🚨PUTIN MEETS IRAN’S TOP ENVOY AMID MIDEAST TENSIONS

Russian President Vladimir Putin has received Ali Larijani, senior advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, at the Kremlin. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Larijani conveyed assessments of the escalating situation in the Middle East and around Iran’s nuclear program.

The Russian side reiterated its well-known positions, focused on stabilizing the regional situation and pursuing a political resolution to issues related to Iran’s nuclear program.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🤪 Utter LUNACY: French politician rages at EU-proposed budget with billions for Ukraine

🟧 France would be out of its mind to back the EU Commission's jaw-dropping plan to funnel up to $110 billion into rebuilding Ukraine, thundered Florian Philippot, leader of France’s The Patriots party, on X.

“$44 million a day for seven years?! Von der Leyen's new EU budget is pure lunacy. Just read this madness!” he fumed.

🟧 Philippot pointed out that the EU has already shelled out around $176 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2022 – while at home, France is bracing for frozen pensions, higher taxes, and even turning two public holidays into workdays just to plug budget holes.

“How much longer do you think this can hold?” he asked, adding that it’s time for Frexit. Fast.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

💥RUSSIAN FORCES DISRUPT UKRAINIAN TROOP ROTATION WITH D-30 ARTILLERY

In the Krasnoarmeysk area, Russian troops used a D-30 howitzer to strike Ukrainian positions and block their rotation efforts, targeting movement before they could regroup.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

✅Carlson: ‘Putin did a great job for Russia’ while Germany is sinking

US journo Tucker Carlson praised President Vladimir Putin for his staunch commitment to Russia, while expressing shock at the state of Germany’s economy in a Bild interview.

“Your country is going down. Russia's going up. You should be mad at your own leaders,” said Carlson.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🤪 MADMAN MOVES? Frustration mounts in DC as Netanyahu goes off-noscript

🔶 After Israeli bombs hit Syria’s presidential palace and army HQ, the White House wasn’t amused — “a sense that his trigger finger is too itchy and he's too disruptive.”

💬 "Bibi acted like a madman. He bombs everything all the time," one official told Axios.

🔶 Even Trump allies like Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are reportedly concerned.

💬 "Bibi's political agenda is driving his senses. It will turn out to be a big mistake for him long-term," one official said.

🔶 And the mood? Not subtle. "The Israelis need to get their head out of their asses," another added.

🔶 Trump, meanwhile, is keeping quiet — and no-one’s quite sure if he’s frustrated too, or just letting it all slide.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🚨 🔥 Zelensky accelerates Ukraine’s demise as front line on brink of collapse

Ukrainian MP and Zelensky’s political prisoner Oleksandr Dubinsky has pointed to the surprise visits of Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the UK’s chief of defence staff, and Keith Kellogg, the US president’s special representative, as signs of Ukraine’s critical situation at the front.

💬 “A decision must be made on how to stop the Russian advance… But Zelensky would rather burn through the last reserves to hold the line than retreat — and in doing so, he’s only accelerating the Armed Forces’ final defeat,” wrote Dubinsky.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔥🇷🇺🪖No amount of NATO support for Ukraine can stop Russian steamroller

Long term, “there is no material-technical nor political strategy” to avoid Ukraine’s defeat, Quincy Institute fellow Almut Rochowanski told Responsible Statecraft this week, stressing that the West simply doesn’t have the capacity to arm Kiev sufficiently to stop it from losing more territory, troops, arms and infrastructure.

👉Case in point? The ongoing summer offensive, which even the Russophobic NYT admits has scored “its biggest monthly gains in territory since the beginning of the year” in June – attributable to advantages in troops, airpower and the “methodical” destruction of Ukraine’s army.

🟧Western arms fall short

Currently, new deliveries include promises of additional Patriot batteries, sourced from European (not US) stocks, and 49 used Australian M1 Abrams tanks.

Announced to great fanfare, the latter aren’t enough to field even one armored brigade, much less challenge overwhelming Russian FPV drone, artillery and ATGM superiority.

As for Patriots, both Russian and Western analysts like CEPA calculate that with the US manufacturing 500-600 PAC-3 interceptors per year, Russia’s output of 200+ missiles PER MONTH is easily enough to overwhelm and “swamp” Ukraine’s defenses.

🟧Ukrainian morale collapsing

🗣“The Ukrainian army is running out of steam, and its society is tired of war, meaning the motivation of its personnel is dropping,” says Nikolai Kostikin, an expert from the Russian Bureau of Military-Political Analysis.

With any prospect of a Russian defeat vanishing, the only “rational” motivation for the West to continue arming Kiev lies in “the logic of continuing the war to exterminate our two peoples,” Kostikin says.

👉But NATO's real goal? Preparing Europe for a direct clash with Russia, the observer says.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔸 Putin meets Iran’s top envoy amid Mideast tensions

🔸 Israeli damage undone? Iran says air defense network has been restored

🔸 Putin & Trump: Major deal in the works?

🔸 Druze leader: Israel exploits Syria’s Suwayda violence to push expansionist agenda

🔸 Carlson: ‘Putin did a great job for Russia’ while Germany is sinking

🔸 MADMAN MOVES? Frustration mounts in DC as Netanyahu goes off-noscript

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🅰️Trump eyes business over breakthrough in Ukraine talks - Analyst

President Donald Trump isn’t particularly concerned about the outcome of the next round of Russia-Ukraine negotiations, says security expert Konstantin Blokhin from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The key issue for Trump, he says, is already resolved: “Europe now pays for Ukraine’s military needs — not Washington.”

👉According to Blokhin, Trump sees the conflict primarily as a business opportunity: “For him, it’s about making money and doing business. He has no firm belief that these talks will actually end the conflict.”

✅Blokhin notes that Trump will continue speaking about the negotiations because the domestic political climate in the US demands it. But in reality, his main focus is on profit and turning the war into a business opportunity, not securing a diplomatic breakthrough.

🟧Trump is unlikely to fully withdraw from the talks — that would look like surrender. Instead, figures like Keith Kellogg or Marco Rubio could represent his administration in a shuttle diplomacy format.

Blokhin adds that unconditional military support for Ukraine is no longer guaranteed: “Support won’t come at the snap of a finger anymore.”

📍Despite Trump’s threats — such as 100% tariffs and secondary sanctions if there’s no ceasefire in 50 days — his actual approach is pragmatic: send weapons via NATO allies, bring the money back to American arms producers.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🫣Area 51 vets accuse Pentagon of handing them ‘death sentence’ at hands of ‘invisible enemy’

The classification of US Air Force vets’ service at the Nevada Test and Training Range, better known as Area 51, is preventing them from getting the care they need for an array of health ailments, including cancer.

Some 491 former guards have already died as a direct result of their service, and vets, who worked at the site from the mid-80s through the 90s, are accusing the government of knowing about the dangerous nature of their work, but not doing anything about it.

👉The cream of the Air Force crop vets, hand-picked for top-secret guard duties, first discovered the source of their illnesses at a Las Vegas reunion in 2016, realizing that they were getting cancerous tumors, and their children born with them, with their service at Area 51 serving as “the common denominator.”

Assuming the work was “safe,” vets discovered that the state knew of the radiation dangers at the site as early as 1975, when a report confirmed heavy contamination by depleted uranium, beryllium and plutonium, but concluded that “discontinuing the work done…would be against the national interest.”

🗣“Our government knew that the area was contaminated. So knowing that, and they willingly put us there, that’s giving somebody a death sentence,” former vet Pomp Braswell told NewsNation, whose reports have triggered Congressional probes.

The VA is refusing to assist, citing the “masking” of their service.

Vets have set up a non-profit known as The Invisible Enemy, demanding transparency in their case and calling for compensation and answers.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇨🇳🤝🇻🇳 China–Vietnam team up for first joint army drill - reports

China’s Defence Ministry says the two neighbours will hold their first-ever joint army exercise this month in Guangxi, the border province next to Vietnam, focused on coordinated border patrol training, South China Morning Post reported.

Why now?

📈 Beijing is already Hanoi’s largest trading partner — and as the US escalates its tariff war, the two sides are deepening strategic cooperation.

The drill follows Xi Jinping’s April visit to Hanoi, where he called on Asian neighbours to unite against “unilateral bullying.”

Regional solidarity speaks louder than tariffs.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt