⚛️ Nuclear energy in Europe: non-existent in Germany, waning in the UK after anti-Russian sanctions

Britain has announced that it is going to spend almost £200 million ($250 million) on a new plant to produce high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The project is supposed to boost the ailing nuclear energy sectors of the UK and France with the “futuristic nuclear fuel.”

This seems unrealistic in the context of steep decline in British nuclear energy output and a recent fine of €12.9 billion which French electricity giant EDF had to pay over construction delays and power cuts.

Why the decline? First, the shortage of nuclear fuel after sanctions were imposed on imports from Russia. Second, the exit of Chinese investors due to European sanctions.

By awarding the Urenco firm £196 million to build the new HALEU-producing facility in Cheshire “we want to wean our European allies away from over-reliance on Russia for nuclear fuel,” Nuclear and Renewables Minister Andrew Bowie.

Compensating for tens of billions of losses by investing just £196 million sounds unrealistic.

For the EU and UK, the decision to impose sanctions on Rosatom after February 2022 could not come at a worse time. In Germany, the last nuclear power station was shut down very same year. German minister of economy Robert Habeck from the Green Party is now accused of not informing the public about the risks of the “exit from atom.”

The British nuclear sector is also struggling. Boris Johnson’s promise to make one quarter of the nation’s energy output nuclear by the year 2050 is already dead. A four-year delay in the Hinckley Point C reactor project has been announced that will push back completion until 2031.

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Moldovan activists lit candles in memory of the 1,418 days of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 fought by the USSR against Nazi Germany and its allies – a part of World War II.

The event took place in Chisinau at the Eternity Memorial Complex and at the monument to the heroes of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol.

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🇷🇺🇦🇲 Trade turnover between Russia and Armenia has exceeded a record $7 billion, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

“The trade turnover has reached more than $7 billion. There has never been such a volume in our trade and economic ties before,” Putin said.

Putin also claimed Moscow-Yerevan relations are “developing very well”, saying cooperation within the Eurasian Economic Union is beneficial for both sides.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov highlighted that Russia is optimistic about its relations with Armenia.

"We see that there is the political will of the two leaders to discuss this [issues], we will wait for the results. There is a dialogue, there is political will to continue this dialogue. There is mutual interest of the parties," Peskov said in a video posted by journalist Pavel Zarubin on his Telegram channel.

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The Zelensky assassination plot: a smokescreen to divert public attention or internal strife?

The alleged plot "could be an artificial ideological construct intended to divert attention from genuinely significant issues, such as the forcible connoscription of individuals and their deployment to the front lines," political analyst Alexander Asafov told Sputnik.

It could also be used as a pretext for "the deprivation of basic human rights of citizens who live abroad, and a host of other problems, including the Zelensky legitimacy issue," he added, referring to the fact that the Ukrainian leader's presidential term expires later this month.

Some experts also believe that a fierce struggle has broken out in Zelensky’s inner circle, following on from the conflict between the Ukrainian president and Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhny and other generals over the botched summer counteroffensive.

If the alleged plot was not a PR stunt, then Zelensky could have been targeted by either the military or political competitors, according to Asafov.

The analyst noted that Ukrainian politicians are embroiled in a behind-the-scenes struggle. Some of Zelensky's competitors either reside abroad or frequently travel there for consultations. Figures like former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have a history of close collaboration with the US Democratic Party.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) alleged earlier this month that the West is extremely concerned about Zelensky's growing unpopularity at home, and has stepped up its search for an alternative Ukrainian president.

According to the agency, the West has contacted Petro Poroshenko, Vitaly Klitschko, Andriy Yermak, Valery Zaluzhny and former speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament Dmytro Razumkov.

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The Paris Olympic defense system mistakenly identifies air conditioners as drones

The €350m automated system, designed to protect outdoor events at the Games, confuses propellers on air conditioning units with drone hardware.

In dense urban environments, drones have reportedly been detected one in every three and only within a range of 800 meters.

