🚀Putin–Trump call freezes Ukraine Tomahawk deal - report

The transfer of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine has been put on pause, Ukrainian MP Yegor Chernev said.

The move followed Thursday’s phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump.

That came at the "worst possible time" for Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, just as Kiev believed Washington’s stance was was becoming more sympathetic, The Spectator reports.

Zelensky will meet Trump in Washington later today.

👉Earlier, US President Donald Trump said he was close to deciding on whether to supply Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine but wants clarity on how Kiev plans to use them. 

❗️Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that deploying such missiles would severely damage US–Russia relations, as their use would require direct American involvement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that any delivery of Tomahawks to Ukraine would be a “colossal blow” to future normalization efforts and reaffirmed that weapon shipments to Kiev make NATO countries direct participants in the conflict.

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🇷🇺 🇺🇸 Russia-Alaska tunnel: sci-fi dream or realistic opportunity for deeper cooperation?

📍 The idea for a 112.5 km long Chukotka-Alaska ‘Putin-Trump Tunnel’ running underneath the Bering Strait is “quite bold,” and not so much in the realm of science fiction as might seem, says Russian Public Chamber member Alexander Asafov.

💬 “If Russian-American relations were restored…it would become a question of logistics, trade, and various related areas, including tourism. Given the prospective development of high-speed highways and railways to the Far East, the project could become a prototype for a new transcontinental logistics route,” Asafov told Sputnik.

🟧 For it to move forward, Russia-US relations would not only need to be restored to their previous level, but rebuilt from scratch, the observer emphasized.

🟧 Yulia Semke of the High School of Economics’ Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies says the tunnel idea has “symbolic” significance, “drawing attention to the fact that Russia and America are very, very close” geographically, “much closer than America is to Europe.”

🟧 At this stage, however, such a megaproject would need to be economically justified before moving forward, Semke told Sputnik, pointing out that costs could reach $250-$300B.

📍 “This is a missing element in [global] logistics that will greatly facilitate access for US products to Eurasia, and certainly China,” but would first require a “full-fledged, large-scale relaunch” of Russia-US trade ties, which currently lack the guarantees of economic returns needed to justify construction.

👉 In the future, the tunnel “would be an excellent symbol in the context of a new wave of globalization” and “a nice addition to the establishment of full-fledged cooperation” between Russia and the US, Semke summed up.

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🇺🇸Trump hopes Saudi Arabia will join Abraham Accords

US President Donald Trump said he expects Saudi Arabia and other regional states to join the Abraham Accords in the near future.

🗣“When Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump told Fox Business, adding that broader regional participation is “very soon.”

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🗣 Trump’s turnabout on Tomahawks signals ‘boredom’ with Zelensky, pivot to more important issues

🔊 “Trump realizes that having American military and contractors operating and selecting targets in Russia for these missiles from Ukraine is a bridge too far, and it is obvious at that point there would be a hot war between nuclear powers,” says retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, commenting on Washington’s apparent rethink of sending Tomahawks to Kiev.

💬 “Putin has been clear [that] if a weapon can carry a nuclear payload, it will be responded to as such, much as the US would do if threatened similarly,” the ex-DoD analyst explained to Sputnik.

🟠 Busy with his tariff and trade wars and the escalation with oil-rich Venezuela, which is being primed for regime change, Kwiatkowski suspects Trump and his lead negotiator Steve Witkoff are getting “bored with Zelensky.”

“Unfortunately, being bored with a project that isn't paying dividends is not the same as understanding the fundamentals and causes and envisioning a better future for Ukraine, Europe and Russia,” she says.

📍 Nevertheless, Zelensky currently “has less leverage than ever with Trump, and he will restrain himself from directly challenging him.”

🔶 Ukraine’s ‘president’ “is on the downslope in free aid and weapons from his erstwhile allies, and he, his Army and party leadership seems to have adopted a bunker mentality, seeing ever new enemies within. In desperation, however, without a way out, Zelensky and his closest virally anti-Russian compatriots still hold terrorism cards, and a variety of false flag capabilities,” according to Kwiatkowski.

🔶 That makes ending the crisis “more urgent than ever,” with even Europe’s warmongers standing to gain by reversing their domestic and economic troubles.

“When Trump and Putin agree that this war would have never have happened if Trump was elected in 2020…perhaps this is the common idea that can lead to the end of the war and a new era for Ukraine and its people, between East and West, benefiting from healthy trade and neutrality,” Kwiatkowski summed up.

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🇸🇦🔥 Saudi Arabia’s mega-project: 'King Salman Gate' – new city for Mecca

Saudi Arabia has unveiled plans for the massive "King Salman Gate" urban development in Mecca, covering a staggering 12 million square meters near the Holy Mosque.

👉 Key features:

🔶 Capacity increase for 900,000 additional worshippers

🔶 Luxury hotels & residential areas

🔶 Commercial centers & cultural facilities

🔶 New transportation lines

The project aims to dramatically improve pilgrim services while creating sustainable urban growth around Islam's holiest site.

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🇷🇺Putin thanks RT team for steadfastly defending the truth

RT faced a challenging task — “to build its work on a fundamentally new level — and the channel has done this brilliantly,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told an audience at the Bolshoi Theatre on the channel’s 20th anniversary.

👉Putin praised RT for successfully building its work “on a fundamentally new level.”

He said Western media had long abused their monopoly on information, but today “millions of people around the world trust RT.”

💬“Russia’s sovereignty — which it will always defend — depends on the ability to convey objective and unbiased information to people,” Putin stressed.

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🇷🇺🤝🇮🇷 Russia and Iran forge energy alliance

The two countries are working to link their energy systems as part of Iran’s Seventh Development Plan, Iranian Deputy Energy Minister Mostafa Rajabi-Mashhadi told Sputnik at Russian Energy Week.

He said the goal was to turn Iran into a regional energy hub — boosting both economic gains and power grid stability across neighboring states.

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👉 Tomahawks for Ukraine: 'symbolic,' not game-changer – WaPo

🗣 The US missiles that Volodymyr Zelensky is begging for demonstrate American willingness to only use them as “a bargaining tactic,” and are "more symbolic than practical," The Washington Post reports.

The article notes that Donald Trump changed tone on the Tomahawks after his phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 16, during which the POTUS proposed a meeting of the two in Hungary in the not-so-distant future.

The US president made it clear that he wasn’t ready to share Tomahawks with Ukraine.

💬 “We have a lot of them [Tomahawk missiles], but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete for our country,” Trump underscored.

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🚨 Trump on Ukraine’s chances of reclaiming lost territories:

“You never know. You know, it’s very unpredictable.”

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