Tag: vladimir putin

Their Fathers’ Organs Were Stolen in China: The Xi–Putin Hot Mic Opens Fresh Wounds

Grief and shock hit 19-year-old Han Yu at once as she walked into a room filled with police.

Center in the throngs lay the lifeless body of her father, who had been in perfect health two months before the Chinese authorities threw him into jail.

Even with makeup, traces of suffering were evident. There was tissue missing from under his left eye and bruises around his chin. Black stitches led downward from his throat.

The police yelled and pushed Han out when the teen tried to unbutton her father’s clothes and check how big the incision was.

A few other relatives managed to lift his shirt up and saw that the cut went all the way to the abdomen. They pressed down on his stomach. There were no organs. It was all ice.

What did they do with the organs?

Fast forward 21 years, and the sense of horror recurred when she saw the hot mic moment of Chinese leader Xi Jinping musing with Russian President Vladimir Putin about continual, multiple transplants leading to longevity.

“Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi said through a translator in Russian at a massive military parade in Beijing commemorating World War II on Sept. 3.

Putin replied through his interpreter in Mandarin: “As biotechnology advances, human organs can be continuously transplanted, allowing us to become younger and younger, perhaps even achieve immortality.”

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Putin Says Curbing NATO Enlargement Crucial to Ukraine Peace Deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sept. 1 that the issue of NATO’s eastward enlargement has to be tackled for there to be a sustainable peace deal in Ukraine.

Putin was speaking after talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tianjin, China.

Putin said the crisis in Ukraine was partly due to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into NATO,” which he said “poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.”

He said that the 2014 revolution in Ukraine was a “coup” in which “the country’s political leadership that opposed NATO membership was removed from power.”

“In order for a Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, the root causes of the crisis, which I have just mentioned and which I have repeatedly mentioned before, must be eliminated,” he said.

Putin Calls for ‘Fair Balance’

Putin also called for “a fair balance in the security sphere” to be restored.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—which has expressed interest in joining NATO—and its forces now control a fifth of the country, including Crimea and large swathes of the south and east of Ukraine.

Just days before the invasion, Putin delivered a speech describing the potential accession of Ukraine to NATO as “a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

In the wake of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden both waived policies of neutrality they had held for decades and joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

NATO now has 32 members, including a string of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union—such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—or were part of the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact alliance during the Cold War—such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Apart from Ukraine, two other countries—Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—have applied for NATO membership.

The alliance’s website states, “NATO’s door remains open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership, and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

During NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, alliance leaders said in a declaration: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

But after NATO’s summit in The Hague in June, there was no mention of Ukrainian membership in the declaration issued, which stated simply, “Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.”

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Did Putin Give the US Permission to Encircle Venezuela?

The contagion of war is spreading like wildfire. Venezuela has been feuding with the United States since 2019, when all communication came to a standstill. In recent weeks, the US placed a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and has accused him of aiding the world’s top drug traffickers. The US has sent thousands of illegal Venezuelan migrants back to Venezuela despite pushback from the government. Tensions have boiled over after Trump visited with Putin.

Did Putin give Trump the green light to move in on Venezuela? Deep ties with Russia have protected Venezuela, but all alliances can come to an end with the proper incentives. On Monday, over four and a half MILLION Venezuelan troops were deployed after it was announced that US warships were circling Venezuela. “This week, I will activate a special plan with more than 4.5 million militiamen to ensure coverage of the entire national territory — militias that are prepared, activated and armed,” Maduro announced on state television. “The empire has gone mad and has renewed its threats to Venezuela’s peace and tranquility,” Maduro continued.

Maduro was indicted in 2020 during Trump’s first term under suspicion of narco-terrorism. The US placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, which was later raised to $25 million under Biden but powerful people are protecting the Venezuelan president.

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Putin Proposes, in Return for the Control of the Donbas Region, to Freeze the Frontlines in Ukraine’s Southern Kherson and Zaporozhie, No More Russian Territorial Conquests: REPORT

Russia is reportedly easing their territorial demands for peace.

In the few hours since the historic Alaska meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin, myriads of articles have been written in the MSM, mostly trying to discredit the US-Russia peace negotiations, as well as planting false information about what happened behind the scenes.

