WATCH LIVE: Putin holds a meeting with heads of state of the CIS

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❄️🇷🇺 Winter Wonderland: Immerse yourself in Moscow’s holiday spirit

The Russian capital is preparing to celebrate the New Year with colorful lights, elaborately decorated trees, and an ice-rink in Red Square.

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US seeking to restore CIA’s ‘human espionage capabilities’ in China, according to the report

The US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is trying to restore its damaged spy network in China, the Wall Street Journal has cited unnamed American officials as saying.

The sources claimed that the goal is to rebuild the CIA’s “human espionage capabilities” in the PRC, where the agency suffered “horrendous” losses of agents a decade ago.

The report comes amid the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s ongoing craсkdown on the country’s individuals suspected of providing information to the CIA.

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🥧 3333 Ossetian pies* sent to soldiers in the special operation zone

The initiative came from the administration of the head and government of North Ossetia (republic in southwestern Russia).

In each box of pies there are letters to the fighters from officials, the warmest words and wishes to return home with victory, the head of the republic Sergey Menyailo said.

*Ossetian pies, prevalent in North Ossetian cuisine and widely enjoyed across Russia, are savory flatbread pies featuring diverse fillings like cheese or potatoes.

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Snipers on the line of combat contact

📹 A Russian sniper pair, together with a spotter from the reconnaissance battalion of the Southern battlegroup, destroy Ukrainian troops.

Video by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

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"Greetings to all Sputnik readers, with all my sympathy"

🇲🇽 Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador addressed Sputnik readers after his regular daily press conference and on the anticipation of the New Year.

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Project ‘Grandpa on a leash’

The West is used to blaming Russia for interfering in internal affairs, but what if US President Joe Biden is Russia's project?

Check out a satirical video by RT

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How Israel-Gaza war morphed into a multi-arena conflict

"We already see a multi-front war against Israel which was started of course by Hamas but was joined by Hezbollah and also by the Houthis in Yemen," Professor Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told Sputnik. "We also see activities of Iranian-led militias, Shiite militias in Syria and also in Iraq, all of them participating in a war against Israel."

Israel's war in Gaza will be long and tough, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Jewish lawmakers on December 26, adding that the Israeli military is currently fighting on seven different fronts – in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

"[The conflict] might spill over to the region," Ayman Yousef, professor of political sciences at the Arab-American University in Palestine, told Sputnik. "If Israel continues to kill Palestinians in this indiscriminate way, (…) that might ignite a kind of a new regional configuration and new regional forces."

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Political highlights you couldn't miss in 2023: Ukraine, Gaza, BRICS

With the countdown for 2024 already underway, Sputnik rolls out a video showcasing a whole array of political highlights that grabbed the global headlights of the outgoing year.

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Israel will stop granting automatic visas to United Nations employees, accusing the UN of being “complicit partners” in Hamas’ tactics.

Government spokesman Eylon Levy said that Tel Aviv will consider visa requests from UN employees on a case-by-case basis.

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The newest bicaliber MLRS "Vozrozhdenie" (lit. Revival) is being created in Russia; it will go into production in the first half of 2024, Sergey Chemezov, general director of the Rostec state corporation, told Sputnik.

"In just a few months we received the first serial two-caliber vehicle, which can both mine terrain with 140 mm caliber rockets and hit targets with 220 mm caliber rockets," he said.

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What are the UK PMs actually doing when they say they are working

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📹 "There are only three hospitals in which major operations can be performed," the head of the department of cardiovascular surgery at one of the hospitals in Gaza, Mohammed Callum, said.

Callum is a Russian citizen. His family was evacuated, but he stayed to work and help women and children.

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"Josep Borrell seems to be bent on offering Europeans daily reminders of his diplomatic ineptitude”

Such was the analysis of Politico which awarded the EU’s foreign policy chief the dubious “Borat award for diplomacy” on Tuesday.

The media outlet noted the EU top diplomat’s propensity for gaffes – earlier this year he drew ridicule for congratulating Ecuador for “peaceful elections” after a candidate was assassinated.

