Maria Zakharova / Мария Захарова (Telegram)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

On March 24, the international community - that part of it that knows history and has not lost the notion of justice and humanism - recalls the 26th anniversary of the beginning of the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia.

By attacking a sovereign country, the United States and its satellites abused international law undermined the foundations of security in Europe, and provoked a crisis in inter-State relations that has not been resolved to this day.

Much has been said about the terrible events of 1999, the chronology of the invasion by the Western coalition has been analyzed minute by minute, and the consequences have been thoroughly documented. But this does not mean that, as time passes, the massacre of Yugoslavia fades into memory or loses its formidable symbolism. No matter how much the NATO allies call on the Serbian people to forget the past, to "turn the page", the memory of that bloody spring lives on.

NATO's so-called "humanitarian intervention" is an example of modern barbarism (and of the "rules-based" world order), of the unfounded belief in one's superiority. Even before the strikes on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Western propaganda was turned on full blast to make Serbs feel guilty, to make them perceive the bombing as a "deserved lesson". The alliance presented the case as bringing the values of freedom and democracy to the Balkans along with depleted uranium munitions.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Russia would remove what the interim Syrian authorities consider to be a “problem” from their hands, it could more quickly settle its new regions, and their ongoing base talks would no longer be overshadowed by these atrocities.

The latest sectarian violence in Syria killed almost 1,000 members of the Alawite minority at the minimum, with many of them still sheltering in place or hiding somewhere outside of their homes due to their fear of being murdered like their co-religionists just were if they step into the street.

RT published a detailed report about what one of the survivors described as this “safari hunting Alawites”, while the UN confirmed that “entire families, including women and children, were killed” over the past week.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that around 9,000 Syrians – presumably mostly Alawites – sought shelter at her country’s Khmeimim airbase to escape the violence that she very strongly condemned. On that topic, Reuters cited two sources who were briefed on last week’s closed-door UNSC meeting on Syria to exclusively report that Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzia “lambasted” what happened by comparing it to the Rwandan Genocide.

Harold Turner
Hal Turner Show

The Russian Government has completely rejected proposals for a one-month halt in fighting in Ukraine. This rejection also includes a proposed pause in aerial and naval attacks. The fighting will continue.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made it clear: Russia won’t accept a “respite” without firm agreements on a final settlement.

Turkey ready to deploy troops to ukraine if needed

The government of Turkey, NATO’s second-largest military power, has indicated it is willing to join a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine to ensure regional stability.

The move, still conceptual, would follow a ceasefire and involve non-combat units to monitor peace. The proposal was made despite Moscow’s full rejection of NATO forces entering Ukraine for __any__ military purpose, though U.S. President Donald Trump believes Russia might agree.

Turkey, balancing ties with both Kyiv and Moscow, has mediated past deals like the Black Sea grain export agreement.

For Russia, none of these proposals make sense for multiple reasons. First, Russia is winning. If they agree to a "halt" or a "pause" or even the entry of "peacekeepers" both Ukraine and teh collective West, operating as NATO, have proven they simply cannot be trusted. The Russians believe any halt to the combat would be immediately used to re-supply, re-arm present Ukrainian troops, and add more troops, for a continued fight, later.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Trump will implement a comprehensive economic, diplomatic, and military pressure campaign against Russia if Putin rejects a ceasefire, but it’s unclear whether Trump will coerce Zelensky into territorial concessions first in order to make it easier for Putin to compromise on his prior demands for this.

Trump’s Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg told the New York Post more about how his boss plans to bring Putin to the peace table. According to him, the US might ratchet up its energy-related sanctions on Russia and associated secondary ones on its clients if he refuses. This would occur together with more diplomatic pressure, likely upon China and India to have their leaders convince Putin to reconsider, and “some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those”.

The immediate goal is “to stop the killing — just stop it — and then you go from there”, so in other words, the abovementioned approach would be aimed at getting Russia to agree to a ceasefire. This aligns with what was assessed here in late January about Trump’s plans. The problem though is that Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed on the same day as Kellogg’s interview that “A temporary ceasefire or, as many say, freezing the conflict, is unacceptable” for Russia.

One day earlier, however, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested that his country’s position on not holding talks with Zelensky due to the Ukrainian leader’s illegitimacy might be reversed for pragmatism’s sake so it’s possible that the aforementioned one about rejecting a ceasefire might be too. That could occur if Trump coerces Zelensky into withdrawing from at least Kursk and Donbass along with declaring that Ukraine won’t join NATO, thus satisfying some of Russia’s goals as recently explained here.