However, some reports have arisen that bear all the markings of actual intel, suggesting that Putin is asking for a little less for peace than a year ago.

I first found this suggestion five days ago in the Italian Corriere Della Sera, which interviewed Russian scholar Dmitry Suslov, deputy director at the Higher School of Economics and a long-time foreign policy adviser to the Kremlin.

“I remember that a year ago Moscow had asked the Ukrainians for the complete withdrawal from all four annexed provinces, while now it is only asking for that from the Donbas. A crucial part of the agreement is Ukraine’s commitment not to join NATO.”

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Putin Criminalizes Online Searches for ‘Extremist’ Content

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed a law that criminalizes searches for “extremist” content on the internet, with fines of up to 5,000 rubles ($64) for each violation.

The Moscow Times noted that even some of Russia’s more enthusiastic censors are uneasy about the new law because they might get busted for seeking out extreme content so they can censor it:

Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League and a prominent advocate of online censorship, voiced unease over the bill earlier this month. She warned that it could obstruct the League’s work, roughly 30% of which involves identifying extremist content and forwarding it to authorities.

Mizulina claimed that the legislation could even put police officers at legal risk for viewing content as part of their duties.

In a similar vein, the head of Russian state propaganda network RT, Margarita Simonyan, lamented that her apparatchiks would be hindered in their quest to “investigate and bring to shame” critics of the Kremlin and the Ukraine war if they were “forbidden to even read them.”

The vote in the Russian parliament to pass the bill was more divided than usual, with opposition from factions that usually give Putin what he wants, including the Communist Party. An aide to a liberal Russian politician who protested the bill by comparing it to the Big Brother dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 was immediately arrested.

Internet freedom advocates, meanwhile, raised the objection that “extremism” can be difficult to define and Putin is likely to stretch the term to include all criticism of his government.

Human Rights Watch pointed out that Putin has previously designated anti-corruption groups, LGBT organizations, independent media outlets, human rights groups, and political opponents as “extremists.” It is a safe bet that Russian courts will find most criticism of the Ukraine war to be “extremist” in character.

The new law empowers Putin’s enforcers to go after people who search for “extreme” content, not just those who create it. The chilling effect on dissent will be formidable in a nation where dissent was already half-frozen to death.

Putin’s digital minister, Maksut Shadayev, was predictably evasive when asked how the regime would define “extremist” content, or tell the difference between users who intentionally seek it out compared to those who stumble across it by accident. Shadayev said it would be up to prosecutors to demonstrate “intent.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Putin’s new law was the “most serious step in censorship and the fight against dissent” since the 2022 bill that established 15-year prison sentences for disseminating “fake news” about Russia’s military activities.

“This vaguely worded, fast-tracked bill shows a clear disregard for open debate and create an even more repressive environment for the media and the public,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Senior Researcher Anna Brakha.

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Putin knew Hillary Clinton had physical, ‘psycho-emotional’ problems — but kept it quiet during 2016 campaign: Gabbard

Russian intelligence obtained damaging information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s health amid her 2016 presidential campaign — including evidence that she had “psycho-emotional problems” that were being treated with severe sedatives — but Vladimir Putin chose not to release it before that year’s election because he thought the Democrat would win.

The astounding revelations were contained in a Sept. 18, 2020, House Intelligence Committee report that reviewed Russia’s influence on the 2016 contest and was declassified and made public Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, “possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression. and cheerfulness,’” stated the report, which the committee based on 20 interviews with intelligence officers and FBI agents, as well as a review of source material for the 2017 Obama-ordered report on Russian election meddling.

“Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power.’”

By September 2016, some of those communications showed then-President Barack Obama and Democratic party bosses found the state of Clinton’s health “extraordinarily alarming” and fretted that it could have a “serious negative impact” on her ability to beat Trump that November.

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‘One-sided game’ in relations with West has ended – Putin

Russia will no longer play “one-sided” games with the West, President Vladimir Putin has told journalists on the sidelines of the summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in Minsk. Western nations have repeatedly betrayed Russia by not fulfilling their promises related to NATO expansion and resolving the Ukraine conflict, he stated at a press conference on Friday.

NATO is currently justifying its planned defense spending hike to 5% of its members’ GDP and military buildup in Europe by pointing to Russia’s “aggressiveness,” Putin said, adding that the bloc’s members are “turning everything upside down” when they make statements such as these.

