Alexander Dugin, the fascist philosopher known as “Putin’s Rasputin”, said: “The capture of Maduro demonstrates that international law no longer exists — only the law of force applies.”

Alexey Pushkov, a Russian senator, accused the US of returning the world to “the savage imperialism of the 19th century”, adding: “Won’t the ‘triumph’ turn into a disaster?”

“The United States carried out a coup in Venezuela, struck the country, and demonstrated that international law means nothing to a nation that considers itself a hegemon,” said Igor Girkin, a former soldier and FSB officer turned commentator.

According to Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Trump administration’s decision to strike Venezuela without even the “veneer of justification” “substantially frays” any sense of international order.

He adds that it “will make it much harder in the future for the US to convince other states that this type of behaviour should be punished”.

“By using force to assert its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the US is trading these short-term gains for a long-term structural cost to its overall position in the international system and to the advantages it enjoys over its rivals Russia and China,” he said.

Ukraine wants to make more of its own fiber-optic drones. Fedorenko complained that Russia receives huge supplies of fiber-optic cable from China, while Ukraine is getting little from the West.
“Unfortunately, we have to say that China is a stronger ally on this than the U.S. and Europe combined,” he said.

"I'm not a specialist in this area, but as I understand it we have 50-60,000 a month, those volunteers who are coming, recruiting, posting, and they would like to get engaged in this thing (in Ukraine)," he replied.

He did not explain why the size of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine has gone down despite what would amount to around 250,000 extra troops being recruited and sent to the front since the beginning of the year.

According to figures from Ukraine's General Staff, Russia has lost 217,440 troops since Jan. 1, 2025.

The discrepancy tallies with Western analysis of Russia's staggering losses.

"They lose somewhere in the ballpark of 35,000 to 45,000 people per month, and perhaps they recruit a little bit north of that number," George Barros, Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), told the Kyiv Independent earlier this month.

Effort suggests Moscow will not halt its counteroffensive at national border, should it recapture Russian territory

After promising a deal within 24 hours of taking office, then kicking off weeks of negotiations, Trump said Friday that he was about ready to give up. He hasn't set a deadline or said whether he would take any further action beyond walking away.

If either side continues to block a deal, "we're just going to say, 'You're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people,' and we're going to just take a pass," Trump said Friday.

Vulnerability to drones sees soldiers using prized weapons as glorified artillery

Colonel Andrii Biletskyi proposes 10-year European financing for 250,000-300,000 Ukrainian soldiers as a strategic alternative to Western troop deployments, citing Britain's £2 billion support model.

The senior European official added that Europe was extremely reluctant to agree to Russia’s demand to block deliveries of weapons to Ukraine by its allies during any truce. That outcome would risk a situation where Russia was able to rearm during a cessation of hostilities, while Ukraine was prevented from doing so, the official said.

Putin has said he supports the US proposal for a pause to the conflict in principle but insists that a number of conditions need to be met before Russia can agree to halt its invasion. The Russian leader will probably agree to a truce, though he wants to make sure his terms are included first, Bloomberg reported on March 12.

The Trump administration has effectively already conceded Russian demands to keep control of occupied Ukrainian territory and for Kyiv to abandon its ambition to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That has fueled European concerns that any deal the US president strikes with Putin will leave Ukraine weakened and vulnerable to Russia in the future.

The US is also likely to want Ukraine to accept effective neutral status and some limits on its army and weapons, in line with Russian demands, said Cliff Kupchan, a former senior State Department official who’s chairman of the New York-based Eurasia Group.

"You should have never started it," he said. The Kremlin has previously accused Ukraine of starting the war against Russia.

"It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022," Russian President Vladimir Putin told US talk show host Tucker Carlson in February 2024.

The agency was in the midst of a probe into the billionaire's equipment at the time of Musk's assault.

"When Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s, we were promised protection. You took away our nuclear weapons? You promised us protection? Yes, in simple terms, so keep your word. We're being slaughtered and you're still trying to play games, to defend your interests. You have to give everything you could to end this war in two days. Who will believe the words of the US or England, who are pissing themselves in front of Russia? Pardon my English."

A fair share of Ukrainians who favor negotiating a quick end to the war believe Ukraine should be open to ceding some territory in exchange for peace. More than half of this group (52%) agrees that Ukraine should be open to making some territorial concessions as part of a peace deal to end the war, while 38% disagree and another 10% don’t know. Gallup did not ask more details about the level of territorial concessions that people would be open to.

Asking Ukrainians about various war termination scenarios showed the divergence between their views and Russian demands (see figure 2). Most Ukrainians (83 percent) strongly opposed reducing Ukrainian military capabilities as a condition to end the war—one of the main sticking points in the Russia-Ukraine talks that took place in Belarus and Türkiye in the spring of 2022. Majorities or pluralities also opposed ending the war in the following scenarios: a ceasefire that freezes the current front lines (65 percent), a Ukrainian renunciation of possible EU or NATO membership (65 percent and 60 percent, respectively), a Russian withdrawal from the territories it has occupied since 2022 only (46 percent), or an agreement that Ukraine will never again strike Russia (44 percent).

White House officials are emphasising to US media that Biden's change of heart is in response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops - a signal to Pyongyang not to send any more.

Gilmore, Trump's OSCE ambassador, told the BBC that he believes it is "Putin who has escalated the war" by deploying North Korean soldiers, and the US cannot "just stand aside and let this dictator go ahead and conquer Ukraine".

Earlier media reports and statements from Trump's inner circle indicated this would entail freezing the war on the current front lines and creating a demilitarized zone in the east, a claim also supported by the WSJ's sources.

Ukrainian Commander-In-Chief: "over the last six days, the enemy hasn't advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction"

traces of explosives, fingerprints, and DNA samples, cell phone tracking, emails, witness accounts, CCTV footage

“In territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape,” Putin said in another address ahead of the invasion. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”

Of the 360,000 troops that made up Russia’s pre-invasion ground force, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, according to the assessment. 2,200 of 3,500 tanks have been lost, according to the assessment.