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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Erdogan, Mr Abbas, members of the clergy, foreign guests, friends, Let me congratulate you from all my heart on the opening of Moscow’s rebuilt Cathedral Mosque. This is a big event for all Muslims in Russia. One of Moscow’s oldest mosques stood on this historical site and has undergone reconstruction that now makes it the biggest in Europe. It was given a magnificent modern new look worthy of the capital of our united, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country. This new mosque is worthy of Russia, in which, I want to stress, Islam, under our country’s...

A neighborhood advisory panel in Washington that typically focuses on liquor license applications and other local concerns is inserting itself into the international furor prompted by the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A, as the Foggy Bottom panel is known, is expected to vote Wednesday to rename the street outside the Saudi Embassy for Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist who resided in Virginia. Under the proposal, the east side of New Hampshire Avenue NW between F Street and Juarez Circle would become “Jamal Khashoggi Way.” The Watergate complex...

Russia over the weekend mounted its most serious aggression against Ukraine since President Trump took office, and America punted. Trump’s outgoing ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, described the chain of events that led to the current standoff at the Black Sea as an “outrageous violation of sovereign Ukrainian territory.” She vowed that Washington and its friends would stand with Kiev. So what’s the plan? “It is our expectation that our European partners will lead this effort through the Normandy Four format,” Haley said, referring to a toothless Barack Obama-era gabfest that has mostly served to legitimize Moscow’s illegal...

Up to and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we all heard plenty about Russian interference. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his lackeys to plant false news stories, create faux hype, and generally confuse American voters. And he is doing it again — this time in Georgia. Georgia, which shares a contested border with Russia, is currently in the midst of its own presidential election. And Russia is back to its old tricks. This election is vital. After an October 28 primary election among 25 candidates, the field narrowed to two finalists who face off in a Wednesday, November 28,...

Many Ukrainians comfort themselves with the observation that Vladimir Putin can’t live forever and that after him relations between Russia and Ukraine will improve, former Soviet dissident Iosif Zisels says; but in fact, the leaders who will emerge after Putin leaves the scene may treat Russia even worse than he does. “It isn’t Putin who is waging war against us; rather it is the Russians who are,” Zisels says. And it is critically important that Ukrainians and others understand that. Putin didn’t “make this Russia;” in a real sense, this Russia made someone like him the kind of leader it...

Ukraine says Russia has opened fire on its ships in the Black Sea and captured three vessels. Two sailors have been wounded after two boats were hit in the strikes, the Ukrainian navy said. The Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has called an emergency session of his war cabinet in response to the incident. "Today's dangerous events in the Azov Sea testify that a new front of [Russian] aggression is open," Ukrainian foreign ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said. "Ukraine [is] calling now for [an] emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council." It comes after a day of rising tensions off...

The Ukrainian navy has accused Russia of opening fire on some of its ships in the Black Sea, striking two vessels and wounding two crew members. The navy made the statement after a day of rising tensions during which Russia stopped three Ukrainian navy vessels from entering the Sea of Azov via the Kerch Strait by placing a huge cargo ship beneath a Russian-controlled bridge.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said Sunday she would rather not see the U.S.-Mexico border close despite threats by President Trump to prevent certain groups of migrants from crossing into the U.S. "We would prefer that we keep it open, so let's work really hard to make sure that we're addressing the asylum seekers before they actually come over the border," Ernst said on CNN's "State of the Union."The Iowa Republican was responding to Trump's suggestion that he may close the southern border if Mexico does not agree to hold migrants while the U.S. processes their asylum claims. "I think the...

In the wake of Trump’s announcement this week that his administration would continue to “stand with Saudi Arabia” despite the recent murder of Washington Postcolumnist Jamal Khashoggi, America’s mainstream media elites erupted in their usual paroxysms of despair and condemnation of the president. Although this time the typical “orange man bad” stories tended to omit calls for Trump to be immediately overthrown by the military or his own cabinet, almost every other major trope was preponderant. This was especially true of Khashoggi’s former place of employment at the Post, where journalists almost universally portrayed Trump as having blood on...

