” of occupation under Stalin. The Estonian ambassador Viljar Lubi, the Latvian ambassador Ivita Burmistre, and Lithuania’s charge d’affaire Lina Zigmantaite, wrote the joint article to mark Friday’s 20...

HELSINKI (AP) — Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating.

What is the US aircraft carrier doing in Israel? It will start to carry out serious massacres there by striking, destroying Gaza"...The comments of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan... A plane carrying ammunition from the United States arrived in Israel tonight... Tonight rocket fire aimed at Israel from Syria... Meanwhile the Russian military in Syria says that there were only three US coalition air space violations in Syria's Al-Tanf today... The United States determining that the new military government in Niger since July is the result of a military coup. This means a permanent cutoff of 200 million dollars... Tensions...

The question of who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines is likely to remain an unsolved mystery for some time.Even as new details surface from European investigators, one of the most intriguing clues to recently emerge comes not from official probes but via a 29-year-old open-source analyst based in Denmark. Oliver Alexander spent months analyzing data from the maritime Automatic Identification System, or AIS, from vessels that passed near the site of three out of the four pipeline ruptures shortly before the damage. He noticed that the Minerva Julie, a 600-foot Greek-flagged tanker, was headed east from Rotterdam when, on...

MINSK, October 17. /TASS/. Belarus reserves its right to take preemptive strategic deterrence measures amid the establishment of offensive NATO groups near Belarusian borders, says Valery Revenko, head of the Belarusian Defense Ministry international military cooperation department. "The Republic of Belarus will protect its national interests with use of all available means, including by use of forces, and retains its right to take a complex of preemptive strategic measure complex in order to prevent an attack or to neutralize an internal armed conflict," he said during a briefing for foreign military attaches, partially published by Defense Ministry press office Monday....

In a move of staggering stupidity and hubris, Lithuanian banned the transit of Russian goods to Kaliningrad effective today, June 18, 2022. Kaliningrad, which is wedged between Poland on the west and Lithuania on the east, is home to almost a half-million Russians and the headquarters for the Russian Navy’s Baltic Sea force. Lithuania claims it is simply abiding by the sanctions imposed by the European Union. After all, Lithuania is a member of the European Union and NATO. But that is the point. This is a deliberate provocation. It is laying economic siege to a vital interest of Russia....

The man who 'invented Putinism' has been detained in Russia and is under house arrest, say reports in Moscow. If confirmed, the move against Vladislav Surkov appears to show Vladimir Putin is turning on his inner circle, and also deep splits among his closest henchmen. Unconfirmed accounts say Putin's 'ideologist' is being held in a wide-ranging criminal probe that has also seen the arrest of 150 FSB agents. The case evidently involves the alleged embezzlement of $5 billion (£3.85billion) by the secret services to create an undercover and intelligence network in Ukraine. The shadowy Surkov, seen as crucial to Putin's...

Putin's regime branded Latvia a 'neo-Nazi' state in a chilling echo of Moscow's threats to Ukraine after the Baltic state made May 9 a day of remembrance for victims of Russian aggression. In an extraordinary rant, Moscow called Riga's decision to commemorate Ukrainian war victims next month - on the same day as Russia's Victory Day to mark the surrender of Nazi Germany - 'blasphemous'. Latvian MPs passed the legislation to draw attention to ' Russia's military aggression'. Latvian national flags will be raised alongside Ukrainian flags at every residence and government building. According to Kremlin-backed media, Russian Foreign Ministry...

RUSSIAN state TV has aired a discussion on seizing the Baltic states as Nato bolster Eastern European allies with thousands more troops. ....Just such a scenario was outlined on Russian state TV channel Rossiya 1 by Colonel Igor Korotchenko, formerly of the Russian General Staff and air force and currently a reserve officer...

What Six Years of ‘Reset’ with Russia Have Wrought by CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER August 27, 2015 On September 5, 2014, Russian agents crossed into Estonia and kidnapped an Estonian security official. Last week, after a closed trial, Russia sentenced him to 15 years. The reaction? The State Department issued a statement. The NATO secretary-general issued a tweet. Neither did anything. The European Union (reports the Wall Street Journal) said it was too early to discuss any possible action. The timing of this brazen violation of NATO territory — two days after President Obama visited Estonia to symbolize America’s commitment to its...

An 80-tonne shipment of US anti-tank missiles has arrived in Ukraine - just the latest delivery of high-tech weapons aimed at inflicting maximum death and destruction on Putin's forces if he decides to invade. A plane loaded with 300 Javelin missiles worth some $50million landed in capital Kiev late Tuesday, the third part of a $200million shipment of American military aid that is being sent to help its ally. The shipment also contained grenade launchers, as well as ammunition and other non-lethal weapons systems, and comes in addition to other anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons already supplied by the UK, Estonia,...

The Baltic States earn a lot on transit of goods and raw materials from the East to the West, but Moscow intends to deprive them of their income, moving its transit to its own ports. Moscow uses a combination of military and economic means against the Baltic states that may be workable. The American Ministry of Finance within the so-called Global Magnitsky act introduced in December included a black list of people, blocking their assets in the United States. That list include several high-ranking foreign officials and politicians suspected of involvement in large scale corruption. Magnitsky was a lawyer and...

A recent surge in illegal migration into Lithuania represents a hybrid attack on that country and the region and European Union as a whole, defense minister Kalle Laanet (Reform) says. Laanet said Friday that: "Lithuania is our close ally, and our duty is to support them immediately in this crisis." "We are also ready to send three unmanned aircraft crews to Lithuania from August 1 to improve situational awareness at the border," he added, according to a defense ministry press release. Laanet made the remarks during a phone call with his Lithuanian opposite number Agnė Bilotaitė, while both ministers agreed...

Kremlin official referred to having to defend civilians from a 'second Srebrenica' Moscow claims that Ukraine is inflaming tensions by beefing up border security It comes as new footage emerged showing tanks being transported to frontier Vladimir Putin insists deployment is defensive and to check 'combat readiness\\ A senior Kremlin official today warned that if Russia is forced to defend its citizens in the disputed Donbass region it would be 'the beginning of the end Ukraine.' Tensions have soared in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks after Vladimir Putin dispatched tanks, helicopters and thousands of troops to the Ukrainian border. Ukraine's...

Throughout this month, Latvia has suspended up to seventeen Russian television channels that have been an aggressive and subversive force within the Baltic nation. Earlier this month, a Russian channel named Rossija RTR was banned from Latvia by that nation’s National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP). The NEPLP reasons given for that action were that Rossija RTR had engaged in “incitement to hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons on grounds of sex, race or ethnic origin. To summon to war or to cause military conflict on grounds of origin, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age or...

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday that Turkey had dropped its block on a plan to bolster the defences of Baltic states and Poland against Russia. He told a news conference after an alliance summit outside London that NATO leaders did not discuss the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey views as a terrorist organisation. Ahead of the summit, Ankara had refused to back the NATO defence plan for the Baltics and Poland until it received more support for its battle with the YPG, including other alliance members recognising it as a terrorist group. In a final press conference...

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened. At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and...

As far as much of the American public is concerned, the timing for U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn't be worse. The indictments of 12 Russian military intelligence officers on Friday renewed the calls for a tougher stance from the administration against Moscow. But with Trump determined to achieve some sort of détente with Russia, the indictments gave ammunition to his critics who see the meeting as appeasement or worse. But while Americans are deeply divided about the highly politicized topic of relations with Russia, many Israelis seem to be taking a very different view...