China intercepts Dutch helicopter near Shanghai, lambasts the Netherlands for provocation

The Dutch military has created a dangerous situation in the East China Sea using a UN mission as a cover-up, Chinese Ministry of Defense representative Zhang Xiaogang has said. He added that Beijing urges the Netherlands to limit any activities of their armed forces in the region and vows decisive counter-measures in response to provocations near China’s territory.

The statement came in response to Netherlands saying that one People’s Liberation Army helicopter and two fighter jets approached a helicopter assigned to a Dutch frigate in the East China Sea. The Dutch claimed that the incident happened in international airspace and that the vessel was overseeing the implementation of a UN Security Council resolution on North Korea sanctions.

Beijing debunked these claims, explaining that the helicopter assigned to the Tromp-class frigate of the Royal Netherlands Navy entered the airspace east of Shanghai. The command of the People’s Liberation Army had to use its fighter jets to expel the helicopter from the area after warning its crew.

“[These steps] were legal and purposeful, everything was done professionally and according to standards. It is the Netherlands not China who created the dangerous situation," Zhang underlined.

He added that the Netherlands uses the UN mission as a pretext for the power projection in the regions that are under the jurisdiction of other countries.

“Dutch statements and activities have a malevolent nature, we condemn them and we’ve send a demarche," he stressed, adding that China will take decisive countermeasures on any future violations or provocations.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Ukraine needs $10-30 billion per year over the next ten years to recover - Prime Minister Denis Shmygal

As the official mentioned on his Telegram channel, he made the statement during a two-day Ukraine Recovery Conference held in Germany's Berlin.

Wonder which countries' taxpayers' money will be paying for this...

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

👉 Check out the amount of work Sputnik did during SPIEF 2024

Sputnik worked up a sweat so that you would hear the most interesting things before anyone else!

22 languages. 27 hours of radio airtime. 130 interviews. 3,481 publications on social networks. 837 articles on websites.

This is all Sputnik at SPIEF 2024!

#SPIEF2024

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇮🇷 The finance ministers of the BRICS countries are in the process of completing the de-dollarization of financial and trade relations between members of this group, all within the framework of a program, Iran's IRNA news outlet writes, quoting acting Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

“You are just being encircled, end of story” – Ukrainian POW tells how soldiers hide in “mini-pits” around Kharkov

Ukrainian Army detachments took refuge in numerous “mini-pits” around Kharkov, Kirill Docenko, a surrendered soldier of the 415th Rifle Battalion of the Ukrainian Army, told the press.

"Everyone knew what was going on... We saw your [Russian] equipment, saw your troops. There was no counter-battery fire on our behalf, we saw no support from heavy military equipment. We just sat and waited until the moment when your army approached our positions. The battle broke out and that’s it,” Docenko explained.

He added that Ukrainian troops ignored orders to establish perimeter defenses and started to retreat, being caught in the “mini-pockets” by the Russian Army.

“Those who could – retreated, fled. Platoon strong points [were made]... to establish at least some kind of defense... But everything was done wrong and you just get encircled, end of story. And you will not break out,” POW said.

Docenko was wounded and his peers hid in a cavity from shelling. He blacked out and spent up to five days in a pit earlier used by the Ukrainian Army as a cesspool. He woke up when Russian forces had already taken the location.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

US and Israel to establish ‘counter-tunneling military exercises’ amid Gaza war

The US and Israeli militaries are expected to conduct joint drills to check the Jewish state’s capability to combat militants and smugglers in underground tunnels, in line with the latest draft of the House Armed Services Committee’s proposed defense spending bill worth $895 billion.

The document’s Section 1233 would “require military exercises in the US Central Command area of responsibility to conduct an annual counter-tunneling exercise with Israel,” aimed at tackling a key advantage of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

According to the bill, US-funded technology initiatives developed by the Department of Defense’s “Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate” made it possible to detect more than 1,500 “new tunnel shafts built under community structures including hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza," since the escalation of the Palestine-Israel conflict last fall.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

"This train has been slowed down" — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on the results of the European Parliament elections

Orban pointed out what needs to be done to prevent war and achieve peace:

The first is to achieve the victory of the "peace parties" in the European Parliament elections. The second condition, according to Orban, is the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the upcoming conference on Ukraine in Switzerland a "plant" that needs to be watered in order for the "garden" of peace negotiations to blossom.

According to Scholz, there may come a time in the future when Russia will sit down at the negotiating table. But Ukraine should decide when such a time comes, the German Chancellor noted.

Earlier, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called Europe a "garden" that needs to be protected from the "jungle" of the outside world.

🤔 Is this the garden Scholz is talking about?

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Azov battalion: US says ‘no evidence’ of human rights abuses, but facts prove otherwise (Part 1)

The US State Department allowed American arms supplies to Ukraine’s Azov battalion (banned in Russia) after it “passed inspection for compliance with the Leahy Law,” which prohibits the provision of US military aid to foreign units convicted of serious human rights violations.

