The European Union’s efforts to impose a new round of sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine appeared to bog down on Monday, as a small group of countries continued to oppose a ban on Russian oil imports.
Turkey´s president on Monday complicated Sweden and Finland´s historic bid to join NATO, saying he cannot allow them to become members of the alliance because of their perceived inaction against exiled Kurdish militants.
The regiment that doggedly defended a steel mill as Ukraine’s last stronghold in the port city of Mariupol completed its mission Monday after more than 260 fighters, including some badly wounded, were evacuated and taken to areas under Russia’s control, Ukrainian officials said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
International security is inherently a secretive business. Governments and militaries like to hide their capabilities and plans from their rivals. Yet in the post-Cold War years, states began to become more transparent about their military postures, aiming to create a new sense of international cooperation and openness. This process has now gone into reverse, with post-Cold War transparency arrangements in sharp decline.