Russian authorities closed off the Kerch Strait Sunday amid a confrontation with Ukrainian naval vessels, Russian state news agencies and the Ukrainian military said. The Kerch Strait links the Azov Sea with the Black Sea. Earlier this year, the Russian government opened a 19-kilometer bridge across the strait, creating a road linking Russia's Krasnodar region with the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. In a statement released Sunday, the Ukrainian ministry of defense said traffic through the strait had been blocked by a tanker anchored near the Kerch Strait bridge. Russian state news agency TASS,...

But Democrats view it as yet another expression of the prime minister’s overzealous backing for a despised U.S. president The Mossad’s Kidon unit, which foreign media describe as Israel’s official assassination squad, must be worried sick over the fallout from the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Alongside its many successful hits, some of which are surely still unknown, Kidon’s men (and presumably women) have also known notorious failures, including the mistaken 1970 killing of Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in Lillehammer, Norway, the failed 1997 assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Jordan and...

• A nightmare scenario involving a potential armed showdown between Saudi Arabia and Iran would put America and President Trump in a high-stakes dilemma. • U.S. policy performs best when focused on a longer-term strategic purpose. In the Middle East, the approach must be on preventing any new conflicts, ending civil wars and unlocking the region's human potential while opposing extremism, writes Atlantic Council President and CEO Fred Kempe. • The U.S. and its Western allies should leverage the post-Khashoggi crisis to achieve some good in the Middle East, Kempe writes....

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on Muslims worldwide on Saturday to unite against the United States, instead of “rolling out red carpets for criminals”. Washington in May reimposed sanctions on Tehran, after President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran under which they had been lifted. “Submitting to the West headed by America would be treason against our religion ... and against the future generations of this region,” Rouhani told an international conference on Islamic unity in Tehran, in a speech broadcast live on state television. “We have a choice to either roll out red...

Just when you thought the story of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Turkey couldn’t get any stranger, Turkish media adds a new wrinkle. It’s being claimed by a columnist for the newspaper Hurriyet that the CIA has a recording of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordering Khashoggi to be “silenced” prior to the killing. No sources are named in the story and nobody else is confirming it, but it’s stirring up all the actors involved in this tale. (Reuters) A Turkish newspaper reported on Thursday CIA director Gina Haspel signaled to Turkish officials last month...

BERLIN — Denmark became the second European country to halt future arms exports to Saudi Arabia on Thursday, following a similar decision by neighboring Germany earlier this month. The Danish announcement comes the same week President Trump backed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite the CIA assessing that he ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Denmark’s ban includes goods that can be used both for military and civilian purposes but is still less expansive than the German measures, which also included sales that had already been approved. While the Nordic country is a tiny arms equipment exporter in...

At the height of the media storm over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, met with a visiting delegation of evangelical Christians from the U.S. for two hours. One of the Saudi attendees was the General Secretary of the Saudi-based Muslim World League (MWL), Dr. Mohammad Al-‘Issa. The MWL was a major engine for the propagation and spread of Wahabist jihad throughout the Western world since it was formed by the Saudi regime in the 1960s. The MWL founded the...

Oksana Ostapenko was 12 years old and facing death from hunger when a stranger saved her life by taking the girl into his family and sharing the last of their food. Today, aged 97, the Ukrainian's voice trembles when she recalls the terrible famine that hit her country in the 1930s due to policies enforced by Joseph Stalin's police. "They came and took away all our grain..." The death toll of the famine - known as the "Holodomor" in Ukrainian - remains debated among historians. But Kiev authorities estimate the number of those who died at around four million, or...

I am already sick of Turkey.I suspect that many Americans feel this way, about the bird and the country. Yet a small group of Washington foreign policy hands — at State Department, at Pentagon and in congressional offices — continue to make the case for Turkey as a “strategically important” partner to the US. On paper, the country looks good: It sits at the center of many of Americas most pressing foreign policy concerns, it is a member of NATO, it's stable, and it can offer foreign partners access to its airbases and intelligence cooperation. I used to think of...

Sen.-elect Mitt Romney(R-Utah) (R-Utah) on Wednesday condemned President Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's latest comments about journalist Jamal Khashoggi's killing, calling them "inconsistent" with the U.S. national interest. "The President's and Secretary of State's Khashoggi statements to date are inconsistent with an enduring foreign policy, with our national interest, with basic human rights, and with American greatness," Romney said in a statement. "Sanctions do not necessarily require ending the alliance; they do demand real and painful consequence," he added.

Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany's intelligence community. Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society. The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by...