Tag: russia

Russia to seize assets of international ‘Satanists’

Russia on Friday added what it termed the “international Satanism movement” to a financial blacklist, enabling it to freeze the assets of alleged members even if they have no criminal record.

Moscow has put several non-existent organisations on the black list of “terrorists and extremists” in recent years, including the “international LGBT movement” and the “anti-Russian separatist movement”.

As such groups are vaguely defined under Russian law, prosecutors can accuse anyone of being a member, giving Moscow a free hand to pursue political opponents, according to critics.

Russia‘s Supreme Court declared the “international Satanism movement” extremist in July, after prosecutors accused its members of desecrating Orthodox Christian churches and spreading “hatred”.

“The movement is closely linked to manifestations of radical nationalism and neo-Nazism,” Russia’s prosecutor general said in a statement in July.

Patriarch Kirill, the influential head of the Russian Orthodox Church, voiced support for the ban in January, accusing Satanists of conducting malign “rituals” and recruiting young people.

“Think about it… Our soldiers are ready to give their lives for values that are clearly being trampled upon by Satanists,” he said at a ceremony at the Kremlin.

Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian federal agency that maintains the financial blacklist of “terrorists and extremists”, added the “international Satanism movement” to its list on Friday, its website showed.

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Several Russian Jets Breach Airspace Of NATO-Member Estonia

NATO member Estonia (since 2004) has fiercely condemned what it says is a “brazen” incident where Russian warplanes violated its airspace over the Gulf of Finland on Friday.

The Estonian foreign ministry described that three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets “entered Estonian airspace without permission and remained there for a total of 12 minutes.”

The ministry quickly summoned Russian chargé d’affaires “to lodge a protest” – and simultaneously EU diplomat Kaja Kallas, who hails from the Baltic country and was the first female prime minister, blasted the incursion as “an extremely dangerous provocation”.

Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna went further to call it “unprecedentedly brazen” saying that–

“Russia’s increasingly extensive testing of boundaries and growing aggressiveness must be met with a swift increase in political and economic pressure.”

Reports in Estonian media claim that the jets turned off their transponders and ‘went dark’ during the incident, so as to not be tracked easily on radar.

This apparently isn’t a first, as Russia has allegedly violated Estonia’s airspace four times in 2025. Moscow likely isn’t too ‘concerned’ over moments its military might breach the airspace of this tiny former Soviet satellite state in the Baltics.

But European leaders are using these increasing instances to push for an ‘eastern flank’ aerial defense shield protecting NATO.

Just last week the two largest eastern members of NATO said that Russian drones breached their airspace.

The Polish instance was the most serious, given Warsaw accused Russia of intentionally sending a ‘wave’ of drones – up to 19 – which resulted in its military urgently scrambling jets to track them.

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Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Says the US Could ‘Kick Russia’s Ass’

Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, had strong words for Russia at a conference held in Ukraine, saying that the US could “kick Russia’s ass,” Remix News has reported.

Kellogg made the comments in the context of a conversation he had in the Oval Office about Russia’s military might. “They were talking about the primacy of the Russian military and how they were, you know, pretty good. And I said to the people in the room, we’d kick their ass,” Kellogg said at the YES Annual Meeting in Kyiv on September 12.

“What I mean by that is don’t take their statements at face value. They’re not as good as Putin says they are, and for that, I give great credit to the Ukrainian military because they’ve knocked them down a couple notches,” Kellogg added. He brushed off the fact that Russia was a nuclear-armed power, pointing to the fact that the US and its allies also have nuclear weapons.

The US envoy also claimed that Ukraine would win the war despite the fact that Russia continues to make gains in eastern Ukraine and has the clear advantage when it comes to manpower and weapons supplies. “Ukraine will not lose this war. Ukrainians have a moral superiority over Russia, that’s obvious,” he said.

Kellogg said that both he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine recently advised President Trump that Russia is not winning the war.

“If Putin thinks Russia is winning, his definition of winning and my definition of winning are absolutely two different things,” Kellogg said. “If he was winning, he’d be in Kyiv. If he’s winning, he’d be west of the Dnipro River. If he was winning, he’d be on Odessa. If he was winning, he would have changed the government. Russia is, in fact, losing this war.”

Kellogg called Russia a “junior partner” of China and claimed that if Beijing cut off Moscow, the “war would end tomorrow.” The Trump administration has failed to get either India or China to reduce its trade relationship with Russia despite the threats of tariffs and sanctions.

Kellogg’s comments come as a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine seems increasingly unlikely as the two sides remain far apart on the terms for an agreement. In his role as a special US envoy, Kellogg has repeatedly met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and has pledged continued US support for the proxy war.

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Assessing Russia’s Claims That Ukraine Is Responsible For Terrorism All Across Africa

RT recently published a report about late August’s claims by Deputy UN Representative Dmitry Polyansky and Director of the Officers Union for International Security Alexander Ivanov that Ukraine is responsible for terrorism all across Africa.

According to them, its drone pilots assist terrorist-designated forces in Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Kiev has also supplied Libya with drones for use in its civil war despite a Turkish prohibition.

