Sweden and Finland have proclaimed their intent to join NATO in the backdrop of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war in Europe.
The move, which is a drastic deviation from decades of military non-alignment between both countries, deals another blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as his country struggles with the repercussions of his unjust invasion of Ukraine.
Emboldened by an oil price surge since Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran’s clerical rulers are in no rush to revive a 2015 nuclear pact with world powers to ease sanctions on its energy-reliant economy, three officials familiar with Tehran’s thinking said.
Russia claimed on Wednesday that Israeli mercenaries are fighting alongside the far-right Azov Regiment in Ukraine, agencies have reported.
“Israeli mercenaries are practically shoulder to shoulder with Azov militants in Ukraine,” the spokeswoman of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, told Sputnik radio.
Twenty years ago, the firebrand mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led his party to a landslide victory in a parliamentary election that would transform Turkish politics. What followed were two decades of uninterrupted control of the government by the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which set out to prove that an Islamist party was not a threat, but could in fact move the country forward.
On a warm summer evening in July 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin, together with the German chancellor and French president at the time, Gerhard Schroder and Jacques Chirac, looked on as a lavish fireworks display entertained a vast crowd in the Baltic city of Kaliningrad. In commemoration of the 750-year anniversary of the founding of what had once been the Prussian city of Konigsberg, the Russian government that had inherited Kaliningrad after its conquest by the Soviet Union during World War II had put on elaborate festivities to celebrate its complex history.
The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran’s ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially — as they should have learned from Russia by now — because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.
On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped.
On the morning of April 1, seven children were playing in the lush wheat fields of Afghanistan’s Marjah district, in the southern Helmand province, by tossing around a metal object. Moments later, it exploded. The blast claimed five of their lives, including the youngest in the group, a 5-year-old boy.
“My daughter has not only lost her three sons, but also her senses,” Haji Abdul Salam, a 55-year-old farmer who lost two children and three grandchildren in the explosion, tells me at his home while attending to visitors there for the funeral. “She neither sleeps nor eats.”
The war in Ukraine is placing significant costs on the environment not only through the destructive effects of modern warfare, but also from the unintended consequences of developing international sanctions on Russia.
The devastating and ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has not only triggered significant loss of life and a massive refugee crisis spilling into Europe, but has also dealt a heavy blow to a silent victim of modern-day military and economic warfare: the environment.
Corruption is endemic in Russia and is pervasive within its defence industrial sector and armed forces. Evidence from Ukraine suggests that it is costing Russian lives.