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Bad luck and coincidence? European political mavericks like Fico face unexplained deaths

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has suggested viewing the attempt on the life of the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in the context of Western preparations “to directly participate in the Ukraine conflict.” He also cited history, saying that such attempts have been made many times before.

Indeed, context and history help unravel 71-year-old Juraj Cintula's motives, who believed the narrative demonizing Fico.

Similar assassination attempts and the “strange deaths” of non-mainstream politicians have happened before, but were all hushed up by the press.

▪️The foiled assassination of France’s Marine Le Pen in 2017 or a strange injection that nearly killed the co-chairman of Germany’s AfD party Tino Crupalla in 2023 are good examples. But the most mysterious part are the two sudden “suicides” of longtime German Vice-Chancellor Jürgen Möllemann and Polish Vice-Prime Minister Andrzej Lepper. None were properly investigated.

▪️Möllemann, an experienced sky-diver, died on June 5, 2003, as his parachute malfunctioned during the jump - minutes after the Bundestag lifted his parliamentary immunity. Right before that, the politician had been accused of anti-Semitism due to his criticism of Israel. He also wrote that FDP party leaders prevented him from becoming foreign minister at the behest of then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon.

▪️For his part, Lepper, Poland’s former vice-PM and the leader of a “pro-Russian” Samooborona (Self-Defense) party, was found hanged in his office on August 5, 2011. According to the official version, Lepper - a rich farmer and father of three, hung himself on the hook of his punching bag “in a moment of depression.” A few months earlier Lepper visited Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and spoke in favor of good ties with Moscow and Minsk. Lepper’s family refuses to believe the suicide version until now.

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'Fico antagonized a lot of powerful forces' - expert on the reasons of Slovak PM assassination attempt

"The things he said about Ukraine and the origins of the war in Ukraine went far beyond anything Viktor Orban has said. Viktor Orban has simply made it a pragmatic issue, saying it has nothing to do with Hungarians... But he never really got into what really happened in Ukraine - Fico did. When you say things like that, you're clearly antagonizing powerful forces," Dr. George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at The Global Policy Institute, tells Sputnik.


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Australians are sick of funding a nation of beggars - Aussie Cossack

“Australians and Ukrainians don't share similarities. Australians are hardworking people. Ukrainians are not. Ukrainians are used to standing in line for handouts, as they are in Germany and Poland and the UK and France and everywhere else all over the world.”


He stressed that “It's Russia that shares a common history with Australia, it's Russian troops, who fought side by side with Australian troops in World War II and World War I.”

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🇷🇺🇨🇳 The 8th Russian-Chinese Expo takes place in the Chinese city of Harbin

The exposition is held as part of the IV Forum in Harbin on May 17-21. Companies from 16 regions of the Russian Federation present their stands there.

The event is designed to stimulate the socio-economic development of the two countries, more effectively use their investment opportunities, improve the implementation of joint projects and increase the supply of quality products.

The exposition area reaches 388,000 square meters and has over five thousand types of goods.

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Sputnik International
'Fico antagonized a lot of powerful forces' - expert on the reasons of Slovak PM assassination attempt "The things he said about Ukraine and the origins of the war in Ukraine went far beyond anything Viktor Orban has said. Viktor Orban has simply made it…
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Expert: The shooting of Slovakian PM Fico will cause more EU pressure to censor political speech

"I think there's going to be more pressure to censor political speech. And I think the powerful forces within the EU, what do they have within their crosshairs? They have within their crosshairs the populist movements. They hate the populist movements. They're afraid of them. And they're going to use this to censor a crackdown on the populist movements," Dr. George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at The Global Policy Institute, tells Sputnik.


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For security purposes? Meet the Asia-Pacific military alliances

Moscow and Beijing believe that the creation of closed military alliances is harmful and counterproductive, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters after talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing. But the West has been encroaching on the region for decades, creating new blocs to contain Eurasian nations.

