Sweden Opts Out of Joint Probe Into Nord Stream Leak, Refuses to Share Findings, Citing National Security

Sweden has opted out of a proposal to set up a formal joint investigation team with Denmark and Germany to investigate the recent leaks of the Russian-owned pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Mats Ljungqvist, the Swedish prosecutor involved in the country’s criminal investigation of the leaks in the Swedish economic zone, told Reuters that the country would not join a Joint Investigation Team from the judicial co-operation agency Eurojust.

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Russia military range shooting leaves 11 dead, 15 wounded

MOSCOW (AP) — Two volunteer soldiers on Saturday fired at other troops at a Russian military firing range near Ukraine, killing 11 and wounding 15 others, before getting killed, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The ministry said in a statement that the shooting took place in the Belgorod region in southwestern Russia that borders Ukraine. It said that the two volunteers from an unnamed ex-Soviet nation fired on other soldiers during target practice and were killed by return fire.

The ministry called the incident a terrorist attack.

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How the West is preparing for Putin to go nuclear

A strike in Ukraine would threaten chaos at home — but one expert says it may not be as bad as we fear

Western countries are making contingency plans to deal with chaos at home in case of nuclear war in Ukraine, officials said yesterday, as the threat of a battlefield strike by President Putin grew.

The measures could include issuing leaflets on how to survive a nuclear attack or ways to ease panic buying amid fears the fallout could reach western Europe and beyond. President Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in recent weeks have sent alarm bells ringing across Nato, with the alliance engaging in discussions behind closed doors as to how it will respond to such an eventuality.

Oh that’s nice, we’re only gonna be irradiated just a tetch.

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French energy giant accused of ‘fuelling Russian fighter jets’ that bombed Ukraine

A French energy giant has been accused of “complicity in war crimes” over allegations it helped fuel Russian fighter jets that bombed Ukraine.

TotalEnergies faces an anti-terror investigation after two associations filed a legal complaint against it.

The complaint comes at a delicate time for the company, which is locked in a battle with hardline unionists who continued to block its petrol refineries in France on Friday in a row over pay, leaving thousands of motorists scrambling for fuel.

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Over 70% of Canadians Support Increasing Domestic Oil and Gas Production to Cut Global Dependency on Russia

Over 70 percent of Canadians say they support increasing Canada’s oil and gas production to reduce the world’s dependence on Russian energy, according to a recent poll.

Released by market research firm Leger on Oct. 12, the poll found that 72 percent of Canadians indicated their support for producing and exporting more domestic oil and gas resources.

The poll was conducted with 1,535 Canadian residents aged 18 and over from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, via the firm’s online panel.

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Elon Musk Pulls Starlink From Ukraine After Ambassador Tells Him to ‘F— Off’

(Reuters)—Elon Musk said on Friday SpaceX cannot “indefinitely” fund the Starlink internet service in Ukraine and send it several thousands more terminals after a report suggested that his rocket company had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations.

Musk’s comment on the question of support for the internet service in Ukraine comes after he angered many Ukrainians with a proposal to end Russia’s war in their country that included ceding some territory.

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Man charged with hate-motivated criminal harassment directed at Russian Calgarians

A Calgary man has been charged with multiple counts of criminal harassment after the CPS hate crime team investigated a number of threats that were found to be hate-motivated.

Calgary police said they received reports around 8 p.m. on Oct. 11 that a man had called and made threats to staff and the church congregation at the All Saints Russian Orthodox Church on 8 Ave. N.E. Police said it is believed the church was targeted because of its Russian heritage and have deemed the threats to be hate-motivated, a news release said Thursday.

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The real reason Biden is escalating America’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war

(Conservative Treehouse) – In a statement Monday from the White House, President Joe Biden pledged “to continue providing Ukraine with the support needed to defend itself, including advanced air defense systems.”

The statement was a result of a phone call between Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Two days prior, the Kerch Strait bridge between Russia and Crimea was bombed by Ukraine causing a section of the bridge to collapse. Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin retaliated with missile strikes against several cities in Ukraine and key infrastructure for energy.

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Kremlin crack-up: who’s out to get Putin?

The soldier with the Kalashnikov wasn’t happy. Neither were the hundreds of comrades who had chosen him as the spokesman for their angry complaints as they milled about on a train platform somewhere in Russia. ‘There are 500 of us, we are armed, but we haven’t been assigned to any unit,’ the newly mobilised soldier complained on a video that went viral earlier this month. ‘We’ve been living worse than farm animals for a week… Nobody needs us, we’ve had absolutely no training.’ Other soldiers, most of them masked, chipped in with more grievances. ‘The officers treat us like animals,’ shouted one. ‘We’ve spent a fortune on buying food for ourselves.’

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Only 4 months before war, Germany claimed Russian gas pipeline posed no risk

BERLIN — The German government on Thursday declassified a top-secret security assessment on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from 2021, only four months before the outbreak of war, which claimed energy supplies “won’t be jeopardized” by increased dependency on Russian gas.

The document, dated October 26, 2021, was adopted in the final days of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s outgoing government, in which Germany’s current leader Olaf Scholz played a key role as vice chancellor.

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Energy Protesters are Beginning of New ‘Fascist Movement’ – German PM

A leftist German state Prime Minister has described those protesting the country’s car-crash energy policy as the beginning of a new “fascist movement” in the country.

Bodo Ramelow, the Prime Minister of Thuringia who is a member of the far-left Die Linke party, described what he saw as an ever more unified populist right in the country as being the embryonic stages of a new “fascist movement” in the country.

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Russian official warns of World War Three if Ukraine joins NATO

LONDON, Oct 13 (Reuters) – If Ukraine is admitted into the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, then the conflict in Ukraine would be guaranteed to escalate into World War Three, a Russian Security Council official was quoted as saying on Thursday.

Just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin formally proclaimed the annexation of up to 18% of Ukraine on Sept. 30, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced a surprise bid for fast-track membership of NATO.

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How to prevent World War III – Only mass engagement can restrain our warmongering elites

… The intimate connection between industrial war and proletarian revolution was understood well enough that, as historians Gabriel Kolko and Azar Gat have demonstrated, most of the distinctive military strategies that emerged across the last century were expressly devised in order to avoid imposing the kinds of costs — especially in blood — that necessitated making promises to the masses. This was true of strategies such as the blockade by the Royal Navy, RAF terror bombing, Nazi Blitzkrieg and US containment, among others. It was also believed that de-massifying politics would help defuse the nationalist passions that fuelled conflict, facilitating diplomacy once elites were freed from explicit commitments to their national populations.

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How Ukrainians define their enemy: ‘It’s not Putin; it’s Russia’

During a visit to Kyiv last weekend, I kept asking Ukrainians a question that vexes me: Is your war against President Vladimir Putin — or against Russia itself? Nearly every time, I got the same unyielding answer. The enemy is a Russia that must be defeated and transformed.

Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.

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How Ukrainian Strategy Is Running Circles Around Russia’s Lumbering Military

Eight months into Ukraine’s war with Russia, its emerging strategy is combining classic military operations with opportunism on the battlefield to exploit the incompetence of Russian forces—and is changing the course of the battle.

Ukraine’s command structure encourages junior officers to make in-the-moment battlefield decisions, an authority that they have used to seize opportunities and quickly take advantage of enemy weaknesses.

Russians, by contrast, have been slowed by a Soviet-era decision-making structure, in which orders trickle down the chain of command from Moscow, and troops at the front lines take little initiative.

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