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.
Greek and Polish leaders asked European Commission President Ursula Von der #Leyen to lead a charge to create a common air defense shield that would be financed by the bloc.
Von der Leyen blessed the idea in a post on X Thursday as she renewed her call for more common defense projects.
The two leaders are also asking for the issue to be discussed at the next #EU summit at end of June.
Since the start of the war #Russia has been targeting #Ukraine culture especially fiercely - it has ruined dozens of museums, now it moved to targeting book warehouses and printing works. In today’s attack in #Kharkiv Russian rockets have killed 7 book warehouse workers (5 women and 2 men).
A video appeared in the official Telegram channels of the Wagner Group, claiming to show footage of a meeting between representatives of the authorities of Chad and the Central African Republic that took place in the Republic of Chad on May 22. #AureFreePress#News#press#headline#Ukraine#Russia#Putin
According to unconfirmed official information, law enforcement officers have detained Lieutenant General Vadim Shamarin, head of the Main Communications Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces and deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. #AureFreePress#News#press#headline#Ukraine#Russia#Putin#EU#NATO
House members who're knowledgeable about Ukraine's vulnerability, are sounding the alarm🚨about the need for more F-16s & air defense:
"No accident that most of these House members have visited Ukraine more than once since 2022, and they know what is at stake.
Request to SECDEF to lift the restrictions on the use US weapons to strike strategic targets in Russia, and to provide more F-16s and air defense."
-M McKew
The #Russian Army of today is not the same army that blundered into Ukraine in February 2022. #Russia has proven its ability to learn and adapt to challenges.
After two years of war, one of those challenges is attacking #Ukraine on the cheap.
#UK CLAIMS #CHINA SENDING WEAPONS TO #RUSSIA: In a break with the U.S., the British defense secretary has said that China has sent "lethal aid" to Russia, calling on #NATO to "wake up."
#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
The leader of #Russia's #Chechnya region, Ramzan #Kadyrov, said early on Thursday he had met President Vladimir #Putin in the #Kremlin and offered to send more fighters to help Moscow in its more than two-year-old conflict in #Ukraine.
He said tens of thousands of "well trained and equipped fighters from the reserves" were prepared to fight for Russia in Ukraine if such an order were given.
#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
🇪🇺 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.
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.
#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
New filings reveal FBI authorized use of DEADLY FORCE when they raided Mar-a-Lago (notthebee.com)