The system also confused propellers on air conditioning units with drones, according to a source familiar with the tests.

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🇷🇸🇨🇳 Serbia and China have vowed to develop cooperation and implement plans under the Belt and Road Initiative, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a joint statement.

Xi visited Serbia on May 7-8 and held a meeting with Vucic. In addition to the joint statement, the parties signed about 30 more documents on mutual understanding and cooperation in various fields.

"The two sides will take advantage of the new phase of high-quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative, jointly implement the agreements reached at the Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, deepen and expand cooperation in areas such as economy and trade, investment, science and technology, innovation, the digital sector, as well as information and communications, jointly support the security of projects and company personnel, which contributes to building the foundation for the establishment of a China-Serbia community with a shared future in the new era," the joint statement released by the Serbian presidency said.

The leaders also agreed to increase bilateral trade, particularly by supplying Serbian agricultural products to China, to work together to develop Serbian infrastructure, including railroads to increase the number of freight trains, and to jointly develop medicine and biotechnology, the statement added.

The countries will support respect for international law and the UN Charter, territorial integrity of all states, and advocate an "equal and orderly multipolar world," against hegemony and the politics of force, the presidents said in the statement.

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❗️ US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, to the disapproving shouts of her colleagues, announced the initiation of proceedings to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

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The US House of Representatives blocked the initiative to oust Speaker Johnson proposed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green.

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US President Joe Biden said that in the event of an invasion of Rafah he would stop supplying Israel with bombs and artillery shells but would continue the transfer of air defense equipment.

Biden claimed, however, that he did not believe such an operation has begun.

"If they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem," Biden said in an interview on CNN.

On May 7, local media, citing the Israeli army, reported that the IDF had taken control of the Gazan side of the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt.

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US President Joe Biden has admitted publicly for the first time that US weapons supplied to Israel have caused civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” he confessed during an interview with CNN.

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Statements made by Western politicians about a possible sending of their military contingents to Ukraine are "extremely irresponsible" and can be seen as an escalation of the conflict, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin has told Sputnik.

"These are extremely irresponsible statements by Western politicians. And even the statements can be regarded as an escalation of the conflict on their part," Naryshkin said, commenting on the increasing frequency of statements about the possibility of sending Western militaries to Ukraine.

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China and Serbia form partnership after depraved CIA attack in Belgrade (Part 1)

May 7, 1999 is a date known across Serbia as the day the United States conducted a deadly bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The strike in the capital city, the only one planned in its totality by the US Central Intelligence Agency, killed three Chinese citizens sheltering there and injured at least 20.

The bombing occurred amidst NATO’s 78-day assault on the former Yugoslavia, which killed hundreds. Decades later increased rates of cancer and birth defects are still observed in the country after the alliance’s use of radioactive depleted uranium during its operation.

Serbian-American journalist Nebojsa Malic joined Sputnik’s Fault Lines program as the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack is observed, an occasion acknowledged during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic trip to Serbia.

“The NATO bombing was super controversial,” noted Malic. “The people who were killed were Chinese journalists that had taken refuge in the embassy because a lot of journalists had previously been at Serbian television, but that was hit in April of '99 during the night, and NATO declared it a legitimate military target after the fact. And nobody prosecuted anybody for war crimes.”

NATO’s attack on the former Yugoslavia, conducted after the UN Security Council’s rejection of the proposal, was illegal under international law. The military alliance justified the assault under the pretense of “humanitarian intervention” amid ethnic strife in the region. The event, along with NATO’s 1995 attack in Bosnia and Herzegovina, signaled the unmasking of NATO as an openly offensive alliance after the end of the Cold War.

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China and Serbia form partnership after depraved CIA attack in Belgrade (Part 2)

“For 40 years… a clandestine intelligence and armed operations organization [has existed] in several member states,” read a European Parliament resolution in 1990 acknowledging the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Gladio. “Military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime.”

