🇷🇺👉 Putin’s warning: why Russia is indispensable to any Ukraine security guarantees deal

🗣 The Russian president’s Ukraine-related comments at the Eastern Economic Forum signal that Moscow remains ready for substantive talks on ending the crisis, but not at the expense of its security interests, says Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of research at the Russian Council on Foreign & Defense Policy.

1️⃣ “First, the president made it unambiguously clear that any foreign troops that appear on Ukrainian territory will become a military target for Russia, and that the plans being discussed by Europe’s so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ to deploy contingents on Ukrainian soil are categorically unacceptable to Russia,” the observer explained.

2️⃣ Second, such deployments would themselves be unnecessary if a comprehensive peace agreement could be reached, contradicting the core principle of Ukrainian neutrality demanded by Russia, as outlined in the 2022 draft peace deal.

3️⃣ Third, Suslov says, Putin made it clear that “without Russia’s participation, no format of security guarantees would be possible in principle.”

Zelensky’s fading star

Putin’s comments on Russia’s readiness for contacts with Ukraine’s leadership, but at the same time the nonstarter of an agreement on key issues with Zelensky, signals Moscow’s continued position that Ukraine is not a sovereign or independent actor ready for serious talks and compromise.

“The reason for this,” Suslov says, is the European powers’ role in keeping Ukraine in the fight, “and in effect forbidding it from seriously negotiating anything with Russia.”

So long as this state of affairs continues, Russia will have only two possibilities open to it:

🔶 dialog with the US on the Ukrainian crisis

🔶 inflicting a military defeat on Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.

💬 “The more catastrophic this defeat becomes, the less opportunity it will have to continue to sabotage the peace process, and the more inclined it will be to conduct substantive negotiations,” Suslov says.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🚨🇷🇺💥 RUSSIAN MOD WEEKLY UPDATE: HUGE GAINS AND DEVASTATING UKRAINIAN LOSSES

⚡️MAKAROVO IN THE DONETSK PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC LIBERATED

◻️ The Russian Armed Forces carried out one massive and four group strikes on Ukrainian military-industrial complex enterprises and military infrastructure

◻️ Air defense superiority: 12 guided bombs and 13 HIMARS rockets shot down by Russian air defense systems

◻️ Six unmanned boats of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were destroyed in the northwestern part of the Black Sea

◻️ Ukrainian losses: 9,320 troops

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🚨Israel strikes residential buildings in Gaza

Israel has launched airstrikes on residential buildings in Gaza, with one multi-story building completely destroyed, Mahmoud Bassal, a representative from local civil defense, said.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇰🇵🇨🇳 Kim Jong-un bids farewell to China

CGTN shares footage of the North Korean leader wrapping up his visit to China.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🌎 Global South lines up: From Beijing to BRICS, investors ready to chip in to Russia’s Far East

President Vladimir Putin’s push to drive Far East development through a unified business-friendly regime is drawing keen interest from ASEAN and other regional players, according to experts.

💬 "Russia as part of Eurasia is extremely important for Asian countries," Dr. Anuradha Chenoy, a retired professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, tells Sputnik. "Now Russia is welcoming them in joint development of the Russian Far East. Those who take this opportunity are bound to do well."

Key drivers that will propel the Far East’s development:

✅The Russian leadership's political and economic commitment

✅A huge resource potential in the Far East, including hydrocarbons, tin, tungsten, gold, coal, fisheries and forests

✅Openness for strategic partners to invest and collectively develop this region with Russian capital.

✅The stability and resilience of the Russian economy despite Western sanctions and three years of conflict in Ukraine

✅Investors' confidence in Russia's commitment and strength

💬 "[Putin] is able to fulfill Russia’s commitments without wavering or flinching even during great adversity. He has steered Russia in this proxy war against the the entire West with a rare capability," Chenoy says.

Who’s lining up to invest?

🗣 "The 10 members of ASEAN... would be interested to have more of a relationship in terms of development infrastructure in the Far Eastern region of Russia, because it is very near to Asia, in this case, compared to other parts of the world," says Professor Azmi Hassan from the Nusantara Academy of Strategic Research in Malaysia.

China “would be very interested” in putting its money in, the pundit notes.

More broadly, countries in BRICS, the SCO, and the wider Global South — largely aligned with Russia — may also channel investment into the Far East, according to Hassan.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🦾 ‘I come in peace!’ Humanoid robot greets guests of EEF

👀 The attendees of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok received a warm, high-tech welcome from Redik the Robot.

