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Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow is ready to end the war in Ukraine, branding it a "tragedy". The Kremlin chief, who sent his troops into Ukraine last February, blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for the continued violence. Putin is reportedly poised to use his speech at an upcoming G20 meeting to urge world leaders to work out a strategy for ending the war. In a virtual meeting on Wednesday, the Russian president said: “Military actions are always a tragedy. And of course, we should think about how to stop this tragedy. Ukrainian President Zelensky signed a decree in October 2022...

Russia's president Vladimir Putin, 70, is taking tanks as old as he is out of storage in his desperate bid to crush Ukraine on the battlefield. A video showing long obsolete Soviet-era T-54B and T-55A tanks - designed to be used in the armies of Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin - on a train carried across Russia, presumably destined for the frontlines of the war, has emerged. It comes with Putin having already raided museums and storage depots for retired T-62 battle tanks, which halted production 12 years ago. The geriatric T-54 was originally produced by Stalin after the Second World...

Ukrainian forces outside the battered eastern city of Bakhmut are managing to keep Russian units at bay so ammunition, food, equipment and medicines can be delivered to defenders, the army said on Saturday. And in the latest claim to have inflicted heavy casualties, Kyiv said its troops had killed 193 Russians and injured 199 others during the course of fighting on Friday. Russia has made the capture of Bakhmut a priority in its strategy to take control of Ukraine's eastern Donbas industrial region. The city has been largely destroyed in months of fighting, with Russia launching repeated assaults.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Saturday indicated that lifting all anti-Russia sanctions and canceling all claims against Moscow in international judicial instances should be an intrinsic part of a peace settlement in Ukraine. -snip- "the cancellation of all illegal sanctions and lawsuits against Russia in international courts should become an integral part [of this settlement]," Zakharova said in a statement. It is noteworthy that on Friday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, on the grounds of alleged "unlawful deportation" of Ukrainian...

Ukraine says its future may depend on the brutal battles raging around Bakhmut, but there are growing splits between officials in Kyiv and some Western military analysts over the best approach to what could be a decisive period in the conflict. For months, Ukraine’s defense of the eastern city has held up and worn down Russian forces while serving as a potent symbol of the country’s defiance. Now, as Moscow’s assault intensifies, a number of observers have questioned whether Kyiv's decision to reinforce the area rather than retreat is being driven more by the political desire to avoid a high-profile...

What’s known is that $250 billion in capital has left, equivalent to 14 percent of its GDP. One expert guesstimates that Russia’s economy has shrunk from the size of Italy’s to Chile’s in the past year — you wouldn’t know this based on bogus figures fed to the media by Moscow. Economist Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) calculates that Western sanctions alone have also “basically shrunk Russia’s economy by 10 percent”, bigger than what happened in the 2009 financial crisis. What is also known is that immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, an...

U.S. officials have released video that shows a Russian Su-27 fighter jet colliding with the propeller of a U.S. MQ-9 reaper drone. The video was released by the U.S. military's European Command on Thursday, allowing the public to view the widely-reported aerial incident. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin summarized the incident Wednesday in a press conference, saying, "Two Russian jets dumped fuel on an unmanned U.S. MQ-9 aircraft conducting routine operations in international airspace. And one Russian jet intercepted and hit our MQ-9 aircraft, resulting in a crash." Austin sharply criticized the Russian military for its actions, stating that the Black...

Russia has put forward a highly contentious list of security guarantees it says it wants the west to agree to in order to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine, including many elements that have already been ruled out. ...The demands, spelled out by Moscow in full for the first time, were handed over to the US this week. They include a demand that Nato remove any troops or weapons deployed to countries that entered the alliance after 1997, which would include much of eastern Europe, including Poland, the former Soviet countries of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and...