🗳🇷🇺 Official voting results of the presidential election

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🇷🇺🇷🇸 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meets with his Serbian counterpart in Moscow

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‘Don’t presume I’m not corrupt’: Joe Biden issues prescient warning from 1974

"You shouldn't presume I'm not corrupt.... in order to get elected, you have to go to those people that have money and they always want something," he said in an interview shortly after being elected to the US Senate for the first time.

Fifty years later, Biden’s family members are under investigation for using his political office to enrich themselves.

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❗️ Putin has addressed the Russian people following the Central Election Commission’s release of the official presidential election results, where Vladimir Putin was re-elected president of Russia

❗️ A strike with high-precision weapons, including Kinzhal missiles, was carried out at night against decision-making centers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. The objectives of the strike were achieved and the facilities were struck.

The EU and US continue to put pressure on China, but this cannot become an obstacle to the development of trade and economic relations with Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. 

Commenting on the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine, Peskov said that "sending any foreign military contingents to Ukraine is fraught with very negative, even irreparable, consequences.”

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❗️Russian troops captured the Alebastrovaya railway station in the DPR, the Defense Ministry said.

🇷🇺🪖 Other statements from the Russian Defense Ministry’s briefing on the progress of the special military operation in Ukraine:

▪️ Russian troops struck places of concentration of foreign mercenary formations in the Sumy region;

▪️ Ukrainian forces lost three tanks during the day, and two Vampire MLRS vehicles were hit near Kupyansk;

▪️ Russian air defenses shot down 163 Ukrainian UAVs as well as 20 HIMARS and Vampire rockets overnight;

▪️ Russian forces hit a drone storage depot and a production and repair workshop for Ukrainian UAVs;

▪️ Ukrainian forces lost up to 120 military personnel, a tank, and a US-made radar station in the southern DPR;

▪️ Ukrainian forces lost up to 250 military personnel in the DPR;

▪️ Ukrainian forces lost more than 320 servicemen near Avdeyevka overnight.

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📹🇷🇺 Full footage of Vladimir Putin's address to the citizens of Russia after the official results of the Russian presidential election

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📹 The Russian Ministry of Defense showed footage of the destruction of manpower and equipment of Ukrainian saboteurs on the border with the Belgorod region.

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💥Smerch MLRS crews wipe out artillery crews of Ukrainian terrorist formations in border area in Belgorod region

A Zoopark radar station crew located the deployment of enemy MLRS and foreign-made howitzers in the border area in the Belgorod region. Smerch MLRS crews promptly moved to firing positions after acquiring their targets. The crews eliminated US-made M777 howitzers, Grad MLRS, and armored fighting vehicles of Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups.

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🏴‍☠️ Olaf Scholz has said that income from Russian assets does not belong to anyone, so he believes they can be used for military assistance to Ukraine

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What’s the plea deal the US is reportedly offering Assange?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the US government is contemplating offering a plea deal to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Insiders revealed that the Justice Department might dismiss the 17 charges under the Espionage Act if Assange agreed to plead guilty to a lesser offense of mishandling classified information, which is only a misdemeanor.

Assange could potentially accept this plea deal from his current location at London's HM Prison Belmarsh, where he has been detained since April 2019.

The plea bargain would bring an end to the legal battle the whistleblower has been engaged in over his extradition to the US. In addition, any time spent in prison in London would be considered time served, potentially resulting in Assange being released shortly after the deal is finalized.

In response, one of Assange’s defense attorneys, Barry Pollack, said in a statement: “It is inappropriate for Mr. Assange’s lawyers to comment while his case is before the UK High Court other than to say we have been given no indication that the Department of Justice intends to resolve the case and the United States is continuing with as much determination as ever to seek his extradition on all 18 charges, exposing him to 175 years in prison.”

Britain’s High Court is expected to decide shortly whether to grant Assange a further right to appeal his extradition.

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❗️ Russia has begun mass production of guided three-ton FAB-3000 aerial bombs, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated during an inspection of defense industry enterprises in the Russian Nizhny Novgorod region.

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Why was the Pentagon plan for the first operational airborne laser weapon scrapped?

Plans of testing a prototype Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) integrated on an AC-130J gunship have been tossed out by the US Air Force.

"After accomplishing significant end-to-end high power operation in an open-air ground test, the AHEL solid state laser system experienced technical challenges… These challenges delayed integration onto [the] designated AC-130J Block 20 aircraft past the available integration and flight test window," The War Zone cited Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) as saying.

In 2019, Lockheed Martin won the Pentagon’s five-year AHEL contract that involved supplying the laser source for the system and then helping integrate it onto an AC-130J gunship. The laser, with a beam control system, would have a 60-kilowatt power rating.

But once Lockheed completed factory acceptance testing and delivered the AHEL to the AFSOC in 2021, years of delay followed.

First, there were technical challenges as an older, Block 20 version of the Ghostrider, was chosen for the integration and testing. Officials worried that later integration with Block 30 might “require quite a bit of additional testing.”

Then the funding must have run out, as the Pentagon 2025 Fiscal Year budget request does not mention the AHEL.

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❗️ Recent statements of the Russian Ministry of Defense:

▪️ Production of FAB-1500 aerial bombs in the Nizhny Novgorod region has been doubled and that of FAB-500 bombs multiplied;

▪️ Sergei Shoigu was informed about the expansion of production capacities of the enterprise that produces and repairs ammunition for the Giatsint complex.

▪️ The production volume of modern artillery and aviation weapons by the Nizhny Novgorod plant was increased five-fold from 2023.

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Fact check: Is Russia really the one responsible for flooding the EU with cheap grain?

The European Commission is putting the finishing touches on stiff tariffs on Russian and Belarusian grain exports, with officials from Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltics claiming the “influx of Russian imports exerts pressure on the EU internal market and directly competes with the production of EU farmers,” and must be stopped.

🔶 In reality, Europe was never a prime market for Russian agricultural producers, accounting for less than five percent of all cereals, oil seeds and other foods imported by the EU in 2021, according to Eurostat.

🔶 From 2022 onward, as overall Russian exports to Europe plummeted by over 80%, food followed suit, with Russia selling just 1.1 million tons of cereals to the bloc between July 2023 and January 2024.

🔶 Over the same period, Ukrainian agricultural magnates enjoyed an export bonanza, made possible by Brussels’ EU’s June 2022 move to lift all customs duties and quotas on Ukrainian food goods. Over the past two years, Ukraine exported over 20 million tons of grains to the bloc, according to Eurostat.

🔶 European farmers have largely realized where the true threat to their survival is coming from, staging demonstrations to protest Ukrainian food imports, and expressing fears that big Ukrainian magnates with farms stretching across hundreds of thousands of hectares could crush small family farms in the EU’s east.

🔶 The EU has reached a provisional deal to continue allowing Ukrainian producers tariff-free access to its markets until June 2025, adding token “safeguard mechanisms” like “tariff-rate quotas if imports of poultry, eggs, sugar, oats, maize, groats and honey exceed the arithmetic mean of quantities imported in 2022 and 2023.”

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