❗️The death toll from the shelling of the Kirovsky district of Donetsk has risen to 25, and the number of wounded to 20, the head of the Republic of the DPR Denis Pushilin announced.

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📹 Since the beginning of the year, the demining unit of the Russian engineer corps has defused about 800 explosive devices on the territory of the DPR.

The sappers are combing the area mined by retreating units of the Ukrainian armed forces. Russian engineers usually try to defuse dangerous grenades and booby traps on the spot. If this is not possible, they are taken to special dumps far from populated areas.

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‘Ill service’: Moscow criticizes Germany's support for Israel amid South Africa's genocide lawsuit

Moscow is not surprised that Berlin recently decided to counter South Africa in its International Court of Justice lawsuit accusing Israel of genocide against Gaza, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.

“This comes against the backdrop of Germany’s unconditional support for Israel, regardless of consequences. This policy line pursued by German authorities has long and firmly occupied an important place among the unspoken dogmas of the ‘rules-based order’ defined by Washington,” Zakharova pointed out.

"The German political elites seem to have done Israel an ill service,” she added. “In a corresponding government statement, Berlin refers to ‘the consideration of German history and the crime against humanity in the form of the Holocaust,’ thereby declaring itself an ‘expert’ in mass extermination-related issues. But what can we do with the crimes against humanity committed by Germany against other nationalities and ethnic groups during the Second World War?” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

Apparently, she went on, Berlin “again forgot that according to the UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/60/7 and a number of other international documents, the Holocaust is the persecution and mass extermination of representatives of various ethnic and social groups by the Nazis.”

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Berlin Declaration “reinforced the need to recognize the importance of respectful treatment of all ethnic and religious groups without segregation,” Zakharova pointed out.

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Statements of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the shelling of the Kirovsky district of Donetsk:

▪️The Russian Foreign Ministry calls the attack of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Donetsk a barbaric terrorist act against the civilian population of Russia;

▪️Russia calls on international structures and governments to condemn Kiev's attack on Donetsk, their silence means approval of the killing of civilians;

▪️The West's desire to inflict a strategic defeat on the Russian Federation has pushed Kiev to take even more reckless steps.

▪️Kiev's terrorist attacks clearly demonstrate its lack of political will to reach a peace settlement through diplomatic means.

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“This was an intentional targeting of a civilian market on a Sunday afternoon.”

Sputnik correspondent Russell Bentley reports from the scene of a Ukrainian artillery strike on the Tekstilshchiki market in Donetsk.

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Moscow berates Germany for supporting ‘Russophobic neo-Nazi Zelensky regime’

Germany is more active than other EU members in defending the Kiev regime that has proclaimed the glorification of Nazi collaborators as a core component of its domestic and foreign policy, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said in a statement on Sunday.

“Berlin supports militants who hold neo-Nazi torch-lit parades glorify World War II criminals, use SS division insignia and patches and put Wehrmacht symbols on Western-supplied military equipment. Berlin sponsors and arms them, as well as organizes treatment and provides assistance in the international arena to those who purposefully kill Russians, Russian citizens and Russian-speaking people,” Zakharova stressed.

The past few months have seen German authorities make more statements, in which they “questioned Berlin's condemnation of the country’s Nazi past,” she added.

“Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who publicly confirmed that Germany and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi regime of Ukraine ‘are on the right side of history,’ actually justified the current misanthropic and Russophobic regime of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, who has reincarnated collaborators of Nazi Germany and is trying to erase the memory about fighters against fascism,” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

Previously, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock “proudly announced the death of her ancestors ‘during the defense of Koenigsberg’ [currently the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad]. This is how Germany’s ruling elite perceives the ‘right side’ of history,” Zakharova added.

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🗣 Hamas is pursuing “revolutionary politics” strategy in war against Israel

"It's intended to explode the paradigm, to break everything up. And yes, of course, there's a price in blood to be paid for revolutionary politics. We've seen the same in Algeria or elsewhere. Revolutionary politics is different. It creates an outrage. It creates an overreaction by the enemies deliberately. Yes, there's a price to be paid. But it does break and has broke the paradigm, completely shattered the paradigm, the paradigm of, if you like, the imprisonment of Palestinians into the small space of the [Gaza] strip," former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke told the New Rules podcast.