One thing is clear – this guy does not need your clothes, your boots or your motorcycle.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔊 European troops in Ukraine? A fantasy, not a strategy

🗣“The whole discussion about European security guarantees to Ukraine” based on boots on the ground “is somewhat surreal,” says strategic analyst Paolo Raffone, commenting on President Putin’s warning that foreign forces on Ukrainian soil would become legitimate targets for the Russian military.

👉 For starters, the ‘coalition of the willing’ is talking about “a deployment of troops after a peace deal without any clarity on the composition and mandate of such troops, and more importantly, without knowing the content of the hypothetical peace deal,” Raffone, director of the Brussels-based CIPI Foundation think tank, told Sputnik.

📍On top of that, Europe faces an array of strategic, political and logistical hurdles which make the plans unworkable:

1️⃣ overwhelming reliance on the US for direct and indirect military support in confronting Russia – which Washington has signaled it is not ready to provide (see the recent $1.6B cut in security funding for Eastern Europe, for example)

2️⃣ disagreements within the EU on whether Brussels even has any authority regarding the deployment of national or NATO contingents

3️⃣ lack of interoperability, sustained logistical support and weapons among ‘coalition of the willing’ members, which would take time, and serious operational and financial commitments to iron out

4️⃣ the “serious fiscal strain” such a deployment would entail on European economies, many of which are already in a weakened state

5️⃣ the threat of “political fragmentation” and the further surge in popularity of European populist movements, which could create a political environment “in which any deployment of troops risks crippling the functioning” of coalition states

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇲🇲​​ Myanmar forges close financial ties with Russia amid global changes

✅ Myanmar has prepared well for the current dynamic of global change that affects all of the BRICS, SCO, EAEU and ASEAN nations, says Kan Zaw, Myanmar’s minister for investment and foreign economic relations.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, he singled out the financial exchange sphere, noting how Russia and Myanmar currently strive to create and streamline a bilateral national currency exchange system.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

⚔️ Weaponizing kids: Ukraine lures Russian teens into sabotage warfare

The Ukraine regime’s tactics have gone completely feral. As if their draconian mobilization wasn’t enough, now they’re exploiting Russian kids as throwaway assets for one-off covert missions, The New York Times reports.
Ukrainian operatives themselves admitted it to US journalists.

🔶 Anonymous users contact kids on Telegram, WhatsApp, and gaming chats (Roblox, etc.) with promises of quick money

🔶 Assignments are disguised as “geolocation games,” with tasks like “earn money by photographing location-stamped pictures of police cars and ambulances”

🔶 Kids’ social media accounts are hacked to find compromising material to blackmail them

🔶 Ukrainian recruiters place stickers and flyers with their personal QR codes in the toilets of Russian schools

🔶 Sabotage curators provide instructions, such as how to build a homemade explosive or use a gas canister for arson – targeting vehicles, railway tracks, and buildings

🔶 One chat urging arson attacks began with the greeting "Bot for schoolchildren who need money" and offered "$5,000 for a helicopter, $10,000 for a plane, $3,000 for a transformer, and $4,000 for power lines”

🔶 Offers of $150,000 were made for verified video evidence of destroyed military equipment, with payments promised via crypto wallet to any bank account

Individuals are offered significantly more than they would earn in a regular job, while in reality they are not paid the full amount or nothing at all.

👉In Russia, criminal liability for committing a terrorist act or participating in the activities of a terrorist organization begins at the age of 14.

👉This is an exception to the general rule, which sets criminal liability from the age of 16.

👉Typical terrorism-related offenses carry between 8- and 12-years imprisonment, with harsher penalties (10 to 20 years or more) for aggravated circumstances.

Since the beginning of 2024, Russia’s financial watchdog for terrorism and extremism has added 93 minors to the registry— a record number in six years of observations.
In 2024 alone, at least 50 minors have been detained in cases involving arson of railway facilities and other acts of sabotage, with some slapped with long-term prison sentences.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🇷🇺​​ Russia’s 24/7 Trans-Arctic Corridor to supercharge northern supply routes

Russia is aiming for full-throttle, round-the-clock operations along the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor, President Vladimir Putin declared at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF).

🔶 Infrastructure will be updated on land, communications, navigation, vessel services, and emergency rescue services.

