The US will guide third-party ships through the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump has said, describing the move as a humanitarian effort to help stranded crews.

An estimated 2,000 vessels have been trapped in and around the strait since Iran closed the waterway to most traffic in response to the US-Israeli bombing campaign launched on February 28. The US has since imposed its own naval blockade on Iranian ports.

In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump said the initiative, dubbed Project Freedom and set to begin on Monday, is aimed at helping countries that are “neutral and innocent bystanders” in the conflict.

“For the good of Iran, the Middle East, and the United States, we have told these countries that we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business,” Trump wrote.

“The ship movement is merely meant to free up people, companies, and countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong – they are victims of circumstance,” he added.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a senior US official, described the initiative as a process through which countries, insurance companies, and shipping organizations can coordinate traffic through Hormuz. The official said it would not involve US warships escorting vessels.

Axios, also citing US officials, said US Navy ships would be “in the vicinity” in case they need to prevent Iran from attacking commercial vessels crossing the strait. The official added that the Navy would provide merchant ships with information about lanes that had not been mined by Iran.

Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security commission, dismissed Trump’s “delusional posts,” saying that any intervention in the strait would constitute a violation of the ceasefire.

Iranian media have released previously unseen footage showing the immediate aftermath of a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh school in southern Iran was hit on February 28, in the early days of the US and Israeli bombing campaign. The building was located near a naval base but separated from military facilities by a fence visible in satellite imagery.

A short, disturbing video shared by SNN TV on Sunday shows two frightened young girls in what appear to be dust-covered school uniforms. One girl has bloodstains on her face and headscarf. Several people are seen running toward a building engulfed in smoke.

A video taken immediately after the explosion at Shajareh Taybeh Minab School in Iran has emerged. pic.twitter.com/e07UMRS1e8

— 1880 News (@1880News) May 3, 2026

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly denied that American forces were responsible. However, multiple investigations by media outlets and analysts have concluded that the school was likely hit by a US-made missile, with evidence pointing to a Tomahawk strike.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in early March that the US would never deliberately target civilians and that the incident was under review.

Iran has described the strike as a war crime, while the UN called it “a grave assault on children, on education, and on the future of an entire community.”

A Ukrainian drone has struck a residential skyscraper not far from Moscow’s business district, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said.

The UAV struck the 52-story residential building known as the House on Mosfilmovskaya Street, a modernist landmark built in the early 2010s. The impact reportedly occurred around the 36th floor. Sobyanin said there were no casualties.

Photos and videos from the scene show damage to the facade and debris scattered on the street.

The attack took place ahead of Victory Day on May 9, one of Russia’s most important public holidays, marked by a military parade on Red Square.

Dozens of police cars and ambulances are at the scene.

Eyewitnesses told RT they heard a powerful explosion, with some saying they saw a flash in the sky and smoke rising from the building.

Ukraine has stepped up strikes deep inside Russia in recent weeks, launching hundreds of kamikaze drones a day. Although successful strikes in Moscow are rare, Ukrainian drones damaged high-rise buildings in Moscow City, the capital’s iconic business district, in 2023.

The US State Department has quietly revived Biden-era tactics of imposing American birthright citizenship on the children of Russian diplomats, in violation of international norms, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote in an op-ed on Monday.

RT is republishing the official English version of the op-ed:

While President Trump is trying to bring order to the American migration mess cooked up by his predecessors, his own staff are, behind his back, engaging in intrigue and are further damaging already ailing Russia-US relations in the sphere of migration.

One of Trump’s central campaign promises was that there would be no legalization of illegal migrants.

Said and done. The only difference is that thanks to the deep state, which is clearly walking in the opposite direction from its current president towards a new one, things have turned out exactly the other way around.

Picture the following.

A Russian diplomat working in the United States receives a phone call from the State Department. It would appear that a contact has been established. Contact has indeed been established, but not of a working kind:

“Mr […]?” goes a State Department employee.

“Yes,” the Russian diplomat replies.

“Do you have a son named Ivan?”

“Yes.”

Sitting at his desk, with his child at school a couple of kilometers away from his office, the man felt his heart drop into a bottomless abyss.

“The US State Department informs you that your son is a citizen of the United States,” the voice – whether a bureaucrat or perhaps already an AI embedded within one – tells him.

What follows is a dialogue that the finest surrealist dystopian writers might envy:

“My son is a citizen of Russia and holds no other citizenship. The US State Department has repeatedly issued my son, as a member of a diplomat’s family, US visas. This contradicts common sense and US law, which combined create a uniquely unambiguous interpretation,” the Russian diplomat responds, instantly recalling his [Moscow State Institute of International Relations] MGIMO studies, Lavrov, and international law in its entirety.

“Your son has been granted US citizenship without his consent by virtue of being born on American soil. The fact that neither he nor you were ever informed of this, and that visas were issued to him as to a foreign national, is a technical error,” the voice reads from a document.

“But we do not need US citizenship; we never asked for it and will never accept it,” the Russian diplomat is practically yelling in the receiver.

“Be on notice that your child is our citizen with all the ensuing consequences, and you cannot renounce this!”

The line goes dead, and so does the logic of whatever the United States is doing domestically and abroad.

No, there is no need to look for fault on the part of Russian diplomats here. There is none. Our colleagues do their work, process all documents in accordance with Russian legislation and the requirements of the Vienna Conventions, and respect US laws. When children are born on US territory, they promptly file papers to Russian citizenship knowing full well that there will be no issues with US citizenship, since diplomats are not automatically subject to the right of the soil under local law – no one can be forced to become a citizen of a foreign country.

However, the law in the United States is reminiscent of a mad tea party with the Mad Hatter.

Let’s go over it once again, but this time seriously.

The deep state in the United States has created a new problem to exert pressure on Russian diplomats, disregarding the fact that this has become a stark example of the decline of the much-vaunted American democracy. Now the State Department – or those behind the facade of American diplomacy – have begun to extend US citizenship to children of Russian consular staff born under American jurisdiction until they reach adulthood, effectively by force, under the pretext of the constitutionally enshrined right of the soil and the supposedly limited nature of consular immunity.

It’s absurd and violates every rule in the book, and delivers a blow to their own president, but who cares when yet another act of Russophobia, so carefully cultivated by the Democratic Party, is at stake?

The Americans began applying this discriminatory practice against Russian personnel in 2023, as if deliberately laying a mine under Trump in order to present him in the most ridiculous light before everyone, such as the Latin American workers invited to the United States, who during the pandemic quite literally carried the country out of hell on their shoulders; the voters; the international community, which watches with astonishment as their compatriots are denied US citizenship and sent home in disgrace at a time when it is forced upon Russian diplomats. It looks like a scene from the Spider Man comic in which he becomes entangled in his own web.

To reiterate, the supreme law of the United States was not amended during this period, nor were bilateral conventions on diplomatic and consular relations revised.

The exemption concerning children of foreign diplomats is spelled out in virtually all internal regulations. An entire chapter of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy manual and a provision in the Code of Federal Regulations are devoted to this matter. Both documents clearly state that children of foreign diplomats do not acquire US citizenship by the right of the soil, as they enjoy diplomatic immunity and are not fully subject to the jurisdiction of the host country.

Moreover, this legal norm was re-affirmed by the US Supreme Court back in 1898 in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Here is a direct quotation from the court ruling:

“The requirement that a person be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States excludes the application of this rule to children born of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state, children born of enemy aliens during occupation, and children of members of Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.”

The US side has always taken pride in its system of case law, so the complete disregard of this well-known ruling provides a very clear characterization of the actions of the US foreign policy establishment.

It is symptomatic that the stepped up activity by the US State Department in the matter of unlawfully granting US citizenship to the children of employees of Russian diplomatic missions – citizenship they neither need nor are allowed by local authorities to refuse – is taking place precisely now, when, on the basis of agreements between the leaders of Russia and the United States, attempts are being made to remove such irritants.

Not merely irritants, because thousands of people who spent years trying to naturalize, pleading to be granted citizenship or at least some form of papers are being deported from the United States. They did not violate local laws; they worked honestly for what they believed to be the good of their new homeland, trusting the previous administration in the White House.

Judge for yourself. US President Trump is pursuing a policy aimed at ending the automatic granting of citizenship to children of foreign nationals born under American jurisdiction. The White House, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have launched a large-scale, unprecedented anti-immigration campaign designed to reduce the flow of migrants. They stop at nothing, including rechecking data submitted during the naturalization process. The media report monthly quotas for investigations into potential revocation of US citizenship. Information is being circulated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement back in 2025 received a green light to use spyware for remote installation on the mobile devices of illegal immigrants and activists among US citizens who oppose mass deportation policies.

At the same time, the United States is systematically violating its host country agreement with the UN by failing to issue visas to foreign diplomats planning to attend relevant events at UN headquarters. One recent example is the disruption of the participation of the Deputy Director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry in the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly’s Committee on Information on April 27, 2026.

Against this backdrop, such demonstrative targeted interest by US authorities in the children of employees of Russian foreign institutions is causing genuine concern. Not for our diplomats, but for the mental health of American officials.

The inconsistency in Washington’s actions on this track borders on the bipolar and calls into question the possibility of reaching agreements with US authorities on this extremely important and sensitive issue for us.

Coercive actions against the personnel of our diplomatic missions contradict the norms of international law and bilateral agreements, which guarantee immunity from the jurisdiction of the host country. With regard to consular staff, the State Department is obliged to be guided by the provisions of the 1964 bilateral Consular Convention, which grants this category of Russian citizens a broader scope of immunities than the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

According to Article 24 of the 1964 Convention, consular officers or employees, as well as members of their families, are exempt from all forms of compulsory obligations. For more than 60 years since the conclusion of the 1964 Consular Convention, it has been interpreted and applied by the parties as excluding the possibility of forcibly extending the citizenship of the host state to the children of consular officers and employees of the sending state. And it is not only a matter of the letter of the law.

The arbitrary granting of US citizenship to such children potentially provides Washington with a lever for improper pressure on our personnel – what if a child were to be abducted under the pretext, for example, of juvenile law or the need to verify gender compliance as part of another wave of the new normal? We have seen many such examples.

The Russian side does not recognize the imposition of US citizenship on Russian citizens born into the families of our diplomatic, administrative-technical, and consular personnel in the United States. We will demand from the Americans confirmation in each specific case that the newborn is not subject to US jurisdiction and enjoys all the immunities and privileges provided for by the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic and consular relations, as well as by bilateral agreements.

The US State Department is flouting both US federal law and diplomatic immunity in forcing American citizenship on children of Russian consular staff, with no option given to refuse, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in an op-ed on Monday.

These moves by the “deep state” are undermining US President Donald Trump’s unprecedented anti-immigration policy and his aim of ending birthright citizenship in the country, she said.

“It’s absurd and violates every rule in the book, and delivers a blow to their own president,” Zakharova wrote.

The US began the practice in 2023 under former President Joe Biden, “as if deliberately laying a mine under Trump in order to present him in the most ridiculous light,” she said, adding that neither federal laws nor diplomatic agreements have been amended since.

Currently, children born of “foreign diplomatic officers” are exempted from US birthright citizenship under the Code of Federal Regulations and US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy, although they are considered lawful permanent residents.

Coercive naturalization also violates Russian-US bilateral agreements and international norms, which grant diplomats immunity from the laws of the host country, the spokeswoman stressed.

Zakharova also warned that the situation gives Washington potential leverage over Russian diplomats.

What if a child were to be abducted under the pretext, for example, of juvenile law or the need to verify gender compliance as part of another wave of the new normal?

Moscow banned LGBTQ-related content in 2022, years after passing laws protecting minors from “LGBTQ propaganda.” In 2024, Russia also banned the adoption of children by countries that allow gender-reassignment surgeries and procedures.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged President Donald Trump to carry out a regime change operation in Iran for many years, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton has told Afshin Rattansi, host of ‘New World’.

West Jerusalem wanted Trump to launch an attack on Tehran already during his first presidential term and continued lobbying for it during his second one, Bolton said, who served between 2018 and 2019.

“I urged that our objective be regime change, so did Netanyahu,” he told Rattansi, explaining that “There is no change in what Trump has been hearing from” the Israeli prime minister over the years. He nevertheless denied that Trump’s decision to launch the attack in late February was influenced by Israel.

Bolton criticized the president for what he called the lack of a clear goal in his campaign against the Islamic Republic and said Trump had failed to “make the case to the American people” about “why the regime change in Iran is necessary” – despite it supposedly being a “very compelling one.”

Known for his hawkish foreign policy views, Bolton maintained that the US should continue to pursue regime change in Iran and claimed that the government in Tehran is “crumbling” from within. However, the former White House official came up short on any specific strategy the US could use to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, where shipping remains severely disrupted by the Iran conflict.

Watch the full interview here:

The Pentagon has ordered the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 troops from Germany, with US President Donald Trump warning that the pullout could only be the beginning.

The move comes amid a sharp divide between the Trump administration and European NATO members over the Iran war, Washington’s calls to increase defense spending, and a bitter aftertaste from the dispute over Greenland.

‘Cutting a lot further’

The withdrawal was announced on Friday, with the Pentagon signaling that the process would be over within the next six to 12 months. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the “decision follows a thorough review of the Department’s force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground.”

However, Trump – who has for years been toying with the idea of a US withdrawal from the bloc – signaled that the figure could be even higher. “We're going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000,” he said on Saturday. He also suggested that he could pull troops out of Spain and Italy – nations he said were unhelpful in the Iran war.

In addition, Reuters reported that the US dropped a Biden-era plan to deploy a US battalion with long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany.

Germany is home to America’s largest military presence in Europe, currently hosting more than 36,000 active-duty US personnel. It is also home to critical training, logistics, and medical infrastructure, including Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest US military hospital abroad. In total, there are over 80,000 US troops in Europe, with many having been redeployed to the continent by the Biden administration after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

Iran war looms over the decision

The announcement came days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz once again criticized the US-Israel war on Iran, saying that Washington “obviously has no strategy,” adding, referring to the US, that “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

It did not take Trump long to fire a broadside in response. He declared that Merz “doesn't know what he’s talking about,” advising the chancellor to “spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine” and “fixing his broken Country.” He also suggested that Merz was “doing a terrible job. He’s got immigration problems, he’s got energy problems, he’s got problems of all kind[s].”

According to Reuters, the current transatlantic rift has also been exacerbated by Trump’s simmering anger over European pushback to his attempt to annex Greenland this winter.

US ‘schizophrenic’

According to an AP source, the US military was not been warned of the decision to pull troops from Germany and learned about it “in real time,” though the Pentagon disagreed, saying that the move “follows a comprehensive, multilayered process” with input from the European command and other top officials.

In addition, an unnamed European insider told Reuters that Trump’s decision was another sign of an “increasingly unpredictable and sometimes ‘schizophrenic’ dynamic.” He noted that Trump’s shock announcement came as uninformed US military commanders in Europe had been talking up commitment and cooperation, just as their counterparts in Washington were doing the opposite.

US lawmakers have also protested the withdrawal announcement, with Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services committees saying they were “very concerned” by the drawdown.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama urged the Pentagon to redeploy the troops eastward rather than send them home – to countries that “have made substantial investments to host US troops” on NATO’s front line – warning the decision risked “undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal” to Russia.

Military buildup as planned

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius played down the news, calling the drawdown “foreseeable.” The Defense Ministry spokesperson also said the development showed “we must strengthen the European pillar within NATO.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was blunter, saying that the greatest threat to NATO is not its external enemies, but rather its “ongoing disintegration[...] We must all do what it takes to reverse this disastrous trend.”

Still, the overall trend of the US detachment from Europe barely comes as a shock, with European NATO members looking to ramp up military spending. The rearmament drive was partly driven by Trump himself, who pushed other NATO members to invest 5% of GDP annually in core defense and defense-related spending by 2035.

On top of that, the European Commission unveiled its Readiness 2030 plan, which aims to provide more than €800 billion ($938 billion) in defense spending across the EU. Germany alone has embarked on a historic military buildup, committing to spend more than €500 billion on defense by 2029.

Moscow has consistently rejected speculation that it could attack NATO as “nonsense,” suggesting that European nations are using “propaganda” to portray Russia as an enemy to mask its own crises.

NATO is holding closed-door consultations with TV and film industry professionals across Europe and the US, The Guardian reported on Sunday. The move has prompted accusations that the bloc is working to leverage the arts for “fear mongering” and “propaganda,” it added.

The military bloc has held three private meetings with directors, producers and screenwriters in Los Angeles, Brussels and Paris, and is planning to convene with members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) in London next month, the newspaper wrote.

The upcoming meeting will be overseen by the British think tank Chatham House and will discuss the “evolving security situation in Europe and beyond,” according to the report. NATO cyber and innovation technology deputy head James Appathurai is expected to attend, among other officials, the newspaper added.

So far, the conversations have partly “inspired” at least “three separate projects,” The Guardian wrote, citing an internal WGGB e-mail.

The military bloc’s move has reportedly sparked concern in the film and TV industry. The planned meeting is “clearly propaganda,” Irish film writer Alan O’Gorman said, as cited by The Guardian.

“I think there’s fearmongering throughout Europe at the moment that our defenses are down,” he reportedly said, adding that he has seen a media and government push in Ireland “to present NATO in a positive light and align ourselves with them.”

Other screenwriters were “pretty offended that art would be used in a way that was supporting war” and believed they were being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for NATO,” he said, according to the newspaper.

The Washington-led military bloc has been undergoing a growing internal rift, with US President Donald Trump again describing NATO as a “paper tiger” after multiple member states refused to join his war on Iran in recent months. Tensions between European NATO countries and the US had already been heightened by Trump’s threats in preceding months to annex Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland.

The greatest threat the bloc currently faces emanates not from “external enemies,” but rather its “ongoing disintegration,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Saturday.

Spirit Airlines, a US-based low-cost carrier, has succumbed to the unprecedented energy crisis, Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev has said, commenting on the company’s recent shutdown.

The airline announced on Saturday that it has begun an orderly suspension of operations, effective immediately, citing the recent surge in fuel costs and other pressures that have significantly impacted its financial outlook.

“Spirit Airlines collapsed – the first airline victim of the historic energy crisis, as jet fuel prices jumped from $2.5 to $4 per gallon. 17,000 laid off,” Dmitriev, who serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, said later that day in a post on X.

Spirit’s bondholders reportedly turned down a last-minute rescue proposal from the Trump administration that could have provided up to $500 million to sustain the struggling airline. The plan would have placed the government ahead of other creditors and granted it a stake of up to 90% in the company.

The shutdown is set to leave around 17,000 people without work, including about 14,000 Spirit employees as well as thousands of contractors and others whose jobs rely on the airline. The elimination of the flights is also expected to result in higher fares across the industry.

The sudden and sustained rise in fuel prices in recent weeks ultimately left the company with no alternative but to pursue an orderly wind-down despite a restructuring plan agreed upon with bondholders in March, Spirit’s President and CEO, Dave Davis, said in a statement.

A mounting jet fuel crunch is hitting airlines worldwide as disruption in the Strait of Hormuz – a key energy chokepoint handling nearly a fifth of the global oil supply – amid the US-Israeli war on Iran has sharply reduced tanker traffic, delaying shipments and raising fears of the worst energy crisis in history, the International Energy Agency has warned.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly downplayed the impact of the Strait of Hormuz energy shock, arguing that the American economy would remain strong, and that energy disruptions would be temporary rather than economically damaging.

Several hundred people have taken part in an ‘Immortal Regiment’ march in Washington, commemorating those who fought for the Soviet Union in the Second World War, the Russian Embassy in DC has said.

The marches were first held in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 2012. In the past, WWII veterans had been honored guests at Victory Day parades commemorating Hitler’s defeat, but their numbers had dwindled, so local organizers came up with the idea of inviting their loved ones to march instead, holding their portraits. Since then, the idea has spread across Russia and to other nations.

The marches are traditionally held on May 9 in Russia, when the country celebrates Victory Day. In Washington, however, it was staged on Saturday, a week before the 81st anniversary of the end of the bloodiest conflict in history.

The demonstrators walked past the White House carrying portraits and red Victory Banners, and made their way towards the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, where they laid flowers, the embassy said in a statement.

The Russian diplomats thanked the organizers of the ‘Immortal Regiment’ march and all those who participated in what they described as an “important initiative, aimed at countering attempts to rewrite history and whitewash the Nazis and their collaborators, who are now being honored in some countries.”

Last year’s procession in the US capitol was marred by provocations from pro-Ukrainian activists. No incidents have been reported during the current event.

An ‘Immortal Regiment’ march also took place in New York City on Saturday, with several dozen people gathering outside the office of the Russian Permanent Mission to the UN.

The previous administration of US President Joe Biden had refused to permit the processions, citing coronavirus restrictions and a difficult political situation. But the ‘Immortal Regiment’ marches resumed after Donald Trump’s return to office.

The Ukrainian military has targeted an external radiation control laboratory at Russia’s Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the facility’s press service has said in a statement on Telegram.

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly attacked Europe’s largest nuclear facility since it came under Russian control in 2022, soon after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. The power plant is located in Zaporozhye Region, which officially voted to join Russia in a fall 2022 referendum.

The laboratory targeted in the Sunday attack facilitates the round-the-clock monitoring of the radiological environment at the plant and is vital for planning any emergency response operations, the press service said.

“Such actions pose a threat not only for the nuclear security but also the for the radiological environment control system,” it added, warning that any damage to the laboratory could affect the timely assessment of the situation and response in case of emergency.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring team working at the station have been promptly alerted about the incident, the press service said. According to the statement, the strike did not result in any “critical” material damage or casualties and did not disrupt the operation of the power plant.

The UN nuclear watchdog confirmed receiving the report from the ZNPP and requested access to the lab for further inspection, the IAEA said in a post on X. Its Director General Rafael Grossi also condemned the strike by saying that “any attacks near nuclear sites can pose nuclear safety risks.”

The Monday attack came a day after Grossi visited Kiev for talks with Vladimir Zelensky, during which the Ukrainian leader urged the IAEA to pressure Russia to hand over control of the plant.

Ukraine has also repeatedly sought to interject proposals to take control of the plant into US-mediated peace talks with Russia.

Moscow has firmly rejected the idea of handing over the plant or allowing for its joint ownership with Ukraine or any NATO nations, citing a high risk of sabotage.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed a contract with a private security firm to locate migrant children who arrived in the US without their parents, although the company is facing accusations of ‘torture,’ The Guardian has reported.

The agency, which is part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), hired the Virginia-based company MVM in mid-April to assist with its expanding effort to track down minors who had been released into communities pending immigration court proceedings, the paper said in an article on Saturday.

A one-year deal was signed between ICE and the contractor, which provides detention and transport services to federal immigration agencies, it added.

MVM is currently being sued over the separation of two Guatemalan fathers from their respective children in 2017. The lawsuit, which had been filed in a California court two years ago, alleges “torture, enforced disappearance and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” on the part of the company.

Its employees “physically took thousands of children away from their parents” before transporting them “using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers,” the document read.

A DHS spokesperson said that MVM has “zero immigration enforcement authority” and that the partnership with the firm represents the agency’s “commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation.”

“The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure thaat they are safe and not being exploited or abused,” the spokesperson stressed.

The Guardian said that it had reviewed an internal ICE document last year, which suggested that it actually runs an operation aimed at deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them or the adults providing for them.

"Accusations that ICE is ‘targeting’ and arresting children are false and an attempt to demonize law enforcement,” the DHS spokesperson insisted.

Democratic lawmaker Delia Ramirez, who is of Guatemalan descent, has called upon Congress to monitor the arrangement between ICE and MVM.

"DHS continues to be a threat to our collective safety. It is beyond reckless to hire a company of dangerous bounty hunters, with a concerning track record of abuse, to ‘track’ immigrant children,” she wrote on X on Sunday.

Iran is seeking a decisive and permanent end to the conflict with the US, rather than a previously proposed two-month ceasefire, RT correspondent Saman Kojouri has reported from Tehran regarding a 14-point peace plan put forward by the Islamic Republic.  

Tehran has submitted a new peace proposal to Washington via Pakistani mediators in response to a US offer, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed on Saturday, adding that “the ball is in the US court.” 

RT’s Saman Kojouri said key provisions of the plan include guarantees against future attacks by Israel and the US, the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of American forces from areas surrounding Iran, and a new mechanism to govern the Strait of Hormuz. “The plan includes a demand to resolve all issues and end the war within 30 days,” says Kojouri, adding that “the space for compromise between Tehran and Washington is narrowing.” 

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would review the offer but cast doubt on its prospects. Trump posted later on social media that he “can’t imagine” the proposal will be acceptable and said that Iran had not yet “paid a big enough price for what they have done to humanity and the world over the last 47 years.”  

Watch the full report of by RT’s Saman Kojouri on the latest peace efforts to end the war in Iran:

Israel’s ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir celebrated his 50th birthday this weekend, treating guests to slices of a cake featuring a noose. Attendees included several top law enforcement officials.

The cake was an apparent allusion to Ben Gvir’s advocacy for legislation that would introduce the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism.”

