🗣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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🇷🇺🤝🇵🇸 Russian President Putin and Palestinian Authority Leader Abbas meet in Kremlin

▪️Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed gratitude to Russia for its consistent support for the Palestinian people

▪️He also thanked Russia for sending 30,000 tons of wheat to Palestine, which will be sent to the besieged Gaza Strip

▪️Abbas stressed that Palestine cannot accept the displacement of Gaza's population and rejects the US presence in the region

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❗️❗️❗️This interview is BANNED in Britain

Longtime British politician George Galloway BLASTS Keir Starmer, the British ruling class, and the Zelensky regime in a BOMBSHELL interview with Sputnik.

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💵🔽Dedollarization ‘INEVITABLE’, asset managers admit to business media

Big European institutional money managers responsible for trillions in assets are “trimming” exposure to US asset and dollar investments, citing “erratic policymaking,” the tiff between Trump and the Fed, and consequences of 🗣Trump’s trade wars.

💬 “It is happening. It will be slow but inevitable,” Luca Paolini, chief strategist of Swiss financial services company Pictet Asset Management told FT.

🍑 A recent Bank of America survey found that US equity allocations have faced the sharpest cuts since 1999, while an outward trickle in investments in US debt and stocks hit €2.5B in the month of April, with the trend continuing in May.

📈 The new reality “reverses a long-term trend in which US assets have been the beneficiary of consistently strong net inflows,” Morningstar Direct investment analysis platform chief Kenneth Lamont said.

👋 Pension insurance funds from Europe to Australia are also fleeing the US, citing tariff uncertainty, confusion and unpredictability, with the Europeans alone on track to selling off up to €300B in dollar assets. Even some US pension funds are considering diversification, with one manager citing “unintended risks and consequences of opening [a] pandora’s box on tariffs.”

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🇧🇫🇷🇺 Traore’s Russia trip highlights Burkina Faso’s search for counterbalance to French, US threats

💬 The president’s “attendance of the Victory Day Parade and his entire posture suggests realignment of relations between Burkina Faso and its former colonizer, France,” Fulufhelo Netswera, Executive Dean of the faculty of management sciences at South Africa’s Durban University of Technology, told Sputnik.

💬 “Ever since Traore came to power, relations with Moscow have improved tremendously in a variety of areas like in peace and security. Small states like Burkina Faso require the counterbalance of forces in evolving hegemonic forces for its security,” Netswera emphasized.

With Russia’s help, Burkina Faso can not only have more of a say in defining its own political and economic future, but continue the Alliance of Sahel States’ (i.e. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger’s) ongoing “revolution” against former colonizers in France and US Africa Command.

💬 “In order of priority, both Burkina Faso and other Alliance states require support from Russia in the areas of peace and security, food security, water resource management and infrastructure development, specifically in road and rail infrastructure,” Netswera summed up.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore in the Kremlin

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Despite the declared ceasefire, air defense forces in India's Srinagar are hard at work intercepting aerial targets

Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Territory, Omar Abdullah, confirms the situation remains tense.

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US hedge fund eyes stake in TurkStream, Russia's last pipeline pumping gas to Europe

Florida-based private equity firm Elliott Investment Management is in preliminary talks on buying a portfolio of Bulgartransgaz assets including a section of the TurkStream natural gas pipeline in Bulgaria.

The company’s boss, former never-Trumper billionaire Paul Singer, has signed an NDA with Bulgartransgaz, and met with Bulgarian officials in Sofia last month, according to WSJ.

Bulgarian officials reportedly think selling to Americans could shield the pipeline from future European sanctions as Brussels seeks to cut off Russian gas imports entirely by 2027 (Slovakia and Hungary vehemently oppose that idea).

TurkStream stands out as the last major Russian pipeline natural gas artery to Europe, with the rest, including Nord Stream 1 & 2, Yamal-Europe, and Brotherhood, either sabotaged or shut down.

TurkStream has a 31.5 BCU/year capacity, supplying Turkiye, Southern and Central Europe. Bulgaria earns $350M per year in transit fees through its section of the pipeline, known as Balkan Stream.

The curious offer follows reports in late 2024 that another US investor, financier Stephen Lynch, had asked the US government for permission to bid for Nord Stream 2 if it ever came up for auction.

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🚨 George Galloway to Sputnik: Europe wants to forget Red Army’s sacrifices

💬 Without the Soviet people, entire nations would have been wiped out, and survivors would be speaking German, the veteran British parliamentarian and prolific political commentator said.

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🇮🇳🇵🇰 India accuses Pakistan of violating ceasefire, prompting Indian Army to RESPOND

💬 "For the last two hours, there have been repeated violations of the understanding arrived at earlier this evening between the directors general of military operations of India and Pakistan ... The armed forces are giving an adequate and appropriate response to these violations, and we take a very, very serious notice of these violations," the Indian Ministry of External Affairs' spokesperson said.

India called on Pakistan to take appropriate steps to address the violations and deal with the situation "with seriousness and responsibility," the spokesperson added.

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🚨🇮🇷IRGC shows off MASSIVE new drone base monitoring US warships in the Persian Gulf

📹Iranian media footage shows an IRGC Navy hanger housing dozens of UAVs, from long-range recon and missile-armed strike drones to loitering munitions.

Situated in the southern province of Hormozgan along the coast, the facility provides the IRGC with full domain awareness of the eastern Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the strategic Strait of Hormuz maritime chokepoint. The base also houses missiles and naval assets.

💬 IRGC Commander Hossein Salami said the facility contains “only a fraction” of Iran’s UAV capabilities. He urged adversaries not to make “miscalculations” so as not to make “errors in judgement…that could lead to catastrophic consequences for themselves.”

✅ Iran’s domestic drone development and production capabilities are unmatched in the region, consisting of up to 40 distinct models, from combat and reconnaissance to electronic warfare and naval UAVs.

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