Borrell was also criticized for comments referring to Europe as a “garden” in need of protection from the “jungle” of the outside world.

Politico also noted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s struggle against Borrell and European Council President Charles Michel to represent the bloc to the public.

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Russian drones rule the skies of Ukrainian conflict battlefields

Kiev's troops may soon be forced into a retreat as their military hardware keeps getting destroyed by Russian drone strikes.

While President Vladimir Putin pays close attention to drone production in Russia, the powers that be in Ukraine apparently have no vision for the drone industry of their own, if the recent revelations of the Ukrainian Center for Aerial Reconnaissance’s head Maria Berlinskaya are to be believed.

During a recent interview with Ukrainian media, Berlinskaya complained about Russian drone strikes taking out much of Kiev regime forces’ military hardware and claimed that Ukrainian authorities have no vision for Ukraine’s drone industry.

👉 Read more

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Accused Pentagon leaker Teixeira was nicknamed 'active shooter kid' by colleagues, a new report found

Newly-obtained documents revealed Jack Teixeira, who was indicted on six counts in relation to the ‘Discord Leak’, was described by his colleagues as “the active shooter kid.” According to the report, Teixeira shared his fringe interests with a close colleague, expressing his desire to live “off the grid” so he could “blow stuff up.”

The findings detailed that Teixeira—arrested in April by the FBI—worried his fellow airmen, who feared he might “shoot up the place” after the since-accused leaker was told off for looking at classified information that had little to do with his job as a computer technician at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod.

🗣“From all our training, this was a red flag, it was tripping all the indicators,” said a fellow guardsman of Teixeira’s.

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Why Russian liberation of Maryinka is so significant

The city of Maryinka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, which for years remained a major stronghold for the Ukrainian forces, was finally liberated by Russian troops.

Aside from dislodging the Kiev regime forces from a heavily fortified settlement, the victory makes it harder for Ukrainian troops to shell Donetsk.

“There were firing positions for long-range artillery and MLRS that shelled Donetsk. Now Maryinka is taken and thus the threat was moved away from Donetsk,” says military analyst Anatoliy Matviychuk, a retired colonel of the Russian Armed Forces.

The liberation of Maryinka also dealt a heavy blow to the morale of Ukrainian forces, and this will significantly contribute to the further success of the Russian army.

👉 Read on for a full analysis

Year-end review: How did the US push deeper into Asia in 2023 while world focused on Ukraine & Israel?

While the world was distracted by the US-backed conflicts in Ukraine and Israel in 2023, Washington was quietly bolstering its military presence in Asia, which it calls the “Indo-Pacific” and considers to be a key theater for “great power competition” against Russia and China.

The US has accused both nations of seeking to overturn what it calls the “rules-based international order,” referring to the post-World War II global order in which the US calls the shots politically, socio-economically, and militarily.

In East and Southeast Asia, the US sought to pry nations away from their partnerships with Beijing and Moscow by casting them as threats to sovereignty that only a military showdown can deter, and to either sell them weapons or place military assets there.

👉 Read on to get the specifics

More than 42,000 people in the United States died as a result of gun violence in 2023, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive

Most of the deaths, 23,760, occurred as a result of suicide, the GVA data published Tuesday said. Another 18,507 people died of unintentional shooting, murder and defensive use, GVA said.

The figure includes 650 mass shooting incidents, 40 mass murders, 1,161 defensive use cases and 1,543 unintentional shootings, GVA said.

More than 1,600 children between the ages 0-17 were killed in gun violence incidents and 4,444 others were injured, added the association.

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Turkiye moves closer to final vote on Sweden's NATO bid

Turkiye may have just moved de jure closer to green-lighting Sweden's NATO membership, with the country's foreign affairs committee officially endorsing the bid. The development follows complex diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Ankara, with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan reluctant to admit Sweden to the alliance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned that NATO's expansion does not contribute to international peace and security, calling the policy a "relic of the Cold War." The Russian president also stressed that the US was doing its best to thwart Moscow's rapprochement with Europe.

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