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EILAT, ISRAEL — In a moment I’ll give you a preview of my interview with Israeli Minister Gideon Sa’ar, a member of Israel's security cabinet and the highest-ranking Israeli official I’ve interviewed since the war with Hamas began. But first let me just take a moment to share with you what my wife, Lynn, and I saw last night while we were driving south from Jerusalem to Israel’s southernmost city. Located right on the gorgeous, glistening Red Sea, Eilat is an ancient city even mentioned in the Bible. Today, Eilat is a resort community where typically hundreds of thousands of...

Many people believe that nationalism and democracy are antithetical, Dimitry Savvin says; but the only successful transitions in East Europe and the former Soviet space from occurred where nationalism reinforced democratic ideas. The same thing will be true for a free Russia or such a state will not exist. The émigré Russian nationalist says, the success stories in the former communist region have been Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia, in each of which democracy and nationalism reinforced one another. In these cases, Savvin continues, “nationalist ideology, in sync with anti-communism and an orientation toward Euro-Atlantic...

KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian government dispatched its highest-level police and security officials to the eastern part of the country Monday in an effort to put down separatist violence described as inspired by Russia and following a script that played out in Crimea. “The plan is to destabilize the situation,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told an emergency cabinet meeting Monday morning. “The plan is for foreign troops to cross the border and seize the country’s territory, which we will not allow.” On Sunday, pro-Russian demonstrations in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk that had been orderly the last...

US a ‘parasite’ on world economy, says Putin On August 1, 2011 SELIGER (AFP) – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday accused the United States of acting as a “parasite” on the world economy by accumulating massive debts that threaten the global financial system. “The country is living in debt. It is not living within its means, shifting the weight of responsibility on other countries and in a way acting as a parasite,” Putin told a group of pro-Kremlin youth in central Russia. He also suggested that Washington may have been flirting with the idea of a default in...

CARACAS (Reuters) - Russia is building arms plants in Venezuela to produce AK-103 automatic rifles and cartridges and is finalizing contracts to send 53 military helicopters to the Andean nation, Moscow's envoy to Venezuela saidMonday. Ambassador Vladmir Zaemskiy told a news conference that Russian engineers and Venezuelan construction firms were building the rifle and cartridge plants which, when operational, would employ more than 1,500 workers. He gave no completion date for the plants under construction in the central state of Aragua. Details about Moscow's military shipments and projects have been scarce since socialist President Hugo Chavez's government began signing military...

Treason!   USA sold us to Russia.   ( http://www.efakt.pl/Zdrada-USA-sprzedaly-nas-Rosji,artykuly,52626,1.html ) (translation from Polish)[The end of anti-missile shield! Americans break promises. There will be neither a US base in Poland nor a radar in Czech Rep.What about our security now?! We've been left on the thin ice.] The strategic ally? The solid rock of our national security? The end of illusions. United States, which could always rely on us, turned its back to us. The President of USA just threw to the garbage bin  the project of building the Anti-Missile Shield in Poland and Czech Rep. The powerful military fascility could strengthen our...

Moscow , June 19 Russia will shoot down the North Korean missile if it strays towards its air space, a top military official today said, even as the country's military is monitoring in "real time" the preparations of its renegade neighbour. "If the North Korean missile would veer towards us, we will shoot it down. All our air and missile defence means are ready for this," Deputy Chief of General Staff Lt-Gen Aleksandr Burutin was quoted as saying by' Vesti FM's radio.

Georgia said on Tuesday a Russian-planned coup plot had been uncovered within the military of the former Soviet republic and a rebellion was under way at a military base near the capital. The Interior Ministry said those involved in the plot had received money from Russia which has criticized NATO military exercises in Georgia due to begin on Wednesday. "The main aim of this uprising was to disrupt the NATO military exercises," Defense Minister David Sikharulidze told Reuters. "We are in negotiations with the soldiers at the Mukhrovani base and I hope this uprising will end soon." Sikharulidze said the...

Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion. Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At...

Can anyone control the forces the Russian president has unleashed? A couple of weeks back, while news readers were averting their gaze from photographs of a shirtless Vladimir Putin fishing in Siberia, two videos circulating on the Internet laid bare a different, much more chilling, portion of the Russian body politic. The first was a crude bit of agitprop thought to originate with the Nashi, a Kremlin-funded youth movement loyal to Putin whose work involves denouncing the president's critics as fascists, homosexuals or foreign-controlled traitors. The eight-minute clip, which eventually found its way to YouTube, was ostensibly meant to persuade...

FROM the day Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer, died of polonium poisoning in London last November, officials in Russia treated the investigation of his death as if it were simply a matter of bad public relations. They dismissed accusations of Russian involvement as nonsense fabricated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s enemies. Britain last week punctured Russia’s strategy. A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to accuse another former K.G.B. officer of the murder and demand his extradition pushed Russia out of the international court of public opinion and into the international court of law. If recent history is...

Russian police today said they would crack down harshly on attempts to hold unauthorized opposition rallies planned for April 14 in Moscow and April 15 in St. Petersburg, RFE/RL's Russian Service reported. Metal police barricades have been erected on the central Moscow square where the March of Dissent is planned. Special police forces, the OMON, are being deployed to the capital. Yulia Malysheva, one of the march's organizers, told RFE/RL's Russian Service that large numbers of OMON officers have already been deployed to Moscow from other regions. She expressed concern, saying that "regional OMON as a rule do not bear...

Poland suggests Russia may have falsified documents in meat spat Published: November 25, 2006 WARSAW, Poland: Poland's justice minister suggested Saturday that Russia may have been behind forged documents accompanying Polish meat exports, the discovery of which led to a ban on Polish products. Zbigniew Ziobro said the documents appeared to have been falsified outside Poland by people accustomed to the Cyrillic alphabet. The Polish-Russian trade dispute has swelled into a larger standoff between Russia and the European Union. Russia claims that Poland tried to get substandard meat onto the Russian market using fake health documents. Poland agrees that the...

Poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died on Thursday in an intensive care ward, London's University College Hospital said. Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Russian government, suffered a rapid deterioration in his health on Thursday, but doctors still were unable to determine the cause of his death, a spokesman said in a statement.

The Government of the United States of America is waging an intense behind-the-scenes battle to stop the European Union lifting its 15-year-old arms embargo against China, warning The Blair government that it will not tolerate the prospect of European military technology being used to threaten its soldiers in the Far East. As Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to travel to Peking next week to discuss ending the arms ban, The Telegraph has learnt that the Bush administration is alarmed by Tony Blair's "cave-in" to French and German pressure. Japan has also expressed dismay over the EU's move dramatically to...