Russia seeks to persuade Iran not to launch attacks from Syrian territory, Syria TV says.
Since the onset of the Israeli war on Gaza, Syria has remained closely involved, as Israeli aircraft have intensified strikes on Iranian targets within its borders. This territory has become a hub of military and security activity for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their affiliated groups.
Russia’s economy and war effort is coming under increasing strain, which will pose increasingly acute challenges to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to sustain the war over the long term. The Washington Post reported on October 27 that the Russian economy is “in danger of overheating,” noting that Russia’s excessively high military spending has fueled economic growth in a way that has forced Russian companies to artificially raise their salaries in order to fulfill labor demands by remaining competitive with Russia’s high military salaries.[1] The Washington Post quoted Russian Central Bank Head Elvira Nabiullina, who warned in July 2024 that Russia’s labor force and production capacity are “almost exhausted.” The Washington Post noted that private Russian companies are struggling to keep up with Russian military salaries and are increasingly having to offer wages several times higher than the typical industry averages. ISW has recently reported that Russian regional authorities are significantly increasing the one-time signing bonuses for Russian contract servicemembers in order to sustain Russia’s rate of force generation (roughly 30,000 troops per month), which underscores the fact that Russia does not have an indefinite pool of manpower and must financially and socially reckon with the ever-growing costs of replenishing its frontline losses via various force-generation avenues.[2] The Washington Post also noted that Russia’s stringent migration policies, particularly after the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack, have further depleted Russia’s labor pool and amplified economic frictions. This has particularly become the case as migrant workers are increasingly identifying Russia as a hostile and unattractive place to relocate for work.[3] ISW has reported at length on the balance that Putin is trying to strike between catering to his pro-war ultranationalist constituency, which espouses extreme anti-migrant sentiments, and his practical need to leverage migrant labor both economically and militarily.[4]
Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party has likely won a simple majority in the Georgian parliamentary election held on October 26, 2024, according to preliminary results. Partial preliminary results released by the Georgian Central Election Committee (CEC) on October 26 indicate that the Georgian Dream party will likely win the majority of seats in parliament, but the results are neither complete nor final.[1] The results suggest that Georgian Dream will form the new Georgian government, but that it will not have the 113 seats required to obtain the “constitutional majority” it needs to pursue some of the goals it has outlined, including outlawing nearly all opposition parties.[2] The CEC reported that voter turnout was nearly 59 percent- the highest since 2012 when Georgian Dream first came to power.[3]
The recent expansion of BRICS presents considerable geopolitical ramifications, particularly for Russia, which has leveraged its membership to mitigate the economic and political isolation enforced by the United States and NATO since the commencement of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
This “is the first step to a world war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gravely told Kyiv’s allies during a rallying trip to Brussels last week as reports of North Korean troops in Russia, thought to be destined for the front lines against Ukraine, trickled out of Kyiv and Seoul.
The question now hangs in the air: will Berlin reconsider its role with Russia, or let the engine seize up?
Recently, an important Brazilian geopolitical channel invited me to shed some light on the political situation in Europe and especially in Germany. Since I’ve been in Berlin, I’ve also been closely following the reaction of the Brazilian internet public to the decline of the EU and Germany, which is already impossible to hide. As far as I can tell, Brazilians still admire a country they have come to know as a global economic power and “the engine of the European project”, but there is also a growing contempt for the Atlanticist foreign policy that Germany has pursued in recent years, which is seen as forced and not particularly genuine.
In connection with the new wave of discussions about the history of the withdrawal of funds from Probusinessbank, The Insider publishes its analysis of the key episodes of what happened, based on numerous previously unpublished interviews with Zheleznyak and Leontyev, which the author of this text conducted 4 years ago. A study of the documents they provided and their own explanations allows us to conclude that the infrastructure built by Zheleznyak and Leontyev was actively used to launder hundreds of millions of “prosecutor’s” dollars, evade regulation provided by law, and transfer funds to offshore accounts, where a significant portion of the funds disappeared even before the arrival of the DIA.
Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to present practical options for advancing Ukraine’s security sector capabilities to consolidate peace and stability as the country transitions from war to peace; the United States Institute of Peace does not take specific policy positions or advocate for specific forms of assistance. Although winning the war rightly remains Ukraine’s highest priority, this report focuses on the security sector issues at the heart of the country’s ability to win the peace. These include tackling corruption; holding the perpetrators of war crimes accountable; integrating veterans into society; and strengthening civilian security.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Moscow’s approach to Moldova is to play for time and keep the country in geopolitical limbo by stoking internal divisions, stalling reforms, and fueling disenchantment with the pro-European course.
An old Moldovan joke goes that the best sight to visit in Moldova is Odesa: a legendary Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea, just a few dozen kilometers from the Moldovan border, that has been publicly coveted by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In February 2022, the joke acquired sinister undertones when that proximity turned Moldova into another potential victim of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Throughout the war, there have been intermittent worries that Russian forces fighting inside Ukraine might seek to join up with the approximately 1,500 Russian troops stationed in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria to open a new front against Ukraine, destabilizing Moldova’s pro-Western course in the process.