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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has set off for Russia aboard a special train, a South Korean source said, as Pyongyang and Moscow on Monday (Sep 11) confirmed a summit with President Vladimir Putin amid Russia's deepening isolation over the war in Ukraine. Kim will visit Russia in the coming days at the invitation of Putin, the Kremlin said, while North Korean state news agency KCNA said the two would "meet and have a talk", without elaborating. US officials have said the pair would discuss possible arms deals to aid Russia's war in Ukraine and provide North Korea with...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s planned meeting with Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, as revealed by US intelligence, gives us a new insight into Russia’s strategy in Ukraine as well as a warning of wider dangers for the world.As Kyiv’s offensive wears on into its fourth month, with only limited success and a few Russian counter attacks, it is becoming clear that Moscow’s plan may be to allow Ukraine to exhaust its men, tanks, shells and missiles against the Surovikin Line’s hardest edge. The thinking could be that, once Ukraine’s Western equipped and trained manoeuvre forces have been ground down, Russia...

Throughout the summer, Ukraine has struggled to mount a counteroffensive that could puncture defenses Russia had spent months erecting. Allies watched in frustration as the Ukrainian military used sophisticated weaponry from Western Europe and the United States to seemingly little effect. The Russians were dug in and, it seemed, going nowhere.But this week, the Ukrainians appeared to be showing signs of forward momentum in the Zaporizhzhia region. The village of Robotyne was liberated earlier this week. Since then, Ukrainian forces have advanced toward nearby Novoprokopivka and Verbove.The recent advance does not mean the counteroffensive can be deemed a success —...

Russia’s central bank on Tuesday hiked interest rates by 350 basis points to 12% at an emergency meeting, as Moscow looks to halt a rapid depreciation of the country’s ruble currency. The ruble slumped to near 102 to the dollar on Monday, as President Vladimir Putin’s economic advisor, Maxim Oreshkin, penned an op-ed in Russian state-owned Tass news agency that blamed the plunging currency and the acceleration of inflation on the “loose monetary policy” of the central bank.

Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned on Saturday what it called Ukraine's "terrorist attack" on the Crimean Bridge, ..."There can be no justification for such barbaric actions and they will not go unanswered," ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app

Ukrainian troops admitted that the Russians have put up a tougher fight than expected as they continue pushing into enemy-controlled territory. Troops at the vanguard of Ukraine’s long-planned counteroffensive in the southeast region of the country said that a fierce battle last week revealed that the Russian troops are better prepared than originally anticipated. “The Russians were waiting for us,” a 29-year-old soldier using the call-sign Bulat told Reuters in the Southern Donetsk Province. “They fired anti-tank weapons and grenade launchers at us. My vehicle drove over an anti-tank mine, but everything was ok, the vehicle took the hit, and...

Russian RAMBO, YOU BE THE JUDGE. go to 4:25 to see video

"As a rule, I have found that the greater brain a man has, and the better educated, the easier it has been to mystify him." So said master illusionist Harry Houdini. He said it during his spat with Sherlock Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the latter’s belief in seances and fairies. Despite being a literary genius, Conan Doyle nevertheless had some foolish ideas. He’s not alone. Researchers have even coined ‘Nobel Disease,’ referring to the tendency for some Nobel Prize winners to embrace unconventional beliefs. Charles Richet, for instance, won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine...

Volodomyr Zelensky got the bad news in Vilnius — notwithstanding lip service from some of the NATO members — the United States and Germany are refusing to let Ukraine join the club out of fear of broadening the war with Russia. Make no mistake — NATO is at war with Russia, but the West is cognizant of its military weakness and is not willing as an organization to risk taking steps that would provoke direct fighting between Russian and NATO forces. A frustrated President Volodymyr Zelensky launched a furious broadside against Ukraine’s NATO allies Tuesday as they began a summit...

A discussion on Russian state television saw arguments praising the achievements of the Soviet Union and the value of dying in the war in Ukraine, with panelists trying to put Vladimir Putin's invasion into a historical context. During a segment on the Russia 1 show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, history professor Elena Ponomareva told anchor Solovyov it was significant the war had started in the centenary of the 1922 creation of the USSR, which she described as "a fair peoples' nation." Although the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago, she took solace in the fact that "it does exist and...

