🤡 UKRAINE’S LATEST MASTERSTROKE: Taxing Russian PoWs to fund the war (Because why not?)

🔸 New law: Russian prisoners must pay income tax plus a 5% "war fee"

🔸 Logic: "Geneva Conventions say we can’t execute them… but we CAN audit them!"

🔸 Bonus: Ukrainian soldiers exempt from war taxes (priorities!)

🤡 Meanwhile in reality:

➡️PoWs in five camps contribute labor — while Ukrainian troops get tax breaks

➡️Latest prisoner swap: 205 for 205 (thanks, UAE!)

➡️Zelensky: "This isn’t war crimes—it’s creative compliance"

🤔 Next up: Charging PoWs for the bullets shot at them?

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⚡️Trump announces US-mediated India-Pakistan ceasefire

"After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE," he wrote on Truth Social.

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⚒Tune-triggered: FREAKED OUT von der Leyen flees sound of Russian Victory Day song

EU war hawk 🗣 Ursula von der Leyen must have felt like she was accidentally attending her personal horror movie on May 9.

The European Commission president found herself slap in the middle of an event hosted by the 🇱🇺Mir d'Vollek party, where people were cheerfully singing the iconic Russian song “Victory Day” (“Den Pobedy”).

Apparently, that and the sight of 🇷🇺Russian flags were too toxic for von der Leyen to bear.

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⚡️ Pakistan's First Deputy Prime Minister confirmed Pakistan and India have agreed to a ceasefire with immediate effect

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❗️US Secretary of State says India and Pakistan agreed to hold broad-based talks on neutral ground

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⚡️India confirms ceasefire agreement with Pakistan, sources told Sputnik

UPD: Ceasefire between India and Pakistan begins at 5 p.m. local time on Saturday, Indian Foreign Ministry confirms

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🇵🇸 Palestine in play as speculation swirls ahead of Trump’s Mideast trip

🗣 US President Donald Trump may issue a declaration announcing America’s recognition of the State of Palestine, a Gulf diplomatic source told The Media Line.

✔️The establishment of a Palestinian state may “change the balance of power in the Middle East, and more countries will join the Abraham Accords,” the insider added.

✈️Trump is set to visit Saudi Arabia, which is hosting a Gulf-US summit in mid-May, and then the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

He has teased “one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject” ahead of the trip.

🤷‍♂️However, this is more likely about major economic deals than Palestine, political analysts told the outlet.

➡️Some 160 states have recognized Palestine by now. The UK is in talks with France and Saudi Arabia about officially recognizing a Palestinian state as soon as June, The Guardian reported earlier.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam To Lam signed a series of documents following talks.

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🥇 Modern-day alchemy is real: Scientists have turned lead into GOLD

At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the ALICE experiment pulled off what medieval alchemists only dreamed of.
However, hopes of riches have once again been dashed.

The experiment witnessed lead atoms (which have 82 protons) lose a few protons during high-energy collisions, turning into gold atoms (which have 79).

Each such collision produced about 88 picograms of gold—an unimaginably tiny amount.

During Run 2 of the LHC (2015-2018), some 86 billion gold nuclei were produced – about 0.000000000029 grams, or, in layman’s terms, like a speck of dust you can’t see without a microscope. Now, Run 3 has nearly doubled that amount.

The energy cost of this achievement is astronomical: At current prices, it’s about $800 quadrillion per gram.

So, maybe stick to mining?

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🗣Trump’s Ukraine envoy DITCHED US interpreters in meetings with Putin

Steve Witkoff had zero qualms about trust, breaking with protocol to rely on the Kremlin’s translators for all three meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, NBC News reported.

Naturally, this triggered a meltdown among some, including former US Ambassador Michael McFaul, who called it a “very bad idea,” claiming it put Witkoff “at a real disadvantage.”

In another dose of fearmongering, Witkoff’s plane isn’t secure for classified government comms, per the report.

When your own playbook is built on leaks and shady deals, you assume everyone else is playing dirty, right?