At the Saturday night celebration at Villa Space in Moshav Emunim in southern Israel, Ben Gvir’s wife, Ayala, presented him with a cake featuring a noose and the words: “Mazel tov to Minister Ben Gvir, sometimes dreams come true.”

Hamas celebrates killing Israelis.

Ben Gvir celebrates killing Palestinians.

Unless this stops, how will there ever be peace? https://t.co/kTxuMoaIdx

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 3, 2026

The celebration featured another tall birthday cake bearing the image of Israel, Ben Gvir’s portrait, two guns, and a golden noose.

ניצב בדימוס סיגל בר צבי, לשעבר ראש אגף המבצעים במשטרה, על חגיגות יום ההולדת של השר בן גביר בהשתתפות שוטרים רבים: "לא כזה נוח, זה אירוע די חריג. בין דרג ממונה שהוא פוליטי ובין המבצע צריך שיהיה מרחק שהדרג המבצע הוא יוכל לעשות את העבודה שלו באופן נקי ובלי השפעה זו סיטואציה בעייתית,… pic.twitter.com/IQoI79Vs2o

— 103FM (@radio103fm) May 3, 2026

The noose paraphernalia was an apparent allusion to the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, which was passed by the Knesset in March by 62 votes to 47. The legislation mandates that Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks in military courts be sentenced to hanging — a provision that critics say effectively exempts Jewish Israelis.

Sentences are to be carried out within 90 days of the ruling, with no right of appeal. The sentence could be mitigated to life imprisonment only under some unspecified “special circumstances.”

Ben Gvir and his party members had worn noose-shaped lapel pins for several months as a symbol of their commitment to the legislation, while the minister himself argued last year that “there is no such thing as ‘Palestinian people.’”

The law has sparked international condemnation, with Germany, France, the UK, Italy, New Zealand, and Australia expressing “deep concern” over the legislation and urging Israel to abandon it. UN experts also warned that the new rule violates international law, contend that it “effectively singles out Palestinians for execution.”

The guest list stirred nearly as much controversy as the cakes. Senior commanders in attendance included Jerusalem District Commander Avshalom Peled, Judea and Samaria District Commander Moshe Pinchi, and Prison Service Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi. Cabinet ministers, including Defense Minister Israel Katz and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana were also present.

Police Commissioner Danny Levy permitted only the most senior command staff to attend, warning all lower-ranking officers to stay away. The directive came despite widespread fears that Ben Gvir could put pressure on law enforcement and undermine police independence.

Ben Gvir is known for his inflammatory views regarding Palestinians, and once boasted that he would do his best so that “the terrorists [in prison] receive the minimum of the minimum” in food. The minister has been sanctioned in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain.

Seven OPEC+ countries have agreed to raise oil output targets by about 188,000 barrels per day (bpd) in June, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing two sources familiar with the group’s plans. The report comes as the US-Israel war with Iran continues to disrupt Gulf oil supplies and follows days after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) quit the cartel.

The UAE, one of the world’s largest oil exporters, withdrew from OPEC and the wider OPEC+ on May 1. According to Abu Dhabi, the decision is driven by national interests and forms part of a long-term strategy – a “sovereign, strategic choice” aimed at giving it greater flexibility over oil output. The country’s share in the organization stood at about 13.5%.

OPEC currently includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of the Congo, and Venezuela. It coordinates oil production policies in an effort to stabilize supply in global energy markets. The wider OPEC+ format also includes a group of allied oil-producing countries, most notably Russia, as well as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Mexico, Malaysia, Oman, Bahrain, Brunei, Sudan, South Sudan and Brazil.

One source told Reuters that the decision to raise output signals that OPEC+ continues to take a business-as-usual approach despite Abu Dhabi’s decision, adding that the move will be similar to last month’s hike of 206,000 bpd minus the share of the UAE.

The rise in output is largely symbolic at this stage, Reuters noted, as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted by the Iran conflict.

The US-Israel bombing campaign on the Islamic Republic and the subsequent closure of the waterway that commonly handles about one-fifth of global energy trade, have sharply reduced exports from key OPEC+ members – Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE – which were previously the only countries in the group capable of increasing oil output.

In March, total oil production across all members averaged 35.06 million bpd, down by 7.7 million bpd from February levels, according to OPEC.

Commenting on the Emirates’ exit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow respects the country’s “sovereign” decision. Peskov stressed that Russia has no intention of leaving the group and dismissed suggestions that the UAE’s move could spell the end of OPEC+.

Kuwait exported zero barrels of crude oil last month, according to data from a shipping monitor, marking the first such halt since the 1991 Gulf War.  

A major US ally hosting around 13,500 American troops and serving as a key regional logistics hub, Kuwait previously produced about 2.7 million barrels per day (bpd) and exported roughly 1.85 million bpd, with most shipments going to Asian markets including China, India, and South Korea.

On April 17, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation declared force majeure, suspending exports after traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was effectively halted amid the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran. Oil accounts for roughly 50% of Kuwait’s total GDP. Petroleum exports generate about 90% of the government’s budget.  

As of early May 2026, Kuwait’s oil output has fallen to around 1.2 million barrels per day, CNBC reported.

Data from Tanker Trackers showed that while Kuwait continued producing crude, it did not export any in April, the first such halt since the 1990-1991 Gulf War. During that conflict, Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, prompting a US-led coalition to launch a military campaign that forced their withdrawal in early 1991.

Oil prices have surged since the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February, prompting the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint handling about one-fifth of global oil and LNG flows. While Iran has kept the vital waterway closed to “hostile ships,” the US Navy has maintained a blockade of Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf.

With negotiations ongoing and no clear solution, crude has climbed above $120 per barrel in recent days, reaching its highest levels since 2022.

The Jewish community in the UK is facing its greatest threat, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Mark Rowley has said in the aftermath of a recent stabbing in London.

On Wednesday, two Jewish men were wounded in a knife attack by a British national of Somali origin in the city’s Golders Green area. The suspect, who was subsequently detained, had also attempted to kill his friend of 20 years the same day. Police say he has a history of serious violence and mental health issues.

In his interview with the Times on Saturday, Rowley said that “every racist or extremist or terrorist group has a list of people they hate, because they all create an ‘other’ who they want to blame everything on,” invoking a concept developed by 20th century French psychologist Jaques Lacan.

According to the police chief, the British Jews “are on everybody’s list, all of those hateful groups, whether you’re extreme right, whether you’re extreme left, whether you’re Islamist terrorist, whether you’re right-wing terrorist, and some hostile states as well now, with some sort of Iranian-related threats.”

“There’s a ghastly Venn diagram that they’re at the middle of,” he added.

The reason for anti-Semitism “becoming more and more mainstreamed” is social media, which allows an increasing number of people to consume information that reinforces their views from “non-traditional sources,” Rowley claimed.

The commissioner said he intends to recruit 300 more officers to protect the Jewish sites in London.

Following the Golders Green incident, the UK terrorism threat level was raised to “severe,” which means that an attack is “highly likely.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said earlier that the stabbing was “not a one-off” and that Jewish people in the UK are “scared to show who they are.” He vowed to do everything to “stamp this hatred out.”

The UK has seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents since Israel began its military operation in the Gaza Strip in response to a deadly incursion by the Palestinian armed group Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Last month, a group of young men torched four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in Golders Green, the same neighborhood where Wednesday’s stabbings occurred.

Over 72,600 people have been killed and over 172,400 wounded by Israel’s airstrikes and ground campaign in Gaza so far, according to figures from the Palestinian health authorities.

China has compared Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te to a “rat crossing the street” after he secretly boarded an Eswatini government aircraft and flew to the small southern African kingdom on an unannounced state visit.

The rebuke was issued by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on Saturday, which lashed out at Lai over the visit, which Beijing views as a direct challenge to the one-China principle.

Lai’s visit had originally been scheduled for late April, but was called off at the last minute after the Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar revoked overflight permits for the Taiwanese leader’s charter aircraft – a move Taipei blamed on Chinese pressure.

Lai, however, did not ditch the plans for the visit and boarded an Eswatini government plane to complete the journey. Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is one of only 12 countries with formal diplomatic ties with Taipei. The landlocked nation of fewer than 1.3 million people is the island’s sole remaining African ally.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office branded Lai a “troublemaker” and accused him of abandoning the island’s residents in the wake of a significant earthquake to fly to Eswatini.

“Lai Ching-te's despicable actions, like a rat crossing the street, will inevitably be ridiculed by the international community... Lai Ching-te’s disregard for the safety of the people and his wanton deception of the public will surely be spurned by the vast majority of Taiwanese compatriots. The so-called ‘diplomatic achievements’ that Lai Ching-te painstakingly fabricated are nothing but trickery and a laughing stock,” the body charged.

Lai pushed back, writing on X that Taiwan “will never be deterred by external pressures,” adding that the island “will continue to engage with the world – no matter the challenges faced.”

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council also hit back, branding Beijing’s rebuke “fishwife’s gutter talk” which it said was “boring in the extreme.”

China considers Taiwan a part of its sovereign territory. While Beijing has said it seeks peaceful reunification with the island, it signaled in 2022 that it “would not renounce the use of force” to accomplish this goal.

China’s Ministry of Commerce has instructed domestic companies not to comply with US sanctions targeting refiners allegedly linked to the Iranian oil trade.

Late last month, the US Treasury warned banks against dealing with so-called “teapot” refineries, privately owned companies which it said account for the majority of the oil China buys from Iran. “This revenue ultimately benefits the Iranian regime, its weapons programs, and its military,” the Treasury said in its notice.

China’s government and major state-owned companies have denied direct purchases of Iranian crude, while customs data have not recorded imports from Iran since 2023.

Beijing has argued that sanctions imposed without a UN mandate are illegal under international law. In a statement on Saturday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said the restrictions interfere with normal trade between its firms and third parties and banned compliance with the sanctions, citing “national sovereignty, security and development interests.”

A government spokesperson said the move would not affect China’s international obligations or its protection of foreign-invested firms.

“The ministry will continue to closely monitor the improper extraterritorial application of foreign laws and measures, and will carry out further work in accordance with the law if such situations arise,” the spokesperson added.

Oil prices have surged since the US and Israeli attacked Iran in late February, prompting the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint handling about one-fifth of global oil and LNG flows.

While Iran has kept the vital waterway closed to “hostile ships,” the US Navy has maintained a blockade of Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf.

Despite a ceasefire declared nearly a month ago, prospects for a peace deal remain uncertain, as both sides have accused each other of pressing unacceptable terms. Oil prices surged past $120 per barrel this week for the first time since 2022.

The war has also pushed US President Donald Trump’s approval rating to record lows and deepened his rift with European allies, whose governments have refused to back operations against Iran.

Negotiations between Ukraine and Greece over the joint production of naval drones have stalled because Kiev wants to retain control over how Athens can use the technology, local media have reported.

According to Greek Reporter, the countries agreed last November that Ukraine would supply components for drones to be built at shipyards in Greece, while Greek companies would manufacture electronic and optical systems. The end result would have been an improved version of the Magura-type attack drones which Kiev uses against Russia.

The newspaper Kathimerini reported on Thursday, however, that Ukrainian officials had demanded that Kiev retain a say over how the Greek military would use the drones, a condition Athens rejected. Greece believes Ukraine set these terms to “maintain a balance” with its longtime rival Türkiye, the newspaper said.

Greece and Türkiye have long accused each other of fueling tensions, with Athens reportedly opposing Ankara’s bid to join the EU’s Drone Wall program aimed at improving the bloc’s ability to detect and intercept hostile UAVs.

Türkiye hosted Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in 2022 and 2025, presenting itself as a neutral mediator in the conflict.

Ankara also condemned Ukrainian attacks on Russian-linked tankers near the Turkish coast last year.

Tehran has submitted a comprehensive new peace plan, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said on Saturday, adding that “the ball is in the US court.”

Both the US and Iran have previously accused each other of putting forward unacceptable terms, as a ceasefire reached nearly a month ago has failed to produce an agreement.

Negotiations have been further complicated by the twin Iranian and US blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and the resumption of Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran has submitted its plan to Pakistan as the mediator with the aim of permanently ending the imposed war, and now the ball is in the US court to choose between a diplomatic solution or a continuation of the confrontational approach,” Gharibabadi said, as quoted by Press TV.

According to Iranian media, the 14-point plan is a counterproposal to a nine-point document presented earlier by the US. News agencies have reported that Iran’s terms include security guarantees, the withdrawal of American troops from the region, the lifting of sanctions, and an end to the war “on all fronts,” including Lebanon.

Iran is also reportedly seeking compensation from the US and a new framework for the Strait of Hormuz.

In a post on Truth Social on Saturday, US President Donald Trump said he would review the plan soon but added that he could not “imagine that it would be acceptable.” The president previously told journalists that he was “not satisfied” with Iran’s terms and threatened to “blast the hell out of them and finish them forever.”

The US has demanded that Iran completely abandon its nuclear program and surrender its enriched uranium stockpiles, a condition Tehran has flatly rejected, insisting that its nuclear program is for civilian use only.

While the prospects for a peace deal remain uncertain, oil prices surged past $120 per barrel this week for the first time since 2022.

Nearly 270 Ukrainian kamikaze drones were shot down over more than two dozen Russian regions on Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Some UAVs were intercepted as far as Chelyabinsk Region in the Urals, nearly 2,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

At least one person, a man in his seventies, was killed in Moscow Region, Governor Andrey Vorobyev has said.

According to the Defense Ministry, Ukraine has launched more than 600 drones over the past 48 hours. On Friday, a drone strike in Belgorod Region killed two teenagers riding a motorcycle, while three lost their lives the previous day in two separate attacks on cars.

Kiev has stepped up strikes deep inside Russia in recent months, targeting factories, oil depots, and port infrastructure, while Russian forces have carried out strikes on Ukraine’s military sites, industrial plants, and power grid.

Last month, the Russian Defense Ministry released what it said were the addresses of companies in European countries supplying Ukraine with drone technology and warned of a potential “sharp escalation of the military and political environment across the European continent.”

Residents of the eastern German city of Schwedt have told the Ruptly video agency they fear being thrown back “to the 19th century” if oil supplies to the local refinery are disrupted. Their comments come after Russia announced it can no longer deliver oil from Kazakhstan directly to Germany via the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline.

The PCK refinery in Schwedt supplies around 90% of the fuel to Berlin, as well as to the state of Brandenburg. The plant previously relied on Russian oil via Druzhba but switched to Kazakh supplies in 2023 after Berlin banned Russian pipeline imports.

Last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak announced a halt to Kazakh oil transit via Druzhba starting May 1, citing a lack of “technical capacity.”

“If the lights go out at PCK, the city dies,” a Schwedt resident told Ruptly. “We do not want to go back to the 19th century.” Another resident warned that a fuel price hike if the flow stopped could even spark “unrest.”

Kazakh authorities have said they are aware of the situation and plan to reroute supplies via Russian Baltic and Black Sea ports.

Transporting oil by sea would mean the plant would have to operate at 65% to 70% capacity, the refinery’s council member, Danny Ruthenburg, told German broadcaster ARD, citing limited infrastructure at the port of Rostock. “That would mean we would have to shut down individual production lines, which would inevitably lead to staff reductions,” he said.

Kazakh Energy Minister Yerlan Akkenzhenov linked the changes to continued Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. “That is most likely connected to the recent strikes on Russian infrastructure,” he said on the sidelines of an ecology forum in Astana.

The Ukrainian military has repeatedly targeted critical Russian infrastructure using drones, including oil refineries and transit hubs. Last month, it struck a hub operated by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, which is used to transport Kazakh oil to Europe and Asia.

Russia will supply Indonesia and Japan with crude as both countries look for ways to weather the fuel crisis brought on by the US-Israeli war on Iran. The global economy is “reeling,” and there is “no swift exit” in sight to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has said.

The blockage of the key shipping corridor has led to wild fluctuations in the markets, with Brent crude briefly swinging to a four-year high of $126 per barrel on Friday, following media reports of US plans to prolong the blockade of Iran.

The EU, which imports around 75% of its jet fuel from the Middle East, has been hard hit by the Strait of Hormuz closure. The waterway handles around 20% of global seaborne liquefied natural gas (LNG), oil, and jet fuel flows. In mid-April, International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol warned that Europe had just weeks of supplies left.

Brussels has also sharply increased its imports of LNG from Russia in the first quarter of 2026, despite its vow to phase out Russian energy by the end of 2027, according to the Financial Times.

Moscow has moved to expand its circle of alternative customers in recent weeks, as well as increasing supplies to regular buyers like India.

Indonesia will soon start receiving Russian crude and expects 150 million barrels by the end of this year, Indonesian Energy Minister Bahlil Lahadalia said on Saturday, as cited by state news agency Antara.

Japan has also turned to Moscow in search of alternative fuel sources. Japanese refinery Taiyo Oil has bought a shipment of Russian crude from the Sakhalin-2 project, TASS reported on Friday. The first cargo is set to arrive by next week, Reuters said on Saturday.

Last month, the Philippines received its first Russian oil shipment in five years after declaring an energy emergency. Moscow has also signed a new oil and gas cooperation deal with Vietnam, and is holding energy talks with Thailand as well.

Vladimir Zelensky should fire Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov over his alleged dealings with a key ally and exiled businessman charged in a high-level corruption case, MP Fyodor Venislavsky has said.

Umerov has acted as Kiev’s top negotiator in peace talks with Moscow since late November but is at the centre of a tightening web of corruption allegations from multiple agencies and has been accused by one of abuse of power.

Umerov has been recorded in conversation with Timur Mindich, a businessman and longtime associate of Zelensky who stands accused of orchestrating a $100 million graft scheme. 

“Given the high-profile nature of the tapes… I believe it would be a wise political decision to fire Mr. Umerov,” Venislavsky told the US-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Friday, commenting on the leaks, which have since become known as the ‘Mindich tapes’.

Earlier, the public anti-corruption council at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, an advisory body tasked with overseeing the ministry’s activities, also urged Zelensky to fire Umerov in light of the latest leaks, arguing that the former minister’s actions should be seen as “power abuse” and a “divulgence of state secrets.” Zelensky has not responded to the calls so far.

According to the leaks, Mindich allegedly urged Umerov to approve a shipment of body armor supplied by his firm that the ministry had refused to certify. They also purportedly discussed issues related to the Ukrainian defense contractor Fire Point – a company Mindich was supposedly effectively running – as well as some appointments within the Ukrainian government.

In early 2025, a Western-backed NGO claimed that Umerov, still the minister at the time, was under investigation for alleged abuse of power. He left his ministerial position in July and was appointed by Zelensky to lead the National Security and Defense Council the very next day.

Members of a Ukrainian press gang have been filmed apprehending a man at a kindergarten, unphased by the children witnessing the violent scene, as forced mobilization across the country continues to intensify amid its conflict with Russia.

A video of the incident, which apparently happened in the city of Lviv in the western part of the country, was published on social media on Friday.

The footage captured draft enforcers in military-style uniforms dragging an unwilling conscript towards a black SUV, parked outside the premises of the kindergarten.

A female is heard shouting off screen: “Please stop, there are children here,” but the press gang ignores her request.

The man tried to resist the draft enforces, but ended up being overpowered, shoved into the vehicle and driven away.

In another forced mobilization incident, a man ended up receiving a severe head injury after scuffling with members of a press gang, who drove their mini-bus into the yard of his private home in Volyn Region on Friday.

The local conscription office has denied responsibility for wounding the resident, saying in a statement on Saturday that “the conscript tried running away and, through his own carelessness, hit his head.”

Ukraine barred nearly all adult men from leaving the country when the conflict between Moscow and Kiev escalated in February 2022 and lowered the draft age from 27 to 25.

Ukraine’s conscription drive has become increasingly violent amid Kiev’s military setbacks and lack of willing recruits.

Every day clips of the so-called “busification” emerge on social media, showing military-age men being snatched off the streets, from workplaces, and from residential areas, then taken to recruitment centers in mini-buses against their will, often triggering clashes with relatives, neighbors, and passersby.

Moscow has accused Kiev of seeking to fight “to the last Ukrainian” at the behest of Western powers waging a proxy war against Russia. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov previously estimated that Ukraine had lost nearly 500,000 servicemen killed or seriously wounded in 2025 alone.

The son of two senior Norwegian diplomats under investigation over ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has taken his own life, Norwegian newspaper VG reported earlier this week, citing lawyers for the family.

Edward Juul Rod-Larsen, 25, was found dead in Oslo days after French and Norwegian police reportedly launched a joint investigation into his parents, Mona Juul and Terje Rod-Larsen. The probe is centered around allegations that the disgraced US financier had helped the couple purchase an apartment, and left $5 million to each of their two children in his will.

The probe is part of widening international fallout from the latest release of millions of Epstein documents, which have triggered criminal investigations, arrests, and resignations across politics, business, and even royalty.

Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting sex from a minor and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence, was arrested again in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. He died by suicide in his jail cell ahead of his trial.

The US Department of Justice has gradually released materials related to the case under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by US President Donald Trump.

The released documents mention numerous high-profile figures, linking some to Epstein’s network or questionable financial dealings. The disclosures have triggered resignations, probes, and reviews worldwide, with many acknowledging contact but denying wrongdoing, with some charges brought in a limited number of cases.

Last month, Former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland was hospitalized after a reported suicide attempt, days after being charged with gross corruption over accepting Epstein’s hospitality. World Economic Forum CEO Borge Brende stepped down over dinners and communications with the disgraced financier.

In the US, the release has placed renewed scrutiny on former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Both have been deposed about their associations with Epstein, but have denied knowledge of his trafficking operation.

Commenting on the disclosures, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the scandal as exposing the “pure Satanism” at the heart of the collective West, accusing Western elites of inventing threats from Russia to distract from their own “monstrous crimes.”

Kiev has no plans to punish the perpetrators of the Odessa massacre, with Moscow’s victory in the Ukraine conflict being the only way to assure justice for its dozens of victims, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said on the 12th anniversary of the tragedy.

On May 2, 2014, clashes erupted in the Black Sea port city of Odessa between Ukrainian nationalists and the opponents of the violent Western-backed coup that had taken place in Kiev earlier that year.

The unrest culminated in ultra-right militants setting fire to the local trade unions building, which anti-government activists had been chased into following a demonstration outside, leading to 48 people being killed and more than 200 others wounded.

In a statement published on the Foreign Ministry’s Telegram channel on Saturday, Zakharova said that photos and videos from the scene prove that what happened in Odessa was “a Nazi intimidation action.”

Attempts by some in the West to present it as a spontaneous altercation between two groups of peaceful demonstrators with polarizing views on Ukraine’s future are hypocritical, she stressed.

According to the spokeswoman, the organizers of the Odessa massacre are well known to the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and are not in hiding, but they still somehow remain free.

Kiev repeatedly promised to complete the investigation into the tragedy, but it apparently “has no time for justice,” she argued. The very word has “turned into an oxymoron considering... the lawlessness and rampant corruption in modern Ukraine,” she added.

However, despite this fact, the foreign backers continue to provide military and financial support to the government of Vladimir Zelensky, Zakharova said.

”It's clear that in modern Europe, encouraging Nazism and financing terrorism has become a tradition,” she insisted.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that “the successful implementation of the goals and objectives” that Russia set for itself in the Ukraine conflict “will guarantee justice for the victims of the monstrous crime,” the spokeswoman stressed.

Since the escalation with Kiev in February 2022, Moscow has been saying that it is looking to achieve the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine as well as ensure that the country is neutral. The Russian side also insists that the Ukrainian authorities must recognize the territorial realities on the ground in order for the conflict to be settled.

Global crude oil prices rise and fall depending on whether US President Donald Trump got enough sleep, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said in a sarcastic remark. His comment came after oil rose to a four-year high amid reports that the US military would brief Trump on options related to the Iran conflict.

On Friday, Brent jumped nearly 7% to over $126 per barrel before easing to $108 later in the session. The rally followed an Axios report that US Central Command had prepared options for “short and powerful” strikes on Iran aimed at breaking stalled negotiations.

“Everything is under pressure, including oil prices, depending on how President Trump wakes up,” Fico said on Friday speaking with journalists in Bratislava.  “If he wakes up in a good mood, oil goes down, if he wakes up in a bad mood and makes some statement, oil automatically goes up.”

Prices saw extreme volatility and a sharp surge after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign on Iran on February 28. Iran responded by barring “enemy ships” from the Strait of Hormuz, which handles about one-fifth of global energy trade. In addition, Tehran conducted retaliatory strikes on US military bases in several countries across the Middle East.

Gas prices have also surged amid concerns over disruptions to global energy supply chains, with volatility spreading across European and Asian markets. Broader financial markets saw sharp swings due to escalation risks. Analysts have noted that global markets remain highly sensitive to political signals and policy decisions by the Trump administration.

Fico also recalled US interventions in Iraq and Venezuela and expressed concern about possible aggression toward Cuba, as well as Trump’s unresolved claims on Greenland, where Washington could “continue to assert its interests.”

There will be much talk this May about the so-called “strategic triangle” of Russia, China and the United States.

US President Donald Trump is expected in Beijing first, followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Whenever the leaders of the three most influential powers meet, speculation inevitably follows. What if they strike some grand bargain? What if the world suddenly becomes more orderly?