Russia has already stationed a first batch of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Vladimir Putin says. Speaking at an economic forum, he said they would only be used if Russia's territory or state was threatened. The US government says there is no indication the Kremlin plans to use nuclear weapons to attack Ukraine. "We don't see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after Mr Putin's comments. Belarus is a key Russian ally and served as a launchpad for Mr Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year....

The Myth Of A Russian 'Resistance' Against The Kremlin June 13, 2023 | By Dr. Vladislav L. Inozemtsev*Russia | MEMRI Daily Brief No. 489Recently, the Russia-Ukraine war was marked by continuous attacks on Russian territory, most remarkably in the Belgorod[1] and Bryansk regions.[2] Since the Ukrainian leadership supposedly promised its Western allies that it would not trespass the Russian border and would limit its actions to the occupied territories only,[3] several transborder incursions were attributed to the Russian battalions, which were first established with the Ukrainian army as early as in 2015.Although there are quite a lot of ethnic Russians...

Russia appears to have moved to take direct control of Wagner, after months of infighting between defence officials and the private military group. Deputy Defence Minister Nikolai Pankov said on Saturday "volunteer formations" will be asked to sign contracts directly with the ministry of defence. The vaguely worded statement is widely believed to target the group. But in a furious statement on Sunday, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin said his forces would boycott the contracts. The private military group has played a major role in the war in Ukraine, fighting on the side of Russian forces. But Prigozhin, who is said...

Russian military performance has been "mixed" in the last 48 hours of fighting, as there are an increasing number of reports of Russian casualties as they "withdraw through their own minefields," according to UK intel. In an intelligence update on Saturday, the UK's Ministry of Defence outlined the progress that had been made on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine. "In some areas, Ukrainian forces have likely made good progress and penetrated the first line of Russian defenses. In others, Ukrainian progress has been slower," Britain's MoD said in a statement. "Russian performance has been mixed: some units are...

In a rare admission, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Friday that Russia is sustaining “significant losses” in the war on Ukraine. “In recent days, we have seen significant losses in Ukraine, they exceed the classical figure,” he said, according to the Kremlin. The Russian president also confessed that Russian forces were dealing with artillery problems, adding in his remarks that “Yes, we still do not have enough of these modern weapons, but the defense industry, the country's military-industrial complex is developing rapidly.” The dispirited comments about Moscow’s prospects in the war come just as Ukraine has launched a series of...

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun. Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel. During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.” “It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus...

Chief of Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary force and self-proclaimed "butcher" for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has once again come out swinging at Moscow's defense ministry, this time warning there will be a revolution like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution if Russian elites do not get serious about the war in Ukraine. According to a Reuters report Wednesday, Prigozhin in an interview posted to Telegram said that there are already "tens of thousands" of angry Russians who are sick of seeing loved ones come back in zinc coffins while the children of Moscow’s elite "shook their a---s." "This divide can...

At least two people have been killed and 23 injured in a missile strike on a medical clinic in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, the regional governor says. Of the 23 injured, 21 are in hospital and three are in a serious condition. Two boys aged three and six were also among the wounded, governor Serhiy Lysak said. Russian strikes on Ukraine have intensified in recent weeks ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. Mr Zelensky posted a video of the damaged clinic that showed firefighters at the scene and smoke billowing from the building. "Russian terrorists once again confirm...

Country 404 (the former 'ukraine') is a state sponsor of terrorism

New documents that suggest Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin offered to give Russian troop positions to Kyiv puts further strain on his relations with Moscow. The Kremlin on Monday attempted to downplay an explosive new report suggesting Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevegeny Prigozhin told a Ukrainian intelligence service that he would give them the positions of Russian troops in exchange for withdrawing from the besieged city of Bakhmut. “It looks like another duck,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, employing a Russian idiom for a hoax or a media stunt, lamenting that a “respected news organization” would buy into it....