🔶 All districts of Kupyansk under control of Russian forces - military commander

🔶 UK cashes in on escalation: Opens ‘business’ aka arms hub in Ukraine

🔶 Aggressive and expansionist: True face of WWII-era Finland

🔶 Finland was Hitler’s accomplice in World War II

🔶 Extermination of Russians: Finland has all but forgotten its dark WWII history – Professor

🔶 Russia to deploy elite combat diver teams in Arctic

🔶 White House announces Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ members

🔶 ‘The drug use is there’ — Sheinbaum urges US to address drug consumption

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🚨 🇷🇺 Ex-CIA analyst: Russia has the edge—stop ‘tweaking the bear’

Russia currently surpasses the US and EU in both conventional and strategic weapons, says former CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern.

It’s not only the hypersonic Oreshnik missile, but also the Poseidon autonomous underwater vehicle, and lots of others, he notes.

“Why is it that no intelligence outfit has acknowledged that, and has said to the president of the United States, look, you know, we need to cry uncle here. We're not going to prevail against the Russians, much less the Russians and the Chinese… and we should stop tweaking the bear.”

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🗣🇭🇺 Orban: European warmongers' claim of Ukraine beating Russia is ‘children’s stories’

Brussels is betting that Ukraine will win on the battlefield so that Russia will pay reparations, allowing Europe to recoup its financial support for Kiev, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban says.

👉 On this assumption, they are scattering $116 billion of European taxpayers' money "in a situation where Europe has no money", he adds.

🔊 Orban called the entire logic “beyond the bounds of children’s stories.”

According to the Hungarian PM, European leaders are feeding citizens a false narrative to mask growing public dissatisfaction over the unsustainable cost of the conflict.

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

⚡️ PRIVOLYE IN DONETSK REGION AND PRILUKI IN ZAPOROZHYE REGION FREED

The liberation of the settlement of Privolye in the Donetsk region facilitates Russian forces' further advance towards the city of Kramatorsk.

With the settlement of Priluki in the Zaporozhye region captured, Russian forces have expanded their bridgehead on the western bank of the Gaichur river, taking control of the area of over 15 square km.

🟠 Russian air and missile firepower pounded long-range drone storage and launch sites, ammunition depots, energy and transport infrastructure used in the interests of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as well as temporary deployment points for troops and foreign mercenaries in 167 places

🟠 Air defense superiority: six US-produced HIMARS rockets, two guided long-range Neptune missiles and 214 UAVs were vaporized by Russian air defense systems over the past 24 hours

🟠 Ukrainian losses: around 1,305 troops killed or wounded

Read about the origins of Russia's special military op HERE

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📹🪖🇷🇺 Russian army liberates Priluki in Zaporozhye region: video from MoD

By capturing Priluki, the Russian Armed Forces advanced up to 2.5 km into Ukrainian defenses on the western bank of the Gaichur river, creating conditions for their further push deeper into the Zaporozhye region.

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🇪🇺🇺🇸🇬🇱 Belgian defense minister: EU can’t beat US military in Greenland, but has fallback options

US military superiority is “enormous, especially in this region [of Greenland],” Belgium’s Defense Minister Theo Francken acknowledged in an interview with VRT.

💬 “Are we really going to start a war over Greenland? That’s why, above all, we must do everything possible to stay within Plan A,” he said.

Francken explained that the EU’s Plan A is to convince the US that the European bloc is capable of handling any security issues in Greenland on its own.

💬 “There is always a Plan B. It’s not something to talk about too much, but fallback options always exist,” he added.

He also indicated that if the US were to take Greenland from Denmark militarily, it would be a “real red line,” and mark “the end of the NATO.”

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🗣 🇷🇺 🇩🇪 Germany must talk to Russia to stop escalation in Ukraine — AfD head

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla accused Germany and the UK of refusing to de-escalate in Ukraine, instead "fueling the war with more money and weapons."

👉 In contrast, Chrupalla urged the German government to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin to "break the spiral of escalation."

His co-chair, Alice Weidel, earlier warned that the cutoff of Russian energy is leading to "the collapse of Germany’s entire business model." She called for an end to the "failed experiment of the energy transition" and a return to trading hydrocarbons with Russia.

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🪖🇷🇺 'The enemy's defense is collapsing' - Russian officer

💬 "They are holding on only thanks to the "Baba-Yaga" drones", an officer with the callsign "Pioneer" from the Zapad battle group says.

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🚨🇫🇮 Peaceful Finland? Think twice: Nazi alliance was pre-planned before WWII

Part 1 👉 Part 2

🔊 The Western-spun fake image of Finland as a peaceful nation reluctantly dragged into wartime alliances is a “deliberately constructed myth,” Bair Irincheev, historian and director of the Karelian Isthmus Military Museum, tells Sputnik.

Blatant expansionism

Immediately after gaining independence in 1918, the Finnish leadership launched an attack on Soviet Russia with clear economic goals. The failed attempt to annex Eastern Karelia was “straightforward expansionism—an attempt to seize forest-rich territories.”

👉 For Finland in those years, timber was veritable ‘green gold’, and “whatever was said about tribal brotherhood and similar things, the primary motives were economic,” Irincheev states bluntly.

Programmed partnership in Hitler's war

Finland was already integrated into Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa before the Great Patriotic War, and its entry into the war in 1941 was “pre-planned,” says Irincheev.