Such expectations are misplaced. The restructuring of the global system is already under way, and it isn’t a process that can be halted or reversed by summit diplomacy. Even so, turning points in history can unfold in different ways; carefully managed, or recklessly accelerated. That’s what makes the coming meetings significant.

Both Russia and the United States are now deeply involved in large-scale military confrontations. The importance of these conflicts lies not only in their scope, but in their broader consequences for the international system. China, by contrast, has historically kept its distance from such entanglements. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear in Beijing that it can’t remain insulated from their effects. Discussions at the recent Valdai Club conference in Shanghai suggested that China is reassessing its position.

At the center of this reassessment is a simple question: what, if anything, is still possible in relations with Washington?

For decades, China’s rise was closely tied to its economic relationship with the United States. The arrangement sometimes described as “Chimerica,” American capital and technology combined with Chinese labor and manufacturing, formed the backbone of globalization. It wasn’t an equal partnership, but it was mutually beneficial. For a long time, it seemed that basic economic self-interest would prevent either side from undermining it.

That assumption has now collapsed.

By the late 2000s, dissatisfaction in Washington was already evident. The United States increasingly viewed the arrangement not as a source of shared gains, but as a structural imbalance. Over time, the accumulation of tensions, economic and strategic, reached a point where incremental adjustments were no longer sufficient. What followed was a qualitative shift in the system itself.

For several decades, the global order operated largely in the interests of the United States as the leader of the Western bloc. Its gradual erosion now threatens those advantages. Washington’s response has been to use the current period of transition to secure as much of a head start as possible for the future.

Donald Trump has become the most visible embodiment of this approach. His rhetoric, openly transactional and even boastful, may appear unconventional, but the underlying logic predates him. The objective is clear: maximize immediate gains and build up national capacity as quickly as possible. Then use that accumulated strength to dominate the next phase of global competition.

This represents a sharp departure from the earlier American strategy, which prioritized long-term investments in the international system. Those investments didn’t always produce immediate returns, but they reinforced a framework that ultimately benefited the United States more than anyone else. Today, the emphasis has shifted toward short-term advantage, even at the risk of longer-term instability.

Whether this strategy will succeed remains uncertain. The initial phase has already produced setbacks. But the broader direction is unlikely to change. Future administrations may adopt a different tone, but they will operate within the same constraints. The liberal international order won’t return, not because of Trump’s personality, but because the conditions that sustained it no longer exist.

For other major powers, including China, this has profound implications. The idea of a comprehensive “big deal” with the United States, one that stabilizes the global system for years to come, has effectively become unrealistic.

Trump’s frequent use of the word “deal” is revealing. In his vocabulary, it’s more than a mere strategic concept but a commercial one. A deal is “big” not because it is durable or all-encompassing, but because of the scale of immediate gain it delivers. And like any commercial transaction, it can be abandoned if a more desirable opportunity presents itself.

Under such conditions, long-term agreements on the structure of world order are impossible. Washington is unlikely to commit to any arrangement that limits its flexibility before it has secured what it considers a sufficient advantage.

This is not necessarily a product of malice or arrogance. It is, in its own way, a rational response to a period of extreme uncertainty. The United States is seeking to preserve the foundations of its future dominance by acting decisively in the present.

But rationality on one side forces adaptation on the other.

If key players conclude that stable agreements with Washington are unattainable, their behavior changes. Military capability becomes more important as a safeguard against pressure. At the same time, interest grows in alternative forms of cooperation. That is, frameworks that operate independently of the United States and are insulated from its influence.

This logic isn’t new, but it’s gaining urgency. Russia has been advocating for such arrangements for several years. China, by contrast, has approached the idea with caution, hoping instead to preserve some form of mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. That hope now appears to be fading.

The upcoming visits to Beijing will provide a useful indication of how far this shift has progressed.

The meeting between Trump and Xi will likely define the limits of a temporary accommodation between two powers that remain economically intertwined, yet increasingly distrustful of one another. The question is no longer whether a comprehensive agreement is possible, but what narrow, short-term arrangements can be reached, and how long they will last.

Putin’s subsequent talks with Xi will address a different issue: the extent to which Russia and China are prepared to develop mechanisms of cooperation that bypass the United States altogether. Moscow has been moving in this direction for some time. Beijing now appears to be considering whether it must follow.

May will not produce a grand bargain. But it may show, more clearly than before, how the world is adjusting to the absence of one.

The Pentagon has said that it has reached deals with major artificial intelligence firms to integrate their advanced AI capabilities into the agency's classified networks.

The US Department of War has been actively negotiating with the industry’s leaders since the start of the year as it is trying to expand the application of AI in military operations and diversify the range of companies that provide the technology.

It is going ahead with the push despite concerns among experts regarding the ability of the AI to reliably operate within the existing laws of war and its possible use to invade the privacy of civilians in peacetime.

Agreements have been struck with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle to deploy their AI systems for “lawful operational use,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday.

Artificial intelligence will be integrated into the Department of War’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 networks to “streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the statement read.

The US Department of War’s official AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million personnel in the last five months, “generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents,” it said. According to the Pentagon, the technology has allowed the execution of certain tasks to be sped up “from months to days.”

Separately, the US Navy has awarded San Francisco-based AI company Domino Data Lab a $100 million contract to aid in combating Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively blocked since the early days of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“The Navy is paying for the platform that lets it train, govern, and field that AI at a speed required for contested waters,” Domino CEO Thomas Robinson told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Washington is betting on the speed of AI in analyzing a wealth of data from multiple sensor types to rapidly improve mine detection in US underwater drones, the outlet said.

The Pentagon’s recent deals with AI companies conspicuously excluded Anthropic, which had a falling out with the Pentagon earlier this year after it refused to loosen safeguards for its technology. The company argued that its AI could be used for domestic surveillance or the deployment of automatic weapons without human oversight.

The Department of War responded by designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a rare label typically reserved for entities linked to Washington’s foreign adversaries, effectively sidelining the firm from any future contracts.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” during a US Senate hearing earlier this week. Hegseth compared the company’s reluctance to agree to Pentagon’s terms to “Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at.”

Anthropic is currently challenging the Pentagon in court to have the “supply-chain risk” label dropped.

History confirms that major Western-instigated conflicts are cultivated rather than spontaneous. From 19th-century colonial pretexts in North Africa to modern digital campaigns, the manufactured lie remains the primary propellant for the war machine. Over the last 50 years, this pattern reached a lethal zenith. Almost every intervention across the Middle East and Africa traces back to a specific fabrication – packaged and sold to the public by a compliant mainstream media.

These are structural deceptions. In this system, dominant Western media functions as a psychological vanguard, sanitizing illegal aggression as a moral imperative. By the time a fraud is exposed, states are decapitated, and economies looted. The toll is never borne by politicians in Washington, London, or Paris, but by millions whose lives are treated as collateral for a geopolitical agenda.

The system of engineered permission was drafted in 2003. Iraq remains the archetype for how a fabricated casus belli dismantles a sovereign state. It was a multi-layered campaign of deception – from phantom WMDs to invented ties between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda. When leaders presented unverified intelligence as truth, mainstream media transitioned from investigative journalism to institutional transcription. By validating discredited sources and creating a ‘feedback loop’ of fear, they framed dissent as a delusion.

The consequence was the calculated annihilation of a civilization’s stability. By the time quiet mea culpas appeared in Western newspapers years later, the damage was irreversible. The human cost is staggering: Opinion Research Business (ORB) data indicates over 1 million Iraqi lives lost – a demographic erasure that birthed regional extremism. The media’s eventual admission was a postscript to a tragedy that achieved its primary objective: the permanent removal of a regional power under a false banner of liberation that never intended to arrive.

While Iraq relied on manufactured fear, the 2011 dismantling of Libya was blatant moral coercion. The ‘Architecture of Consent’ repurposed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), transforming a safeguard for civilians into a weapon for regime change. The foundational lie rested on uncorroborated reports of an impending massacre in Benghazi. This narrative, broadcast by regional satellite channels and adopted without scrutiny by Western governments, was used to bypass the African Union’s diplomatic peace initiatives.

Rather than analyzing a complex civil conflict, Western media functioned as psychological support for the intervention. They reduced a sovereign crisis to a simplistic fable pitting ‘pro-democracy’ forces against a singular ‘villain’. Once the ‘no-fly zone’ served as a gateway for a sustained NATO bombing campaign, the trap was sprung. The ‘liberation’ celebrated in European capitals resulted in an immediate centerless, fractured wasteland.

The human and economic toll of this narrative was predicated on staggering fabrications. In the 2011 uprising, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini claimed 1,000 people were killed in the first days by Gaddafi’s forces. Media reports aggressively inflated this to 10,000 within weeks. However, investigative post-mortems reveal a different reality: Human Rights Watch documented that the actual death toll across Libya during those initial four days was 233 – a tragic number, but a fraction of the ‘onslaught’ marketed to the UN Security Council.

Furthermore, the ‘foreign mercenaries’ narrative used to justify R2P remains a successful myth. Despite widespread reporting, organizations such as Amnesty International found no evidence that Gaddafi deployed African mercenary units; many targeted were actually sub-Saharan immigrants or black Libyans in the regular army. This data inflation was essential to building the ‘moral case’ for intervention, propagated by a media machine that prioritized existential threat narratives over reliable intelligence.

The 20-year occupation of Afghanistan was characterized by the absolute refusal to acknowledge it. In this theater, the ‘Architecture of Consent’ functioned through a rigid ultimatum: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” This rhetoric was designed to bypass the fundamental legal requirements of international justice and silence any call for procedural proof or diplomatic mediation.

Historical records, largely suppressed by the Western press, confirm that the Taliban leadership repeatedly attempted a diplomatic resolution. Through their representatives in Pakistan, they requested ‘solid evidence’ linking the suspects to the 9/11 attacks and offered to facilitate a trial in a neutral, third-party Islamic jurisdiction. The response from Washington was a total dismissal of the rule of law, asserting that the accusation itself was sufficient for war. Major media outlets facilitated this by rebranding a legitimate request for due process as an act of hostile ‘defiance’, thereby turning an illegal aggression into a ‘just war’.

The cost of this rejection of evidence is a matter of grim record. According to data from the Brown University Costs of War Project, the conflict resulted in over 176,000 deaths in Afghanistan alone, including roughly 46,000 civilians. By the time the Western forces staged their chaotic exit in 2021, the ‘evidence’ was irrelevant; the country had been reduced to a humanitarian emergency where over 90% of the population now survives below the poverty line. The ‘liberation’ was a 20-year cycle of violence that ended exactly where it began, but with a nation buried under the rubble of a failed narrative.

As we turn toward the current horizon, the machinery of engineered permission is undergoing a recalibration for its most ambitious project yet: the dismantling of Iran. The psychological buildup follows a frequency nearly identical to the 2003 Iraq blueprint, refined for a digital age where narrative control is seamless. Here, the deception is not tethered to a singular phantom weapon, but to an existential demonization that denies a regional power its right to sovereign security. This dehumanization reached its terminal point with Donald Trump’s declarations threatening to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization – a rhetorical war crime – and the dehumanization of its people as ‘animals’ unworthy of existence.

A calculated ‘cognitive quarantine’ is being drawn across Western consciousness. Just as the public was kept in ignorance regarding the diplomatic overtures made prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, today’s audiences are shielded from the nuances of nuclear monitoring and the horrific human toll of ‘maximum pressure’ economic warfare. The narrative framing treats Iran not as a rational state actor with historical grievances, but as an irrational, fanatical entity. This conditioning ensures that when the first strikes occur, the Western public will view them as an unavoidable necessity rather than an illegal act of aggression. The cost of the lie is already being paid in the lives of thousands of Iranian patients who are denied life-saving medicine due to a sanctions regime that the media portrays as ‘peaceful pressure’.

This architecture relies on the phenomenon of moving goalposts. In Afghanistan, a mission to apprehend one individual devolved into a 20-year social engineering project. In Libya, a ‘no-fly zone’ marketed as civilian protection morphed instantly into a regime-change bombing campaign. This fluidity of purpose is the engine of the ‘policy of no return’. That is, by the time the original justification is exposed as a fabrication, the military footprint is permanent, and the target nation is locked into a cycle of chaos. The media validates each new shift without demanding accountability for the failures of the last, ensuring that the resulting blood and ruin are never linked back to the original architects in the public mind.

This truth-laundering system is the structural spine of modern interventionism. From the rigged ultimatums of the early 2000s to the ‘humanitarian’ disguises used in the 2010s, the cycle remains unbroken because the architects are never held to account.

Politicians engineer the pretext, corporate media sanitizes the violence, and millions –predominantly in the Global South – pay with their lives and their heritage. True accountability will never come from quiet corrections issued years after a nation has been pulverized and its wealth looted. It begins by exposing these conflicts as the systematic dismantling of states to ensure a profitable, perpetual chaos that serves the ‘imperial directive’. If we refuse to dismantle the architecture of the lie today, we are simply preparing the ground for the next million victims tomorrow.

German schoolmasters of an earlier dispensation indulged the cruel sport of asking pupils in final examinations which disease had carried off Julius Caesar. The trap was designed to expose as a fool the candidate who could not answer, proof enough that Caesar’s assassination remained common knowledge long after antiquity itself had vanished.

In the postmodern age of unbounded electronic warfare, extrajudicial killing has assumed a more sinister, revolutionary form: not a mere relapse into barbarism, but a novel, mutant paradigm of violence that exceeds even the egregious transgressions of pagan antiquity.

Ex ante execution: The grammar of a novel transgression

There are pivotal moments in geopolitics when language itself begins to signal a deeper rupture. Israel’s lethal rhetoric emerges as a revealing instance.

Along a fatal arc of escalation, the Jewish State has crossed from killing subordinate commanders to eliminating the very apex of its adversaries’ leadership – first in Lebanon, then in Gaza, and ultimately in Iran, where sovereignty was reduced to a target and the supreme leader to a mark.

More ominous still are the announcements: Jerusalem has signaled that succession itself would not be spared, that even those yet unchosen are already slated for death.

A declaration that a state will kill not merely its enemies, but its enemies-to-be, that is, future officeholders not yet chosen, not yet acting, not yet accountable, inaugurates a moment of disjunction in the form of a stark conceptual shift: from targeting individuals to targeting roles, and the very idea of succession.

At its core, Israel’s posture can be characterized as a doctrine of pre-emptive or anticipatory assassination: Whoever becomes the next leader is treated as a legitimate target, regardless of his identity or individual conduct.

This stance falls within what security analysts more broadly subsume under the rubric of leadership decapitation strategy, the deliberate elimination of command figures to provoke internal succession struggles, disrupt decision-making, and send an unmistakable deterrent signal to adversaries.

Yet the novelty of what may be termed “expectant extrajudicial elite execution” (EEEE) lies not in the removal of senior decision-makers as such, but in the extension of that logic forward in time, rendering the future occupant of the supreme office a present target.

This is where the standard security frameworks start to fray. Because once the threat applies not to a person but to a position, it becomes something more radical: anonymous role-based targeting.

In the case of such proleptic condemnation, violence is no longer justified by what a concrete individual has done, but by what future helmsmen are presumed to become. It is an institutionalized policy of unconstrained assassination and collective punishment transposed to leadership in the abstract, because the threat attaches not to a specific actor, but to the office itself.

From a legal standpoint, especially under human-rights law, such a posture can be categorized as an especially grave form of state-sponsored terrorism, precisely because such extrajudicial killing not only bypasses due process, but also severs punishment from individual culpability.

Supporters, however, invoke a different vocabulary, reducing such depersonalized, role-based assassination to mere deterrence signaling or psychological warfare: an attempt to make supreme authority so hazardous that no aspirant of ordinary prudence would accept it.

On this account, the strategic logic of elite deterrence seeks to magnify the hazards of political ascendancy to the point where succession itself becomes unstable. If holding an office carries an implicit death sentence, potential successors may simply refuse to assume power, and, ultimately, governance may wither.

Even those intrepid enough to accept the targeted office are thought to be diminished: forced into concealment, deprived of personal contact, and unable to project the charismatic presence on which power and influence often depends. Leadership then becomes spectral – formally present, yet politically half-absent – until followers may begin to wonder whether a leader exists at all.

Yet alongside these intended effects lie significant risks, especially if organizations replenish leadership faster and more adeptly than expected: Martyrdom may harden resolve, and successors may prove more formidable and radical than those they replace.

What appears in theory as a sequence of clean decapitations may, in practice, yield a hydra-like reality: like the mythic monster whose severed necks gave rise to new heads, each slain commander may generate successors more numerous, more elusive, and more lethally adept than the one removed.

Classical tyrannicide: The person, not the placeholder

Athens could dedicate an altar to the “unknown god”; it did not designate unknown tyrants for death.

Even before the advent of Christian moral thought, Greek and Roman debates on tyrannicide remained tethered to the person of the ruler, whose conduct, however contentiously judged, furnished the grounds for punitive action.

Judgment turned on imputed deeds, not on the office itself. The verdict was often disputed and divisive, yet still anchored in what the ruler had allegedly done and whether it warranted death.

What is at issue now is the radicalization of that logic: The future holder of an office, as yet unknown, is condemned in advance, irrespective of act or accountability. Such a paradigmatic leap, from striking down a tyrant to pre-emptively threatening any successor, would have strained even the comparatively permissive moral horizons of pagan antiquity.

The doctrine of tyrannicide has its roots in classical antiquity, where it was construed, however controversially, as a defense of the political community against unlawful rule.

In the Greek world, the killing of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton in 514 BC in Athens during the Panathenaea – the city’s sacred festival of Athena – was canonically enshrined as the founding myth of tyrannicide.

The conspirators’ violent deed came to be hallowed as an act of civic virtue, even as philosophers continued to dispute its moral warrant.

Plato’s Socrates warned that injustice must not be answered by injury, nor the city’s laws overthrown by private violence. Aristotle, less intent on moralizing tyrannicide than on diagnosing tyranny’s self-destruction, observed that the tyrant summons the very conspiracies that undo him, as his unjust treatment of his subjects breeds fear, contempt, anger, hatred, and revenge.

In truth, the deed that immortalized Harmodius and Aristogeiton belonged less to the assembly-ground of politics than to the theatre of passion.

As Thucydides stresses in the History of the Peloponnesian War (6.53–59), the joint deed sprang from private grievance rather than public principle; though premeditated, it was carried out in panic, and claimed not the ruling tyrant, Hippias, but his brother, Hipparchus.

Only later was this act of personal vengeance transfigured into a noble but deceptive legend. The narrative recast an impulsive killing as the iconic archetype of conscientious tyrant-slaying, thereby sanctifying an ignoble deed that sprung from private affront rather than public cause.

As an early illustration of extrajudicial killing’s perverse effects, this pseudo-tyrannicide neither ended the tyranny nor liberated Athens; it merely hardened the regime: Fear drove Hippias to intensify repression by putting many citizens to death.

Murder and memory: From the Peisistratids to the Ides of March

Taken together, the very genealogy of tyrannicide, corrupt before it became canonical, is tainted at the source: disreputable in motive, impious in setting, disastrous in consequence, and mendacious in memory.

Within the economy of the posthumous discourse, the exculpatory and legitimating myth functions as a stark foil, supplying the positive pole of a Manichaean opposition. This interpretive emplotment is ideologically useful precisely because it suppresses ambiguity, turning a muddled act of private violence into a metanarrative morality play of liberty against tyranny. For latter-day liberals in decadent Western circles, the erotic bond between Harmodius and Aristogeiton only deepens the aura of civic sanctity woven around the celebrated Tyrannicides.

With so tainted a pedigree – a private vendetta later ennobled as public virtue – it is small wonder that the progeny of this lineage should bear the marks of their vitiated origin: from further extrajudicial killings in antiquity that only hardened tyranny to Israel’s sacrilegious killing of Iran’s supreme Shiite leader in the age of viral geopolitics, a fatal moment in which the blade again promised liberation while bequeathing a darker future for the world at large.

Against this morally entangled backdrop, Thucydides’ nuanced judgment is all the more striking: The Peisistratid tyranny, he observes, was marked by unusual moderation: It taxed lightly – at a mere five percent, a rate that would make many modern taxpayers wistful – adorned Athens, secured its defense, endowed the temples, and otherwise left the city’s established laws largely intact, save for the dynastic precaution that a member of the Peisistratid family should always hold office.

Posterity schooled in the Whig myth of liberty smiled more readily on the Alcmaeonids, the rival aristocratic house, because democracy claimed them as ancestors.

Yet the record is less moral than memorial, for the Peisistratids were tyrants with achievements, while the Alcmaeonids were retrospectively anointed liberators with a stain: the old Cylonian sacrilege and curse, that is, the miasmatic slaughter of suppliants under the divine protection of Athena after Cylon’s abortive coup, an affair conventionally, though not securely, dated to 632 BC.

From Athens, the historical arc bent next to Rome, where political killing widened from the personal tyrant-slayer’s blow to the bureaucratic terror of proscription and, ultimately, to the most famous assassination of antiquity: the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC.

The death of the dictator perpetuo remains so deeply lodged in cultural memory that German schoolmasters of a bygone age, formed in the venerable humanist tradition, forged ignorance of it into a badge of intellectual disgrace, taking for granted that every pupil – save the irredeemably obtuse – knew Caesar had not died of disease.

[To be continued]

US President Donald Trump has said he would consider withdrawing some American troops stationed in Italy and Spain, after making a similar threat toward Germany amid a deepening rift with Washington’s European allies over the war with Iran.

Trump threatened earlier this week to reduce the number of US troops in Germany, continuing to deride NATO as a “paper tiger” following the refusal of other member states to back the US-Israeli bombing campaign in the Middle East. On Friday, the Pentagon said it would withdraw around 5,000 of the roughly 36,000 active-duty service members from Germany.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the US decision was “to be expected.” He maintained that intensive military cooperation between the two nations would continue, adding that the continued US military presence on German soil “is in our interest.” The minister also urged European NATO members to “assume greater responsibility” and said that Berlin was “on the right track” by seeking to enlarge its army and procure more weapons.

Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Friday whether he would consider removing troops from Spain or Italy, Trump replied: “Yeah, probably. Look, why shouldn’t I?”

“Italy has not been of any help to us. And Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Trump said. “It’s one thing if they said nicely, or if they said, ‘Okay, we’ll help,’ but the help is a little slow,” he added.

Spain denied the use of a naval base near Cadiz for attacks on Iran and closed its airspace to US planes involved in the campaign. Italy similarly refused to allow the US to use an air base in Sicily.

Trump reiterated that he considers NATO ungrateful for US military support to Ukraine. “We helped them with Ukraine. You know, they made a mess out of Ukraine, a total mess,” he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has strongly criticized the bombing of Iran. “From my point of view, this war is illegal, it is a big mistake,” he said last month. In a recent op-ed in Le Monde diplomatique, Sanchez again condemned “the unilateral attempts by the United States to engineer regime change in Venezuela and now Iran – all without seeking even a veneer of international approval.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said the war with Iran has added to instability in the Middle East and driven up energy prices. She also criticized Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV over his opposition to the conflict as “unacceptable.”

US President Donald Trump has joked that American forces are behaving like pirates as he boasted about the capture of tankers and cargo ships attempting to breach the blockade of Iranian ports.

Oil prices surged past $120 a barrel this week for the first time since 2022, while Trump’s approval rating fell to 34%, a record low in Reuters/Ipsos polling.

Speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches dinner in Florida on Friday, Trump recalled how a destroyer fired at the Iranian-flagged cargo vessel Touska near the Strait of Hormuz on April 19 before it was boarded by US Marines.

“We took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates,” Trump said, prompting laughter in the audience.

Trump on US Navy Seizing Ships:

It’s a very profitable business. We’re like pirates. pic.twitter.com/erWDQmJWnw

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2026

Iran has condemned the seizure as illegal, with a government source telling Press TV this week that US “piracy and banditry” would be met with an “unprecedented” response.

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly one-fifth of global oil trade, to “enemy ships” shortly after the US and Israel launched their bombing campaign on February 28. The US declared a naval blockade of Iran last month as the countries agreed to a ceasefire.

Trump said on Friday that he was “not satisfied” with Iran’s latest peace proposal and hailed the blockade as “incredible.”

An RT crew has filmed an airstrike in southern Lebanon as the Israeli military continued to pound targets despite a ceasefire declared last month.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck the town of Habboush on Friday, killing six people, including a woman and a child, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

“This comes just one day after Israel killed eight civilians in south Lebanon. Four of them were women, and two of them were children. All of this is happening during the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel,” RT’s Ali Rida Sbeity said, reporting from Lebanon’s Tyre District.

Sbeity said IDF aircraft and drones were flying at low altitude, and an airstrike was carried out near the area where he was reporting. Israel has previously issued evacuation orders for 24 villages in the area.

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir said on Wednesday that there was “no ceasefire” with the armed group Hezbollah despite the US-mediated truce between Israel and Lebanon which was reached on April 16.

Under the agreement, Israel promised to halt offensive operations in Lebanon but reserved the right to defend itself against “planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.”

