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Russia and China warned on Wednesday that Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Iron Dome for America” missile defense system would destabilize global security and turn outer space into a new arena for armed confrontation. “The recently announced large-scale ‘Golden (Iron) Dome for America’ program is deeply destabilizing,” the two sides said in a joint statement during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Moscow. The U.S. plan “explicitly provides for a significant strengthening of the arsenal for conducting combat operations in space,” it added. -snip- Moscow and Beijing claimed nuclear states must “reject Cold War mentality” and avoid seeking military...

A statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, Cheka, was unveiled in front of the headquarters of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in Moscow on September 11. The statue is a replica of a larger Dzerzhinsky statue, one of the symbols of Soviet repression, which was pulled from its pedestal outside KGB headquarters in August 1991. SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin said at the ceremony for the statue's unveiling that Dzerzhinsky's face on the original and new statues is turned toward Poland and Baltic states "because the threat to Russia from the northwest remains."

Will Zelensky attack ther Victory Day parade and escalate the war to the maximum? On the one hand, we all know ‘talk is cheap’, so it may be that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is just posturing when he hints that his forces may well attack the May 9th Victory Day Parade in Moscow, Russia – an event that will gather thousands of people, including as many as 20 heads of state. This would amount to an especially damning escalation since Putin declared a 3-day truce from May 8-10 – a proposal that Kiev sneered at, but hasn’t publicly rejected. However,...

Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, referred to Ukraine as "a disappearing country" in a post on Telegram. "But Trump has finally broken the Kiev regime into paying for American aid with minerals. Now they will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country," Medvedev said, according to a Google translation of part of his post. The Russian official also noted President Donald Trump's ratings have declined. "And the US Senate, led by Republicans, is preparing to introduce more ‘crushing sanctions’ against us. Let's see how the new administration...

Stalin, a cynical and clever leader, didn’t experience any epiphany but simply knew that taking it easy on the Orthodox Church was important for winning the war. First, many Soviet citizens remained secretly religious (which was not directly forbidden), so the “legalization” of Orthodoxy helped to keep the nation at war united – quite a crucial thing. Second, the Allies were pushing Stalin towards loosening his grip on the religious: the oppression of the faithful was bad publicity, internationally speaking. Third, in 1943 the Red Army was regaining the Soviet lands previously occupied by Germans. The occupants, trying to gain...

All heads of state from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), except for Ukraine and Moldova, will attend the Victory Day parade in Moscow, said CIS Secretary General Sergey Lebedev, APA’s Moscow correspondent reports. "All CIS heads of state will participate in the May 9 Parade, except two... Unfortunately, Ukraine and Moldova will not attend. Nine heads of states will be present," Lebedev said, responding to a question about the participation of CIS leaders in the Moscow celebration.

A declassified Cold War-era file from the CIA has gone viral over its coverage of a supposed clash between Soviet soldiers and a UFO, passengers of which reportedly turned the troops to stone before blasting off. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CIA acquired a 250-page KGB report recounting the events that transpired after a platoon fired at a flying saucer over Ukraine. The report included eyewitness accounts and pictures of the aftermath, which one American agent described as “a horrific picture of revenge on the part of extraterrestrial creatures, a picture that makes one’s blood...

January 21, 2022 With inflation at a record high, millions of its citizens fleeing the country, and a political opposition recognized by most Western democracies as the legitimate government of Venezuela, the regime of Nicolás Maduro seemed to be on the brink of collapse in 2019. But Maduro regime survived, thanks to a number of factors — among them the external support it received from malign state actors such as Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing never wavered in their political support of the Venezuelan regime, or of Maduro himself, including by refusing to recognize the constitutionally mandated interim presidency...

Lawmakers in Russia’s lower-house State Duma on Tuesday ratified a 20-year strategic partnership treaty with Iran, deepening military and political ties between the two countries as they remain under heavy Western sanctions. The pact, signed by President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian in January, aims to strengthen cooperation in areas including defense, intelligence sharing, trade and nuclear energy. “The agreement takes [Russian-Iranian relations] to a fundamentally new level,” Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said last week ahead of the vote. One of the treaty’s key provisions commits Russia and Iran to counter shared security threats, exchange intelligence and...