🔸 This week, Washington and Tokyo signed the Cooperative Development Project Arrangement on jointly developing the Glide Phase Interceptor, designed to fit into the US Navy’s Aegis ballistic missile defense-equipped destroyers and “strengthen regional deterrence.”

🔸 In June 2022, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the US and the UK announced the establishment of the Partners in the Blue Pacific “to bolster Pacific regionalism” by naval forces of the alliance’s member states.

🔸 September 2021 saw the creation of AUKUS, a security alliance between Australia, the UK and the US to initiate a pathway for Canberra to acquire nuclear-powered but conventionally-armed submarines. With Japan already cleared to join AUKUS, Yoji Koda, a former commander of the country’s Self Defense Fleet, said Tokyo should be prepared to contain the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan by blocking strategic straits.

🔸 In 2007, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, commonly known as the QUAD, was established between Australia, India, Japan and the US, which regularly hold joint military exercises under the alliance’s auspices. Many argue that the US looks to create a fully-fledged military anti-Chinese coalition in the region based on QUAD, which is often referred to as the “Asian NATO.”

🔸 In 1946, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US was formalized. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organization that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries."

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Why Russia needs buffer zone amid current offensive in Kharkov region

Russia has no plans to take control of the city of Kharkov in northeastern Ukraine because the goal is to create a buffer zone, President Vladimir Putin has announced.

Generally speaking, a buffer zone is an area for the deployment of troops who have an order to prevent an enemy from carrying out combat missions, military observer and Afghanistan and Syria combat veteran Anatoly Matviychuk told Sputnik.

As for Belgorod, "the buffer zone is an area from which standard artillery systems of the Ukrainian army will not be able to reach Belgorod and its populated areas," he noted.

"The length of the zone could be up to 100 kilometers, because it's necessary to protect the population of Belgorod from the enemy's cannon and rocket artillery. This means that the zone will include all settlements of the Kharkov region from the point of view of the Russian border, including Kharkov," Matviychuk said.


According to him, President Putin rightly emphasized the necessity of creating the buffer zone to protect the Russian territory from the enemy's terrorist attacks amid the ongoing advance of the Russian army.

"If Kharkov falls into this zone, we will have to take control of the city to prevent the Ukrainian army from shelling Belgorod," the observer noted.


He recalled that the "most convenient buffer zone" in the world is the Golan Heights, an area controlled by the Israeli army near the Sea of Galilee and Syria.

"This is a classic example of Israel fencing off the Arabs with the help of a buffer zone," Matviychuk said, referring to a number of other buffer zones, including between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan.


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Eurasian security with zero Euro-Atlantic flavor – Lavrov unveils details of Putin-Xi talks

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping discussed the Beijing global security initiative, said Russia’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov at the XXXII Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defensive Policy.

“Chairman Xi Jinping’s initiative on global security was discussed during our visit to China at meetings both within the framework of delegations and at a meeting in a narrow group of leaders face to face. We see great reason that the practical promotion of the idea of ensuring global security would begin with the formation of the foundations of Eurasian security without any Euro-Atlantic flavor,” he said.


The minister noted that Russia remains open to dialogue with the West, including on the issues of security and strategic stability.

“But, firstly, not from a position of strength, not from a position of one’s own exclusivity, but only on equal terms and with respect for each other’s interests,” Lavrov underscored.


The second important point for Russia, he added, is that the dialogue must be conducted with the full scope of the problems that exist in today's world in the field of strategic stability and the military-political landscape.

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🇮🇷 Iran showed footage of the operational deployment of the advanced floating base IRIS Shahid Mahdavi in the Indian ocean.

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▪️Why Russia needs buffer zone amid current offensive in Kharkov region

▪️For security purposes? Meet the Asia-Pacific military alliances

▪️Australians are sick of funding a nation of beggars

▪️Bad luck and coincidence? European political mavericks like Fico face unexplained deaths

▪️China sells record amount of dollar assets as US remains 'world bully'

▪️Expert: The shooting of Slovakian PM Fico will cause more EU pressure to censor political speech

▪️The 8th Russian-Chinese Expo takes place in the Chinese city of Harbin

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"Profit-generating" and woke brainwashing: What's happened to US military?