Hezbollah, which boycotted the negotiations last month, has demanded that the IDF halt all troop movements and return to positions it held before early March, when it began firing rockets at Israel in support of Iran.

An Israeli soldier was killed and three others were wounded in a Hezbollah drone attack in southern Lebanon on Thursday.

More than 2,600 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, and around 1.2 million have been displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

The US has warned several European countries, including the UK, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia, to expect delays in deliveries of American-made weapons because the war with Iran has depleted stockpiles, the Financial Times reported late on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The reported move comes as US President Donald Trump has become increasingly critical of NATO for refusing to back the American-Israeli war with Iran.

The UK, Poland, and the Baltic states have been among the most vocal supporters of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

Poland and the Baltic states also rely on foreign military aid as part of what they describe as efforts to strengthen the bloc’s eastern flank. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, has said that his country would not attack a NATO member unless it is attacked first.

The war in the Middle East has cost the US an estimated $25 billion, several media outlets reported, citing a senior Pentagon official, as Washington has burned through its arsenal of bombs, cruise missiles, and interceptors. The air campaign launched on February 28 failed to stop Iran from launching ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones in retaliation against Israel and Gulf states hosting American bases.

Trump has lashed out at European leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, for criticizing his war effort and refusing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“We got no help – zero! – from NATO. You know, we spent trillions of dollars on NATO – we got no help. We didn’t need it, but we got none,” Trump said in a speech in The Villages, Florida, on Friday. He went on to describe NATO as a “paper tiger,” and dismissed claims that the US was not winning the war with Iran as “treasonous.”

Russian journalist Vladimir Solovyov has accused Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of betraying the interests of her own voters by following the EU line on Ukraine and Russia in an interview with Il Fatto Quotidiano published on Wednesday.

“I don’t have any problem with Signora Meloni,” Solovyov said. “Italian people, they have problem with Signora Meloni. Donald Trump, he has problems with Signora Meloni.”

The TV host claimed Meloni had “changed her position on Russia and Ukraine completely” after winning the election. He argued that Rome’s current policy has hurt Italian businesses, tourism, and consumers.

“What’s in the best interest of Italian people?” Solovyov asked, pointing to “high oil prices,” a “bad economic situation,” and the loss of Russian markets and tourism. “Is it worth it?”

He also questioned whether Italy remains “the Italy of Berlusconi” or has become “the Italy of immigrants” who “don’t respect your culture, your history, your language,” asking whether this is “the right price to pay for European Nazi solidarity.”

The interview followed Solovyov’s sharp criticism of Meloni on his show earlier in April. His remarks prompted a strong response in Rome, where Italy’s Foreign Ministry summoned Russian Ambassador Aleksey Paramonov to lodge a formal protest, describing the comments as “extremely serious and offensive.” Paramonov, in turn, called the move unusual, stressing that Solovyov was speaking in a personal capacity and does not represent official Russian policy.

Watch the full interview here:

The US-Israeli war on Iran has already been “terminated,” and the Trump administration believes it does not need an extension from Congress to continue the fighting, the Associated Press has reported, citing sources.

The report comes as a deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Act rapidly approaches. The legislation limits any military action launched by the president without congressional authorization to 60 days. 

The White House insists that, for the purposes of the law, “the hostilities that began on Saturday, February 28, have terminated,” an unnamed senior administration official told AP on Friday. Tehran and Washington reached a two-week ceasefire on April 7, with the truce extended indefinitely since then.

The assessment echoes the stance voiced by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during hearings in the Senate on Thursday. The Pentagon chief said the conflict has been “paused” since the ceasefire was implemented, arguing that in the administration’s “understanding” the 60-day period was on hold as well.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who grilled Hegseth about the timeline, told the press that the secretary offered a “very novel argument that I’ve never heard before,” which “certainly has no legal support.” Multiple legal experts have said that the 60-day period envisioned by the act cannot be “terminated” or “paused.”  

That unorthodox view of the 1973 legislation, however, has been backed by some experts. Richard Goldberg, a former official with the National Security Council during Trump’s first term and current senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington-based think tank, claimed the interpretation was viable.

Launching a new operation later would help to circumvent the congressional approval requirement, Goldberg claimed, stating that the move “solves it all” in his opinion. A new attack on Iran “would inherently be a mission of self-defense focused on reopening the strait while reserving the right to offensive action in support of restoring freedom of navigation,” he suggested. 

Since the ceasefire was announced, Washington has been pouring additional troops and hardware into the Middle East, prompting widespread concern that the truce is only a pause prior to the renewal of the hostilities. Three aircraft carrier strike groups, as well as multiple marine expeditionary groups, are currently active in the region, with some of the units enforcing Trump’s naval blockade of Iran, and others appearing to be on standby.

US President Donald Trump has announced 25% tariffs on EU-made cars and trucks, accusing the bloc of breaching a trade deal reached last summer but yet to be fully ratified by EU lawmakers.

The move constitutes a 10% hike from current 15% levies on the automotive industry. Announcing the decision, Trump urged European car makers to move their manufacturing to the US, saying that such cars would not be subjected to increased tariffs.  

“I am pleased to announce that, based on the fact the European Union is not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal, next week I will be increasing Tariffs charged to the European Union for Cars and Trucks coming into the United States. The Tariff will be increased to 25%,” Trump wrote on his TruthSocial platform.

While the deal between the US and the EU was agreed last July following a brief trade war, it ended up left in the bloc’s bureaucratic limbo. The EU Parliament voted at the end of March to advance the agreement, having twice delayed it before. However, the deal has not yet been fully ratified by the process known as the “trilogue.” To be fully implemented, the agreement must be approved not only by the legislature, but also by the EU Commission and the council of EU leaders.

The trade deal has been repeatedly criticized as a capitulation of EU bureaucrats before the US leader due to its generally unfavorable terms. Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, for instance, has repeatedly blasted the bloc’s passive stance in the trade standoff with the US, stating that the “deal was unfair from the beginning,” with Washington imposing 15% tariffs on the bloc while “we reduced ours on them.”  

Trump’s announcement prompted an immediate reaction in the EU, with the Parliament’s international trade committee head, Bernd Lange, lamenting Washington’s untrustworthiness and mulling retaliation.  

“This is no way to treat close partners. Now we can only respond with the utmost clarity and firmness, drawing on the strength of our position,” Lange stated without providing any insights on potential countermeasures.

The Berlin youth wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has suggested abolishing marriage in Germany in favor of cohabiting partnerships.

At present, marriage enjoys constitutional protection under Article 6 of the Basic Law.

The motion titled ‘Down with the patriarchy, even if it feels romantic’ was presented late last month ahead of a conference of the SPD’s Berlin branch scheduled for May 8 to May 9. According to the Berlin Young Socialists (Jusos), marriage is a key institution of patriarchy that secures the “oppression of women by cis-men” and “restricts freedom and self-determination through its claim to permanence.”

“Marriage serves the chauvinistic, capitalist nation-state as an instrument for enforcing misogynistic, anti-queer, classist, and racist policies,” the proposal argues.

While the SPD Berlin youth wing did concede that “many people see marriage as a romantic connection and are happy in it,” it still insisted that “emancipation and overcoming heteropatriarchy and capitalism are only possible through radical and solidaristic change.” This change should see traditional marriage, as well as all related laws and tax benefits axed and supplanted by a kind of cohabiting partnership, as envisaged in the motion.

In order to establish a so-called “community of responsibility,” individuals would merely need to file a joint written application at the registry office, with the union considered valid upon submission. Exit from such a partnership could be effected through a written request at any time, “without the consent of others,” the Jusos proposed.

According to German media, the motion will likely not be discussed at the upcoming state party conference but rather postponed until 2027.

Meanwhile, a YouGov poll last month indicated that only 13% of respondents would vote for the SPD in a hypothetical election – the Social Democrats’ worst showing since December 2019.

By contrast, the opposition right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which campaigns on family values, among other points, has seen its popularity rising tangibly over the past year.

A Bild/INSA survey suggested last week that the AfD would win a hypothetical election with 28% of the vote – a new record high for the party.

An open neo-Nazi associated with the notorious Azov regiment, Yan ‘MacGregor’ Klishayev, has been spotted among a group of 15 Ukrainian veterans enrolled in a new leadership program at Yale University.

The meet-and-greet photo surfaced online on Thursday, showing Klishayev among the veterans posing alongside Timothy Snyder, Professor of History and Global Affairs. The militant has been long associated with the notorious neo-Nazi Azov regiment, which has been rebranded as the 3rd Assault Brigade after suffering a crushing defeat from the Russian military during the battle of Mariupol early in the Ukraine conflict.

Today Prof. Timothy Snyder welcomed a group of 🇺🇦veterans to Yale University.

Among them was neo-Nazi Yan "Macgregor" Klishaiev from the Third Assault Brigade (rooted in the Azov movement).

I have some questions:

🟥Why didn’t Yan wear his favorite Wolfsangel T-shirt — that… pic.twitter.com/mBXSxMOGo1

— Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta) April 29, 2026

The leadership program for Ukrainian veterans at Yale was announced last week by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, a charity set up by one of the wealthiest Ukrainian oligarchs. Pinchuk is known for actively supporting Kiev’s war effort, having supplied the country’s military with drones and other equipment.

The Pinchuk Foundation said the program was “aimed at developing leadership potential through access to world-class educational practices,” and the first group of 15 veterans is set to participate in the “pilot phase” of the project and receive “intensive training” in the US.

Ukrainian neo-Nazi militants have repeatedly surfaced at assorted public events and programs hosted by Western institutions. Late last year, for instance, London-based think tank Chatham House hosted Yevhen Karas as a speaker, presenting him as a drone battalion commander while failing to mention he was actually the founder of the notorious S14 far-right paramilitary group. The organization has been long cozying up to the post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which have used it as a neo-Nazi mob to intimidate and silence dissenters. 

Kiev has long been in denial that it has any issues with the rise of neo-Nazi groups in the country, dismissing such assertions as “Russian propaganda.” Mounting evidence, however, shows otherwise, with individuals displaying neo-Nazi symbols and tattoos repeatedly making it into official propaganda materials featuring Ukraine’s leader, Vladimir Zelensky. The need to “denazify” Ukraine has been named by Moscow as one of its goals in the military operation against the country, and it has repeatedly reiterated its commitment to that objective.

Sovereignty, as defined in international law, is both crucial and complex. In the real shark-pool world of geopolitics, it is not hard to spot: if you have the ability to rule at home and resist attack from outside (any outside), then you are sovereign. Otherwise not. No exceptions.

That’s why Iran has sovereignty, but Germany does not. Iran has withstood two months of a devious and brutal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel, which in turn is “merely” the culmination of decades of assaults levied via economic warfare, assassination campaigns, and subversion.

However, Iran has not only successfully foiled the current Israeli-American blitzkrieg-and-regime-change scenario, but also put the attackers on the backfoot. Tehran’s achievement is already historic. It has changed and will change the course of history.

Germany, by contrast, cannot even defend its own vital infrastructure, as the Nord Stream sabotage and its aftermath have demonstrated. What is even worse, its governments have had no will to do so. On the contrary, they have been rewarding the Ukrainian attackers with untold billions to feed Kiev’s ultra-corruption. Their backers – certainly including the US and Poland, and most likely Great Britain, too – need not worry about any trouble from Berlin either.

Case closed: Iran is sovereign, Germany is not. If you are German and find this uncomfortable, complain to Berlin.

Against this backdrop, it is oddly fitting that it is Iran which is now exerting a powerful influence on German politics despite not having any deliberate designs to do so, whereas German calls on Tehran (or, for that matter, Moscow or Beijing) to do this and leave that – as articulated by Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul with an almost comical lack of self-awareness – come across as embarrassing: sad spectacles of an impotence that doesn’t even know itself.

Iran, on the other hand, has now had a palpable impact on what unfortunately remains Germany’s single most important foreign-policy relationship. Indeed, as the current, post-1990 “unification” (really, expansion, and that’s still a polite term) Germany is really the old Cold War West Germany writ large (and going to seeds, too), the relationship with the US is more than just important. Historically, it was literally foundational.

And here we are: It is due to Iran’s resistance that this relationship has entered a deep crisis. Of course, other factors have played (or should have played) a role as well: for instance, Washington’s ferocious, bipartisan economic warfare against its old key client (polite term) in Europe, including at least complicity in destroying vital energy infrastructure and supply options (Biden, Democrats) via massive incentives for German industry to relocate to the US (Biden, Democrats) to devastation by tariffs (Trump, Republicans).

But it is over Iran that things have now come to a head: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has openly criticized Washington’s conduct of the war, and US President Donald Trump has launched one of his social media rampages, going after Merz and Germany with, as Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth would put it, “no quarter” given.

Trump has even threatened, in effect, to withdraw the almost 40,000 US troops from Germany. It would be stupid and self-damaging for the US to do so, but then, this is the Trump administration. Full disclosure: As a German, I hope they go ahead.

Trump has also told Merz off for wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon (false on two counts: Iran isn’t building one, and Merz is a compliant client leader who would never dare dissent from the US and Israel) and for being bad at running Germany, which must rankle, because most Germans agree. Merz has just earned himself the worst poll ratings of any German chancellor ever.

He has made things even worse – yes, Merz can do that – by releasing an exceedingly masochistically timed interview to complain that, in essence, no one likes him. True, but saying so has only triggered a national tsunami of mockery: now he is not only vastly unpopular but derided as a wimp, who loves to dish out harsh admonishments and mean austerity but can’t take the response.

A short video clip deep-faking Merz performing a satire of MC Hammer’s classic “You can’t touch this” by singing “No one likes me” is going viral. At a town hall-style meeting, the chancellor was openly laughed at. Major mainstream media are beginning to talk about a crisis deep enough to end the current government and, even worse for Merz, about rebellious murmurs inside his own CDU party.

All of this because Merz was making remarks about the Iran War. But make no mistake: Friedrich Merz, still infamous for applauding Israeli “dirty work” (“Drecksarbeit”) in Iran last summer, has not discovered a conscience. Listen attentively to his recent statements, made before a group of high school kids, and you realize, the chancellor’s real beef with America is that Washington hasn’t done its current “dirty work” quickly and, above all, successfully. No one loves a loser, not even, it turns out, Friedrich Merz, whose prior obsequiousness toward Trump had raised eyebrows even in Germany.

Yet whatever Merz’s sordid motives, take a step back and look at this picture from the point of view of history-in-the-making: Here is the German chancellor, who claims to be ready to make his country lead Europe (yes, not a great idea, but let that pass for now), whose government is presiding over the greatest German debt-and-armament splurge since World War Two (and that against a background of profound economic crisis), and he is stumbling over Iran. So much for the rise of multipolarity and the decline of Europe.

Not because that was Tehran’s aim. As a matter of fact, the Iranian leadership probably has very little time to think about Berlin – except noting for the future that, in practical terms, it is serving as a loyal accomplice in the American-Israeli war of aggression. No, the reason Iran now impacts and shakes the American-German relationship is that Tehran has been defeating the US, and so the client state Germany is registering the public “humiliation” of America (Merz’s term) by showing immediate signs of faltering compliance.

Who in this picture is reshaping things? And who is being shaped? Here’s another way to define sovereignty. And Germany still loses.

A shell company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump has agreed to a merger with a mining group that secured up to $1.6 billion from the US government in 2025 to facilitate the extraction of tungsten in Kazakhstan, the Financial Times has reported.

The agreement between Skyline Builders group, in which US President Donald Trump’s sons hold a stake, and Cove Kaz Capital group was signed on Thursday. The newly-formed entity will trade on Nasdaq as Kaz Resources, according to a statement.

Cove Kaz currently controls 70% of the Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty tungsten deposits in central Kazakhstan, believed to be one of the largest in the world. Last year, the federally-funded US Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation committed to invest heavily in the development of both projects.

The statement didn’t mention Trump’s sons, but the FT reported on Friday, citing informed sources, that they bought into Skyline last August via a special purpose vehicle run by a subsidiary of Dominari Securities. The size of their investment was not disclosed, but they increased it by $24 million in October.

The paper stressed that “there is no suggestion that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump knew that Cove was on the cusp of securing a contract from their father’s US administration when they made their initial investments in Skyline… or that they influenced the awarding of the contract.”

American Ventures, of which Dominari is a member, said that Donald Trump Jr. “has no operational involvement in the company” and “does not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company he invests in.” Eric Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment from the FT.

The Democrats have repeatedly sounded the alarm over potential conflicts of interest arising from the investments by Trump’s family members in companies that have secured lucrative government contracts. The president’s kin made more than $1 billion in pre-tax profits last year by getting involved in cryptocurrency, AI, drones and critical minerals projects, according to FT.

Due to its high heat resistance and hardness, tungsten is essential in the production of aerospace and defense ‌equipment. The US currently has no active mines producing the metal and is highly dependent on China for its deliveries.

The entire international jury of the Venice Biennale has tendered their resignations amid pressure caused by the Italian cultural exhibition’s decision to allow Russia and Israel to participate.

In early March, the Venice Biennale Foundation unveiled the line-up of the 2026 art fair, which runs from May 9 through November 22. Russia was included in the list for the first time since 2022, with its “The tree is rooted in the sky” exhibition. The event organizers noted, however, that the display would be strictly closed to the general public.

Nevertheless, the decision to allow Russia to participate has provoked harsh criticism from the Italian government and EU officials.

According to a press release published on Thursday, jury president Solange Farkas, as well as Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi handed in their resignations.

In their resignation letter, the jury members cited their previous statement last week, in which they refused to consider the works that represent “countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.” While not mentioning any nations directly, the jury was evidently referring to Russia and Israel, whose leaders are subject to ICC arrest warrants – something both countries have rejected.

In the wake of the jury’s resignation, the Venice Biennale organizers have announced that the awards ceremony, originally slated for May 9, would instead be held on November 22, given the “exceptional nature of the ongoing international geopolitical situation.”

Commenting on the development in a post on X on Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga claimed that by inviting Russia, the event organizers have harmed the Venice Biennale. He added that there was still time to reverse their decision.

Meanwhile, last Thursday, European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier confirmed that Brussels would carry through on its previous threat to withhold a €2 million ($2.34 million) grant from the Venice Biennale.

Mikhail Shvydkoy, a Russian presidential aide for international cultural cooperation, characterized the commission’s decision as “disgraceful,” with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova similarly denouncing it as a “relapse into anti-culture.”

Speaking to the press, Russian art critic Elizaveta Likhacheva described the sum in question as too insignificant for the Venice Biennale’s organizers to pay attention to.

Earlier this week, Italian media reported that the country’s Ministry of Culture had sent inspectors to check on the event organizers’ compliance with EU sanctions against Russia.

As for Israel, the country did not take part in last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, citing renovations to its pavilion. This year, however, the Jewish state is among the nations invited to the art fair.

In mid-March, some 178 artists participating in the event signed an open letter calling for Israel’s exclusion, citing its ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which has been marked by widespread civilian casualties.

Indo-Russian BrahMos Aerospace posts record 2025-26 revenue with 48.6% growth. Vietnam eyes $611.5 mn deal for supersonic missiles as India expands global defense exports

BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture by Indian and Russian defense manufacturers, posted record revenue in the last fiscal year, India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) has said.

The earnings for the 2025-26 financial year (ending March 31) stood at $548.24 million, the DRDO stated on Thursday. It is a 48.6% surge from $368.9 million recorded a year ago.

Brahmos Aerospace is also steadily growing its footprint in the global defense market with two export orders worth $420 million signed in 2025-26, DRDO said.

A big leap towards #AatmanirbharDefence

BrahMos Aerospace revenue has crossed ₹5200 crores for the year 2025-2026

The new Lucknow facility has started rolling out the first batch of missiles within a year of commencing operations.

Brahmos Aerospace is also steadily growing…

— DRDO (@DRDO_India) April 30, 2026

A deal with Vietnam is currently in the works and could be signed when its President To Lam visits New Delhi next week, India Today reported.

The deal includes shore-based BrahMos batteries for coastal defence, along with training, logistics, and an initial batch of missiles, and is reportedly estimated at $611.5 million. Moscow has cleared the transfer, the report said,  signalling the continued defense cooperation between India, Russia, and Vietnam.

If the deal materializes, Vietnam would become the third Southeast Asian nation to induct the supersonic cruise missiles into its arsenal. Last year, the Philippines became the first third-party customer for the BrahMos system, taking delivery of an initial batch in April under a $375 million agreement signed in 2023.

In March, Indonesia said it had entered into a pact with India to procure ‌the BrahMos missile system.

Earlier this month, India inducted a warship capable of carrying BrahMos supersonic missiles into its naval fleet.

The BrahMos, named after the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers, is among the fastest supersonic cruise missiles in the world. Originally capped at a range of 180 miles (290 km), it has since been upgraded for greater reach, increasing its strategic value and drawing heightened interest from Southeast Asian countries amid shifting regional security dynamics.

The strategic importance of Greater Nicobar, the southernmost and largest of the Nicobar islands of India that dominate the Malacca Strait – a critical maritime chokepoint through which 60% of global trade passes – have once again come into focus due to the turmoil in the Gulf of Hormuz amid the ongoing Iran War.

Against that backdrop, the Indian government earlier this month submitted a draft master plan for developing Greater Nicobar island.

The group of Andaman and Nicobar islands (ANI), governed as a single union territory by the central government of India, covers an area of 8,249 square kilometers. The entire island chain consists of 836 islands, including islets and rocky outcrops, of which about 31 are permanently inhabited. 

Located 1300 kilometers southeast of the Indian mainland, these territories are India’s premier maritime and air outpost, offering immense strategic leverage in the Indian Ocean. They act as a crucial bridge between South and Southeast Asia and as a strategic gateway for India into the Malacca Strait, which is a crucial shipping route connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

The Nicobar islands are instrumental for India in monitoring shipping lanes and help to extend its military reach. They serve as a key bulwark of India’s Act East Policy against the growing influence of China in the region. The islands act as a permanent air and naval base, facilitating power projection and rapid military deployment in the eastern and northern Indian Ocean. They support comprehensive maritime domain awareness, and also provide a first line of defense against both traditional and non-conventional threats such as illegal fishing, drug trafficking, and piracy. 

The islands provide 300,000 sq. km of additional Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), rich with underwater mineral and hydrocarbon resources. Sustainable power projects are designed to enhance both economic growth and strategic defense capability.

Great Nicobar Development Plan

The mega plan envisages a $9.9 billion mega-infrastructure project with proposed focus on tourism as the “primary economic driver” of growth. It is being envisioned as a “seaside destination to relax, enjoy theme parks, and wellness tourism in a pristine, unspoilt and protected environment.”

A 450 MVA gas/solar power plant, and a large township will support the population. There will be conference and convention centers. The already unfolding project includes an international container transshipment port, an airport, power plants, and a township. The plan looks to utilize island’s strategic location next to the very crucial and busy sea-lane, the Malacca Strait.

Maritime and port development will enhance connectivity through new jetties and expanding port facilities to accommodate large cargo vessels. It will give boost to tourism, entertainment, and processing clusters along the eastern coast of the island from Galathea Bay in the south to Campbell Bay in the north. Situated near the Malacca Strait, these projects aim to reduce dependence on foreign ports (like Singapore or Colombo) for container handling.

The project is expected to span 166 sq km. Of this, around 40% has been set aside as “urbanizable,” with the rest allocated to “special projects” including an airport, container port, freight and passenger terminals, defense area, and a green development area where no tree-felling will be allowed. About 129 sq. km of land is expected to come from diverted forest areas.

The project also intends to get the “population to settle here,” through both permanent and temporary jobs that will be created.  The plan has been drafted for a projected population of 336,000 by 2055. Of this, the local Nicobarese population is expected to grow to about 11,500 from the current 7,500. The annual inflow of tourists to the island by that time is expected to achieve more than a million people. The development will be in phases and will finish by 2047 in line with the targets of the Narendra Modi-led government’s vision ’Viksit Bharat’ (Developed India).

Hydro Carbons Potential

The ANI Basin is a highly promising, under-explored frontier. India’s Directorate General of Hydrocarbons estimates hydrocarbon potential at 371 MMTOE (Million Metric Tons of Oil Equivalent).

Recent 2025 deep-water exploration, particularly in the Sri Vijayapuram-2 well, has confirmed significant natural gas deposits (87% methane). This region is considered a major new source which could significantly boost India’s energy security and reduce import reliance. The basin, extending over 47,000 sq. km, is part of a complex island arc system formed by the convergence of the Indian and Burmese plates.

In 2025, Oil India conducted a three-well drilling campaign that proved commercial gas potential in the Andaman shallow/deep-water, including at a depth of 295 meters.

To speed up exploring and identifying crude oil and hydrocarbon reserves in the Andaman-Nicobar basin, the Indian government has opened up previously restricted areas and is encouraging investments via the Open Acreage Licensing Program. The discovery is crucial for India’s energy transition toward cleaner fuel (methane over coal) and holds the potential to significantly enhance India’s offshore energy assets.