Ukraine boasted about backing Tuareg separatists in Mali after they ambushed Wagner in summer 2024 so that part of Russia’s accusation is undeniable, which lends credence to claims that they’re also backing similar forces in the pro-Russian CAR, but questions arise about their role in Sudan and the DRC. Western media reported in early 2024 that Ukrainian special forces were contracted by Sudan’s UN-recognized government while Trump has bragged about brokering peace between the DRC and Rwanda.

It would therefore be a startling reversal for Ukraine to now militarily aid the Sudanese rebels, not to mention do anything that could risk plunging the DRC back into any sort of serious conflict and thus embarrassing Trump after how proud he was that his peace deal helped to finally stabilize it.

Cynics might also suspect that Russia’s accusation that Ukraine’s diplomatic missions in Algeria, Mauritania, and the DRC are smuggling arms to groups in Libya, Mali, and the northeast DRC is meant to sow discord.

Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to take these claims seriously, which will now be explained.

Trump’s capriciousness might have prompted Ukraine to pursue non-Western business opportunities, including those that contradict US interests like in the DRC, as part of a backup plan in case the US one day cuts it off or at least significantly curtails financial-military aid. It’ll likely comply with US demands to abandon them if they’re made, but thus far, the US seemingly doesn’t have a problem with any of this.

In fact, Trump might even support Zelensky’s “entrepreneurialism” in principle, especially if his advisors inform him that Ukraine’s newfound strategic role in Africa could potentially be leveraged by the US for “plausibly deniable” divide-and-rule purposes in certain future scenarios. As for Ukrainian diplomatic missions’ alleged role in smuggling arms from Algeria and Mauritania to Libya and Mali, Russia might have tipped off the host governments sometime back but wasn’t satisfied with their response.

RT mentioned that Mauritania’s nonchalance towards this claim might be due to it simply being unaware of Ukraine’s activities on its soil while praising Algeria for investigating this matter. It’s also possible that Russia either suspects those two of facilitating Ukraine’s activities, or might even have proof of this, but is giving them a “face-saving” way to end everything by solely blaming Ukraine’s diplomatic missions. Algeria’s investigation might therefore be meant to improve recently troubled ties with Russia over Mali.

Returning to the substance of Russia’s claims, it can therefore be assessed that they’re all likely true, though it’s also possible that some aspects might be revealed to be slightly inaccurate or exaggerated. In any case, the point is that Ukraine has indeed increasingly involved itself in terrorism all across Africa, but to different extents in each instance. The US has the power to put a stop to this by threatening to cut Ukraine off if it refuses but won’t because it believes that this might become useful down the line.

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Did The Polish Deep State Try To Manipulate The President Into War With Russia?

Leading Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita reported on Tuesday that investigators determined that the munition which damaged a home last week during Russia’s drone incursion into Poland actually came from an unexploded missile launched by an F-16 that was trying to down the incoming projectiles.

The National Security Bureau claimed that neither it nor President Karol Nawrocki were hitherto informed of these findings by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government, which Nawrocki then confirmed.

He represents the conservative-nationalist opposition and pledged ahead of the second round in spring not to approve the dispatch of Polish troops to Ukraine while Tusk represents the ruling liberal-globalist government whose Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski just called for a no-fly zone there. Some therefore speculate that members of the Polish permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, or “deep state”, kept Nawrocki out of the loop in order to manipulate him into escalating against Russia.

Given what’s now known about how an F-16’s unexploded munition was responsible for damaging a Polish home, which Tusk’s government earlier told the UNSC was a Russian munition in a scandal that the National Security Bureau demanded accountability for, the aforesaid conjecture isn’t far-fetched. As for the drone incident itself, this analysis here argues that Russia’s drone incursion was due to NATO jamming causing Ukrainian-directed decoys (possibly launched from Belarus) to veer into Poland.

A compelling sequence of events is therefore beginning to take shape. It was likely the case that Russia’s drone incursion into Poland was accidentally caused by NATO jamming and only involved decoys that naturally weren’t outfitted with countermeasures against electronic jamming. A Polish F-16 then missed when firing an air-to-air missile that tried to intercept one of these out-of-control decoys, regardless of whether they knew that they were decoys at the time or not, which is a separate matter of speculation.

In any case, the munition didn’t explode after it missed, but the military would have known the entire time that a wayward missile must have landed somewhere and thus quickly realized that this was the cause of the damage to that home (especially after investigators arrived on the scene and found it). The National Security Bureau and the President were kept in the dark until a source leaked this to the media all while Tusk’s government blamed Russia for the damage at the UNSC and agitated for a no-fly zone.

Extrapolating from the above, Poland’s “deep state” dynamics are such that the National Security Bureau and the President oppose any escalation against Russia that risks sparking a direct war, which contrasts with some members of the armed forces and Tusk’s government as a whole who favor this scenario. That’s why they hid these facts from the first two in order to manipulate them into escalating. The domestic and international implications of this scandal could lead to the collapse of Tusk’s government.

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Ukraine’s Embrace of Suicidal Nationalism

The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 and a war that has decimated the Ukrainian state.

