Russia has described the decision not to invite its representatives to the Queen’s funeral as “profoundly immoral” and “blasphemous”.
Leaders and dignitaries from around the world have been invited to the late monarch’s state funeral, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin and others were snubbed.
Iran and Russia have been strengthening their alliance recently, growing it gradually to such an extent that the Wall Street Journal wrote on August 27 that the two countries were “forging tighter ties than ever,” as both countries face continued international isolation.
In recent months, Russia and Iran have signed a multitude of agreements, especially in trade, oil and gas, and military cooperation.
Vladimir Putin’s forces are being forced to source equipment from North Korea and Iran as the impacts of sanctions and military losses in Ukraine bite, defence experts believe.
British defence intelligence analysts think that Moscow is “increasingly sourcing weaponry from other heavily sanctioned states” as its own stockpiles are depleted.
An update published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence pointed to claims that Ukrainian forces had shot down an Iranian-made drone as evidence of Moscow’s use of systems sourced from Tehran.
Ukraine claimed it shot down the drone near Kupiansk as part of the offensive that has punched through Russian lines around Kharkiv on the eastern front.
The image suggested the Shahed “suicide drone” had been shot down by Ukrainian forces and had not detonated on impact as designed, though little information was released by the authorities in Kyiv.
If it makes everyone feel better, Justin relies on South Korea to pull its fat out of the fire:
Canada has asked the government of South Korea to produce and deliver more artillery rounds to backfill supplies that Ottawa sent to war-torn Ukraine.
(Sidebar: this article is dated June of this year.)
What’s worse is that Justin will bore South Korean president Yoon Sok-yeol later on this month.
Poor Mr. Yoon.
The Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation was once a small, obscure list of autocrats that posed no real threat. Not any more, writes Matthew Campbell
Authoritarian world leaders including President Putin of Russia and President Xi of China will gather this week in Central Asia for the annual summit of an obscure organisation which has attracted little global attention since its founding in 1996.
That is about to change, for the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is poised to take a bold step. In a development certain to irritate Washington, it is granting membership to Iran, a country regarded in America as a state sponsor of terrorism.
“One would think the Tsar is back!” This is how a colleague covering the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2006 commented after a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the facilities provided for journalists covering the “historic event.” Historic because this was the first time that Russia, admitted as a full member of the club of “great powers” in 1997, was hosting the summit.
Putin wore his usual disdainful grin like the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo.
To show that Russia is back, Putin had chosen the Konstantinovsky Palace as the venue for the G8 summit. The elegant chateau had been started in 1714 by Peter The Great as a Russian answer to the Versailles Palace in France.
The chairman of Russia’s Lukoil oil giant, Ravil Maganov, has died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, reports say.
The company confirmed his death but said only that Maganov, 67, had “passed away following a severe illness”.
Russian media said he was being treated at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital and died of his injuries.
Maganov is the latest of a number of high-profile business executives to die in mysterious circumstances.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who oversaw detente with the West, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 91.
Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost” towards the West, underpinned by summits with US President Ronald Reagan to curb the nuclear arms race, paved the way for the end of the Cold War, made him one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century. At home, however, his move to decentralise the Soviet economy, a strategy know as “perestroika”, precipitated an economic collapse that hastened the end of the Soviet Union.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has delivered a stark warning about Russia’s and China’s growing presence in the High Arctic, listing several recent steps by Moscow to increase its military strength in the region.
Speaking Friday at a news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Cold Lake, Alta., Mr. Stoltenberg noted that the shortest path to North America for Russian missiles and bombers is over the North Pole.
President Putin has revived a Soviet-era award for women who have ten or more children as Russia faces a demographic crisis that has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
Joseph Stalin established the “Mother Heroine” title in 1944 to encourage large families after the death of tens of millions of Soviet citizens during the Second World War. More than 400,000 women received the award before it was scrapped after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In his meeting in Tehran with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised what he called “Your Excellency’s pre-emptive initiative” in launching “Special Operations ” against Ukraine.
He claimed that if Putin had not invaded Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have started a war against Russia to regain control of the Crimean Peninsula.
Although later removed from the official media in Iran, the remarks started a debate in Tehran’s decision-making circles about the Islamic Republic adopting a similar strategy by going on the offensive against its “enemies”.
The Biden administration had previously been as deeply committed to escalation in Ukraine as Senator Lindsey Graham or actor Ben Stiller were, but suddenly even the West Wing is beginning to acknowledge the futility of unreservedly backing Zelensky. Apparently, there are limits, even for the Washington War Machine.
“The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out,” said Vladimir Putin in June, at a meeting of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—grouping.
Russia and China have launched another attempt to develop a “new global reserve currency.” In other words, they are again attacking the dollar.
A “coordinated global challenge taking place to the U.S. dollar… would be the biggest news story in decades,” writes “Tyler Durden,” the pseudonym for in-house staffers at the ZeroHedge site. Durden is “stunned that nobody seems to care that arguably the largest shift on the global macroeconomic playing field over the last half century may be taking place.”
A 33-year-old film featuring a naked secretary and a head-shaped cake turns out to be one of the best explanations of the ideas driving the Russian leader.
It could have been any sleepy industrial town anywhere across the old Soviet Union. A weary out-of-town businessman enters the office of the local factory manager and gets his first hint that things aren’t quite right when he sees the manager’s secretary typing away, completely naked. When the dumbstruck visitor alerts the manager that his secretary is completely nude, the manager looks and dismissively shrugs — “well, so she is” — before continuing with business as usual.
Thus begins the main character’s descent into an increasingly bizarre realm where he, along with the audience, struggles to determine what is real and what is not.
After years of Russiagate conspiracy theories about how the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 presidential election using Facebook ads, the Senate Intelligence report awkwardly revealed that the Russian operation had focused most of its attention on black nationalists.
The Senate report revealed that “most of the videos” put out by the Russian IRA troll factory on YouTube “pertained to police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization” and found that “no single group of Americans was targeted… more than African-Americans” around “race and related issues”.
A Russian court found U.S. WNBA star Brittney Griner guilty of deliberately bringing cannabis-infused vape cartridges into the country, sentencing her to 9 years in prison, Reuters reported.
Griner, who filed a guilty plea, is one of the pre-eminent stars in the WNBA, described by her lawyers as the “Usain Bolt” of women’s basketball, according to Reuters. Prosecutors requested 9 and a half years and a 1 million ruble fine, according to Reuters.