The Strategic Focus

The Great Nicobar project fits well into India’s Act East Policy, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. It is a strategic, proactive, and dynamic shift from the 1991 Look East Policy, focusing on enhancing economic, cultural, and strategic ties with Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. The policy prioritizes regional stability and the development of India’s northeastern states bordering China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

While focusing on ASEAN nations, it extends cooperation to Japan, South Korea and the wider Indo-Pacific to counteract regional challenges. A major focus is integrating India’s northeastern states into the broader framework of regional trade and infrastructure, serving as a gateway to Southeast Asia. Key projects in this domain include road and rail links, maritime cooperation with Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

New Delhi’s transition to ‘Act East’ emphasizes rapid implementation, with a focus on maritime security and a rules-based order, particularly in partnership with Indo-Pacific powers. The policy has facilitated deeper cooperation, including the sale of BrahMos missiles to the Philippines and maritime exercises.

The Nicobar Islands therefore hold critical strategic importance for India, acting as a “geostrategic pivot” in the Indian Ocean and a vital maritime watchdog. Indira Point adjacent to the Galathea Bay, India’s southernmost point, is just 145 km north of Indonesia’s northernmost Rondo Island and 160 km from the Western Entrance of Malacca strait.

The 800-kilometer strait is crucial for global supply chains, but its narrowest point, less than three kilometers wide, makes it a risk point for piracy and maritime security, often referred to as the “Malacca Dilemma” by nations reliant on it.

The Nicobar Islands secure trade routes, enable power projection, and facilitate regional cooperation against security threats, effectively acting as India’s first line of defense against Eastern maritime threats. The islands enable the Indian Navy to monitor the crucial maritime route.

Expanding Military Assets

As the home to India’s only joint services Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC), the islands enable enhanced, integrated surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, and rapid deployment capabilities. ANI control the “arc of power” in the Bay of Bengal, anchored by the ANC. Key assets include major naval and air bases, and missile batteries, designed to monitor maritime traffic. INS Utkrosh (Port Blair) is the primary air station for aerial operations. INS Kohassa (Diglipur) is the northern air base for surveillance. INS Baaz (Campbell Bay) is the southernmost air station overlooking the Malacca Strait. INS Jarawa (Port Blair) houses the floating dock FDN-1. INS Kardip is a strategic naval facility in the Nicobar group.

All these are being upgraded with deeper berths, airstrip lengthening and modernization, and surveillance facilities at Campbell Bay, Kamorta, and Hut Bay. The new Great Nicobar development plan will support operations of advanced surveillance aircraft and combat jets. It will allow greater time on station for surveillance aircraft (P8I and MQ-9) and shorter reaction time for fighter jets of Rafale and Su-30 MKI class. Indian Navy submarines can operate from the specialized infrastructure at Port Blair. 

The ANC oversees Army infantry brigades with armored columns, Navy missile corvettes, amphibious warships, and patrol vehicles. Rutland Island is frequently used for joint amphibious assault exercises.

The existing military areas of the Indian Navy and Air Force (IAF) are being expanded to house more permanent assets. The runways at Diglipur and at Air Force Station Car Nicobar are being lengthened, and airfield assets including hardened shelters will allow sustained operations. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has cleared the mega-infrastructure project, citing it as of ‘strategic importance’.

The Way Ahead for Mega Plan

The Great Nicobar project faced scrutiny due to significant environmental impact, large-scale forest land diversion, and potential effects on local biodiversity and tribal communities. But the strong leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a clear development strategy have allowed work to progress.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation (ANIIDCO) is leading these efforts, focusing on public-private partnerships to develop international-standard tourist resorts and eco-tourism facilities. The focus remains on accelerating growth while aiming to manage the ecological sensitivities of the region.

The military airstrips in the ANC including Car Nicobar, Campbell Bay, and Diglipur have been designated for dual‑use activation to expand civilian air services across the archipelago, thus reflecting a model of symbiotic civil‑military growth. A phased transformation of the ANC into a strategic outpost would strengthen India’s image as a preferred security partner among Indian Ocean littorals. A Su-30 MKI with single air refueling will be able to reach the South China Sea when operating from Car Nicobar. Land based BrahMos missiles will also be positioned.

New Delhi’s engagement with its neighbors through the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), an international organization of seven South Asian and Southeast Asian nations, alongside provision of operational turnaround facilities to friendly navies and the undertaking of coordinated patrols (CORPATs), can further promote regional order and cooperation.

India’s development of the ANI have progressively emerged as a pillar of its maritime diplomacy in the eastern Indian Ocean Region. The strategic advantages are phenomenal. Surveillance of extra-regional warships, deep-sea fishing fleets, ‘dark shipping’, illegal activities, and research vessels along key chokepoints is essential and the ANI offer distinct advantages in facilitating this task. Similarly, the emerging hydrocarbon potential has to be exploited and secured.

ANI could become a multifunctional node for container trade, cold‑chain exports, maritime services, and digital commerce, creating steady demand for feeder services, warehousing, and skilled local employment, while deepening India’s integration with Bay of Bengal littorals and ASEAN supply chains.

The completion of the Chennai-ANI submarine cable (CANI), a 2,300 km high-speed fiber-optic link, has laid a strong foundation for sustained digital connectivity and future growth. In all this, the interests of the several tribal groups that the Andaman Islands are famous for has been looked into.

With increasing Chinese Navy presence in the Indian Ocean Region, India requires enhanced and sustained naval and air presence and stringent access monitoring at the Malacca Strait, staged through the ANI, to enable timely responses to potential military build-ups. The new infrastructure will allow it to integrate the islands more deeply into the national security architecture, and reinforce the country’s maritime posture in the Indo-Pacific.

A permanent fighter squadron must be positioned at Great Nicobar as early as possible. Lessons from recent wars also indicate the need to set up strong air defenses on the major islands with SAMs and other defenses. India must position larger numbers of air and ground launched cruise missiles.  

The ANI are the most strategically located islands anywhere in the world. With focused development and military empowerment, these islands could emerge as India’s strategic fulcrum against misadventures by India’s northern neighbor. Land-based air power has its own operational advantages and lesser risks. Major infrastructure development of the ANI will tilt the strategic balance further towards India.

Late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s purported suicide note has remained locked up at a courthouse for years, out of reach of investigators, the New York Times has reported.

The message was allegedly discovered by Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, in July 2019 after the disgraced US financier had been found unresponsive with a strip of cloth around his neck at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, the paper said in an article on Thursday.

Epstein survived that incident, but was found dead in his cell on August 10 the same year. The convicted sex offender apparently hanged himself with his bedsheets, but skeptics continue to insist that he was murdered to cover up for the powerful individuals supposedly implicated in the case.

Tartaglione, a former police officer serving four life sentences for a quadruple murder, told the NYT on the phone that the suicide note was written on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad and tucked into a graphic novel that Epstein used to read.

According to the cellmate, in the message the financier claimed that the investigators had “found nothing” on him despite looking for months. He said that Epstein's note concluded with the words: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.”

Tartaglione claimed that he had given the paper to his lawyers, suggesting that it could have been useful to counter claims made by Epstein after the July 2019 incident that he had been attacked by his cellmate.

The note eventually ended up being sealed by a federal judge as part of Tartaglione’s criminal case and still remains locked up in a New York courthouse, the NYT said. This means that the investigators, who looked into Epstein’s death, lacked what could have been a key piece of evidence, it added.

A spokesperson for the US Justice Department confirmed to the paper that the agency hasn’t seen the note. It was also not found among the massive trove of Epstein files published by the DOJ earlier this year, according to the article.

The New York Times said it filed a petition on Thursday for the judge to unseal the note.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky is deeply implicated in corruption schemes and a broader power struggle in Kiev, former Ukrainian diplomat and ex-Prosecutor General’s advisor Andrey Telizhenko told RT on Thursday. He added that the recordings published by Ukrainian media as the “Mindich tapes” are exposing the early stages of a wider network of financial wrongdoing.

Earlier this week Ukrainian media published transcripts of the covert recordings from an anti-corruption probe, indicating that businessman Timur Mindich, widely described as close to Zelensky, effectively ran the weapons firm Fire Point despite public denials. The materials show him discussing funding, contracts, and foreign investors with then Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, now head of the National Security and Defense Council.  

The head of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry Public Oversight Council, Yury Hudimenko, said the recordings suggest “at least five to six crimes” that could be proven in court, pointing to potential links between the two.

The council warned that Fire Point could be barred from state contracts if the link is confirmed. The company has been promoted by Zelensky abroad as a flagship defense project, while national media have long referred to Mindich as “Zelensky’s wallet.”  The transcripts point to close links between the businessman, the firm, and figures in the president’s inner circle. A certain “Vova” – the familiar form of Vladimir – is mentioned several times in the recordings.  

“Zelensky’s name is in there… this is just the beginning of his involvement,” Telizhenko said. 

“He’s involved… up to his neck in money‑laundering schemes,” he claimed, adding that people like Mindich and [Sergey] Shefir, Zelensky’s business partner and former top aide,”are working by his side.”

Telizhenko said the developments reflect a broader struggle, claiming “the British are controlling the situation,” and “investing into the military industrial complex of Ukraine.” London has pledged a record package of more than 120,000 drones for Ukraine this year.

He described the situation in Kiev as “a power grab,” claiming that “Zelensky is right in the hotspot of it,” and predicting that “he’s going to be done. He will have nowhere to go.” Telizhenko insisted that “The West is trying to leak and destroy Zelensky, get him out of power.” 

Commenting on continued foreign support for Kiev, he claimed that Western Europe is “involved in this corruption scheme right from the beginning,” adding that that they “are going to continue to push the money, because they are making profit from this.”  

The EU’s actions have drawn criticism from Russia and some of the bloc’s members. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto stated in December that Brussels did not want to expose Ukrainian corruption because it was “also riddled with a similar corruption network.” 

Addressing the scale of alleged corruption, Telizhenko tinsisted that “this is just the tip of the iceberg [...] There’s not only $100 million… there’s billions and billions,” he said, claiming that “there’s around $120 billion that were laundered throughout this war just from what I know.” 

Telizhenko said more revelations could follow, saying “within the next couple of weeks, we’re going to see more tapes with Vova… more and more come up.”

Two teenagers have been killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s Belgorod Region, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has said.

The victims were aged 18 and 15, the governor of Belgorod Region wrote in a post on his Telegram channel, adding that the drone deliberately targeted the motorcycle they were riding in the village of Volchya Aleksandrovka in Volokonovsky District. He added that the two died at the scene from their injuries and offered condolences to their families, writing: “This is a terrible loss for all of us.”

Belgorod and other Russian regions bordering Ukraine have repeatedly been targeted by drone strikes during the ongoing conflict. Moscow has accused Kiev of “terrorism” and of deliberately targeting civilians and critical infrastructure.

The drone which took the boys’ lives was just one of dozens Kiev has used to target Belgorod Region this week. On Wednesday, three women were killed when a drone struck a passenger bus in Voznesenovka. Eight others were injured, two of them seriously.

A day earlier, a man was killed in the same village when a drone hit a car. In a separate incident, a married couple were killed when a drone struck their vehicle in the village of Bobrava in Rakityansky district. Their 16-year-old son was injured and suffered blast trauma.

Russian officials have described the aerial incursions as desperate “terrorist attacks” meant to compensate for the setbacks Kiev’s military has been suffering on the battlefield.

Moscow has retaliated with a long-range strike campaign of its own, targeting dual-use infrastructure, including power grid facilities and military sites in Ukraine with missiles and drones. Russia maintains that it never targets purely civilian sites.

Air India will cut about 100 flights across international routes starting from June, the Economic Times reported on Friday.

India’s second-largest carrier, which was privatized and bought by Tata Group in 2022, operates roughly 1,100 daily flights. The steepest reductions are expected on long-haul international routes to Europe, North America, Australia, and Singapore, where fuel consumption is highest.

An unidentified Air India official told the outlet that the airline is currently unable to recover operating costs on a large number of flights. The carrier has already accumulated losses of about $2.1 billion, the report noted, with its finances hit hard since the closure of Pakistan’s airspace following the military standoff in May 2025.

The closure has forced Indian carriers to take longer routes, significantly increasing operating costs.

The report comes amid an industry-wide plea by Indian airline companies for the federal government to intervene, as surging ATF (Aviation Turbine Fuel) prices threaten their commercial viability.

On Friday, India announced hikes for jet fuel prices for international airlines. However, it maintained that there was no change in ATF prices for domestic airlines.

Earlier in April, India raised fuel prices for international flights while only slightly increasing rates for domestic routes. The hike for domestic carriers was capped due to a government intervention, which directed state‑run oil marketing companies to limit the increase to 25%.

The retail prices of petrol, diesel, and domestic LPG (14.2 kg cylinders) have remained unchanged, fully insulating domestic consumers from the recent increase in international fuel prices. No change in prices of domestic LPG (14.2 kg) for 33 crore domestic LPG consumers. No…

— ANI (@ANI) May 1, 2026

Fuel accounts for up to 40% of an airline’s operating costs and seemingly minor price hikes impact profitability, making tickets more expensive.

Jet fuel prices in India have soared past the $2,140 per kiloliter mark amid the ongoing Middle East conflict, well above the previous high of $1,180 per kiloliter recorded in 2022 after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis.

Globally, jet fuel prices averaged $179 per barrel, an over-80% increase from the $99 per barrel level observed in late February 2026.

More than 15,400 flights operated by Indian carriers were canceled from February 28 to April 24. Airlines are now operating just 50-55 flights per day to the Middle East, compared to nearly 200 daily services earlier. 

India is the world’s third-largest domestic aviation market. The sector provides more than 369,000 jobs directly and 7.7 million indirectly, according to official figures.

The US has delivered 6,500 tons of munitions and equipment to Israel within 24 hours, West Jerusalem has said.

The announcement coincided with media reports claiming that the head of US Central Command, Brad Cooper, has briefed US President Donald Trump on a plan for the potential renewal of military action against Iran in a bid to pressure it to consent to a more favorable peace deal.

According to Fox News, what Cooper described as the “final blow” against Tehran could include a “short and powerful wave of strikes” targeting Iran’s “remaining military assets, leadership and infrastructure.”

The ceasefire in the US-Israeli war against Iran was announced on April 8 after more than a month of fighting, but attempts by Washington and Tehran to reach a diplomatic settlement to the crisis have so far been in vain. The control of the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian nuclear program reportedly remain the main stumbling blocks between the sides.

The Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that two cargo ships docked at the country’s ports of Ashdod and Haifa had arrived with thousands of air and ground munitions, military trucks, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs) and other military equipment.

The hardware was loaded onto hundreds of trucks and moved to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bases across the country, the statement read.

According to Defense Ministry data, Israel has already received over 115,600 tons of military equipment, via 403 airlifts and 10 sealifts since the US-Israeli attack on Iran began on February 28.

Semafor reported in mid-March, citing American officials, that Israel had informed the US that it was running “critically low” on air defense interceptors amid Tehran’s retaliatory strikes. The IDF rejected the claim.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday that West Jerusalem supported Washington’s diplomatic efforts, but warned that it “may soon be required to act again” against Iran to make sure it will “not return to being a threat.”

The Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Aerospace Force Brigadier General Seyyed Majid Mousavi, said the same day that Tehran will respond with “with painful, prolonged, and far-reaching strikes” if attacked again.

Pakistan has launched the first of eight Chinese-built Hangor-class submarines, expanding its undersea fleet, as Islamabad deepens defense cooperation with Beijing.

The move follows the induction of Chinese-made J-10C fighter jets, which Pakistan says were used in combat for the first time during its 2025 conflict with India.

President Asif Ali Zardari attended the commissioning ceremony in the southern Chinese port city of Sanya, alongside Pakistani Navy Chief Admiral Naveed Ashraf and other senior officials from both countries. Zardari, who is on an official visit to China, described the induction as a “historic milestone” for the navy.

The Hangor-class is based on China’s Type 039A submarine design and is a diesel-electric platform with air-independent propulsion. It can carry a crew of up to 38 and is equipped with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. Under a deal signed in 2015 and estimated at being worth about $5 billion, four submarines are being built in China and delivered to Pakistan, while the remaining four will be constructed domestically.

Pakistan has long relied on its submarine fleet as a key element of its deterrence against India, with which it has fought three wars since 1947. During last year’s conflict over Kashmir, Islamabad said it used Chinese-made J-10C jets to shoot down Indian aircraft, including French-made Rafale fighters, a claim New Delhi has not confirmed.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China accounted for approximately 81% of Pakistan’s arms imports in 2020–2024. Their joint venture projects include the Hangor as well as the JF-17 fighter jet.

Earlier this week, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh accused Pakistan of supporting terrorism and said that New Delhi is ready to respond to any threat, underscoring ongoing tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

India has not commented on the latest commissioning, but its navy has previously said it is closely monitoring China’s supply of submarines to Pakistan, while stepping up efforts to expand its own undersea fleet, citing Beijing’s expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean. New Delhi is also advancing its nuclear and conventional submarine programs in order to strengthen its maritime capabilities.

The US Department of Justice has released new high-quality CCTV footage showing Cole Tomas Allen, who has been charged with attempting to assassinate US President Donald Trump, allegedly rushing past security and opening fire.

The incident took place on Saturday at the Washington Hilton, which hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attended by the president, First Lady Melania Trump, White House officials, and journalists.

The footage, which has no sound, shows the suspect walking down a hallway before dashing past a metal detector screening area.

At one point, he points a shotgun at a security guard, while another guard fires several shots from a sidearm.

🚨#BREAKING: Newly released footage shows 31-year-old Cole Allen of California walking around The Washington Hilton in washington DC then soon opening fire on a U.S. Secret Service officer during an attempted attack targeting President Donald Trump and others at the White House… pic.twitter.com/ytHWUPlRxT

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) April 30, 2026

The suspect was tackled and restrained before reaching the ballroom where the president was seated. According to the DOJ, a Secret Service officer wearing a bulletproof vest was shot once in the chest.

Allen reportedly left a manifesto in which he, without identifying Trump by name, criticized his policies and described his intent to take action against “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.”

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, whom US President Donald Trump once heralded as “the greatest salesman on Earth,” has promoted his bag-man’s weapons company at the center of new revelations of corruption, on multiple trips abroad, signing deals that have enriched his close associates even as they attempted to hide their de facto ownership of the company.

Reported transcripts of surveillance recordings of Zelensky’s longtime former business partner Timur Mindich – known as “Zelensky’s wallet” in Kiev – reveal him to be the de facto owner of the Fire Point weapons company and in constant conversation with former defense minister and Zelensky insider Rustem Umerov to secure contracts with Kiev’s backers and inflate its value.

Fire Point co-owner Denis Shtilerman has consistently denied the company’s ties to Mindich and dismissed the recordings as a slander campaign aimed at “damaging the reputation of one of Ukraine’s most effective weapons producers.”

Zelensky, though, with his ability to secure billions from foreign governments – the EU has just backed a €90 billion package for Kiev dressed as a “loan” – has promoted the company at home and abroad as a cutting-edge technology player central to the conflict with Russia, likely in full knowledge that he would eventually be lining his own pockets.  

How often has Zelensky promoted Fire Point

Zelensky lauded Fire Point on most of his 130-plus trips since 2022, first as an opportunity for partnerships with European firms and later as a cost-effective solution against Iranian drones in the Middle East.

In recent weeks Zelensky has touted what he grandly announced as a “European joint security system” to smiles and applause at meetings across Germany, France and Norway, promoting Fire Point's largely untested missiles as a "new patriot" – a reference to the in-demand and highly expensive US batteries. 

But his weapons grade con-trick goes back further and deeper than that.

The ‘most successful weapon’

Just days after the Associated Press published the first photo of the Flamingo in August 2025, Zelensky described it as “by far the most successful missile in Ukraine’s arsenal.” 

There are no recorded cases of the weapon having been used in combat by then. He added that it would be mass-produced by February.

Then Defense Minister Denis Shmygal hailed the Flamingo as “a very powerful” weapon capable of striking deep inside Russia.

Crowdfunded in EU, cashed in Ukraine

In October 2025, Zelensky presented Fire Point as one of Ukraine’s top drone makers at the International Defense Industries Forum in Kiev, which was attended by Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

“By the end of the year, no less than 50% of the weapons at the front must be Ukrainian-made, and this task must be accomplished,” Zelensky said.

A month later a Czech crowdfunding campaign donated approximately $760,000 to the company, which was by then courting hundreds of millions in investment from the UAE-based weapons group EDGE. In April the Ukrainian anti-monopoly Committee blocked the deal. 

Transcripts suggest Umerov and Mindich believed that each Fire Point shareholder would cash out some $300 million on the back of the EDGE deal and other European contracts, which would value the company at some $2.7 billion. 

The crowdfunded cash is not mentioned but the transcript lists Mindich saying 50% of the money received from public defense contracts should be taken as cash out. 

Rocket fuel and special terms in Denmark

In 2025, Denmark announced plans to host a Fire Point rocket fuel production plant in Vojens, southern Jutland, near the Skrydstrup Air Base.

Copenhagen rushed through special legislation forbidding any local, social or environmental opposition to the proposed plant, judging it to be in the national interest.

In September 2024 and June 2025, Umerov as Ukrainian Minister of Defense, met with his Danish counterpart to finalize protocols, knowing Fire Point was beneficially owned by Zelensky’s close confidant Mindich and not by the former movie location scout Egor Skalyga, listed as Fire Point's CEO and minority shareholder.

Zelensky personally met with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen multiple times in early 2025 to finalize the “co-production” strategy and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was brought onto the board of the Danish company.

Zelensky closes deals for his "wallet"

During Zelensky’s visit to Madrid in March 2026, Fire Point signed a cooperation agreement with Spanish defense giant Sener, which produces components for the IRIS-T missile used by Ukraine.

“We are deeply grateful to President Zelensky for showing interest in our capabilities and for recognizing the value of Sener’s contribution to Ukraine’s air defense,” Sener President Andres Sendagorta said at the time.

Fire Point signed a similar deal with German defense company Diehl during Zelensky’s trip to Berlin in March. Diehl manufactures several anti-air missile systems, including IRIS-T.

The transcripts reveal that Umerov told Mindich of incoming contracts worth several billion dollars.

Shtilerman, the company face that has denied the businessman known as "Zelensky's wallet" owned Fire Point, suggested that Ukraine could serve as a testing ground for European missile defense systems and proposed a project called Freya, which would integrate Fire Point’s technology into a joint European ballistic missile defense framework.

Oil money from the Gulf

The US-Israeli war with Iran provided Ukraine with an opportunity to market interceptor drones to Gulf states hosting American bases as a cheaper alternative to air defense systems such as the US-made Patriot.

In March Zelensky proposed using Ukraine’s “fire points” to unblock the Strait of Hormuz.

On April 23, Zelensky announced that Ukraine had signed a drone deal with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

“We want to help them defend themselves and will continue to foster partnerships with other countries,” Zelensky said, adding that Ukraine could share its defense technology with the US.

When did Zelensky welcome the first use of Fire Point?

In February, the Ukrainian military began reporting the use of the Flamingo in combat, which Zelensky later highlighted at international events.

Speaking at a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in Kiev, he claimed the missile had struck a weapons factory in Russia’s Udmurtia region.

“I believe this is a real achievement for your industry,” Zelensky said, adding that the strike demonstrated “the high quality and accuracy” of the weapon.

Zelensky also discussed the missile at the Munich Security Conference the same month, where he met with European officials, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines, he acknowledged that Russia had destroyed “a large production line” but said Flamingo production would continue.

What is the bottom line?

Zelensky and his backers have played a convenient role for Western war hawks and hoodwinked them at the same time. The West’s pro-war cabal have been willing to accept massive graft as an inevitable consequence of pouring billions into the most corrupt country in Europe to fuel a proxy war that will cost Ukraine lost generations.

Sitting on top of the rubble, will be Zelensky and his cabal, with begging bowls in one hand, a movie script and a sales pitch in the other.

The international advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused Israel of kidnapping journalists traveling on board the Gaza-bound activist flotilla, which was intercepted by the Israeli Navy on Thursday.

Israeli forces seized 22 of the 58 boats of the pro-Palestinian Second Sumud Flotilla near the Greek island of Crete, detaining 175 people, according to West Jerusalem. The organizers, meanwhile, said that 211 activists were “kidnapped.” 

The boats sailed from the Spanish port of Barcelona on April 12 with the intention of breaching the Israeli naval blockade of the Palestinian enclave. 

“RSF condemns the Israeli army’s abduction of three journalists in international waters: Hafedh Mribah (French) & Mahmut Yavuz (Turkish) from Al Jazeera, and Alex Colston (American), a contributor to the outlet Zeteo,” the group wrote on X on Thursday. “The Israeli army is responsible for their safety,” the RSF added.

Israel announced it had taken control of 21 out of 58 vessels from the Gaza-bound flotilla, in a piracy operation carried out in international waters about 1,000 km off the coast of occupied Palestine. pic.twitter.com/Gpa6NOxn3Q

— Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) April 30, 2026

The passengers included Margaret Connolly, a physician and a sister of Irish President Catherine Connolly, who told The Journal over the phone on Thursday that the interception of the boats was “absolutely illegal.” 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a frequent critic of Israel, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of violating international maritime law and called on the EU to suspend a trade agreement with the country. 

