#Russia's border guard removed more than 20 buoys demarcating shipping lanes from the #Narva River on Thursday (May 23), #Estonia's PPA said.
Estonia installed the markers in its waters based on the State Borders Act and the buoys' location were agreed by the border agencies in 2022.
However, this year Russia disagreed with the locations of approximately half of the 250 markers. Some of those removed on Thursday morning were those disputed by Russia
#Russia embassy in Poland boasts of ‘rebuilding Mariupol’. Only it omits a minor detail - the Russians are not rebuilding #Mariupol in the sense of renovating or rebuilding existing buildings for their existing residents.
What they do is demolishing existing buildings and raising new multi-family houses in their place, offered on the open market, which are unaffordable for existing residents…. because no one will give a mortgage to a person whose flat has been demolished! Residents rendered homeless by the Russian army are thus left in the lurch, as can be seen from the many desperate appeals they publish on Telegram.
The Mariupol authorities also officially run a housing restitution programme but, in typical Russian government fashion, they use many tricks to make it a sham - for example, the new buildings have a slightly different address and plot number and the allocation is no longer ‘due’! Or it turns out that the person in question still has a (also ruined) allotment garden, so as a ‘holder of two properties’ the return of the flat is also ‘not due’!
Such ‘reconstruction of Mariupol’ thus has the character of a exploitative colonisation of the city by the new owners rather than a real reconstruction of the city, and on top of that it only concerns attractive plots of land near the sea and in the centre. Hundreds of blocks of flats in popular bedroom neighbourhoods have remained without water, electricity, without windows and with holes in the roofs for two years.
P.S. I can provide numerous appeals from Mariupol residents on request
🇪🇺 New details of Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka’s espionage for #Russia
The Insider and Re:Baltica examined 19,000 of Ždanoka's emails, revealing her extensive correspondence with FSB agents and work for the Kremlin — while being an MEP.
How #Russia understands Western #deescalation? Margarita Simonyan’s husband Tigran Keosayan explains to his colleagues:
Everything we wanted to know about NATO is now quite clear: we can start a war with any NATO country, almost any, and US will not intervene. As long as US doesn’t intervene, they are just a bunch of paper tigers.
#Russia war correspondent Romanov doesn’t hide the fact he’s personally engaging in fighting, quite the opposite - he proudly publishes videos of himself firing a mortar. What ICRC says about journalists protection at war time?
Journalists and their equipment enjoy immunity, the former as civilians, the latter as a result of the general protection that international humanitarian law grants to civilian objects. However, this immunity is not absolute. Journalists are protected only as long as they do not take a direct part in the hostilities. News media, even when used for propaganda purposes, enjoy immunity from attacks, except when they are used for military purposes or to incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence.
🇷🇺 #Russia is still recruiting enough men willing to fight for money, but it looks increasingly stretched. Some regions have doubled sign-up bonuses. Analysts say a new mobilisation is “just a question of when.”
🇷🇺 The leader of Russia's #Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, said early on Thursday he had met Putin in the Kremlin and offered to send more fighters to help Moscow in its more than two-year-old conflict in #Ukraine
Inside the White House, a Debate Over Letting #Ukraine Shoot #US Weapons Into #Russia
After a sobering trip to #Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony J. #Blinken is urging the president to lift restrictions on how Ukraine can use American arms.
#Russia alarmed #NATO allies by proposing to unilaterally redraw its border in the #Baltic Sea, before withdrawing the bombshell text without offering an explanation.
By deepening economic relations with both #China and #Russia, #Orbán hopes to give #Hungary an oversized say in global decision-making. And his “friendship” with #Putin is feeding the ever-growing clientelism within his government and funding his cronies.
For example, while other European countries have been downgrading the size of their staff at Russian embassies and consulates, staff numbers at the Russian Embassy in Budapest are on the rise.
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja #Kallas says #Russia is conducting a “shadow war” against the West.
Kallas cited a warning from an intelligence agency to a European country that one of its warehouses was targeted by Russian military intelligence. When a fire occurred at the warehouse two weeks later, officials in the country suggested that “we don’t know it is the Russians,” she said. Kallas did not identify the country.
> The system also opens the possibility of using them to ambush Russian aircraft as they take-off or land on Crimean air bases. The USVs can sit off the Crimean coast and pick off the aircraft as they approach unawares. There is at least circumstantial evidence to suggest that this may have already been done.
So the President thinks the US is responsible for what others do with the weapons we give them? That is interesting. #israel#palestine#ukraine#russia#war