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Russia's Wagner Group mercenaries have sent a "bloodied" sledgehammer in a violin case to the European Parliament after members started proceedings to label them as terrorists. Sledgehammers have become an unofficial symbol of the Kremlin-linked group because its fighters have used them to kill during overseas missions. In a video posted on one of its Telegram channels, a suited lawyer working for Wagner Group carries a violin case into a bare room and places it on a table. He lifts the lid of the violin case, showing off a highly polished sledgehammer. The head has been engraved with Wagner's logo...

NATO is making a show of force this month with five aircraft carriers operating in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, one month after the alliance and Russia held rival nuclear exercises amid the latter’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Two U.S. carriers are involved: the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS Gerald R. Ford, according to a U.S. Navy press release. The other three carriers are the U.K.’s HMS Queen Elizabeth and the flagships of the French and Italian navies: the Charles De Gaulle and Cavour. The exercise allows NATO forces to practice working together. It’s also another beat...

An entire battalion of Russian mobilised men was wiped out within days of being sent to the frontline in Ukraine, survivors have told Russian opposition media. The soldiers had been ordered to the frontline in Luhansk, Donbas, and then told to dig trenches, the Verstka news agency said in an unverified report. “We had three shovels per battalion and there were no provisions at all. We dug in as best we could and in the morning the shelling started from artillery and helicopters. We were simply shot,” Agafonov, the alleged unit survivor, said. “When it all started the officers simply...

The world’s largest nuclear submarine has been spotted leaving Gibraltar under intense protection from the Royal Marines as it reportedly heads towards the Black Sea. The USS Rhode Island’s departure comes as fears grow over what Vladimir Putin will do after another humiliating retreat. Yesterday, the Russian President called for civilians to leave Kherson in the south of Ukraine due to the advancing counter-offensive on the occupied city. Officials and Russian commanders who had been installed by the Kremlin in the occupied region were seen fleeing as the Ukrainian counter-offensive pushed south. Putin’s regime has repeatedly claimed Ukraine was planning...

U.S. military personnel are now on the ground in Ukraine, keeping track of and inspecting weapons the U.S. has shipped to Ukrainian forces, a senior defense official announced during a Pentagon background briefing on Monday. These U.S. personnel are some of the first the Pentagon has acknowledged have entered Ukraine since Russia launched its large scale invasion of the country in February. The senior defense official who spoke on background during an official Pentagon event, said, “U.S. personnel have recently resumed on-site inspections to assess weapon stocks in country whenever and wherever the security conditions allow.” The official said “the...

Have you ever found yourself completely losing your temper in the middle of a heated struggle of some sort? Whether it is a hotly contested sporting event, an actual fist fight or a bitter battle against an online foe, it can be way too easy to lose your temper. And when tempers flare, you can end up losing control and doing things that you deeply regret later. Unfortunately, the same thing is true on an international level. Russia and NATO have both become absolutely obsessed with “winning” in Ukraine, and leaders on both sides are getting angrier and angrier. And...

Ukraine's Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate announced a reward of $100,000 on Saturday for the capture of Igor "Strelkov" Girkin. Girkin is a former Russian FSB agent and a key figure in Russia’s initial occupation of Ukraine in 2014, when he led Kremlin-backed separatists to seize Slovyansk, in the Donetsk Oblast. A former Russian intelligence officer who once boasted he had “pulled the trigger of war” in Ukraine, Girkin served as the leader of the Kremlin’s forces in Slovyansk in the first months of the 2014 conflict. Going by the pseudonym Igor Strelkov (which means “shooter” in Russian). Girkin was...

China called on its citizens still in Ukraine to strengthen security precautions and evacuate the country given the severe security situation within Ukraine on Saturday. The appeal was made by the Foreign Ministry and China’s embassy in Ukraine in a news release. Already last week, the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine had issued three successive notices, reiterating the grave safety situation in the country, reminding Chinese nationals to take emergency shelter and prepare emergency supplies.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones has warned that the U.S. economy is likely headed for a recession, but he says the market could rally depending on how Russia's war in Ukraine plays out. "We have a dictator who's losing and typically that doesn't end well," Jones said Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "Typically, that's going to end with a violent death and the question is who is he going to take with that?" What To Know: Jones has suggested the war in Ukraine will end with the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He told CNBC that what...

The city of Kyiv has said it is handing out potassium iodine pills to evacuation centers in preparation for a possible Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine capital. Russia has been doing poorly since starting war-slash-conflict with Ukraine, so poorly in fact that one might be tempted to think Putin is taking a dive in his own war. Why would he do that? One reason might be because he’s really trying to bait the United States and NATO into it, the US has a foot-and-a-half in already, shouldn’t take too much more to seal the deal. Another reason might be because...

Making their biggest breakthrough in the South since the war began, Ukrainian forces recaptured several villages in a tank-led advance along the west bank of the strategic Dnipro River on Monday, Ukrainian officials and a Russian-installed leader in the area confirmed. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said "there are new liberated settlements in several regions," without going into specifics about Ukraine's military advance. According to Russian reports, Ukrainian forces reached all the way to Dudchany, 40 km from the established front lines before the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and into territories freshly annexed by Russia just last week.

The Pentagon currently has no information on the testing of Russia's Poseidon nuclear torpedo-drone that would change the United States' strategic posture, a senior US military official said in a US Defense Department press briefing Monday evening. The statement came in response to reports in La Repubblica that NATO intelligence had warned allies that Russia's Belgorod nuclear submarine was in the Artic Kara Sea to possibly test the "super torpedo." The Times said that that the weapon could also be tested in the Black Sea, where the Russia Navy has been launching ballistic missile attacks on Ukrainian positions to limited...

As Russians escaping a partial military mobilization in their homeland drank their morning coffee in a cinema that opened its doors for them in northwestern Kazakhstan, Central Asia was waking up to yet more fallout from Moscow’s bloody war in Ukraine. Almost a week into the drive for soldiers that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on September 21 in response to a tide-shifting Ukrainian counteroffensive, sightings of Russians wandering the streets of cities throughout the region with backpacks and lost expressions have become commonplace. So, too, have lengthening lines at the state borders that Russian citizens can still cross without...

KYIV — Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, announced by President Vladimir Putin on Friday, will not affect Kyiv’s resolve to free them with military force, said an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “For our plans, [Russia’s annexation] doesn’t matter,” Mykhailo Podolyak told POLITICO, speaking before the signing ceremony in Moscow orchestrated by Putin. The Russian leader railed at the United States and the West, denounced the Ukrainian government, and warned: “We will protect our land using all our forces.” The annexation comes on a day when Ukrainian soldiers have reportedly encircled thousands of Russian troops near the city...

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that any weapons in Moscow's arsenal, including strategic nuclear weapons, could be used to defend territories incorporated in Russia from Ukraine. Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that referenda being organized by Russian-installed and separatist authorities in large swathes of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory will take place, and that "there is no going back."

Summons delivered to eligible men at midnight. Schoolteachers pressed into handing out draft notices. Men given an hour to pack their things and appear at draft centres. Women sobbing as they sent their husbands and sons off to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The first full day of Russia’s first mobilisation since the second world war produced emotional showdowns at draft centres and even signs of protest, while it appears Russia could be considering far more than the 300,000 new conscripts claimed by the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. One woman in a small village in the Zakamensky region of...