Netanyahu thanked the Navy for intercepting a flotilla of “Hamas supporters.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar dismissed the flotilla as a “PR stunt,” adding that all activists “who were taken off the vessels were taken off unharmed” and would be set ashore in Greece. 

Israel has intercepted several such flotillas in the past, including dozens of boats in June 2025, whose passengers included climate activist Greta Thunberg and French politician Rima Hassan. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump have held another phone call. It was their 11th telephone conversation since February 2025.

Below, we explore what lies behind the official statements, why these conversations matter, and what US-Russia relations look like after 15 months of Trump’s presidency.

The spirit of Anchorage

Last summer, a new term entered the political lexicon of Kremlin spokespersons: “the spirit of Anchorage.” Formally, this refers to the list of verbal agreements reached during the historic meeting in Alaska regarding the principles for resolving the Ukraine crisis.

During that meeting, Trump dropped his demand for an immediate ceasefire, while Putin agreed to a ceasefire after the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donetsk and Lugansk regions. This set a trap for Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and allowed Putin to continue the military operation.

Moscow, however, sees the issue from a broader perspective. Following the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022, the attention of the whole world turned to Ukraine. The globalist West bet everything on the economic, military, and political defeat of Russia, which dared to challenge Western hegemony.

Trump has little regard for the unified West or the globalists. Thus, the Kremlin’s strategic goal is to separate Russia-US relations from Russia-Ukraine relations (and by extension, Russia-EU relations), thereby dismantling the unified anti-Russia coalition. 

It would be best to achieve this while Trump is still in office. The future of American politics is unpredictable, but the chance of rallying a new unified anti-Russia front is minimal. Therefore, it’s essential to break this coalition now. 

Separating the good from the bad

This scenario would effectively pull the US out of the conflict. Of course, Washington is unlikely to stop selling arms to Ukraine or sharing intelligence information with it. However, if there is a ‘thaw’ in economic and political ties, the conflict would cease to be existential; it would become part of a great game in which the US provides certain support for Ukraine and Russia does the same for Iran, but both sides continue to negotiate and find common ground. Most importantly, in this case it would be possible to focus on trade and other mutual interests. 

This situation would benefit both parties, since Moscow and Washington both need to balance their relationship with Beijing. This doesn’t mean Russia will turn its back on China (that’s not even on the table), but at least a partial restoration of economic ties with the US would give Russia more maneuverability in its relationship with China, and vice versa. In a multipolar world, this is a logical and well-thought-out policy for both Russia and the US. 

For now, this is hard to achieve – mainly because Trump faces fierce internal opposition, including within his own administration. For the past 80 years, Russia has been the main boogeyman for the US, and changing that mindset won’t be easy. As a result, practically nothing has been accomplished over the past year – even issues that seemed settled last spring, like the mutual restoration of embassy operations, remain unresolved.

A thousand-mile journey

Things have shifted somewhat with the start of the war in Iran. Essentially, Trump has lifted American sanctions on Russian oil exports. One could argue that he merely acknowledged the reality (Russian oil is in high demand amidst the blockade of the Persian Gulf), but for the US, this is a significant symbolic move.

Why is it an important step? Because Trump continues to dismantle the taboos imposed by Biden. Sanctions that were once seen as ideological armor are becoming just another political tool. And that’s a lot easier to deal with. 

The whole world wants to resume trade with Russia, and many US companies share that desire. Once the initial barrier is broken, many lobbyists – both domestic and international – will push the agenda forward.

Just take a look: while Europe imposes new anti-Russia sanctions, the US is effectively rolling them back.

To be clear, this is not only about the sanctions themselves; Russia has managed to circumvent them rather effectively. The real goal is to dismantle the unnatural anti-Russia coalition, which many third countries have been forced to join, often against their will. Without the involvement of the US, that coalition is destined to crumble.

***

Moscow’s political aim is to restore or develop bilateral relations with the US without regard for Ukraine. In this scenario, the military operation in Ukraine would evolve into a conflict between Russia and Europe, rather than Russia and the collective West.

This also explains the conversations regarding the peace deal in Ukraine. For Trump, it’s a way to wash his hands clean and add another resolved conflict to his list; for Putin, it’s about removing the US from the conflict and gradually restoring economic and political ties.

Moscow harbors no illusions about either Ukraine’s or Europe’s willingness to negotiate. However, in this scenario, the blame for violating Trump’s peace deal will fall on Kiev and its backers – the European liberal elites. 

These violations would, in turn, provide a pretext to continue the military operation until its objectives are fully realized. Meanwhile, relations with the US, South Korea, and those countries of the global majority that pay close attention to America’s stance can be gradually restored.

Is such a scenario actually possible? To be honest, the chances are slim. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try.

That’s why Putin and Trump are talking and will continue to do so.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz should focus on resolving the Ukraine conflict and deal with problems at home instead of questioning Washington’s strategy in the war against Iran, US President Donald Trump has said.

Trump was responding to the chancellor's comment on Monday that the US was being “humiliated” by Iran and that the Trump administration lacked a clear strategy in the conflict.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump wrote that the “Chancellor of Germany should spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine (Where he has been totally ineffective!), and fixing his broken Country, especially Immigration and Energy, and less time on interfering with those that are getting rid of the Iran Nuclear threat.”

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Berlin has been the second-largest supplier of weapons to Kiev, having allocated nearly €20 billion ($23 billion) in military aid between January 2022 and October 2025, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Russia has consistently condemned Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, saying they only unnecessarily prolong the hostilities without changing the outcome.

Earlier this week, Trump claimed that Merz “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” asserting that the German chancellor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Last month, Merz said that the Iran war “must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and with a clear plan and strategy.” He also rejected German participation in the conflict, noting that “this war is not a NATO matter.”

Trump criticized European NATO member states for refusing to back the US and Israel in the conflict after they rejected his call to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Politico claimed last week that the White House had compiled a NATO “naughty and nice” list, based on each country’s contribution, or lack thereof, to the war against Iran.

US President Donald Trump has said his administration will declassify and release government files on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the near future, describing some of the material as “very interesting.”

The Pentagon has recently said it is reviewing and consolidating related records before any public release, citing security concerns. Trump signed an executive order in February instructing the Department of War to disclose “any and all information” related to UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

“I think we’re going to be releasing as much as we can in the near future… some of it is going to be very interesting to people,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing late Wednesday, adding that public interest in the topic had built up “for a long time.”

“I interviewed some pilots – very solid people. And they said they saw things that you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

Trump’s order on UFO files followed a widely shared podcast appearance by former President Barack Obama, who said he believed aliens were real but insisted the US government was not hiding any proof. Obama referred to Area 51, a classified US Air Force site in Nevada long at the center of conspiracy theories alleging the government conducts secret research there and stores extraterrestrial materials and technology.

REPORTER: “Do you have an update on the UFO files?”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I think we're going to be releasing as much as we can in the near future…I've interviewed people my first term primarily, but I interviewed some pilots, very solid people, and they said they saw things that… pic.twitter.com/CNKvIhgvH7

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 29, 2026

Trump later claimed Obama had disclosed classified information and said the planned document release was intended to meet “tremendous interest” from the American public. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said he will learn “alongside” the public whether his department holds records proving the existence of alien life.

The American authorities have been collecting reports of UFO and UAP sightings for decades, with the Pentagon now running an All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) for the purpose. In March 2024, the Pentagon said it had no proof that any unidentified aerial phenomena were alien technology, adding that many cases involved weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, or other routine activity.

In a report released in late 2024, the department stated it had received 757 UAP reports between May 2023 and June 2024, of which 21 “merit further analysis” because of “anomalous characteristics and/or behaviors.”

Trump later claimed Obama had disclosed classified information and said the planned document release was intended to meet “tremendous interest” from the American public. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said he will learn “alongside” the public whether his department holds records proving the existence of alien life.

The American authorities have been collecting reports of UFO and UAP sightings for decades, with the Pentagon now running an All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) for the purpose. In March 2024, the Pentagon said it had no proof that any unidentified aerial phenomena were alien technology, adding that many cases involved weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, or other routine activity.

In a report released in late 2024, the department stated it had received 757 UAP reports between May 2023 and June 2024, of which 21 “merit further analysis” because of “anomalous characteristics and/or behaviors.”

The US Central Command has requested that long-delayed Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles be deployed to the Middle East, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.  

The new munition, also known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), has been in development since 2018, with the Pentagon pouring over $12 billion into the program meant to catch up with Russia and China, which have already fielded hypersonic weaponry. The program has been lagging well behind schedule, and the system has not been declared fully operational yet.

The request for the LRHW deployment is based on intelligence suggesting that Iran moved its ballistic missile launchers out of range of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg. No decision has been made on the request yet, according to the source.

The PrSM, a short-to-medium-range ballistic missile slated to replace the aging Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), was deployed against Iran without undergoing proper testing procedures as well. The ballistic missiles were extensively used during the conflict, with a US Army unit equipped with the new munitions fully exhausting its entire PrSM inventory, an official admitted earlier this month.  

While the US military still has some PrSM missiles in stock, the supply could prove to be insufficient if the conflict with Iran reignites. The Pentagon had ordered 130 before the 2024 fiscal year and a further 250 in 2025, but it remains unclear how many munitions were delivered.

The missile became a source of controversy during the US-Israeli attack on Iran, with the PrSM believed to be involved in at least one mass-casualty incident. According to the New York Times, a PrSM missile was likely used in the February 28 strike on a school and sports hall in the southern Iranian city of Lamerd, which killed at least 21 people. 

The Pentagon denied any involvement, insisting that it had not targeted any sites in Lamerd on that day, claiming the munition visible in the footage of the attack was an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile. The NYT, however, doubled down on its initial assessment earlier this month, citing experts who said the munition looked like a PrSM and lacked any features of the Iranian-made projectile.

Videos are circulating online showing North Korean workers arriving in Russia to work on construction sites. The reaction, in some quarters, has been surprisingly positive. People remark on their discipline, their physical fitness, even the way they move in formation. It has prompted a broader question: should Russia actively invite more workers from the DPRK?

In truth, North Koreans have been part of Russia’s labor landscape for decades. I remember seeing them as far back as the late 1990s in Tyumen. In the 2000s, they were a common sight in industrial zones, moving in groups, often under supervision, quiet and self-contained. For reasons I never fully understood, they collected empty Coca-Cola and Fanta cans. You could spot them instantly.

Later, in St. Petersburg, I noticed groups of North Korean women working near a sewing workshop. They too, travelled together, and they stood out, strikingly thin and reserved. At the time, I even called the workshop, concerned about their conditions. It seemed harsh, perhaps even exploitative. But they continued to come and go freely. Whatever the system, it was structured, not chaotic.

So this is not a new phenomenon. What has changed is the rationale. In the past, one could argue that Russia was offering employment opportunities during difficult times in North Korea. Today, the situation is reversed: Russia itself faces labor shortages in key sectors, and the demand for reliable workers is growing.

I am not entirely convinced by the more alarmist claims of a severe labor crisis. Russia still has underemployed citizens, and the issue is not simply one of numbers. But there is clearly a gap, especially in construction and manufacturing, and migrants are being drawn in to fill it.

The question then, is not whether migrant labor is needed, but what kind.

This is where North Korean workers stand apart. Above all, they’re disciplined. They come through organized, state-managed channels, with a clear purpose: to work and to represent their country. For them, a trip abroad goes beyond mere employment; it’s seen as a responsibility. They arrive with a sense of duty, to their state and their own reputation.

That mindset matters because it contrasts with the more fragmented, individualized migration flows we often see elsewhere. North Korean workers are doing more than drifting in search of opportunity; they’re deployed, in a sense, as part of a broader national strategy. They’re expected to perform, and they do.

Another factor is social structure. These workers tend to be older, often already married, having completed military service. They’re not aimless young men arriving in a foreign country with no ties or responsibilities. They’re there to work, and they know it.

This doesn’t mean life in North Korea is easy, far from it. The system that produces such discipline is strict, even harsh. But from the perspective of a host country, there’s a certain predictability in dealing with workers who operate within clear boundaries. Their behavior is monitored and their objectives defined. 

There’s also cultural factors. North Koreans are universally literate and generally secular. They’re also accustomed to structured environments and they adapt to industrial work with relative ease. In many cases, they arrive with relevant training or education, particularly in construction and engineering fields. Employers consistently note their diligence and curiosity.

A new wave of North Korean workers began arriving around 2025, and early feedback has been positive. They’re described as hard-working and capable of learning quickly. In sectors where reliability is crucial, this is no small advantage.

Of course, any discussion of migrant labor raises broader questions and social cohesion and long-term demographic effects can’t be ignored. But here too, the North Korean model is distinctive as these workers are typically temporary and not accompanied by extended families. Their presence is functional rather than transformative.

There’s is also a historical familiarity because Koreans have lived and worked in Russia for generations, particularly since Soviet times. There’s a degree of cultural understanding, a shared memory of order and collective structures. This makes interaction smoother than with groups that arrive from entirely different social contexts.

For North Korea, the arrangement is equally logical. The country has a population of around 26 million, concentrated in a relatively small territory. Urbanization is increasing and automation is advancing. Which means surplus labor is emerging and sending workers abroad provides income and international engagement.

For Russia, the benefits are clear: a steady supply of disciplined, skilled workers who can fill gaps in the labor market without the unpredictability that sometimes accompanies other migration flows.

None of this suggests a simple or universal solution. Migration policy is always complex, and no single model fits every situation. But as Russia looks for ways to sustain its economy and maintain stability in key sectors, the North Korean option deserves serious consideration.

If we need migrant labor, and in some sectors we clearly do, then it makes sense to prioritize systems that deliver reliability and mutual benefit.

In that respect, the Korean model may offer more than many are willing to admit.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team

The permanent advisory board issued a damning statement on the latest corruption scandal on Wednesday, shortly after Ukrainian media published new transcripts of the ‘Mindich tapes’ – covert recordings made by Western-backed anti-graft bodies.  

The newly published materials, among other things, suggested that Mindich was effectively running the Ukrainian weapons manufacturing company Fire Point. The transcripts are reportedly of a conversation between the businessman and then Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who currently heads Ukraine’s National Security Council.  

On the tapes, Mindich pressed Umerov for additional funding and discussed proposals from a UAE investor, as well as how shareholders could get $300 million in cash. Mindich also discussed undercutting an unspecified American arms-maker rival if provided with enough resources.

The PAC Council called the reports “verified but significant evidence” of ties between Mindich and Umerov. Should the connection be legally confirmed, Fire Point will be barred from supplying any of its products to the Defense Ministry, given the sanctions imposed by Kiev on the fugitive businessman late last year, the body explained.  

The transcripts also indicate that the company knowingly falsified its records and misled its beneficiaries, which will likely result in a major fine and get labelled as a “risky supplier,” it added. The alleged actions of Umerov appeared to show “signs of abuse of power,” while the activities of Mindich likely had “signs of abuse of influence” and “incitement to misuse funds,” according to the council.  

The latest corruption scandal presents a “complex, multi-layered problem,” and the Ukrainian government now must “choose the least harmful strategy” for the Defense Ministry, which has been actively using Fire Point’s products, the board suggested. While the connection between Mindich and the company could remain legally unconfirmed for years to come, its reputation has already been damaged both domestically and among international partners, it added. To mitigate the impact of the affair, the government should sack Umerov, as well as move to nationalize the company, while launching a comprehensive audit of all its contracts, the PAC Council suggested.

Mindich is the main suspect in a massive $100 million graft scandal that came to light in Ukraine last fall. The Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) alleged he had organized a crime ring to siphon money from the state nuclear operator Energoatom. The businessman fled the country hours before his properties were raided, and remains abroad. Ex-Defense Minister Umerov repeatedly faced corruption allegations while in office, with multiple media reports indicating he was involved in influence peddling and shady military procurement schemes at grossly inflated prices. Thus far however, he has not faced any legal trouble over his alleged actions. 

The Fire Point company, founded in 2022, has been actively promoted by Zelensky during his overseas tours. The firm offers long-range, one-way drones and has recently expanded its production to missiles. The only fielded munition of the latter type, the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, has reportedly demonstrated extremely poor accuracy and high failure rates, and some experts have suggested its characteristics were grossly inflated by the manufacturer. Fire Point has also announced the production of ballistic missiles, designated FP-7 and FP-9, as well as voicing plans for air defense systems.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has come under fire again in the European Parliament, as lawmakers are accusing her of double standards in foreign policy and failing to shield EU citizens from soaring energy costs.

MEPs from multiple factions voiced their frustration during Wednesday’s debate on EU strategy for the Middle East and energy security, pointing to what they described as a lack of clear direction and coherence in the bloc’s response.

Belgian lawmaker Kathleen Van Brempt questioned the bloc’s credibility, which she said was being undermined by Brussels’ “double standards in our foreign policy” – imposing sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine conflict while staying “silent” over Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. 

Italian MEP Roberto Vannacci likened the EU’s inactive policy on the Middle East to “cockroaches that freeze and play dead when the predator arrives,” arguing that if the EC had “applied lockdown to itself” instead of to member states, Europeans would have been spared “a lot of damage and a lot of pain.”

Portuguese MEP Joao Oliveira accused von der Leyen of “staying quiet because of pressure” from US President Donald Trump. “Von der Leyen doesn’t say a word to condemn the aggression against Iran and Israel’s actions, the invasion of Lebanon, the killing of Lebanese people and more than 1.2 million displaced in Lebanon,” he said.

Oliveira also accused Brussels of backing a policy “under the leadership and guidance of multinationals,” saying “We must put an end to the neoliberal control of the energy sector,” and argued that “not one measure has been taken to control prices and to support farmers.”

Austrian Green MEP Thomas Waitz said the EU remained trapped in recurring dependency cycles, warning that shifting reliance between external suppliers amounted to “a dead-end street” rather than a long-term solution. “It’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for people, it’s bad for energy prices,” he argued.

Polish MEP Grzegorz Braun, who has repeatedly said that Brussels’ policies are dragging the bloc into a war, used highly charged language, dubbing von der Leyen “Madame Reichsführerin,” a reference to Nazi-era ranks. He argued that the energy crisis was not temporary but the result of “deeply wrong decisions.”

US President Donald Trump has called on his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

Indicted in 2019, Netanyahu has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing. The trial, which began in 2020, has seen numerous delays and is expected to drag on for several more years.

Trump reportedly told Axios on Tuesday that Netanyahu, a long-time ally who co-launched the unprovoked war on Iran with him, has complained that he will have to appear in court instead of concentrating on the conflict that is strangling the global economy. The US president reportedly expressed incredulity, saying “In the middle of a war? Give me a break!”

According to the publication, Trump went on to claim that he likes Israeli President Herzog and that he “will be a national hero if he gives Bibi a pardon.” The US president recently derided Herzog as “weak and pathetic” for not pardoning Netanyahu.

“Bibi is a wartime prime minister. He can’t have this hanging over his head,” Trump reportedly argued in his latest interview with Axios. He also suggested that Netanyahu’s trial makes Israel “look bad.”

Earlier this week, Herzog invited Netanyahu’s lawyers, the attorney general, and the state prosecutor to negotiate a potential settlement, clarifying that he will not consider a plea until that avenue was exhausted.

Commenting on the prospect of a deal that will likely require an admission of guilt, Trump said that Netanyahu “can’t take” a settlement and needs a full pardon, as quoted by Axios.

Late last year, the outlet claimed that the Israeli prime minister had asked the US president for more help in his push for a pardon.

A month earlier, Trump sent an official letter to the Israeli president, insisting that “the ‘case’ against Bibi… is a political, unjustified prosecution.”

“I hereby call on you to fully pardon Benjamin Netanyahu,” the US president wrote at the time.

In June 2025, Trump similarly characterized the charges against his Middle Eastern ally as a “WITCH HUNT.”

A senior female JPMorgan Chase executive is being sued for allegedly turning a married male banker into her “office sex slave” over the course of several months, threatening his career to force compliance, The Sun has reported.

According to legal filings cited by the outlet, Lorna Hajdini, 37, drugged, sexually assaulted and coerced a junior colleague into “non-consensual and humiliating sex acts.”

The accuser, who has opted to go by the name John Doe, claims the abuse began shortly after Hajdini joined his team in April 2024 and escalated rapidly from unwanted touching to explicit coercion.

”If you don’t f**k me soon, I’m going to ruin you… I f**king own you,” Hajdini reportedly threatened.

The executive also reportedly admitted to drugging the accuser with a “date rape drug” and gave him substances affecting sexual performance, while leveraging her senior position to control his bonuses, promotions and future at the bank.

JPMorgan Chase has rejected the claims, saying an investigation found no evidence to support the allegations, The Sun wrote.

Court records on the New York State Courts Electronic Filing system (NYSCEF) show that a summons and complaint were submitted on Monday in New York County Supreme Court, listing “John Doe” as the plaintiff and JPMorgan Chase and Lorna Hajdini as defendants. However, the publicly available entry does not include details on the substance of the allegations.

The claims come amid broader legal and reputational challenges facing JPMorgan, including the fallout from its long-running ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawsuits alleged the bank “turned a blind eye” to red flags such as large cash withdrawals and kept Epstein as a client for years after his 2008 conviction, as well as providing the “financial infrastructure” for his sex trafficking operation. JPMorgan paid $290 million and $75 million in 2023 to settle the claims without admitting wrongdoing.

In January, US President Donald Trump filed a $5 billion lawsuit, accusing JPMorgan of “debanking” him and his businesses for political reasons, claims the financial institution has rejected and is seeking to dismiss in court.

More than half of Ukraine’s drone-interceptor crews haven’t been able to take down a single Russian UAV over an entire year, a senior Ukrainian air force commander has revealed. The disclosure comes amid Kiev’s push to market its anti-drone expertise to Gulf nations and the US in its war against Iran.

In an interview with Ukrainskaya Pravda published on Wednesday, Colonel Pavel Elizarov, deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force, stated that of the 300 interceptor crews under his command, 66 shot down more than 10 Russian Geran drones while 170 failed to hit a single one. In one region, 24 out of 28 crews recorded zero eliminations over the same period, he said.

Elizarov, a former television producer, also described systemic mismanagement in Ukraine’s low-altitude air defenses that has persisted for years. Radar stations were regularly placed wherever operators felt like standing, he stated, while regional commands treated drones that passed through their territory without striking as a success.

The colonel also admitted that Ukraine’s drone logistics still follow an outdated delivery model, creating chronic mismatches where some units possess drones but no control stations while others have stations and warehouses full of unused aircraft.

“Unfortunately, we have lost our drone advantage. With what we had in 2022-2023, we could have done key things,” Elizarov told the outlet.

The admissions come as Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has been offering to provide the US and Gulf states with Ukraine’s supposed expertise in defending against Iranian drones. He is also engulfed in an expanding graft expose involving his closest associates and the Firepoint company. Once a casting agency it now boasts a billion dollar drone-production capacity Zelensky is also promoting internationally. 

Last month, he stated that some 200 Ukrainian specialists had been deployed across five countries, with Kiev later claiming its forces had shot down Iranian Shaheds in several Gulf states.

Kiev has reportedly signed defense agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, which are estimated to be worth billions of dollars, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Tehran claimed last month to have destroyed a depot of Ukrainian anti-drone systems in Dubai. Farhad Ibragimov, a Middle East expert at Russia’s Financial University, told RT the strikes were likely meant as a warning that Ukrainian assets would become “legitimate targets” if Kiev continued its involvement in the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Western media has hailed Ukraine for being highly innovative in fighting Russia, both in frontline tactics and the development of technologies, primarily drone warfare. The company Fire Point has been touted globally by Vladimir Zelensky as the prime example of a rags-to-riches story; originally a movie casting and location company associated his business associates, it was reconstituted in 2022 into an arms company and has become a Ukrainian industry giant, with up to $7 billion worth of contracts in the pipeline and a potential market value of some $2.7 billion, according to a slew of gushing articles in the Western press.

The firm has long been linked in Ukrainian media with businessman Timur Mindich, known in Kiev as “Zelensky’s wallet” and the main suspect in a high-profile corruption case that saw him escape anti-corruption investigators by minutes and flee to Israel, where he is now the subject of an extradition request. On Tuesday, the outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda published what it reports to be transcripts of surveillance records that law enforcement made while investigating Mindich in 2025.

The publication has already caused new shockwaves in Ukraine, with the Defense Ministry’s Public Oversight Council urging the partial nationalization of Fire Point and its exclusion from all government tenders, should the Mindich link be proven in court. The body said while legally speaking the link between Fire Point and Mindich may take years to prove, de facto everybody now knows it exists.

Friends in high places

Assuming the transcript is authentic, Mindich’s conversation with then Defense Minister Rustem Umerov (resigned in July over corruption allegations, now secretary of the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council) confirms beyond any doubt that he has been running Fire Point, contrary to his and the firm’s public claims. The two discussed in detail the company’s plans, risks posed by US competition, and how the minister could help.

Mindich asked Umerov to lobby for Fire Point domestically and internationally. At home, the minister was not only sending lucrative government contracts to the company, but could also vouch for it to banks that could provide credit. Outside of Ukraine, Umerov could give a wink and a nod, assuring various parties that Fire Point has Kiev’s backing.