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Of the six people on board the plane that crashed in Afghanistan, four are tentatively alive and the fate of the other two is being clarified, according to the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency.

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How scientists manage to preserve Lenin’s body a century after his death

One hundred years after his death, the body of the legendary Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin remains on display inside the Mausoleum in the Red Square in Moscow.

Thanks to a special embalming liquid they developed, Russian scientists have been able to preserve Lenin’s body to this very day, so that visitors from all corners of the world may marvel at the remains of the Soviet Union’s founder.

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Taliban discovers crashed plane in Afghan mountains

According to the Taliban* Ministry of Transport, the plane fell in the vicinity of the Arzu-Kuh village in the Kuf Ab region. Rescuers continue to work at the site.

*the organization is under UN sanctions for terrorist activities

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Russia alarmed about German militarism’s revival amid Berlin’s neo-Nazi agenda

Moscow is “shocked and exasperated” by the fact that the bulk of the Third Reich’s crimes, including the extermination of 27 million Soviet citizens, are not considered a reason for repentance by the German authorities, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday.

“On the contrary, Berlin is once again mired in the destruction of the residents of the part of Europe that Hitler failed to neither destroy nor conquer,” she underscored.

“The question arises whether Germany’s previous repentance was sincere and if the de-Nazification of Germany achieve its goals,” Zakharova said. She added that Moscow considers the current German government’s stance to be “unacceptable, illegal and immoral.”

The Kremlin is highly alarmed about “the ongoing resurgence of German militarism against the backdrop of [Berlin’s] endorsement of a neo-Nazi agenda. This may have extremely serious consequences for the fate of Germany itself, as well as Europe and the world, given the country’s contradictory historical experience,” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman warned.

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The rejection of the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people are unacceptable, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated.

"The right of the Palestinian people to build their own state must be recognized by all," Guterres wrote on his X page. (formerly Twitter).

This comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that a Palestinian state could not be created under current conditions, adding that Israel intends to "maintain security control over all territory west of the Jordan River".

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🇫🇷 In Paris, several thousand people gathered to march against a law tightening immigration rules, which opponents call a "victory for the far right."

The country's Constitutional Council will make a decision on whether the law complies with legal norms in the next four days.

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🗣 Israel’s Strategy in Gaza “Makes No Military Sense” — Former MI6

"What Israel troops are doing? When they come in, they're bombing civil structures, they're bombing civil Gaza. But the forces that are opposed to them, are sort of 60 to 70m below the surface and have a different movement mobilization. So when they say they've cut off part of Gaza. Yeah, they've cut off a segment of surface Gaza. Doesn't mean they've cut off underground Gaza, the substrata of Gaza. So it doesn't make any military sense," former British diplomat Alastair Crooke told the New Rules podcast.

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Decommissioned attack submarines - slap in the face of American admirals

The decommissioning of nearly 40 percent of the US nuclear-powered fast attack submarines (SSNs) is "quite a big blow to the pride of American admirals and sailors," Vasily Dandykin, a veteran Russian military analyst and retired Russian Navy captain 1st rank, told Sputnik.

He was commenting on a report by the US Congressional Research Service that out of the 49 SSNs in the Navy, a total of 18 are currently out of commission for repairs.

"After the self-proclaimed victory in the Cold War, the Americans turned a blind eye to maintenance problems," Dandykin said, adding that "the delayed repairs shorten the life of a submarine.

Operational pressure on the SSNs that are in service will almost certainly increase, meaning that their service lives may be shortened and more such submarines will have to be built, Dandykin explained.

He was echoed by Earl Rasmussen, a retired lieutenant colonel with over 20 years in the US Army and an international consultant, who explained that the fact that 18 SSNs are now out of commission means that the US Navy will have to limit its operations in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the South China Sea.

"Almost 40% of the SSNs being decommissioned will impact our capability to deploy our reach and to deploy the defensive capability,” Rasmussen pointed out. The US Navy is “below its optimal or even projected readiness capability," he added.

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The Islamic Resistance in Iraq movement, which includes Shiite militias, said it carried out drone attacks on two US bases in Syria.

“Fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked two American bases in Syria with drones - at the Omar field and in Al-Shaddadi,” the groups said in a statement.

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