“No one is saying a word about how we’ve come up to the Russian special military operation,” the president said, adding that the roots of the Ukraine conflict go back decades when Moscow was “blatantly lied to” about NATO expansion. “What followed was one expansion wave after another,” he stated.

Russia’s security concerns about the bloc’s activities have been consistently ignored and met with silence, according to Putin. “Isn’t it aggressive behavior? That is precisely aggressive behavior, which the West does not want to pay attention to.”

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Assassination attempt on Putin mentioned by Budanov prepared with US money — Russian MFA

The assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned by chief of the Ukrainian military intelligence service Kirill Budanov was prepared with US money, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

“Yesterday one of chiefs of the Kiev regime Buganov openly admitted that the Ukrainian intelligence service prepared assassination attempts on the Russian president. This assassination attempt was again prepared with US money,” she wrote on her Telegram channel.

Instead of financing terrorists from Kiev Washington should have invested those funds in its domestic security, Zakharova said due to the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump.

There was a shooting at a rally of Trump in Pennsylvania late on Saturday. The Republican was wounded. According to recent reports, he is safe, the injury was minor – the bullet pierced his right ear. The shooter was killed by members of the US Secret Service, which is responsible, in particular, for protecting the top officials of the state. The Associated Press reported that authorities were investigating the incident as an assassination attempt on Trump.

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Transactional Weakness Tips the Balance of Power – ‘Hold to No Illusions; There Is Nothing Beyond This Reality’

A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order ‘is gone’

The post-WWII geo-political outcome effectively determined the post-war global economic structure. Both are now undergoing huge change. What remains stuck fast however, is the general (Western) weltanschauung that everything must ‘change’ only for it to stay the same. Things financial will continue as before; do not disturb the slumber. The assumption is that the oligarch/donor class will see to it that things remain the same.

However, the power distribution of the post-war era was unique. There is nothing ‘forever’ about it; nothing inherently permanent.

At a recent conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, President Putin highlighted both the global fracture, and set out an alternate vision which is likely to be adopted by BRICS and many beyond. His address was, metaphorically speaking, the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’.

Putin is now hinting that Russia has accepted the challenge posed by the post-war financial order. Russia has persevered against the financial war, and is prevailing in that too.

Putin’s address last week was, in one sense, nothing really new: It reflected the classic doctrine of the former premier, Yevgeny Primakov. No romantic about the West, Primakov understood its hegemonic world order would always treat Russia as a subordinate. So he proposed a different model – the multipolar order – where Moscow balances power blocs, but does not join them.

At its heart, the Primakov Doctrine was the avoidance of binary alignments; the preservation of sovereignty; the cultivation of ties with other great powers, and the rejection of ideology in favour of a Russian nationalist vision.

Today’s negotiations with Washington (now narrowly centred on Ukraine) reflect this logic. Russia isn’t begging for sanctions relief or threatening anything specific. It is conducting strategic procrastination: waiting out electoral cycles, testing Western unity, and keeping all doors ajar. Yet Putin is not adverse either to exerting a little pressure of his own – the window for accepting Russian sovereignty of the four eastern oblasts is not forever: “This point can also move”, he said.

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Limo from Vladimir Putin’s ‘fleet’ blown up in massive explosion

An Aurus limousine believed to be part of Vladimir Putin’s official car fleet exploded and caught fire in Moscow. Footage appears to show the £275,000 Aurus Senat ablaze on a street just north of Moscow’s FSB secret service Lubyanka headquarters.

The car is believed to be part of a fleet of vehicles belonging to the Kremlin’s Presidential Property Management Department. Images show the engine fire spreading to the interior of the limousine. It was not clear who was in the vehicle at the time of the incident.

Nor has there been any confirmation about what caused the sudden blaze on Sretenka Street.

Reports suggest that there were no injuries or fatalities as a result of the explosion and fire.

Putin, 72, routinely uses the Russian-made cars and has gifted the limousines, for example to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

The incident is likely to increase Kremlin paranoia that foreign agents are plotting to assassinate Putin.

Earlier this year, the Kremlin warned any attempt to assassinate the Russian leader would be met with a nuclear response.

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