“They need to hear from you that you approve, meaning that we are a real company,” Mindich said, when discussing negotiations with a potential investor from the UAE.

Funding trouble

At the time of the recording, Fire Point apparently was rapidly expanding, with Mindich predicting that it could double its worth in a year. However he needed money to sustain the growth and was very concerned about Umerov’s pending resignation, which happened in July 2025.

“You leave now, and we are f***ed on everything,” Mindich said. “I am not alone here, meaning Fire Point. The competition can sink it.”

Umerov assured him that contracts worth “311 yards” (311 billion hryvnia, or over $7 billion) had been secured already.

Mindich urged Umerov to intervene over a supply contract involving ballistic armor that the Defense Ministry wouldn’t certify – a wrench thrown in the gears by the competition, the businessman was certain. He said he urgently needed the money to fund Fire Point. The contract was for 10,000 pieces valued at $5.2 million, according to media reports.

“Just let them sign off on it. It’s just a phone call for you,” Mindich prodded Umerov. “Tell them, I don’t want to hear from Timur about those vests anymore.”

Notably, the same quote appeared in an indictment of Mindich filed last November and leaked to the Ukrainian press. While suspicions that Umerov was compromised have been mounting for months, he remains the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.

Undercutting the Americans

Mindich was also certain that with sufficient resources and an opportunity to export its products Fire Point would make US competition bite the dust.

“We are a problem for them, for the Americans,” he said. “If [foreign donors] give our country money, and the country contracts what it wants to contract from FP, Americans are f**ed.”

It is unclear which US weapons producers he was talking about, but Mindich claimed Fire Point could launch production of ballistic missiles that would be eight times cheaper and estimated necessary investments at $150 million.

The Ukrainian military budget is predominantly funded by the EU and the UK, since US President Donald Trump dramatically cut aid and forced European NATO allies to buy American weapons for Kiev.

Cashing out with the Arabs

Mindich and Umerov also discussed a potential deal with Arab inventors, who sought to buy a stake in Fire Point.

The preliminary terms were for $600 million for 33% of its shares, of which Umerov said half could be invested into the company and half paid to shareholders – presumably himself and whatever other undeclared business partners he had. Mindich wondered if taking the “parachute” was a good idea, considering Fire Point’s uncertain future.

In early April, Reuters reported that a proposed Fire Point deal with UAE-based EDGE Group, which sought to purchase a ‌30% ⁠stake for $760 million was turned down by Ukraine's anti-monopoly committee.

Capitalism with Ukrainian characteristics

Ukrainian arms procurement has long been rife with corruption, which simply evolved after the conflict with Russia escalated in 2022.

“Reznikov’s golden eggs” was the 2023 scandal with overpriced rations bought for the army under then Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov – who resigned and was never charged with any crime. Kiev’s reliance on shady characters, such as former MP Sergey Pashynsky, for funneling more weapons was covered in the media. 

The Ukrainian arms business has unique characteristics. Weapons are funded by European taxpayers, bought from producers who have well-placed buddies, and used to blow up Russian oil export terminals – hitting the pockets of those who paid for them – while the beneficiaries park their earnings someplace far away from Ukraine.

Weapons, including three R4 rifles and a grenade launcher, have been stolen during a suspected burglary at the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF) Tek Base in Lyttelton, Pretoria, the military confirmed on Wednesday.

In an official statement released on Thursday, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) said the suspected burglary was discovered on April 27 at around 12pm.

”A member of the South African National Defence Force discovered a break-in at a storeroom upon returning from an official funeral in Mafikeng, North West,” the SANDF said.

According to the statement, the storeroom’s burglar door had been forcefully opened. Preliminary findings indicate that three R4 rifles and a grenade launcher were stolen. Authorities suspect that access to the premises was gained by cutting a hole in the perimeter fence.

A case of business burglary has been opened, and the SANDF is currently verifying whether any additional equipment or items are missing.

”The investigation is currently under way and progress regarding the case will be communicated in due course,” the SANDF concluded.

First published by IOL

The II Open Dialogue, 'The Future of the World. A New Platform for Global Growth,' has concluded at the National Centre RUSSIA in Moscow. Maxim Oreshkin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, summed up the event, saying its key difference from last year was a stronger focus on turning ideas into practice.

”The difference between the second Open Dialogue and the first is that we are paying more attention to the implementation stage of the proposed ideas. A mentorship format has been introduced: Russian businesses and international companies are beginning to work with the essayists and involve them in their projects. They are genuinely helping to implement the essayists’ ideas from the standpoint of business, society, and humanity as a whole. So the format is definitely evolving and becoming stronger, and next year another step forward will be made,” Oreshkin said.

He also stressed the forum’s human-centered approach.

”A person must always remain at the center – their development, the realization of their potential, and the preservation and extension of active life under the demographic changes we are witnessing today. A person’s active life is becoming increasingly significant not only from the point of view of life itself, but also from the point of view of the development of our societies and the economy,” he said.

The winner of the Investment in People track was Lubinda Haabazoka, who proposed creating a common education system within BRICS.

”As the events of recent years have shown, the education system is structured in many ways like the global financial system, where only certain countries have full access, and that access can be restricted or cut off at any moment – as happened, for example, with access to SWIFT. It is the same in education,” Haabazoka said, adding that African researchers often have to adapt to external standards for their work to be accepted by recognized journals.

The forum’s conclusions will be considered at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Essayists will also take part in preparations for the Russia-Africa summit and BRICS-related work. A key feature of the dialogue was continuity, with essayists from previous years serving as experts.

The II Open Dialogue was organized by the National Centre RUSSIA together with the Third Rome Center for Cross-Sector Expertise, with support from the Russian Presidential Administration.

Although the United Arab Emirates has tried to present its upcoming exit from OPEC and the wider OPEC+ framework as part of its sovereign energy strategy and long-term economic planning, its timing and regional context suggest that this is a political act.

With its exit, the UAE is challenging the authority of Riyadh, strengthening its own strategic autonomy, offering Washington a useful instrument for influencing energy prices, and moving closer to a regional make-up where the US and Israel remain central actors in the pressure campaign against Iran. It’s a signal that Abu Dhabi no longer wishes to behave as a secondary participant in a Saudi-centered order that has shaped the Gulf oil system for decades.

Economic ambitions

The economic explanation is the most visible one, since the UAE has spent years building production capacity that the OPEC+ framework did not allow it to use fully. Abu Dhabi’s production capacity is estimated at around 4.85 million barrels per day (bpd), while the country has been moving toward a target of 5 million bpd by 2027, although before the latest regional shock it was producing around 3.4 million bpd and remained close to its effective OPEC+ ceiling. This created a growing contradiction, because Abu Dhabi had already built the industrial, financial, and logistical architecture for a larger role in the oil market, while the collective rules of the cartel forced it to operate as though its ambitions and capabilities were still limited.

The first and most cautious scenario is a gradual release of restrained supply, in which the UAE, once export routes are stabilized and infrastructure disrupted by the Iran war is restored, could add several hundred thousand bpd to the market without immediately provoking a full-scale price war. Such a path would allow Abu Dhabi to demonstrate that leaving OPEC+ produces real commercial benefits, while still avoiding a direct collision with Saudi Arabia, softening prices without collapsing them, and testing the limits of its new freedom without burning all bridges with Riyadh and other producers.

The more ambitious scenario would emerge if regional conditions calm and Asian demand remains strong, allowing the UAE to move toward 4.2 million or even 4.5 million bpd within 12 to 18 months, while the most aggressive scenario would involve a push close to 5 million bpd and the addition of roughly 1.3 million to 1.5 million bpd compared with its previous constrained position. In a tight market, such volumes could stabilize prices and provide relief to consumers, but in a softer market they could intensify downward pressure, undermine OPEC+ discipline and force Saudi Arabia to decide whether it is prepared to tolerate the political symbolism of Emirati barrels entering the market outside Saudi-led restraint. The real danger for OPEC+ is therefore not only a lower oil price, but the loss of confidence that collective discipline remains stronger than national ambition.

The UAE vs. the KSA: A deep-seated rivalry

Yet the economic argument, however important it may be, explains only the surface of the decision, while the deeper meaning is political. Abu Dhabi is not merely seeking a larger export quota, nor is it simply trying to correct a technical imbalance between capacity and production limits, but is using oil to redraw its position inside the Gulf hierarchy. For decades, Saudi Arabia has treated OPEC as an extension of its regional leadership, while Riyadh’s ability to convene producers, manage scarcity, and influence prices has served as one of the foundations of its claim to leadership in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

The UAE’s exit challenges this architecture, implying that Abu Dhabi no longer accepts a system in which Saudi Arabia sets the rhythm and others are expected to adjust their ambitions accordingly. This makes the whole issue a dispute over who has the right to define the economic and political order of the Gulf.

Competition between the UAE and Saudi Arabia has been building for years and has long gone beyond oil. The two states may remain partners when they face external threats, and they may continue to cooperate in selected areas where their interests overlap, but they are increasingly rivals when the question becomes who will shape the future of the Gulf, who will attract global capital, who will dominate logistics, and who will become the main regional gateway between East and West.

Saudi Arabia is trying to transform itself into a financial, logistical, entertainment, and investment hub under its Vision 2030 initiative, while the UAE already occupies many of these spaces through Dubai’s commercial networks, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-wealth power, Emirati airlines, ports, free-trade zones, and investment platforms. Because both states are attempting to sell themselves as the indispensable center of the post-oil Gulf economy, their rivalry is structural.

The role of oil

Saudi Arabia needs high oil prices to fund its vast transformation agenda, while the UAE can often tolerate lower prices more comfortably because its economy is more diversified and its fiscal break-even level has historically been lower. This gives Abu Dhabi more room to favor volume over price, while Riyadh is more inclined to defend a price floor that protects the financing of its domestic transformation.

This difference does not automatically make conflict inevitable, but it makes compromise more difficult, since the two countries are no longer simply discussing quotas within a shared framework. They are defending different models of Gulf power, different visions of economic transformation, and different ways of turning oil wealth into political influence.

This confrontation could become open if Saudi Arabia deems that the UAE is using oil to weaken Saudi leadership. In that case, Riyadh may respond by increasing output, defending market share, applying diplomatic pressure, or trying to isolate the Abu Dhabi inside the Arab system.

The risk goes beyond just a price war – Saudi Arabia still has weight in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League, Islamic diplomacy, and the wider oil system. If the UAE’s move is seen as serving American and Israeli strategy at a moment of confrontation with Iran, Riyadh may find ways to portray Abu Dhabi as a state that is destabilizing the Arab consensus for the sake of its own narrow advantage.

A boon for Trump

The UAE’s exit gives the US, and specifically the administration of President Donald Trump, a potential strategic advantage. Trump has long criticized OPEC for restraining supply and supporting high oil prices, and a UAE decision to leave the cartel and eventually raise production gives Washington a friendly Gulf producer that can help soften energy prices without requiring a direct American confrontation with Riyadh.

This gives Trump an opportunity to argue that pressure on OPEC has worked and that America’s partners in the Gulf are helping stabilize the market. If additional Emirati barrels eventually reach the global market, Washington may be able to claim a political victory at home, even if the underlying regional situation remains unstable and dangerous.

Unshackled Emirati oil supplies would also provide Trump with additional political breathing room at home, easing energy-price pressures such as inflation and transport costs and alleviating public anger and voter dissatisfaction.

This would make Abu Dhabi an invaluable partner, in turn giving it political leverage in Washington. In essence, this is a political transaction where barrels are exchanged for strategic importance.

However, the UAE’s decision makes strategic sense only if the US-Iran conflict over the Strait of Hormuz remains in a cold phase without escalating into a wider regional war. If Hormuz is fully closed, if insurance costs become unbearable, or if Gulf infrastructure remains under constant threat, Abu Dhabi’s spare capacity becomes much less useful. The UAE needs stability, but not necessarily peace, because what it requires is a managed confrontation in which Iran is pressured, shipping is controlled, American and Israeli coordination remains active, and Emirati exports can gradually recover.

Frozen conflict is the perfect state of the US-Iran war for the UAE’s current ambitions – a situation where it can benefit from the pressure applied on Tehran, but oil infrastructure does not become part of the active battlefield. The UAE wants the presence of American and Israeli power, but it does not want to be part of a shooting war. It wants OPEC+ market discipline weakened, but it does not want total market chaos. Its strategy is therefore a balancing act between confrontation and continuity, because Abu Dhabi seeks to profit from instability without being consumed by it.

Israel and Arab pushback

The Israeli dimension is also important, especially because, since the normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel via the 2020 Abraham Accords, the UAE has developed a new regional identity as a state that has openly integrated Israel into its diplomatic, technological, and security calculations, and in the context of confrontation with Iran, this matters enormously.

The UAE can present itself to Israel as a partner capable not only of intelligence and diplomatic coordination, but also of energy-market influence. If Abu Dhabi can help stabilize prices while Iran faces pressure, then Emirati oil policy becomes part of the wider anti-Iranian front.

This carries risks inside the Arab and Muslim worlds. Even states that distrust Tehran may not want the Gulf order to be openly reorganized around Israeli and American strategic needs, especially if such a reorganization weakens Arab collective mechanisms and deepens divisions among Gulf states. Saudi Arabia in particular may not oppose pressure on Iran in principle, but it will resist any arrangement in which the UAE becomes Washington’s preferred Gulf energy partner at Saudi Arabia’s expense, especially if that arrangement appears to combine energy policy, Israeli cooperation, and pressure on Iranian regional influence.

The view from Russia

OPEC+ was built as a Saudi-Russian mechanism for stabilizing the global oil market, and Moscow has benefited from the predictability that this format provided. The UAE’s departure does not automatically create a crisis in Emirati-Russian relations, especially given the broader economic and political ties between Moscow and Abu Dhabi, yet it may cool the atmosphere around energy coordination.

If Emirati production eventually puts pressure on prices or weakens discipline among other producers, Moscow may view the move as a step that complicates the very framework through which Russia and the Gulf states managed oil volatility in recent years, adding a layer of mistrust and cautious calculation to the dialogue between Abu Dhabi and Moscow.

Worst-case scenario for the UAE

The worst scenario for the UAE would combine several pressures at once, with Saudi Arabia responding aggressively, Russia becoming more cautious, Iran escalating in the Gulf, export infrastructure remaining constrained, and Trump failing to provide the expected level of political and security support. If, in addition to all this, energy prices fall too far to reward the UAE’s extra production, the Emirates may find themselves in a difficult position in which they have weakened OPEC+ without gaining enough from the US, challenged the Saudis without neutralizing their influence, and exposed themselves to Iranian pressure without securing full protection.

American support is both the most vital and the most uncertain part of the UAE’s calculation. Trump may welcome the weakening of OPEC+ and the possibility of lower prices, but his domestic and international room for maneuver is not unlimited. If pressure inside the US grows, if Congress resists deeper regional commitments, or if American voters become tired of Middle Eastern entanglements, the UAE may discover that Washington’s promises are less durable than its own strategic exposure.

OPEC was created to give producers more control over their resources and more collective power against outside consumers, while OPEC+ was built to extend that control into a wider system that included Russia and other non-OPEC producers. The UAE’s exit reverses that, weakening producer solidarity and giving major consumers, especially the US, more leverage.

Abu Dhabi may gain autonomy, but the oil-producing world loses coherence. It is a breach in the idea that oil producers can still act collectively when their national projects, foreign-policy alignments, and strategic ambitions begin to diverge. The UAE is betting that autonomy will be more valuable than discipline, that partnership with the US and Israel will bring greater strategic returns than deference to Saudi Arabia, and that Moscow will treat the issue carefully enough to preserve broader relations with Abu Dhabi. It is also betting that Iran can be contained without turning the Gulf into a wider battlefield, and that the conflict can remain cold enough for oil to move while staying hot enough to keep pressure on Tehran. Each of these bets depends on conditions that Abu Dhabi does not fully control.

The exit from OPEC and OPEC+ is the beginning of a political test. The UAE has chosen to convert barrels into leverage and capacity into sovereignty, while also choosing confrontation over compromise and strategic autonomy over cartel discipline. The coming months will show whether Abu Dhabi has opened a path toward a new energy architecture, or whether it has underestimated the price of breaking the old one.

A new European task force formed to crack down on “violence as a service” has made 280 arrests in its first year, the EU’s police agency, Europol, has said in a statement.

The unit, dubbed GRIMM, was formed last April to tackle the growing trend of outsourced violence, sometimes described “gig economy” terrorism, in which criminals hire individuals via social media to carry out acts ranging from assaults to murder. The task force involves police from several EU countries, alongside the UK, Norway, and Iceland.

”Violence is no longer confined to… local dynamics. It is increasingly offered as a service: accessible, scalable and driven by online ecosystems that enable recruitment, coordination, and execution across borders,” read the statement released on Wednesday. More than 1,400 people linked to these activities have been identified, it added.

”This phenomenon is spreading like a wildfire across Europe,” Andy Kraag, head of Europol’s European Serious Organized Crime Center, told Dutch TV programme Nieuwsuur.

Recruitment mainly takes place via platforms such as Snapchat, Telegram, and TikTok, as well as gaming environments, Kraag said. Recent cases include teenagers as young as 14 recruited online to carry out shootings in Denmark and Sweden, as well as a Dutch suspect accused of acting as a getaway driver for two minors behind a series of explosions in Germany in 2025.

The report comes amid a push in Europe to restrict social media for minors due to growing concerns over mental health, online safety, and addictive platform design. France has passed an age-verification bill for under-15s, while Germany is debating a ban for under-14s. The UK is weighing restrictions for under-16s alongside limits on addictive features, and the European Parliament has backed a non-binding proposal for a bloc-wide minimum age of 16.

Messaging and gaming platforms have come under increasing scrutiny. Telegram, which has fewer than 45 million users in the EU, is facing a criminal investigation in France over alleged failures to curb illegal content, while Russian authorities have imposed restrictions on the service citing security concerns.

Russia also blocked online gaming platform Roblox, citing distribution of illegal materials, including extremist content, and attempts by adults to contact minors inside Roblox’s chat features.

The Pentagon’s latest cost assessment of the war against Iran is a lowball figure that does not include the extensive damage to US military bases during the conflict, CNN has reported, citing three people familiar with the matter.

On Wednesday, senior Pentagon official Jules Hurst gave lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee the first official statement on the controversial war’s price tag, estimating it to be around $25 billion. 

However, sources told CNN that the true cost is significantly higher when factoring in the expense of rebuilding damaged US military installations across the Middle East. One source put the real figure closer to $40-50 billion.

The estimate has also been challenged by Tehran. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the real cost to the US is far higher, accusing the Pentagon of underreporting the financial impact of the conflict. Writing on X on Friday, he cited two charts on the US economy and claimed that “Netanyahu’s gamble has directly cost America $100 billion so far, four times what is claimed.” “Indirect costs for US taxpayers are FAR higher. Monthly bill for each American household is $500 and rising fast,” Araghchi added, concluding that “Israel First always means America Last.”

As reported by CNN, Iranian strikes across the Gulf during the conflict damaged at least nine US military sites, including facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Several US radar systems were reportedly destroyed, including components linked to an American THAAD battery in Jordan and similar installations at two sites in the UAE. The outlet added that a US Air Force E-3 Sentry was also destroyed in a strike on a Saudi air base.

Hurst noted that most of the $25 billion had been spent on munitions. War Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to say whether the figure included repairs to damaged US bases.

Last week, Hurst also told reporters that the Pentagon does not yet have a final estimate for damage to overseas installations and that the repair costs are not reflected in the War Department’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic and some Republican lawmakers grilled Pentagon officials, with Representative Ro Khanna calling the $25 billion estimate “totally off” given that they had previously told Congress the conflict cost roughly $11 billion in just the first six days.

Hegseth was also scrutinized over the war’s economic impact, rising gasoline costs, and misleading justifications for the conflict. The war secretary pushed back, calling Democrats “reckless, feckless, and defeatist,” and insisting the cost was justified to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The US-Israeli war on Iran, launched in late February and initially expected to last several weeks, has left more than 1,300 civilians dead and has triggered a global energy crisis due to the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has charged that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “stole a charity” and called himself a “fool” for funding the company, claiming that the ChatGPT maker had strayed from its original nonprofit mission.

Musk sued OpenAI in 2024, alleging he was misled when he co-founded and funded the company in 2015 on the understanding it would remain a nonprofit. The AI firm, now valued at about $85 billion, has since restructured, with a nonprofit parent retaining a stake in its for-profit arm, including ChatGPT.

Testifying on Wednesday, Musk said OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, had broken that founding commitment by shifting toward a profit-driven model, according to court proceedings.

He said he continued financing OpenAI after receiving assurances from Altman that it would remain a nonprofit.

“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup,” Musk told a federal court in Oakland. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said he contributed $38 million from December 2015 through May 2017, believing he was supporting a charitable venture.

Musk’s lawsuit alleges OpenAI abandoned its founding agreement by pivoting to a for-profit model and seeks to remove Altman and Brockman, reverse the shift and secure damages for the nonprofit arm. He described his view of OpenAI’s leadership in three phases, moving from “enthusiastic support” to a loss of confidence and finally to a belief that “they’re looting a nonprofit.” 

“They can’t have it both ways,” Musk said of OpenAI. “They can’t have a nonprofit and free funding and the positive halo effect of being a nonprofit charity and also enrich themselves greatly.”

Under cross-examination, Musk clashed with OpenAI lawyer William Savitt. When pressed for simple answers on emails discussing a for-profit structure, Musk pushed back. “Your questions are not simple,” Musk said. “They are designed to trick me essentially.” 

OpenAI has rejected the allegations, arguing that leaders never promised the organization would remain a nonprofit forever. The company contends Musk’s legal challenge aims to undercut OpenAI’s rapid growth and bolster his rival AI startup, xAI.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman, bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, and launched his own artificial intelligence firm xAI the following year.

The trial in California started on Monday and is expected to last about four weeks.

Sudan’s military leadership has ruled out any talks with rebel forces, signaling a hardline stance as the conflict grinds on.

Speaking at a ceremony honoring the former chief of staff and members of the general staff on Wednesday, Sudanese army chief and head of the Sovereignty Council, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said the military offensive against what he described as a “rebel militia” would continue until it is decisively defeated.

“There will be no negotiations with the rebels or those who support or cooperate with them,” Burhan stressed. He added the armed forces remain committed to securing victory, portraying the conflict as a duty to protect civilians, “who have endured the horrors of this rebellion and nightmare.”

Sudan plunged into a civil war in April 2023 after a struggle for power broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), nearly 12 million people remain displaced due to the conflict, including 6.8 million within Sudan, while around 4.5 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries.

Chief of staff of the SAF, Yasser Abdel Rahman Al-Atta, echoed the message, vowing to press ahead with operations across all regions until full territorial control is restored. 

Last week, the Sudanese army launched a series of coordinated air and ground operations targeting RSF positions across six states, during which it claimed to have destroyed weapons depots, ammunition stockpiles, and drone launch sites used by the paramilitary forces.

In March, Sudan’s armed forces announced that they had taken control of two localities in the Blue Nile state, strengthening their foothold in the country’s south-east. The following month, the military reported that it had fended off a renewed offensive launched by the RSF alongside the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) faction led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, in the same Blue Nile area.

Military sources also told the Sudan Tribune last month that the army had destroyed two key rebels supply bases located near Sudan’s borders with Chad and Libya.

Britain and other north European states will create naval force outside of NATO to counter Russia, first sea lord and chief of naval staff in the UK, General Gwyn Jenkins, has said.

Moscow has repeatedly denied what it calls ‘hysterical’ claims it plans to attack NATO states or anywhere in Western Europe, arguing that they are being made by Western politicians to distract the public from problems at home and justify increased military spending. It also says that Russia will only fight NATO if it is attacked first.

During his speech at the Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday, Jenkins announced that members of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (Jef), which has been in place since 2014, signed a statement of intent last week to set up a new “multinational maritime force.”

The Jef includes the Netherlands, all five Nordic nations (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) and the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.)

As the crisis in the Middle East unfolds following the US-Israeli attack on Iran, the British naval chief insisted Europeans should not lose sight of the fact that “Russia remains the gravest threat to our security.”

The naval force will be commanded from London and serve as a “complement to NATO,” according to Jenkins. It will see the fleets of the ten nations training and preparing together to be ready to “fight immediately if required, with real capabilities, real war plans and real integration” by 2029.

“Russian incursions into our waters has jumped by almost a third in the last two years,” the British naval chief claimed, adding that Britain expects this activity by surface vessels and submarines to intensify.

Moscow began deploying frigates to escort its oil tankers after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer threatened to seize them in late March. Since then, almost a hundred tankers have passed through British waters unimpeded, according to the Guardian.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, reiterated on Thursday that the Kremlin “has no aggressive plans” regarding Europe.

“And what are the Europeans saying?.. They are saying every day: ‘The Russians will definitely attack us….’ You all know where that is heading. If you keep saying that the war is inevitable, it will start. There could be plenty of reasons and causes for that,” Medvedev warned.