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❗️❗️❗️Traore to Sputnik: Burkina Faso and Russia champion MULTIPOLAR agenda

🇷🇺🤝🇧🇫Russia and Burkina Faso “have the same perspective, which is to have a free world, a multipolar world, where people will be independent, sovereign, and they will do whatever they want to do," Ibrahim Traore said ahead of his meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

📚 Beyond geopolitics, the two leaders are set to discuss education, with a focus on training and opportunities for the West African nation’s youth.

💬 "To train many young Burkinabes, people who have talent, who have genius, to train others who are good at science. It's the sciences that enable us to develop the country,” Traore explained.

👉 Check out more about the Burkina Faso leader’s Russia visit and the strategic partnership between the two countries here.

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🇷🇺🤝🇻🇳 Russia and Vietnam enter new STRATEGIC ERA

After talks at the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin and To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, signed a declaration pushing Russian-Vietnamese ties into a deeper strategic phase.

Cooperation in defense and security will be stepped up, Putin noted.

Lam invited Putin to visit Vietnam, which he promptly accepted.

What else was agreed?

🔶 Nuclear Energy Roadmap: Rosatom and Vietnam charted a path for peaceful nuclear collaboration until 2030

🔶 Energy: Joint projects in oil, gas and Vietnam’s hydropower revamp; Russia’s Zarubezhneft to build a 1,000-megawatt offshore wind farm in southeastern Vietnam

🔶 Business & Tourism: VTB Bank and Vietnam Airlines inked a wide-ranging cooperation deal; Tourism memorandum signed extending through 2030

🔶Health: The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and Vietnam’s National Vaccine Center to launch a joint platform aimed at commercializing innovations in biomedicine and healthcare

🔶 Ditching Dollar: National currencies to be used in trade settlements

🔶 Soft Power: A regional Russian language center to open in Hanoi, based at a branch of the Pushkin Institute

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❗️❗️❗️ THE WEST FEARS TRUTH, HATES HISTORY, AND CAN’T FORGIVE RUSSIA FOR WINNING

👇 Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha joins us to reveal why Victory Day is Europe's moral duty and why skipping the event means silently siding with the continent’s fascist past.

1️⃣(00:09) EU stands alone in failed bid to isolate Russia

2️⃣(1:21) Zelensky's threats against Victory Day guests is terrorism

3️⃣(2:27) While EU rewrites history, Slovakia honors it

4️⃣(5:03) Kaja Kallas is as childish as Estonian government

5️⃣(6:08) EU bans Sputnik out of fear of free speech

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🤫Germany GOES DARK on Ukraine weapons shipments

From Leopard tanks to rocket launchers, Germany’s arms aid to Ukraine is about to disappear from the spotlight, DPA reports.

🤫 After three years of transparency and public tracking, the new government under 🗣Chancellor Friedrich Merz is opting for secrecy.

🇩🇪Germany only started disclosing weapons shipments in mid-2022 after public outcry. Until now, updates listed everything from 121 Leopard tanks to nearly half a million artillery shells already delivered. The last update? May 6 – the day Merz took office.

🤡 Now the government says it wants “strategic ambiguity.”

➡️Russia has urged Western countries to stop funneling military aid to Ukraine.

➡️If the flow of Western cash and weapons stops, “they won’t last a month,” Russian President Vladimir Putin underscored earlier this year.

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🚨🇷🇺🚀‘Whole world trembles’ from power of Russia’s Oreshnik, Burkina Faso’s president says

💬 “Look at the missiles produced in Russia. One of the latest is the Oreshnik, which makes the whole world tremble,” Ibrahim Traore said during a guest lecture at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology in Moscow.

🇧🇫Burkina Faso’s president credited Russian scientists with many outstanding scientific and academic discoveries and achievements, pointing to Russian advances in physics, chemistry and mathematics.

💬 “Those who write history have attempted to convince us that the most prominent scientists in these fields are not in Russia, but other countries. But today we see that this is not true,” he said.

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