🇷🇺🪖More statements from the Russian Defense Ministry's weekly briefing on the special military operation's progress:

▪️Russian troops liberated seven settlements in the Donetsk People's Republic, in the Kharkov region and in Russia's Kursk region.

▪️Ukraine lost up to 1,100 troops and two Leopard tanks in the Russian Vostok Battlegroup's combat zone.

▪️Russian aviation shot down a Neptun-MD missile and 36 HIMARS missiles.

▪️Russian aviation shot down two Ukrainian MiG-29 aircrafts.

▪️Ukraine lost up to 1,365 militants in the Russian Yug Battlegroup's combat zone.

▪️Ukraine lost up to 2,255 soldiers and 11 tanks in the areas of responsibility of Russia's Battlegroup Sever.

▪️Ukraine lost up to 460 troops and 10 electronic warfare stations in the Russian Dnepr Battlegroup's combat zone.

▪️Ukraine lost more than 250 militants in the Kursk region over the day.

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📹Oreshnik warheads get as hot as the surface of the Sun: Putin

The president revealed a key problem that Russian defense scientists had to solve when creating the new weapons system: preventing warheads from “melting like a popsicle” in flight.

How was this problem solved? Take a listen to Putin's remarks at the Future Technologies Forum.

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Russian forces HUNT DOWN & SMOKE OUT Ukrainian combatants during Kursk region op

Paratroopers from the 106th Guards Tula Airborne Division ferreted out and neutralized a Ukrainian military unit that was hiding in a private residence during a mop-up operation in a recently liberated area of Russia’s Kursk region.

A drone operator provided real-time guidance to the ground forces, helping them accurately target enemy fortified positions while demonstrating effective coordination between reconnaissance and assault teams.

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🗳 Holding elections in wartime isn’t hard, Zelensky: here’s proof

Ukraine’s self-proclaimed ‘president’ is stonewalling US demands to hold elections to prove his legitimacy, citing the conflict with Russia, prompting an annoyed Trump to dub him a “dictator” with a “4% approval” rating.

Elections during wartime aren’t as difficult to organize as Zelensky implies.

🟠The US held a presidential vote in 1864, in the middle of its Civil War – the deadliest conflict in American history. Abraham Lincoln rejected calls by aides to suspend the vote, despite predictions he’d lose, stressing that elections were a test of a nation’s ability to be “strong enough to maintain its own existence in great emergencies.”

“We cannot have free governments without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us,” he famously said.

🟠The US held the 1944 election in the middle of WWII, and voted during a series of post-war conflicts, from Korea and Vietnam to the 2000’s ‘forever wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.

🟠Britain has done the same, choosing a new PM in 1945 while the Allies were still at war with Japan, resulting in a Potsdam Conference where Winston Churchill was replaced midway by Clement Attlee.

🟠Iran held elections in 1981 after the assassination of its president. Ali Khamenei, current Supreme Leader, was elected, and reelected in 1985. Through these years, Iran was engulfed in a brutal war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which launched gas attacks targeting its military, and its cities.

🟠Iraq voted in 2005, two years after the US invasion, and at the height of a massive insurgency.

🟠Afghanistan held seven votes during NATO’s occupation (though they didn’t save the puppet government from crumbling once the West pulled out).

🟠Same goes for other countries wracked by long-term conflicts, from Colombia and Sri Lanka to Syria and the DRC, which continued voting during civil strife and foreign-backed dirty wars.

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💬 Ukrainian forces set up multiple firing positions near residential buildings in Bogoyavlenka, DPR, to shield themselves behind civilians.

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🔊LIVE NOW: Lavrov holds a press conference following the third plenary session of the G20 Ministerial Meeting

👉 Watch live in our Telegram

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🤡Really, Nigel? UK Reform leader claims Zelensky ‘is not a dictator’

“Let’s be clear, Zelensky is not a dictator, but it’s only right and proper that Ukrainians have a timeline for elections. I mean after all I recently said that I thought Keir Starmer was behaving like a dictator because he’s canceled the vote of 5 ½ million people in local elections,” Nigel Farage told GB News when asked about Trump’s ‘dictator’ comments, saying they shouldn’t be taken “literally.”

Farage’s comments on Zelensky just don’t square with the reality, which is that the Ukrainian junta leader runs the country under martial law, has banned opposition parties, jailed politicians, persecutes Ukraine’s largest church, runs a corruption racket worth $100 billion, and oversees a military recruitment system pressganging unwilling men into service.

Farage better be careful, or he could be overtaken by someone like Andrew Tate as leader of Britain’s anti-globalists.

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⚡️ Zelensky's regime is consuming hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been directed towards the development of needy countries — Lavrov

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❗️NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has told Volodymyr Zelensky to stand his ground before Ukraine peace talks begin – Lavrov

🇷🇺 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made key statements at a press conference following the third plenary session of the G20 Ministerial Meeting:

🔸 All G20 foreign ministers welcomed the Russia-US talks in Riyadh

🔸 More reasonable voices on the Ukraine issue are coming from the US

🔸 Washington’s unwillingness to support the anti-Russian United Nations resolution reflects US President Donald Trump's pragmatism

🔸 The mere fact that Russia and the US sat down and talked is seen as betrayal in the West—and that is "unhealthy"

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Trump’s presidency is ‘counterrevolution’ against Obama & Biden’s radically liberal, Robespierre-style politics

Donald Trump’s return to power is not a “revolution,” as it has recently been dubbed by his enemies, but a “return to normalcy,” a “return to common sense,” historian Victor Davis Hanson said in a cutting analysis of the turmoil America and the world have been put through over the past decade-and-a-half under radical Democrats.

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What are DOGE's TOP-5 departments facing budget cuts and audits?

Various federal programs are on the chopping block as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leads the effort to drastically reduce taxpayers' money being wasted.
Here are some targets:

USAID

🔸 DOGE halted contracts and ousted 58 senior managers from USAID within 45 minutes of arriving at the agency on January 27.

🔸 USAID's spending "IS TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE... CLOSE IT DOWN!" Trump had posted on his Truth Social page.

🔸 Elon Musk previously claimed that the aid agency is "a criminal organization.”

Pentagon

🔸 DOGE is considering an 8% reduction in the Department of Defense (DoD) budget in each of the next five years — amounting to some $50 billion each year.

Ukraine aid

🔸 Musk responded with an “OK” on his social media platform X to a post by political commentator Charlie Kirk, who urged a DOGE probe into how American aid has been spent.

🔸 President Donald Trump claimed that the US had spent $350 billion on Ukraine and received “nothing in return” in a Truth Social post earlier.

NASA

🔸 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is already under review, with DOGE “on site”, confirmed acting chief of the US space agency, Janet Petro, in an email to staff.

🔸 The DOGE page on the X network asked for the public’s collaboration on “finding and fixing waste, fraud, and abuse at NASA.”

Federal Reserve

🔸 Asked if he plans to audit the Federal Reserve, Musk briefly said “yes” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

🔸 He added that he would be looking into Fort Knox US Bullion Depository after President Donald Trump recently stated "We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there.”

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❗️Volodymyr Zelensky has no "cards up his sleeve" for peace talks with Russia, US President Donald Trump said in an interview to Fox News.

Zelensky is handling the negotiation process poorly, he added.

Trump: not 'very important' for Zelensky to be in Ukraine ceasefire talks

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