Ukraine would then lift martial law and finally hold its long-delayed elections, which could potentially lead to the US replacing Zelensky like Russia’s foreign spy agency claimed last week is supposedly in the cards. That scenario sequence aligns with Russian and US interests, but it can’t be ruled out that some of the last administration’s Russophobic hawks remain in positions of influence within the US’ “deep state” and end up dissuading Trump from coercing Zelensky into territorial concessions first.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

A view of a scene of an explosion in Moscow, Russia, 17 Dec.
ember 2024. According to a statement by the Investigative
Committee of Russia, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and
his assistant were killed in a blast outside of an apartment
building in Moscow. [EPA-EFE/YURI KOCHETKOV]

The SBU’s cowardly assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov won’t stop his agency’s work.

Reuters cited a source in Ukraine’s SBU on Tuesday to report that they were responsible for assassinating Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces (RChBZ). RT reminded their audience that he was instrumental in informing the world about the WMD threat posed by Ukraine. This includes its American-backed bioweapons experiments, dirty bomb plans, and the use of chemical weapons against Russian servicemen in the special operation zone.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted on Telegram that Kirillov “has been systematically exposing the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons for many years, with facts in hand: NATO provocations with chemical weapons in Syria, Britain's manipulations with prohibited chemical substances and provocations in Salisbury and Amesbury, the deadly activities of American biolabs in Ukraine and much more. He worked fearlessly. He did not hide behind people's backs.”

Her country is correspondingly expected to continue raising maximum global awareness of these issues. They’d somewhat faded out of the media limelight over the past year as attention shifted to the scenario of conventional Western escalations in Ukraine such as the decision to authorize Kiev to use the ATACMS for carrying out strikes deep inside of Russia and the possibility of deploying troops there under the cover of peacekeepers. All the while, however, Ukraine’s WMD threats never fully went away.

A lasting peace is therefore only possible if the solution includes mechanisms for dismantling this clandestine infrastructure and monitoring compliance afterwards. Trump would have to be on board for that to happen, but since some of his surrogates have talked about this issue before, it can’t be ruled out that he’d agree to this proposal if they convince him that the problem veritably exists. He also has an axe to grind with Hunter Biden, some of whose companies have been implicated in these schemes.

Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian military
intelligence services (© Serhiy Morgunov for WaPo via Getty)

The US’ internal policymaking dynamics have shifted since the start of Russia’s special operation.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told the Rossiya 1 TV channel that the US heeded his country’s demand last month to force Ukraine to call off a major provocation that his country believed had American backing and which would have dramatically escalated tensions if it happened. He strongly hinted that this was supposed to be an assassination attempt against Putin and new Defense Minister Andrey Belousov at St. Petersburg’s Naval Day Parade on 28 July in order to generate a “media effect”.

Ryabkov’s remarks follow Belousov’s call to his American counterpart Lloyd Austin on 12 July, the content of which was first reported by the New York Times (NYT) on 26 July, where he conveyed Russia’s demand for the US to force Ukraine to call off its plans. One day later on 13 July, which was coincidentally the same day that an assassination attempt was made against Trump, Ukrainian military-intelligence chief Kirill Budanov confirmed that his country had indeed tried to kill Putin in the past but obviously failed.

His candid admission prompted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova to accuse the US of funding such attempts and allege that Western countries had also directly participated in them. This scandalous development wasn’t given the attention that it deserved due to the fallout from Trump’s attempted assassination, which took priority in the global media cycle, hence why most observers weren’t even aware of Budanov’s admission and Zakharova’s response.

Ricardo Nuno Costa
New Eastern Outlook

On 16 July, Jürgen Elsässer (67) woke up startled at 6 a.m., opened the door of his house while still in his dressing gown, and in front of him were dozens of police officers, some with their faces covered, heavily armed, in a surreal image befitting any authoritarian state. However, it was in Brandenburg, on the outskirts of Berlin, in the Germany of the tragicomic Scholz government, aka the ‘Traffic Light’ coalition.

The police were about to raid his house, while more than 200 federal and Brandenburg state agents were deployed to carry out further searches in eight other houses and offices in the region. Other raids were carried out in the states of Saxony, Hesse and Saxony-Anhalt, ordered by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD), who had ordered Compact to be closed by decree as an ‘association’, when it was legally a publishing house. She also banned any activity by the audiovisual company that produced Compact’s content, such as its YouTube, Facebook and Instagram accounts.

The minister later explained that Compact ‘incites hatred against Jews, against people with a history of migration and against our parliamentary democracy in an indescribable way’. According to the Ministry, the legal basis is the Law on Associations, according to which organisations that are directed against the free and democratic basic order can also be banned.

‘The ban shows that we are also taking action against intellectual arsonists who are fuelling a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and who want to bypass our democratic state,’ the minister explained. “Our message is very clear: we will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs in Germany and who does not. Our rule of law protects all those who are harassed because of their faith, their origin, the colour of their skin or even their democratic position.