Modern observers draw parallels between Operation Gladio and NATO countries’ backing of jihadist organizations in the Middle East, demonstrating that Western powers are willing to covertly support violence and terrorism for political ends. But as the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s briefly left the United States as the world’s only superpower, the military alliance openly engaged in such acts of terror, leaving a deep impression upon those who remember 1999’s criminal attack on China’s embassy in Belgrade, Serbia.

“When president Xi actually wrote about it in the oldest newspaper in the Balkans he named the three people who died [and] he said ‘we will never forget and we will never allow this to happen again,’” Malic explained. “The entire op-ed was basically saying, ‘we have an ironclad friendship with Serbia, we agree on a lot of international issues, and we're going to work together for a more just, equitable and fair globalization in a multipolar world.’”

The two countries’ partnership has resulted in a strong economic relationship, with China becoming Serbia’s largest foreign investor. “The Chinese have been able to leverage some of the steelworks and mines that were abandoned by the West [during the 1990s] as being unprofitable whereas the Chinese have made them very profitable,” Malic noted.

Partnership with China promises to restore Serbia’s industry and infrastructure, with a Chinese-built high-speed rail line linking Belgrade with the city of Novi Sad recently being unveiled.

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The head of Moldova's Gagauz autonomous region Evgenia Gutsul and the leader of the Moldovan opposition 'Shor' party Ilan Shor took a piece of the Eternal Flame to be carried to Moldova.

On the eve of Victory Day, the politicians laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Alexander Garden.

“Today is a great day. Because today, together with my colleagues, we attended a very morally important event for us. Today we are taking a piece of the flame to our native Moldova. We will give it to absolutely every region where there will be a procession and honoring in celebration of Victory Day,” Shor said after the laying of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“We consider ourselves and we are descendants of the great victors, because it was the Victory of one big, great country. Yes, we had many different peoples and nationalities, but the Victory was one for all. Today, unfortunately, there are callous people in [Moldova] who try to rewrite history, but we will never allow this. For me personally this is a very important day, because both of my grandfathers reached Berlin. I am proud of this and I will always be proud of this and I pass it on to my children,” Shor emphasized.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to attack an oil depot in Russia's southern Krasnodar Territory with drones. Six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) crashed on the territory of the facility causing a fire, the regional response center said in a statement on Telegram.

"Early on Thursday, the criminal Kiev regime attempted to attack a civilian facility - an oil depot in the village of Yurovka near the city of Anapa using unmanned aerial vehicles... About 6 UAVs were repelled, but a few drones fell on the territory of the oil depot. As a result, a fire broke out and several tanks were damaged," the statement said.

The center said 62 people and 20 pieces of equipment are involved in extinguishing the fire. No injuries were reported per preliminary information.

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The United States' defenses against hypersonic weapons are inadequate, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space and Missile Defense John Hill said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

“We have some systems to defend in the terminal stage, but we need more,” Hill said Wednesday, responding to a question about his response during a hypothetical launch of a "hypersonic missile from Murmansk at six thousand miles per hour.”

“Our hypersonic defenses are inadequate,” he admitted.

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Following the signing of a cooperation agreement with Russia's Promsvyazbank, Moldova's autonomous region of Gagauzia is negotiating cooperation with other Russian banks, Yevgenia Gutsul, the head of the region, told Sputnik.

"We are in talks, of course. We are working with Promsvyazbank only for now. We do not rule out that we can [work] with others as well," Gutsul said.

On April 9, Gutsul signed an agreement with Russia's Promsvyazbank aimed at establishing a long-term partnership and developing financial and credit cooperation, in particular, for the issuance of Russian Mir cards to retirees and public sector workers in the region to receive monthly financial aid. According to the plan of the local authorities, all retirees had already received access to Russia's Mir payment system by May 1, and some of them have already received the additional payment to their pensions in the amount of 2,000 lei ($113).

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Russian air defenses destroyed two Ukrainian airplane-type drones over the Bryansk region, Governor Alexander Bogomaz said.

No injuries or damage were reported per preliminary information, according to the governor.

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