It may sound like the beginning of a Star Trek plot, but there’s a very real arms race going on in space. And Russia may have just made the first move. According to some startling reports, Russian military satellites have apparently launched unknown objects into Earth’s orbit. Space.com described the trio of Russian satellites as “secretive” objects “whose purpose is unknown.” “The three satellites, designated Kosmos 2581, 2582 and 2583, launched on a Soyuz-2.1V rocket from Plesetsk cosmodrome early on Feb. 2,” the outlet reports, adding that the satellites “have displayed interesting behavior.” That behavior includes getting oddly close to...

  BOOKS CITED Central Asia's New States: Independence, Foreign Policy, and Regional Security by Martha Brill Olcott (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 202 pp., $19.95) Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo'av Karny (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 436 pp., $15) The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture by Charles King (Hoover Institution Press, 303 pp., $39.95) Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity edited by Sharon L. Wolchik and Volodymyr Zviglyanich (Rowman & Littlefield, 310 pp., $35) Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian PostCommunist Transition edited...

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Russia’s Skolkovo Foundation, with Clinton’s copious help, was the source of Russia’s incredible hypersonic weapons technology. During his first TV interview as the new President of the United States, Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Russian Federation had been “stealing” hypersonic weapons research and development from the United States during the Obama administration. This point went viral. But the story is murkier than that. Certainly, Russia did acquire key components from the United States during the Obama administration. But they did not steal it. They purchased it. And the person who authorized the sale was none other...

Azeri president says apology isn’t enough, in confrontation that shows Moscow’s waning influence over former Soviet territories. Azerbaijan’s president accused Russia of trying to cover up its role in a plane crash that killed 38 people, delivering a harsh condemnation that signaled a reversal of the power dynamics that long saw Moscow hold sway over its former Soviet republics. President Ilham Aliyev said Sunday that Azerbaijan had laid out for the Kremlin the necessary conditions to satisfy the country, demanding that Russia take responsibility for causing the crash, provide compensation for the country and victims’ families, and bring those guilty...

Putin has vowed to incinerate Ukraine with new missiles firing warheads almost as hot as on the surface of the sun. The Russian dictator said he would use the new Oreshnik missiles to turn areas of Ukraine “to dust” in blasts “comparable to nuclear weapons”. In a speech to ex-Soviet state leaders in Kazakhstan Putin vowed to ramp up his country’s production of hypersonic missiles, in a bid to outpace the West’s ability to supply Ukraine. Boasting about his new super-weapon Oreshnik, he said that in future it would be devastating in the destruction it caused. “Of course, there are...

"Europeans must be ready to sacrifice some “luxuries” to pay to support Ukraine and to prevent a “wartime scenario” coming to the nations of the continent if they are insufficiently prepared, NATO’s most senior military officer said in a speech namechecking both Russia and China as threats..."- from the article

Russia's central bank hiked its key interest rate by 200 basis points on Friday to 21%, the highest level since the early years of President Vladimir Putin's rule, when Russia was recovering from the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On Oct. 16, 1978, the cardinal electors of the Roman Catholic Church elected Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to sit on the Chair of St. Peter. Wojtyla took the name Pope John Paul II, having succeeded John Paul I, who died suddenly after serving as Roman pontiff for only 33 days. Though few recognized it at the time, the papal election of Karol Wojtyla was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. As George Weigel explained in The End and the Beginning, John Paul II, only eight months after his election, “ignited a revolution of conscience in his native...

...For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers. The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University—8 June 1978. {Russian audio with English-translation audio overlay; and English subtitles.} PLEASE NOTE: THERE DOES NOT EXIST A VIDEO WITH ONLY ONE LANGUAGE AUDIO. SORRY. THIS IS HOW IT WAS RECORDED. PLEASE TURN ON CC/SUBTITLES TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THE ENGLISH.