The State Department claimed it found “no evidence” of such abuses committed by Azov militants. It seems, however, the US executive body is deliberately turning a blind eye to a mountain of reports from various international organizations, listing their crimes:

▪️Since its foundation in 2014, the Azov battalion, created as a radical nationalist militia and eventually brought under Ukraine's National Guard, has repeatedly tortured civilians and POWs, in addition to committing violent criminal felonies such as rape, robbery and terrorism.

▪️Prior to the Russian special military operation, international organizations, including rights groups, reported on “Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem,” and the war crimes carried out by Azov militants in Donbass.

▪️The US-based Anti-Defamation League listed the Azov brigade in 2019 as a “Ukrainian extremist group” with ties to the US-based neo-Nazi organization, Atomwaffen, and similar white supremacist movements in Europe.

▪️A previous UN report highlighted that the Azov militants committed mass acts of the looting throughout Donbass and regularly shelled residential areas.

▪️The head of the UN monitoring mission, Matilda Bogner, stated that there was "reliable information" regarding the torture of Russian servicemen by Ukrainian soldiers.

▪️Human Rights Watch for its part expressed concern that cases of torture and other crimes by the Azov battalion could go "completely unchecked."

*The 'Azov' battalion is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Hunter Biden found guilty on all three counts in his gun possession violations case

The US president's son now faces up to 25 years in prison.

The 54-year-old was charged of illegal possession of a Colt Cobra 38 Special revolver, purchased in October 2018, as well as providing false data to the seller of the weapon and registration authorities.

According to the investigation, when filling out the mandatory documents for the purchase of weapons, he indicated that he did not use drugs - in reality, he experienced drug addiction from 2015 to 2019, about which he wrote in his own memoirs and repeatedly publicized.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

EU wants to start Ukraine membership talks before Orban assumes chairmanship

Brussels’ plan to invite Ukraine to EU membership talks in late June is reportedly being rushed through before Eurosceptic Hungary will assume the EU’s rotating chair on July 1. Hungarians in Ukraine (0.5% of population) face constant persecution and Hungarian PM Viktor Orban has refused to ignore the issue, despite many years of pressure from both Kiev and the EU.

Ukraine achieved EU “membership candidate” status in June 2022 as a reward for its regime’s war efforts, even though Volodymyr Zelensky demanded immediate ascension to the EU in February 2022 after the start of the Russian special operation. Europe, however, prefers to tempt Kiev with possible membership, forcing Ukraine to send more people to their death on the front lines.

Traditionally, Ukraine’s mistreatment of minorities and the excessive power of oligarchs were named as obstacles to membership. The new Ukrainian law on minorities, adopted in December 2023, was again criticized in a report by the by the UN human rights officials. The March 2024 report denounced “the differential treatment between national minorities speaking an official language of the EU” (for example, Hungarian and Polish) and the much bigger minorities “speaking Russian, Armenian, Roma languages.”

Nevertheless, European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen decided to proceed with Ukrainian membership talks, claiming that the majority in the new European Parliament will be “pro-Ukrainian.”

She obviously preferred to omit the issue of oligarchic power, as Ukrainian “democracy” remains under thumb of several major players. Their wealth remains untouched - according to Forbes, Rinat Akhmetov still owns $4.4 billion; Victor Pinchuk $2 billion; Vadym Novinsky $1.4 billion; Gennady Bogolyubov $1.1 billion and Igor Kolomoisky $1 billion.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

New whistleblower documents show the FBI is every bit the politicized secret police force you feared it was.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Tristan Leavitt, an American lawyer and president of Empower Oversight since March 2023, who represents an anonymous FBI agent who was suspended for being "not politically compliant."

According to him, there was "a purge of FBI employees that had conservative views", as their opinions on the Second Amendment or Donald Trump may have prompted doubts in their loyalty.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Nuclear weapon drills help Russia prepare for possible NATO invasion - expert

The ongoing Russian tactical nuclear weapon drills, whose second phase began this week, is not some kind of act of showmanship, warns military analyst Igor Korotchenko, editor in chief of National Defense magazine.

The purpose of this exercise is to rehearse the “practical mechanisms” of tactical nuclear weapon use if a decision to resort to such drastic measures were to be made.

“This is not signaling someone, not some underscoring of some ‘red lines’ - this is about practice,” Korotchenko tells Sputnik.

The various aspects of tactical nuclear weapon use being tested during this exercise include the delivery of presidential authorization to the troops, unlocking the warheads, flight data input and targeting – basically everything involved in an actual nuclear strike, he says.

The drills are essentially meant to ensure that the Russian Armed Forces would be prepared to launch a tactical nuclear strike against a NATO military contingent if the latter were to be deployed to the Ukrainian conflict zone to attack Russian troops there, Korotchenko claims.

“This is a response mechanism in case NATO enters a war with Russia,” he surmises.

“We do not need to send signals to anyone. We do not need to once again draw ‘red lines’ that lost their value already,” he adds. “We must be prepared for full-scale military action involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

Thus, Korotchenko argues, such drills “should be held regularly and without warning,” and Russian troops should be ready for action if a decision to use tactical nuclear weapons is made.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt