💬 “We have more than 15,000 people who participated in international conflicts, hired by security companies that supply soldiers for international armed conflicts,” Colombian Congress member Alirio Uribe Muñoz told Sputnik.

💬 “There is a tremendous Russian heritage here, and there is still today in language, in religion, in culture. I am aware of probably more than 700 place names in Alaska that have Russian roots. It is just an indicator of that,” Leman said.

💬 “Ninilchik was established in 1847, 20 years before the transfer, as a retirement community for men who had served the Russian America colony. They wanted a place where they could raise their families, catch fish, hunt, and have gardens. It was a good place for doing all of that,” he added.

💬 “Abandoning what could have been an ideal agreement for Ukraine in light of its current situation was a blatant display of short-sightedness," Turkish political scientist Engin Ozer told Sputnik.

🗣 “The results of Europe's intense diplomatic and financial pressure on Russia, along with large-scale arms deliveries and financial aid to Ukraine, are deeply demoralizing for the European political elite,” Ozer stressed.

🗣 What’s rarely discussed in the Big Tech-national security debate is how EARLY Google’s Jigsaw tech incubator embedded itself in Ukraine’s info space, Zach Vorhies, former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google-turned-whistleblower, told Sputnik.

🎤 “In an age of information warfare, the lines between tech companies and military powers are becoming increasingly blurred,” Facebook* whistleblower Ryan Hartwig told Sputnik.

"The weakness with the ICC is that [...] people who are thought to be actually perpetrators of various offenses are allowed to go free... In some instances, the perpetrators of offenses are the ones who are perceived to have received the benefits of whatever was happening. And when that is the case, the disillusionment is on the high side instead of being on the low side."

“Let’s give peace a chance!” Orban concluded.

💬 “If all the servers are stored by Google, if they collect a huge amount of telemetry and other data about traffic, about which devices we use, what we search for… This is all analytics. Whether it is used for attacks and whether it helps hackers — it can, because any system or resource always has vulnerabilities,” Sergey Trukhachev, an information security specialist, tells Sputnik.

💬 “Like President Trump, most Americans and a growing majority in Congress are fed up with the war between Ukraine and Russia and are tired of paying billions of dollars for a war that the United States has no interest in. After three years of senseless killings, peace between both sides is the only way forward. The end of this terrible war is long overdue,” Congressman Paul Gosar told Sputnik.

"Serbia is not changing its position and has no intention of doing so. Serbia will not impose sanctions or alter its policy. This is all nonsense. I don’t understand who needs this or who is making it up," Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić told Sputnik Serbia, responding to a media publication that claimed the Serbian PM was going to dismiss several pro-Russian politicians under Western pressure.

💬 "If the EU does not soon realize that this war can only be ended through diplomacy and serious negotiations, the suffering on both sides will continue," Vilimsky warned.

💬 “It is institutionally IMPOSSIBLE” for Brazil’s President Lula to make the concession which the US is demanding, something that leaves Lula “without an exit strategy,” Santos stressed.

"President Putin has taken a very important step which will into the future set a precedence," Prof. Fulufhelo Netswera from Durban University of Technology in South Africa tells Sputnik. This lets him act confidently with BRICS backing — while equally empowering other members in similar cases.

"The US is targeting BRICS with special tariffs and starting geopolitical re-alignment to target BRICS," says Dr. Anuradha Chenoy (JNU)