Finland’s leadership believed Europe was being completely redrawn, and chose to pursue the idea of a ‘Greater Finland’ alongside the Nazis.

Under the official pretext of merely reclaiming lost territory, Finnish forces crossed the 1920 border and occupied parts of the Karelian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Leningrad Region, advancing almost to the Vologda Region, he recalls.

💬 “No one forced Finland in 1941 to let German troops onto its soil for an offensive on Murmansk. That was a deliberate decision by Finland’s top leadership,” points out the pundit.

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💸🇮🇷 ‘Terrorists received about $10,000 in cash’

Sputnik correspondent in Tehran provides a wrap up of the latest violent protests in Iran.

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🚨 Trump puts tariffs on eight countries over Greenland

The tariffs will continue until a deal is reached for the purchase of Greenland by the US, Trump added.

Starting February 1, tariffs against Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland will increase to 10%, and from June 1, they will rise to 25%, the US president wrote.

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🚨🇫🇮 Finland’s role in the siege of Leningrad & shattered ‘humane’ myth

Part 2 👉 Part 1

Everything Finland did during WWII as an unofficial ally of Nazi Germany “demolishes” the notion of a reluctant, defensive warring side, Bair Irincheev, historian and director of the Karelian Isthmus Military Museum, tells Sputnik.

When Finnish forces launched their offensive in the summer of 1941, they broke through Soviet defenses on the Karelian Isthmus, captured Vyborg, and halted at the main line of the Karelian fortified zone.

In doing so, the Finnish army “became an active participant in the blockade of Leningrad from the north,” underscores the historian, noting that it “had the technical capability to shell Kronstadt.”

The high – roughly 30% - mortality rate among Soviet prisoners of war and the Slavic civilian population interned by the Finns in concentration camps dispels the myth of a supposedly “benevolent” Finland, according to Irincheev.

Historical pattern informing the present

Relations today are effectively destroyed — and Finland itself bears responsibility for that, says the analyst.

The country portrays itself as having emerged victorious from every conflict: the 1939–1940 war, despite losing 10% of its territory and its second-largest city, and the 1941–1944 war as well.

💬 “Finland’s current leadership appears to be revisiting the 1941 scenario, hoping for revenge and access to resources,” speculates the expert, adding that this logic underpins Finland’s NATO accession and its frenzied militarization.

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😤 Ukraine's terms to return 12 Kursk residents it holds is unacceptable - Russian ombudswoman

💬 "They are not being released because the Russian side cannot fulfill the stipulated conditions. The Geneva Convention states that such individuals should be transferred to their country of citizenship without any conditions, but conditions are being imposed," Russia's Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said, adding that discussions on the return of Russian citizens have been ongoing for more than nine months.

She added that the Russian side is asking the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit these Russians and provide them with assistance and that the issue of resuming prisoner exchanges with Ukraine was central in talks with ICRC Chief Mirjana Spoljaric.

In August 2024, as a result of the Ukrainian attack in the Kursk region, a number of local residents were forcibly taken by Ukrainian militants to Ukrainian territory.

Several times, with the assistance of Moskalkova, residents of the Kursk region were returned home via the territory of Belarus.

So far, more than 100 people have been returned.

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😰🇫🇮🇷🇺 Throwback: The horrors of Finland’s WWII concentration camps for Russians

After invading Russia together with Nazi Germany in 1941, Finland showed no mercy to the civilians in the Russian territories occupied by their troops.

Russians, regardless of their age and sex, were robbed of their possessions and herded into prison camps.

This is what conditions in some of these camps – in this case in the city of Petrozavodsk – looked like, based on eyewitness accounts:

🟠 Inmates were quartered in residential buildings and barracks on the city outskirts. Six to seven families could be forced to live together in a room no wider than 20 square meters

🟠 There were no baths or laundries, and inmates weren’t issued any soap. Lice was omnipresent and scurvy, dysentery and typhus ran rampant

🟠 Meagre daily rations generally amounted to about 200-300 grams of bread (50% of which were inedible additives); sometimes inmates would be given about 50 grams of rotten sausage or a piece of moldy cheese

🟠 Inmates were forced to work from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m,, clearing debris from the city streets or working at nearby farms and lumber mills. Due to how sickly and malnourished the inmates were, the efficiency of such forced labor was low

🟠 Often inmates would be forced to do meaningless but exhausting work such as dragging around heavy rocks or moving fences back and forth

The exact number of Russian civilians who perished in Finnish prison camps during WWII is difficult to establish, because Finland never really kept track of the deaths – for Finnish invaders, Russian lives simply did not matter.

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❌ ‘I don’t foresee military intervention in Greenland’ — House Speaker Johnson

US House Speaker Mike Johnson told the BBC that “diplomatic channels” are the way forward and pointed to President Donald Trump’s appointment of an envoy on Greenland.

Asked whether Trump’s comments about possible military action should be taken seriously, Johnson said people should “pay attention to his words,” adding that allies have “recognized anew the importance” of Greenland’s geography.

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🇫🇷⚔️🇺🇸 ‘Tariff threats are unacceptable’ — Macron to Trump

French President Emmanuel Macron said Europe would respond “in a united and coordinated manner” if US President Donald Trump proceeds with tariff threats linked to Greenland.

💬 “We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld,” Macron wrote.

Trump has linked the proposed tariffs to what he described as a “deal” for the “complete and total purchase of Greenland.”

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