At two key moments over the past 20 years, during 2004’s Orange Revolution and, a decade later, during the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s nationalist political elites, at the urging of the American foreign policy establishment, sought to marginalize, stigmatize and eventually disenfranchise the substantial bloc of ethnic Russian citizens living in the country’s east and south.

That such an eventuality was possible (if not likely) was foreseen some 35 years ago by the last decent foreign policy president we’ve had, George H.W. Bush, who crafted a post Cold War policy based on (1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and (2) a wariness of re-awakening the poisonous sectarianism that so marked the politics of Eastern and Central Europe at mid-century.

Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding creating unnecessary crises within the post-Soviet space rather than provoking new ones (as subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen to do). As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

The nature of the Cold War had changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev announced that the USSR was abandoning the class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were now free to choose their own paths, declaring that “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” was “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed Gorbachev’s overture, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft, echoing the analysis offered to him by the CIA, worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev likewise was extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe.

There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

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Top Russian officer reports advances on all Ukrainian fronts

A senior Russian officer toured positions held by his troops in Ukraine on Wednesday and said Moscow’s forces were advancing on all fronts, the Russian Defence Ministry said, with the heaviest fighting taking place around the logistics centre of Pokrovsk.

General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of staff of the armed forces in what Moscow calls its “special military operation”, said Moscow’s troops were making progress in the eastern Donetsk region, the conflict’s focal point, and further west in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

“Our troops in the zone of the special military operation are advancing in practically all directions,” the Defence Ministry quoted Gerasimov as saying.

“And the heaviest fighting is occurring in the Krasnoarmeisk direction,” he added, using the Soviet-era name for the city of Pokrovsk, “where the enemy, by any means and taking no account of losses, is trying unsuccessfully to stop our advances and seize back the initiative.”

The Ukrainian military, he was quoted as saying, “has deployed the best-trained and most capable fighting units, taking them from other areas. And that facilitates the advance of our troops in other sectors.”

In their slow advance through eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have maintained heavy attacks on the area around Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region for months.

Gerasimov said Russian forces were also making progress in taking Kupiansk, a largely destroyed city in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, and Yampil, further east.

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Polish missile caused ‘Russian drone attack’ damage – media

The only confirmed damage from what Poland claims was a Russian drone incursion into its airspace was actually caused by a Polish missile fired from a NATO F-16 which struck a residential building, the Rzeczpospolita outlet has reported, citing sources.

Polish officials last week reported at least 19 violations of the country’s airspace by drones, saying up to four UAVs had been downed. Warsaw accused Moscow of being behind the incident. Russia has rejected the accusation and insisted its drones only strike Ukrainian military-related facilities.

Western leaders, according to Moscow, “accuse Russia of provocations on a daily basis, most often declining to offer any arguments.” 

Rzeczpospolita reported on Tuesday that most of the drones involved in the incident were not carrying explosives and caused no damage. However, one exception was in the village of Wyryki Wola near the border with Belarus, where what was described by Poland as an “unidentified flying object” crashed into a private home, damaging the roof but without causing casualties.

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EU to propose new plan to leverage €170bn of frozen Russian money

Brussels is pressing ahead with a plan to use €170 billion of Russia’s frozen sovereign assets to back “reparation loans” for Ukraine, the Financial Times has reported. The EU faces growing pressure to find additional funding for Kiev as US cuts back its support.

Moscow has condemned the asset freeze and warned that any seizure of its money would amount to “theft.” 

Western nations froze an estimated $300 billion in Russian funds after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 – some €200 billion of which is held by Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. The funds have accrued billions in interest, and the West has explored ways to use this revenue to finance Ukraine. While refraining from outright seizure, the G7 last year backed a plan to provide Kiev with $50 billion in loans to be repaid using the profits generated by the funds. The EU pledged $21 billion.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has proposed going further by creating a ‘reparation loans’ mechanism, which she described as urgently needed to finance Kiev.

People familiar with discussions said the plan involves channeling cash balances from Russia’s immobilized assets into EU-issued bonds, with the proceeds transferred to Ukraine in tranches. Brussels argues the system would provide Kiev with immediate support while sidestepping a formal seizure.

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Ukraine expects $3.5 billion fund for US weapons to sustain fight against Russia, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine expects there will be around $3.5 billion by next month in a fund to buy weapons from the United States and help sustain its more than three-year fight against Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday.

The financial arrangement known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, pools contributions from NATO members, except the United States, to purchase American weapons, munitions and equipment.

“We received more than $2 billion from our partners specifically for the PURL program,” Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference in Kyiv with visiting European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. “We will receive additional money in October. I think we will have somewhere around $3.5-3.6 billion.”

Zelenskyy declined to provide details of what weapons the first shipments would include, but said that they would definitely contain missiles for Patriot air defense missile systems and munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS.

An end to the war appears no closer, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts.

The Patriot systems are vital to defend against Russian missile attacks. The HIMARS systems have significantly bolstered the Ukrainian military’s precision-strike capability.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for peace talks, telling reporters on Wednesday that “we remain open for negotiations and prefer to settle the Ukrainian crisis by political and diplomatic means.”

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