As early as 2022, the German intelligence services (BND) considered that Compact, ‘as a multimedia company, conveys anti-democratic positions in society and against human dignity’, and since then, it has been classified as far-right by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and under suspicion.

"Hadi bin Hurr"

Why would ISIS choose to carry out such a large-scale terrorist attack on Russian soil at this very moment when we know that nothing similar was attempted even in the midst of the war in Syria?

I

If it weren’t infinitely disgusting and totally inappropriate to the tragic moment, someone might find it funny how much Washington and their satellites are trying these days to prove that Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the horrible terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall that killed 144 completely innocent Russian civilians, while 360 of them were injured and 95 are still considered missing. If these professional Western liars had a little more brain than a parrot needs to endlessly repeat the same nonsense that no one on this planet believes anymore, they would realize that Moscow, by labeling the Kiev Nazi regime as the culprit of the second largest terrorist operation in Russia since 1991, in fact, in front of the whole world, more than directly calls out Washington and their other subordinate power centers. After all, simple logic and the abundance of direct and indirect evidence that is already available to the public lead each of us to come to the same conclusion ourselves.

American attempts to shift the blame for the massacre in Moscow solely to the “Islamic State” are more than naive and foolish. Worse than those pathetic attempts was only the American conviction that this false flag operation could pass and that the Kremlin could be successfully misled. Moscow does not believe in American crocodile tears! In addition, a large part of the world public has never allowed itself to become a victim of brainwashing by the Western mainstream media, so it does not fall for the American claims about the non-involvement of Kiev in the massacre in Moscow, which also applies to an increasing part of the Western public, which has become resistant to the lies of Zionist-controlled Washington. The world public has long been aware of the fact that Daesh is nothing more than a proxy weapon of global terror under the control of the infamous Zionist triad of special services consisting of the CIA, MI6, and the Mossad. Reinventing ISIS as the duty culprit for all the crimes planned in Washington, London, and Tel-Aviv is no longer possible.

Maria Zakharova
Komsomolskaya Pravda

In an article for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman tells who is sowing controlled chaos in the interests of the United States.

American politicians have persuaded themselves that the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall was committed by the ISIS* terrorist organization banned in Russia. Why they do this is clear - there are no two ways about it.

Billions of dollars and an unprecedented amount of weapons were invested unaccountably and with the use of corrupt schemes in the Kyiv regime, aggressive rhetoric against Russia and blatant nationalism, the ban on peaceful negotiations on Ukraine, and endless calls for a violent solution to the conflict, the refusal to condemn the long-standing terrorist attacks carried out by the Kyiv regime and massive information and political support for any, even the most terrible actions of Zelenskyy - all this directly and indirectly points to the involvement of the current occupants of the White House in the sponsorship of the terrorist organization ISIS*. Hence, Washington's daily "excusing" of its underlings in Kyiv, and the attempt to cover themselves, along with the Zelenskyy regime they created, with the scarecrow of the banned ISIS*. And then they fell into their own rusty trap.

What is ISIS*?

At one time, as part of the counteraction to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Washington actively supported the mujahideen, armed and guided them. Already when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, almost clapping her hands, recalled: "...we are going to recruit these mujahideen. And that's great. Let's import the Wahhabi variety of Islam into Afghanistan so that we can defeat the USSR". It was as a result of that Afghan campaign that Al-Qaeda* (recognized as a terrorist organization, banned in Russia) emerged. Let's leave Afghanistan for a moment and move on to Iraq.

Cesare Sacchetti

There was a time when Russia was not even a State. At least, it was not a national State in the real sense of this word. Its government had no power to enforce its laws and other actors dominated the scene. This was the time of the 90s. If we were to speak with some Russians who lived at that time in the country, they would surely tell us what kind of living hell Russia was then.

The collapse of the Berlin wall was a disaster because it dismantled the Soviet blockade and created a political vacuum. A political vacuum that was filled by foreign powers such as the US deep state along with the infamous Russian oligarchs, who happen to be quite often Ashkenazi Jews.

These oligarchs allowed Russia to be ruled by the worst kind of people, including mobsters, human smugglers and drug dealers. All these elements were the de facto government of Russia at that time. At this point, we need to stress some facts before continuing our analysis. We are certainly not nostalgic of the Soviet era.

How Wall Street created the USSR – The USSR was a creation of the Anglo-Saxon financial world and it was conceived to spread communism throughout the world and also to get rid of the ancient Russian tsarist tradition, which embraced Christian values.

The real story of the birth of the USSR is not told in the history books because it would disturb the liberal narrative. For instance, we do not read in the history books, at least the ones that we study at school, that Trotsky went to New York to plan his revolution in 1917 and we do not read that in this city he received funding by the local powerful and wealthy banks.