The third Saturday of May is celebrated in the US as Armed Forces Day to honor all active members of the country’s military.

This year’s celebrations take place as the US war machine appears to be but a shadow of its former self, its reputation tarnished by the de facto humiliating defeat in Afghanistan in 2021 and the inability to stop Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

The decline of the once-powerful military could be traced to the 1990s, the time right after the end of the Cold War, argues former US State Department counterterrorism analyst Scott Bennett, saying that liberal reforms quickly “cascaded into an avalanche of social justice”.

“Suddenly you saw a weakening of the military and that was the beginning of the end of the US military,” Bennett says.


The 9/11 terrorist attacks triggered a wave of US military interventionism across the world, ostensibly aimed at fighting terrorism but in reality serving as an “enrichment exercise for the military-industrial complex.”

“So you've seen the military transform from a nationally-owned organization to an organization that was really being used to feed corporate entities like Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, a myriad of defense contractors, missile manufacturers, arms dealers, and that was another death blow to the military because suddenly it became a profit-generating organization,” Bennett remarks.


According to him, the US military has suddenly lost interest in actually winning wars and resolving conflicts – instead, it aims to perpetuate conflicts and use the armed forces “as a social re-engineering organization” - with the promotion of feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism under Obama.

“They completely corroded and decayed the military from within, causing a lot of the best soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors to depart, to not re-enlist,” he states.


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Russian air defenses destroyed a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile over the Belgorod region, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

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Armed Forces Day: Is the US ready for a real military challenge?

The United States’ military is surprisingly amateurish, says Mike James, a US Navy veteran and a mass communication specialist petty officer who served in Iraq in 2008.

“We're surprisingly caught up in such an enormous sense of false superiority and security that there's just really bad decisions made all up and down the chain of command, even at the highest levels. Yeah, just generally quite unprofessional and immature and goofy,” he tells Sputnik.


According to him, Western military science as a whole is essentially “an imperial project” and depends on “complete hegemony.”

“It depends on complete domination of the battlespace. So that means overwhelming logistics, overwhelming recruitment and fitness of their soldiers, of their troops. It requires overwhelming approval of the populace, the general populace of the nation or of the Western world, of the multiple nations participating in it,” he says.


James notes that the majority of US military recruits enlist for “education and travel, work experience” rather than out of a “huge feeling of patriotism,” with the veteran adding that the US military has become heavily reliant on immigrants and foreign nations who are “operating as mercenaries.”

He also did not seem particularly impressed with the current level of US military tech, suggesting that both the US military hardware and IT infrastructure have “become a giant hunk of s**t.”

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Israeli political crisis deepens as IDF failures prompt cabinet resignation threat

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power appeared under threat this weekend when a key member of the country’s war cabinet threatened to resign.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz issued an ultimatum Saturday, claiming he would leave the emergency political formation if Netanyahu does not implement his six-point plan for the country’s military operation in Gaza by June 8. Among Gantz’s demands are efforts to ensure the return of Hamas-held Israeli captives, a demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and a move towards international administration of the Palestinian territory.

“If you choose the path of fanatics and lead the entire nation to the abyss — we will be forced to quit the government,” he said.


Gantz, a retired army general, has criticized Netanyahu’s prosecution of the country’s military campaign in Gaza, reflecting public frustration in Israel over the prime minister’s failure to secure the return of Israeli hostages.

“The people of Israel are watching you,” Gantz said in the prime-time address to Netanyahu.


The threat suggests the transpartisan political cooperation that emerged after October 7 threatens to break down, potentially leading to calls for new elections. Critics have claimed Netanyahu has prolonged Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to maintain his hold on power. The Prime Minister was previously under investigation on multiple charges of corruption, with the judicial process against him set to resume if he is toppled.

The loss of the support of Gantz could make Netanyahu more politically reliant on hard liner members of his coalition such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have called for the rebuilding of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

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