🇸🇰🤝🇷🇺 Fico backs talks with Russia over Ukraine conflict

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has always supported dialogue with Russia, he reiterated in a recent interview.

He has ordered the restoration of bilateral intergovernmental commissions with Russia, and says the Ukraine conflict senselessly claims lives and can only be ended through talks between major powers—not military escalation.

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🚨 Thousands of ISIS* detainees transferred from Syria to Iraq

💬 “Iraq has received 2,225 terrorists from the Syrian side by land and air, in coordination with the international coalition,” an Iraqi official told European media on Saturday.

They will be held in “strict, regular detention centers,” the official said.

The transfer is part of the ~7k person-strong group of ISIS fighters CENTCOM plans to transplant from Syria to Iraq, with the transfer announced last month by US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack, who said that the Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) role as the “primary anti-ISIS” force had “largely expired.”

The US signaled an end to its support for the SDF in January after Syria’s transnational government launched an offensive into Kurdish-held areas, with government forces rapidly advancing into the northeast.

Home to the vast majority of Syria’s oil and gas and much of its food-growing areas, the US and the SDF occupied Syria’s northeast for years to prevent its return to Damascus’s control under the Assad government.

*A terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.

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🔥 'Ukraine is our enemy' — Orbán on energy pressure

💬 “Ukrainians need to understand that they must give up their constant demands. In Brussels, they constantly want to undermine Hungary and cut it off from cheap Russian energy,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban slammed the Kiev regime.

📈 Orbán argued that without Russian oil and gas, household costs in Hungary would rise sharply, citing an average annual utility bill of 250,000 forints, compared with 800,000 to 1 million in Poland and the Czech Republic, which have cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy.

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🛸 Leaked US drone footage shows unidentified objects over Middle East — reports

Two leaked videos recorded by US Air Force Reaper drones appear to show unidentified aerial objects operating over the Middle East, according to The New York Post.

The Post reported that one video, dated Aug. 23, 2012, shows three lights in a triangular formation over the Persian Gulf, while another clip from 2021 captures an orb-like object near the Syria–Jordan border.

US defense and intelligence agencies have classified the sightings as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).

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