🔶 Arctic and Far Eastern ports are slated for modernization

🔶 New icebreakers are on the drawing board

🔶 Airfields and landing pads will get a full revamp

Putin highlighted the Far East’s new Artyom multimodal transport and logistics hub as a game-changer for northern supply routes.

With a projected 103 million tons of cargo by 2030, check out Sputnik’s graphic for a glimpse of what the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor could look like

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🗣 Jailed Gagauzia leader accuses Moldovan president of political repression

✅ Yevgenia Gutsul, the elected head of Moldova's autonomous region of Gagauzia, has been sentenced to seven years in prison. From her cell, she has launched a scathing public attack on Moldovan President Maia Sandu.

In a letter shared by her lawyers, Gutsul accused the president of orchestrating a "political massacre" and losing touch with the people.

Key accusations from Gutsul's letter:

👉"Political repression": Gutsul called her sentencing a clear example of silencing dissent.

👉A personal plea: "Mrs. Sandu, you have imprisoned me for seven years, separated me from my family, left my children without their mother."

👉Weakening authority: She claimed Sandu is now "left alone," asserting that "the people hate you, and your European partners have neglected you."

👉A warning: Gutsul warned the president of her "personal responsibility" for the country's direction.

Gutsul, elected leader of Moldova's autonomous Gagauzia region in May 2023 with 52.36% support, faces politically-motivated charges related to alleged illegal financing of the banned Shor party. She advocates for closer ties with Russia and opposes Moldova’s EU integration. Authorities have moved to ramp up repression, targeting dissenting voices and blocking opposition media.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

👉 All pledge, no edge: why Europe’s Ukraine force is a nonstarter

“It’s clear that NATO countries will not be able to deploy troops without Russia’s agreement. And since Russia is opposed, all these gestures and discussions that took place in Paris are absolutely useless,” Donbass-based French journalist Christelle Neant told Sputnik, commenting on French President Macron’s announcement of plans to send a ‘reassurance force’ to Ukraine once the conflict ends.

💬 A peace deal complete with security guarantees won’t be possible in the first place so long as “certain individuals within NATO” continue to seek to absorb Ukraine “at all costs,” Neant added, emphasizing that the proposed European troop deployments “would effectively amount” to such integration.

✅ President Putin warned Friday at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that Russia’s military would treat foreign troops deployed in Ukraine as “legitimate targets.”

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔊Slovak PM believes Ukraine conflict will end 'quicky'

Robert Fico is confident that the Ukraine conflict will soon be over, paving the way for restored relations with Russia.

Following his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine's Uzhgorod, Fico commented on his recent talks with President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, saying that he and Putin "focused on bilateral cooperation. Yes, we may have different positions on this, but we believe the war will end, and we all believe it will happen very quickly, and relations with Russia will be standardized."

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

▫️ Putin’s warning: why Russia is indispensable to any Ukraine security guarantees deal

▫️ European troops in Ukraine? A fantasy, not a strategy

▫️ Global South lines up: From Beijing to BRICS, investors ready to chip in to Russia’s Far East

▫️ Putin’s Arctic play: Northern Sea Route redefines Asia trade

▫️ Kim Jong-un bids farewell to China

▫️ Israel strikes residential buildings in Gaza

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔊 Europeans aren’t suicidal enough to send troops to Ukraine: expert

💬 “This is an absurd situation that would inevitably trigger a war,” Donbass-based journalist Laurent Brayard told Sputnik, commenting on Europe’s announcement of plans to deploy a ‘coalition of the willing’-style ‘reassurance force’ to Ukraine to provide ‘security guarantees’.

💬 “I don’t think the West will cross that line,” the journalist believes.
The deployment would not only be an obvious “trap,” but President Putin’s announcement at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Friday that such forces would be treated as legitimate targets by the Russian military is “firm and clear,” Brayard said, emphasizing that Moscow “has always said it wants NATO to move away from its borders.”

👉 As for Kiev’s ambitions to join the EU, which Putin said Russia does not oppose, such a step would pose as a “very big challenge,” according to Brayard, who suggested that Brussels has no real interest in allowing a “country in ruins” to join the bloc.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

📹⚔️ Trump renames Pentagon to Department of War

President signs executive order rebranding the Defense Department, declaring:

"It has to do with winning. We could have won every war. We chose to be politically correct and just fight forever."

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

🔊 Trump pledges to address security guarantees for Ukraine

The US president emphasized Europe will pay key role in providing the guarantees.

🗣 "It will end. All of a sudden, it's going to come together. You watch."

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt