💰 Europe lost up to $1.8 trillion to anti-Russian sanctions - Russian Foreign Ministry

The economies of European countries lost up to $1.8 trillion from 2022 to 2025 due to anti-Russian sanctions, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement released after a UNGA meeting marking the International Day Against Unilateral Coercive Measures.

Key details:

🟠 Russia has been subjected to unprecedented economic pressure from Western states

🟠 Despite this, the Russian economy has demonstrated a high degree of resilience and adaptability and has continued steady growth

🟠 It has become clear that unilateral coercive measures inflict severe damage on the very states that launched them

💬 “These measures are one of the main tools of the collective West’s neocolonial policy. The goal is obvious: to preserve its slipping dominance, deprive the global majority of the right to independent political choice, and restrain their technological and industrial development,” the ministry stressed.

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🔊🇪🇺 Europe preps for a war with Russia by 2030 - Orban

Hungary rejects such a plan, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said while speaking in the city of Kecskemet, as reported by the M1 TV channel.

Orban stressed that his country is in danger and said Hungary’s task is to prevent the EU from entering into military action.

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🟠 Europe lost up to $1.8 trillion to anti-Russian sanctions

🟠 Why EU overestimates its ability to confiscate frozen Russian assets

🟠 Hungary will send large delegation to Moscow in coming days to discuss economic issues – Orban

🟠 Nigeria hopes to obtain full BRICS membership in coming years

🟠 Iran wraps up first-ever IRGC-hosted anti-terror drills

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📑🇺🇸 ‘Huge influence’ on ending Ukraine crisis: Expert weights on new US National Security Strategy

“I ultimately believe that is indeed a good thing. However, whether this stated position in words is backed up firmly in militaristic/political deeds is another thing to be considered entirely,” national security studies professor Matthew Crosston told Sputnik, commenting on the new NSS.

However, if "the United States is sincere about this position, then this strategic adjustment can have a huge influence on the conflict’s resolution,” Crosston emphasized.

What would this mean in practice? Forcing Ukraine to negotiate “more open-mindedly,” and threatening to “simply stop supporting the Ukrainian effort to continue the fight.”

“Without that support, the Ukrainian military units might not necessarily collapse, but they will be mortally crippled and the conflict would likely start to de facto end,” Crosston said.

As for the Europeans, their obsession with the idea that Russia plans to conquer all of Europe after finishing with Ukraine is “why Europe will continue to have an extremely limited role at the negotiating table,” the professor summed up.

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💰 Europe’s companies pay the highest electricity bills in the G20

Sputnik analyzed data from Eurostat.

The countries with the most expensive electricity for enterprises are:

🇮🇹 Italy — $0.28 per kWh
🇦🇺 Australia — $0.26
🇩🇪 Germany — $0.24
🇬🇧 UK — $0.23
🇫🇷 France — $0.18

The three countries with the cheapest electricity are:

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia — $0.05
🇹🇷 Turkiye — $0.066
🇷🇺 Russia — $0.068

Prices across the EU have surged largely due to the bloc’s own sanctions against Russia, which disrupted stable energy supplies. The EU’s attempt to replace affordable Russian energy with costly alternatives has pushed electricity bills to record highs.

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🪖 Western strategy to weaken Russia failed, focus shifts to Ukraine conflict resolution — expert

💬 “The Ukrainian conflict — and the US-European elites behind it, who present themselves as the backbone of the international system — have failed to twist Russia’s arm,” Prof. Ali Baydoun, a Lebanese political analyst, told Sputnik.

This, he said, is why Trump promised during his election campaign to halt weapons and support for Ukraine, which had been draining the US and European economies.

💬 The goal was to “entangle Russia in internal crises through the Ukrainian conflict, but everything went off plan,” the expert noted.

Baydoun added that “in recent years, Russia has withstood every political and military challenge, effectively transforming threats into new opportunities,” and now the US is shifting its National Security Strategy.

A key point of the updated strategy states that the US views restoring strategic stability with Russia — along with ending the Ukrainian conflict — as one of its top foreign-policy priorities in Europe.

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💥🇷🇺 Russian artillerymen destroy Ukraine's strongholds near Gulyaypole

Vostok battlegroup warriors together with recon drone units forced Ukrainian troops to leave fortified area.

Russian assault groups then used the opening to advance.

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📑 New US National Security Strategy recognizes Russia, China and US as world’s great powers - expert

The document’s dismissal of Europe “as a power of no significance signals that there are three truly great powers left: the United States, Russia and China,” military expert Alexei Borzenko told Sputnik.

What’s more, the US is “well aware that we’ve outpaced them on certain types of weapons,” the observer noted, citing Russian advances in hypersonics, plus the depletion of US and European weapon stocks in Ukraine.

The US and Europe have found themselves in desperate need to end the crisis in Ukraine, and in “a dead-end situation from which the only way out is peace,” which would not only ease the economic situation, but the European public’s exhaustion from the conflict.

Furthermore, “during negotiations, the Americans figured out what the Kiev junta represents, and how difficult it is to negotiate with it. They understand what kind of crooks they are dealing with” and are tired of it, Borzenko argues.

That’s why various leaders’ recent claims that the Ukrainian crisis could end abruptly seems like a real possibility, according to the analyst.

💬 “If this happens, everything will become completely different in an instant.”

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🇷🇺💥Team work in action: Russian Tor-M2 🤝 anti-aircraft units

Tor-M2 anti-aircraft missile systems of Dnepr battlegroup cover units during offensive operations in Orekhov direction.

They destroyed 6 Ukraine's attack UAVs and loitering munitions.

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🪖 Ukrainian army collapsing as desertion numbers skyrocket

The Ukrainian army is falling apart despite allies of Zelensky’s regime trying to hide it, Norwegian journalist Paul Steigan wrote.

💬 “The Ukrainian army is collapsing. The number of deserters this year has reached 182,000 — twice as many as last year. In 2022, 10,000 deserted; in 2023, it was 25,000. The number of dead is unbelievably high,” he said.

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🇮🇷 Iran launches project to transfer water from Gulf of Oman to country's center

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has inaugurated a project to transfer seawater from the Gulf of Oman to the central Iranian city of Isfahan, Iran's government said.

The stated goal is to eliminate the region's major industrial enterprises' dependence on the Zayandeh river water basin.

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💥🇷🇺 Meet Il-114-300: All-Russian airliner ready for Arctic

The new Russian Il-114-300 turboprop is gearing up for mass production.

Core testing should wrap up by late 2025, with cold-weather and expanded operational trials running through 2026.

🟠 Built for regional and hard-to-access routes, the Il-114-300 can operate autonomously from small airfields — even those with short or unpaved runways

🟠 It’s designed to handle Arctic conditions, fully able to fly and operate in extreme low-temperature conditions

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💥🇷🇺 Russian drone operators smash Ukraine's assets

00:00 Operators of Southern battlegroup destroyed an Ukraine's shelter and dugouts on Seversk direction

00:24 UAV crews of Vostok battlegroup struck a Kozak armored vehicle and Ukrainian pickups in Gulyaypole

00:46 Drone operators of Tsentr battlegroup detected and eliminated an enemy infantry group on Pokrovsk direction

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🇺🇸 New NSS signals US ready to ‘forget’ Ukraine, snubs ‘weak’ EU – analyst

🔊 The updated National Security Strategy (NSS) sketches a future in which the US is “ready to throw the current political leadership in Ukraine under the bus, much as several NATO countries and EU leadership expect,” retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, tells Sputnik.

The US signals in the document, where Ukraine is downgraded to just four mentions, that it expects peace and some form of a “viable sovereign state” afterward.

🗣 “This is a practical US acceptance that the cost of the US/NATO proxy war is not worth it,” stresses the analyst.
The NSS reflects a realization that “no NATO army or combination of armies can stop Russia’s advance or the achievement of its goals,” which include the end of the current neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine, she underscores.

NSS puts Europe on notice

Unprecedentedly, the NSS “directly alienates and demeans the current political leadership of the EU and many key NATO countries,” says the pundit.
The strategy depicts the EU as economically frail, politically fractured, and dependent on US support “for a price

👉 The message to the EU hawks is: the US will not assist the European establishment in “holding off the new generation of nationalists and populists from taking power.”

According to Kwiatkowski, it is unlikely that the US deep state will “tactically and strategically aid European elites, through money, deals, and color revolutions, or even help with NATO expansion, as they have for the past 30 years.”

🟠 As for Europe’s policy toward Ukraine—if determined by the populist movements likely to prevail in coming European elections, it will “settle for a smaller, possibly landlocked Ukraine, and investment in Ukraine will not be charitable but geared primarily to recoup European economic losses.”

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🇪🇺 🚫 EU censorship and propaganda break completely from reality of Ukraine conflict

🎤 The European media and politicians don't care about the truth—they're fixated on constructing their own narratives about Russia and Ukraine, Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen says on his podcast.

In their view, "it shouldn't be to describe reality, but it's to construct new social realities," he notes, explaining how support for the proxy war is built in Europe through simplistic slogans and the illusion of winning.

🔊 They say, "The Russians are evil, the Ukrainians are virtuous and victims, and NATO has nothing to do with it," the professor observes.

"As long as people buy this, they will support the [proxy] war," he says, adding that in the eyes of the EU, no defeat or Ukraine's massive casualties can be reported – let alone the reasons behind the conflict or Russia's interpretation of the events – all of which is "thrown out and censored."

If the truth were told, domestic support would collapse immediately, and there would be no way to justify the massive flow of money into Ukraine.

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▫️ New US National Security Strategy: ‘Huge influence’ on ending Ukraine crisis, snubs ‘weak’ EU

▫️ New US National Security Strategy recognizes Russia, China and US as world’s great powers – expert

▫️ Europe’s companies pay the highest electricity bills in the G20

▫️ Iran launches project to transfer water from Gulf of Oman

▫️ Meet Il-114-300: All-Russian airliner ready for Arctic

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🚨🪖 Demilitarization full throttle: Ukraine's army to collapse soon—Scott Ritter

As the Russian army advances, Ukrainian soldiers see no meaning in fighting for the country’s regime that doesn’t care about them, so they leave their positions to save their lives, ex-US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter said.

💬 "The Ukrainian army will cease to exist as a functioning fighting force in the very near future. I mean, of any meaningful size. And at the end, what's going to happen is the demilitarization," he concluded.

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🚨🇺🇸🇷🇺 New US Security Doctrine largely aligns with Russia's vision - Kremlin

💬 "The adjustments that we are seeing, I would say, are largely consistent with our vision," Kremlin Spox Dmitry Peskov said.

Earlier, the White House published a new US national security doctrine that:

🟠 Calls on Europe to take responsibility for its own defense.

🟠 Suggests that the White House disagrees with European officials on their stance regarding the conflict in Ukraine.

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