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.

A Trump State Department official who shut down a U.S. counter-disinformation office has Kremlin ties, the Telegraph reported on June 3. The official, Darren Beattie, is married to the niece of a former Russian official linked to Putin and has echoed pro-Kremlin narratives.

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.

unless you're Russia, Belarus, or Hungary

"The additional ad valorem duty on all imports from all trading partners shall start at 10 percent"

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.

Was US President Donald Trump a secret Russian spy in 1987? A former officer of Russia's spy agency Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) has claimed that US president Donald Trump was groomed 37 years ago as a "potential Soviet asset'. According to him, the Soviet administration recruited Trump, who was then a 40-year-old businessmen, under a pseudonym ‘Krasnov.

"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.

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one GOP aide told The Hill. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

“Vladimir Putin has sought to appeal more to the poorer parts of society. Inflation risks undercutting this,” he said.

Analysts said price rises were unlikely to trigger massive street protests but they would damage Putin’s popularity.

Ordinary Russians link inflation to Putin’s war in Ukraine. They may not see the war but they can feel it.

Russia’s ailing economy may actually force Putin to end his war in Ukraine.

“It increases the risks to Putin of continuing the war and might just push him to the negotiating table,” said Timothy Ash, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. “Perhaps, anyway.”

technically not collusion: "The indictment does not accuse the individual influencers of knowing about the Russian scheme."

McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Puck News he thinks “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

Turner, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN that anti-Ukraine messages from Russia are “being uttered on the House floor.”

German political figures respond to a reported plot against Rheinmetall chief Armin Papperger.

Russia has demonstrated that it is waging not only a war on the battlefield to destroy Ukraine, but also an information war to break up the United Europe.

Havana Syndrome involves the Russian intelligence services and radio frequency / microwave weapons. U.S. intelligence is wrong to say it has no foreign source.

“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.”