Algeria remains committed to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and OPEC+ and considers the producer alliances a foundation of stability in the global oil market, the country’s Ministry of Hydrocarbons and Mines said on Wednesday.

The ministry said the North African nation will continue to support collective coordination between oil-producing countries, arguing that the OPEC framework and the wider OPEC+ mechanism remain essential to balancing supply and demand and limiting market volatility.

The statement comes after the UAE announced on Tuesday that it would leave OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1, citing its national energy strategy and the need for greater policy flexibility.

Algeria is one of eight OPEC+ countries, alongside Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Kazakhstan and Oman, taking part in voluntary production changes.

The countries agreed this month to raise output by a combined 206,000 barrels per day in May, while retaining the option to pause or reverse the move depending on market conditions. Algeria’s share is 6,000 barrels per day, taking its output to 983,000 barrels per day, according to official figures.

OPEC said the countries had reaffirmed the need for a cautious approach and full conformity with the Declaration of Cooperation, including compensation for any overproduction since January 2024. It also warned that attacks on energy infrastructure and disruptions to international maritime routes could increase market volatility and undermine supply security, a concern that has centered on chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Algeria has repeatedly backed coordinated production management within OPEC+. In March, the group agreed to begin unwinding 1.65 million barrels per day in additional voluntary cuts, while stressing that the process could be adjusted in response to market conditions.

OPEC was founded in 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Algeria joined the group in 1969 and has since backed coordinated output decisions while seeking stable energy revenues for its hydrocarbon-dependent economy.

The NATO states would have joined the US and Israel in their war on Iran “like vultures” if Washington had succeeded in the initial days, an Indian strategic affairs expert has said.

The European nations did not want to “get caught in the crossfire,” Zorawar Daulet Singh told RT India in the latest episode of the podcast India, Russia, and the World.

“They’re seeing the US has really played a hand, which has backfired very badly,” Singh said, adding this does not mean a breakdown in the “US-European unity.”

Pakistan tried to play a mediating role by urging “the Iranians to accept the American kind of framework,” Singh said. “I think the Iranians have kind of reached a dead end with that.”

Singh spoke of the importance of Moscow for Tehran. “Iran knows that it needs bigger partners, it needs a stable long-term partnership,” he said, citing the recent Moscow visit of its foreign minister as a step in this direction. “Russia sees Iran as, in a sense, a second front of its struggle with the West.”

Russia, India, China, and Iran are emerging as “the stabilizing players for the next 100 years,” Singh added.

There is an impression in Iran and elsewhere “that the Americans are not prepared for a second round,” he said, adding that the US knows it will also get battered in such a scenario.

The US mainstream media and former administration officials, who are part of the American establishment, now admit “that Iran holds strong cards and they can’t be wished away,” Singh said.

He suggested that Indian policymakers should reconcile themselves to the fact that the US policies are undermining New Delhi’s interests at every level.

“Whether it’s your trade, tariffs, energy security, geopolitics, Pakistan…on every aspect, the facts and the empirical evidence suggests that the US approach to India is not what it was, let’s say, 20, 25 years ago,” Singh said.

“We have a misplaced sense that these are transient trends, that ultimately America will go back to what it was after Trump,” he added, terming it as “a completely naive and a delusional perspective.”

The US-India relationship simply cannot go back to what it was, Singh noted.

US President Donald Trump’s envoy for South Asia, Sergio Gor, is visiting Nepal on Thursday, hoping to clinch a meeting with a prime minister averse to meeting to junior officials from foreign countries, local media has reported.

Recently elected Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah refused to meet visiting US Assistant Secretary of State Samir Paul Kapur earlier this month, Kathmandu Post reported on Wednesday.

Gor is reportedly seeking a meeting with Shah on Friday or Saturday at any time of his convenience, according to the report.

As of Wednesday evening, the prime minister had reportedly not given any indication he would see the US diplomat, the paper added.

Sergio Gor is the highest-ranking diplomat to visit Kathmandu since the Rastriya Swatantra Party government headed by Shah was sworn in on March 27.

The report, citing multiple sources at the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Shah had not decided to meet Gor, despite suggestions through various channels.

Gor will meet with Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal, Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai, and some other local officials and leaders, an aide to the prime minister said.

The Himalayan nation’s PM reportedly wants to set a benchmark of meeting only ministers or higher-level officials from foreign countries.

Shah reportedly met the ambassadors from different countries jointly on April 8 to underscore his line of thinking.

Gor met with outgoing Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh multiple times. He has also met King Jigme Khesar Namgyel and Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay of Bhutan, and Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu cancelled his meeting with Gor in protest against the US-Israel war on Iran.

Though this is Gor’s first visit to Kathmandu in his official capacity, he has engaged with the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP). Following the party’s victory in the March 5 election, Gor had a telephone conversation with RSP president Rabi Lamichhane on March 25 to congratulate the party on its electoral victory.

The US is set to pitch foreign governments on a new initiative for controlling the Strait of Hormuz, with participation explicitly excluding “adversaries” Russia and China, according to media reports.

The proposal was outlined in a cable sent on Tuesday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to US embassies, which were instructed to present the plan to host governments. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the cable, with Reuters later confirming its contents.

The initiative, known as the Maritime Freedom Construct (MFC), would be jointly managed by the State Department – serving as a “diplomatic operations hub” – and the Pentagon through its regional command, CENTCOM.

“Your participation will strengthen our collective ability to restore freedom of navigation and protect the global economy,” the message to prospective partners states. “Collective action is essential to demonstrate unified resolve and impose meaningful costs on Iranian obstruction of transit through the Strait.”

According to the reports, countries joining the MFC would not be obligated to contribute military forces. The initiative is also described as separate from President Donald Trump’s longtime “maximum pressure” strategy targeting Iran and from any potential future deployments by European NATO members. The invitation is not being extended to nations described in the cable as “adversaries,” including Russia, China, Belarus, and Cuba.

Trump has previously berated NATO members for declining to support the US-Israeli air campaign aimed at effecting regime change in Tehran. Reports suggest the White House has compiled a list of European members of the military bloc that could face repercussions for their lack of backing – or for openly opposing the operation, which was Spain’s position.

In response to the late-February attack, Iran throttled shipping through the Strait of Hormuz – a key artery for global oil flows – and carried out attacks on Arab countries hosting US military bases. A fragile ceasefire was announced in early April. However, tensions persisted, with Trump later declaring a naval blockade of Iranian ports after Pakistan-mediated talks failed to produce a breakthrough.

Two Ukrainian officers have been injured in Rivne Region after a 48-year-old man opened fire with an assault rifle on Territorial Recruitment Center (TCC) personnel who approached him to check his documents.

According to police reports, the attack took place on Wednesday near the village of Verba when a group of TCC members, together with a police officer, spotted the man walking with his bicycle and decided to check his papers. When approached, the suspect took out an automatic weapon and began shooting.

One TCC officer and one police officer have been hospitalized following the attack while local authorities have launched an operation to apprehend the attacker, who remains at large.

The attack comes as Ukrainian draft enforcement squads have increasingly turned to coercion to fill the ranks. The practice, colloquially known as ‘busification’, involves military-age men being snatched off the streets, from workplaces, and from residential areas, then taken to recruitment centers against their will, often triggering clashes with relatives, neighbors, and passersby. 

Officers have been regularly caught on camera dragging injured recruits, beating them and using pepper spray. Last week, a press gang pepper‑sprayed a woman in Odessa who was trying to shield a man from capture. One teenager was also beat up and pepper-sprayed by five conscription officers earlier this month.

The resistance to Kiev’s brutal mobilization tactics has grown increasingly violent. Several weeks ago, a TCC officer was stabbed to death in Lviv and another two were attacked in Vinnytsia. Ukraine’s National Police has recorded over 600 attacks against conscription personnel since 2022, with the number continuing to rise.

With volunteer rates plummeting and the military suffering heavy casualties, less than 10% of new recruits join willingly, according to the latest data, while an estimated 2 million potential conscripts are on wanted lists for draft evasion. 

Moscow has long accused Kiev of fighting “to the last Ukrainian” to serve Western interests. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov estimated that Ukraine had lost nearly 500,000 servicemen in 2025 alone, depriving Kiev of the ability to replenish its ranks even through compulsory mobilization.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has stated that Americans support the US operation against Iran, a claim that stands at odds with multiple national surveys showing most adults in the nation oppose the conflict.

The war, which began with a US-Israeli bombing campaign in February and was initially expected to last several weeks, has dragged on at a cost of $25 billion, leaving more than 1,300 civilians dead and triggering a global energy crunch after the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, with no clear US gains.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday in his first major public appearance since the war began, Hegseth lashed out at Democrats and some Republican lawmakers who criticized the conflict and accused them of “handing propaganda to our enemies.”

He accused Democrats of being “reckless, feckless, and defeatist” and questioned their loyalty. “Who are you cheering for here? Who are you pulling for?”

“I know the American people support that mission, despite your loose talk and words like ‘quagmire,’” Hegseth said during questioning that turned into hours of contentious debate over the Iran war.

US President Donald Trump echoed Hegseth’s remarks, posting on Thursday “Harvard Harris Poll: Strong Majority back President Trump on Iran Nuclear stoppage.”

Recent polls, however, suggest otherwise. The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll cited by Trump found 52% support for US airstrikes on Iran, but that same survey showed support split along party lines, with 79% of Republicans backing the strikes compared to only 26% of Democrats and 46% of independents.

Surveys by NPR/PBS/Marist and CNN show a majority of Americans oppose the military action, while a Reuters/Ipsos poll found support slipping to about one-third by late April.

Hegseth’s testimony comes as Trump’s approval rating has fallen to record lows, recent polls show, with his Iran policy dividing allies. While hawks urge tougher action, business leaders warn that disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and rising energy prices could pose political risks for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, Democrats are reportedly considering legal action against Trump over the war. They argue the White House has violated federal law by failing to seek approval for the ongoing operation.

Malian forces have regained control of a key city in the north of the country after pushing Islamic State-linked militants to withdraw, local sources reported on Wednesday.

The insurgents, who earlier this week had seized Menaka, located on the Niger border, retreated following clashes with the army and its allied forces, Reuters reported, citing residents and a diplomatic source.

The pullback follows a series of coordinated attacks on military targets in the West African country on Saturday by fighters from Al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). The authorities confirmed that Defense Minister General Sadio Camara died from injuries sustained when a suicide car bomb struck his residence during the offensive.

According to officials, Malian forces, supported by the Africa Corps, a Russian Defense Ministry unit deployed in Mali, repelled the militants’ attempt to seize military sites and key infrastructure. More than 200 militants were killed in the ensuing clashes and significant quantities of equipment were seized, Malian Chief of General Staff Oumar Diarra said on state TV on Sunday night.

Malian Prime Minister Abdoulaye Maiga said on Monday that the insurgents had attempted to overthrow the government and destabilize the country’s institutions with the “support of sponsors.” While he did not specify the sponsors, Russia’s Defense Ministry later issued a statement, alleging that the militant formations, numbering about 12,000 fighters, were trained with the involvement of Ukrainian and European mercenary instructors. It also described the assault as an attempted coup by JNIM and the FLA against Mali’s military-led government.

The former French colony has been battling a deadly insurgency for more than a decade, a crisis that has spilled into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger despite years of French military operations in the region. All three countries have expelled French forces, accused Paris of supporting terrorists and turned to Russia for security assistance.

On Tuesday, Russian Ambassador Igor Gromyko held talks in Bamako with Mali’s transitional leader, General Assimi Goita, over the latest militant violence. The envoy reaffirmed Moscow’s commitment to assisting Mali “in the fight against international terrorism,” state broadcaster ORTM reported.

In a televised address on Tuesday, Goita said Malian armed forces had regained control of the situation and vowed to neutralize those responsible for the April 25 attacks.

Somali government forces have killed more than 20 Al-Qaeda-linked militants during a coordinated military operation in the Lower Shabelle region, officials said on Wednesday.

The offensive, carried out over the past 72 hours with support from “international partners,” targeted the Bulo Abdalla area between Mubarak and Ugunji.

According to officials, the operation involved both ground combat and airstrikes, resulting in the deaths of 22 Al-Shabaab fighters, including a senior militant commander identified as Abdirahman Jeeri, who was accused of terrorizing local civilians.

The Somali Defense Ministry and army command said they intend to intensify operations in an effort to eliminate what they described as remaining elements of the group.

Al-Shabaab has waged an insurgency in the Horn of Africa country since 2007, seeking to overthrow the fragile federal government and establish its own rule based on a hardline interpretation of Sharia law. The group controls large swaths of land in Somalia’s southern and central regions, carrying out sporadic bombings and gun attacks on civilians and military infrastructure despite repeated offensives by national forces, African Union troops, and other foreign partners, including the US.

In March, Somali armed forces eliminated nine Al-Shabaab militants during an operation in the Lower Shabelle region. Earlier the same month, security forces also carried out two separate operations in which a total of 22 Al-Shabaab fighters were killed, according to military statements. The authorities also reported that government forces regained control of the Hawaadley area in the Middle Shabelle region, which had previously been held by Al-Shabaab militants.

In December, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution extending the mandate of the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) until December 31, 2026.

“Adoption follows the recent extension of the Al-Shabaab sanctions regime. Taken together, these decisions demonstrate the Council’s continued determination to support Somalia in its fight against Al-Shabaab,” Archibald Young, UK ambassador to the UN General Assembly, said.

King Charles III has gone to Washington, ostensibly to help the transatlantic cousins celebrate getting rid of his predecessor George III 250 years ago. But being a royally gracious loser is, of course, only a pretext.

In reality, as The Economist, the premier British mouthpiece of transatlantic orthodoxy, has deplored, Charles’s mission is to salvage what’s left to be salvaged from the sinking “special relationship” between Washington and London.

That the relationship is in very bad shape is obvious from the compulsive manner in which Britain’s leader Keir Starmer keeps insisting that it still exists, while also emphasizing that he “will remain laser-focused on what is in the British national interest.”

Indeed, the abysmally unpopular Starmer has been subjected to so much typical Trump hazing that, as The Guardian notes, he may be enjoying “a vanishingly rare moment of public approval for his relatively robust response.”

Historically, the “special relationship” has certainly seen better days. It goes back a long way, even if the term itself was coined as late as 1946, when Winston Churchill needed a polite way of suggesting a political friendship with benefits: The British Empire was bankrupt and shrinking, and London was ready to submit to its former colonists in America in return for a new place as their permanent privileged sidekick in the beginning Cold War crusade against the Soviet Union.

Historically, the moderately sized island realm off Europe’s shores had laid the foundations for the continental behemoth across the Atlantic, even if – to be fair to the British – not deliberately but by strategic blunder. The bloody divorce between the rebellious colonists and the obstinate mother country – in many respects really a war between competing oligarchies, including plenty of slave holders and traders – has been imaginatively baked into the bedrock of US self-glorification as a war of independence and revolution.

It is true that, at first, the British were very cross indeed and returned in 1812 to burn the White House. When the Americans went to war with each other in the 1860s, Britain’s upper classes mostly rooted for the South, that is, for the break-up of the US. But even then, London was already cautious enough to maintain official neutrality.

Fast forward half a century and that turned out to have been a very wise decision. When the Germans fought for hegemony in the First World War and knocked out Russia – weakened by revolution – Berlin might well have won or, at least, achieved a stalemate peace against France and Britain, its key antagonists in the West. It was US intervention that, instead, ensured German defeat in 1918.

True, considering the consequences of that defeat and its shortsighted mismanagement by the victors, you don’t have to like the Kaiser’s Germany to wonder if Europe – and the world – would not have been better off if the Americans had stayed out, as eminent historian Dominic Lieven has long pointed out.

In any case, as things happened in the real world, there was a second German (and, this time, also Japanese) try for primacy, much worse than the first. Again, in the Second World War as well, over-extended Britain and the booming US were not only on the same side but formed a particularly close if unequal relationship.

The pattern continued during the subsequent Cold War and beyond, with American and British spies and soldiers often in cahoots to topple sovereign governments and replace them with authoritarian vassal regimes, including Iran in 1953, Chile twenty years later, Iraq in 2003, and Syria only recently, to name only a few cases.

Churchill’s very own American dream, in short, came true: While shedding its empire, a much-diminished Britain – really a middling power with debilitating manufacturing-base weakness – kept punching above its economic and geopolitical weight, due in large measure to having found a new niche as America’s junior accomplice.

There have been partial exceptions and mishaps. Britain, for instance, refused to send troops to help the US in Vietnam. Hardly remembered now, in other ways London did, however, consistently support Washington’s brutal and futile war, if on the sly. The greatest single debacle was, of course, the Suez in 1956, shorthand for a British-French-Israeli imperialist Blitzkrieg on Egypt that went sour when the US – and the Soviet Union – put the Zionist-colonialist marauders in their place. Then as well, a British monarch, Charles’s mother Elisabeth II, ended up making a very delicate trip to Washington.

And Suez brings us to today. Because if that combination of Western-Israeli scheming, crude lying and vicious aggression, a strategic waterway (the Suez Canal), and successful resistance by a country systematically demonized in Western mainstream media (Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt) looks familiar, then it’s because the Trumpist US regime has just produced an inadvertent re-enactment. This time, the heroic and effective resistance comes from Iran, the conniving war of aggression based on lies from Israel and its US auxiliaries, and the strategic waterway is, of course, the Strait of Hormuz.

There are many differences between the Suez in 1956 and the current war on Iran, too. What matters with regard to the American-British special relationship is that this time, it is the US that has gotten badly stuck in a failing war of aggression waged together with Israel. Britain has by no means “refused to take part,” as the New York Times has misinformed its readers. In reality, in letting the US use it as a launching pad for bombing Iran, London is the ever-trusty accomplice again, no better than Germany.

Yet the Starmer regime is trying to have it both ways by engaging in what are really shyster sophistries to mask its deep involvement, while rejecting Washington’s demands for even more collaboration. The upshot is that Starmer has tied himself into a pretzel to please Washington as much as he can without fearing for his own political skin, but that is not enough to satisfy America’s Donald Trump. “When we needed them, they weren’t there,” the president-in-dire-straits has growled.

There are other issues of discontent and sore spots between the “special relationship” partners: London is not amused at all that the Trump administration has cast doubt over its sovereignty over the Malvinas (AKA Falklands), an empire-remnant of some geopolitical significance that is much closer to Argentina (which also lays claim to them) than Britain. London’s plans for the Chagos Islands, home to British and American bases, have run into US opposition.

Britain used to have some special oomph being America’s poodle inside the EU, but Brexit put an end to that. At the same time, Washington does see London as part of Europe whenever Europe fails to satisfy Trump’s every whim, as over his urge for Greenland. In the US, it is precisely with the most MAGA Americans that Britain tends to have the worst image, caricatured as a hotbed of Islamism and anarchy, whereas in reality it’s an increasingly authoritarian hub of Zionist influence.

Opinion polls show that the disenchantment is more widespread: on both sides of the Atlantic, the cousins are growing to like each other less and less. Indeed, the British public has been largely unhappy about the king’s trip.

So, there’s much that is rotten in the “special relationship” between the former global empire and its current successor on its own trajectory of decline and decay. But that is not the only reason why things give off a fetid odor. The worst irony of them all is the fact that the US and Britain still do have important things in common, but they are even worse than what sets them apart. Both Washington and London have cultivated a pathologically close relationship with Israel, supporting the war-addicted apartheid state to the detriment of their own societies, countries, and national interest.

In the same vein, the elites of both London and Washington are, moreover, at the heart of the scandal around the pedophile criminal and conspirator – clearly on behalf of Israel – Jeffrey Epstein. King Charles and President Trump could exchange notes on how to spin the fall-out from the Epstein files, both for the royal family and for the American president himself. Indeed, one of the many recent bust-ups between the British government and Trump has been about Starmer’s criminally negligent – at the very best – appointment of yet another Epstein “customer,” the sinister powerbroker Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

Think about it: with all the bad blood between London and Washington, they still converge on complicity with a genocide and the state perpetrating it, and they can commiserate with each other over being stuck up to their necks in the worst, most disgusting, most politically disruptive scandal of the century. The “special relationship” stinks of corruption, whether in agreement or disagreement.

African nations are increasingly calling for a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world order for greater autonomy in shaping their partnerships. This approach aligns with Russia’s own foreign policy position, providing a basis for expanding cooperation between Moscow and the continent.

Ghana, whose relationship with Russia dates back to the Soviet era, has experienced both growth and setbacks in its ties with Moscow. The 1966 coup in the country, allegedly orchestrated with US involvement, led to an abrupt termination of a nuclear project that had seen the Soviet Union helping Ghana establish Africa’s first atomic energy plant.

The US sought to depose Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, due to his pro-Soviet policies and alleged anti-Western stance. This historic moment marked a turning point in Ghana-Russia relations, but the ties have since evolved into modern-day diplomatic and economic engagement.

The West African nation’s ambassador to Russia, His Excellency Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah, who presents himself as a product of long-standing Ghana-Russia ties, has been tasked with strengthening bilateral relations, in support of Ghana’s key initiatives, including the 24-Hour Economy ambition.

The envoy first arrived in Moscow as a medical student in 1980. After more than three decades, he returned to Russia, officially beginning his diplomatic tenure on January 15, 2026, when he presented his credentials to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In this exclusive interview, Jehu-Appiah discusses the enduring Russia-Ghana friendship from its Soviet-era roots and the impact of US interference, Russia’s non-colonial image and Africa’s rising frontier of opportunity, non-aligned stance amid Western pressure, the sabotage of African leaders who sought control of their countries’ resources, and why Ghanaian students should seize the opportunity to study in Russia.

‘The CIA, which had orchestrated the coup, went to the Russian Embassy and ransacked it’

Q: Ghana and Russia share a long history of diplomatic ties. How would you characterize the current state of bilateral relations between the two countries?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: Ghana’s relationship with Russia started during the Soviet Union era. Ghana had a strong relationship with the Soviet Union right from 1957 when we gained our independence. Our first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, made a trip to the Soviet Union, came to Moscow, and met Leonid Brezhnev, the secretary-general of the Communist Party. They had a good rapprochement between the two of them.

They signed beneficial agreements between Ghana and the Soviet Union. The first atomic energy plant project in Africa was initiated in Ghana. That contract was first agreed upon in 1961 but officially signed in 1963, and construction of the plant began in Accra [Ghana’s capital].

Unfortunately, Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966. Everything was abruptly stopped, and the equipment was removed from Ghana and sent to the US for study. Interestingly, after the coup, the CIA, which had orchestrated the coup, went to the Russian Embassy, ransacked it, and tried to find any evidence. They also ransacked the Chinese Embassy in Ghana to see if there was anything they could seize.

To cut a long story short, they took the equipment to the US for study. So, our relationship started very well. Similar to the Soviet Union, we had the Young Pioneers established in Ghana, and I was a member.

The Russian government at that time gave opportunities for Ghanaians to come and study here. We called them the “snowmen.” The snowmen came to study here right from the time of Kwame Nkrumah, and everything went well. Even after Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown, nothing was truncated. Our relationship continued to grow.

‘The current president did part of his studies in Moscow’

Q: Considering the shifting geopolitical landscape, are there any recent developments you consider especially significant in Ghana-Russia ties?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: Unfortunately, for the last ten years, until two years ago, the government in Ghana was not friendly to Russia, and so they made a lot of statements. For instance, our [former] president went to the US to talk about how Russians were supporting Burkina Faso, and that posed a challenge for Ghana. I think it was a very unfortunate statement.

But luckily for us, the current president, John Dramani Mahama, did part of his studies in Moscow, and he loves Russians. So the relationship has started to improve. The selling hand for me has been the fact that Russia, on its own, was able to invite Mahama, even when he was in opposition, and they supported him to launch his book, ‘My First Coup D’État’, translated into Russian. He came here [to Moscow] to launch it. So believe me, the relationship has been cordial.

I had an opportunity to meet President Vladimir Putin. And I told him that I want my president to visit this country on the 9th of May, that is Victory Day. For me, that would have sealed a good friendship between the two countries. But we are still working at it.

‘Russia did not colonize any country like other countries did’

Q: Russia’s increased engagement in Africa has raised questions about its strategic goals. How does Ghana view Russia’s growing presence?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: Do you know one thing about Russia that I like? They have never colonized any country. Russia did not colonize any country like other countries did. The geopolitics of the day meant some countries would not align with what the Soviet Union believed in. But now it has grown warmer and warmer.

Since I’ve been here, from October last year, I’ve attended several programs, and I realized that Russians have good intentions for Africa. And unfortunately, my country, Ghana, has not benefited much. But Russia has good relationships with Egypt, with Namibia, with South Africa. The BRICS, for instance. Some countries were voted to join BRICS. South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, they’ve joined. I was at a BRICS meeting in St. Petersburg last November, and I spoke at that program.

So, for me, the relationship is building up, it’s warming up. With the multipolar world and Russians going through a lot of sanctions, I think they’ve turned their attention to Africa. Ghana will start to benefit.

We used to call Ghana the gateway to Africa. But I said we should change it. We should make Ghana the gateway and the destination. Yeah, because we cannot be a gateway where other countries will be the destination.

I’m here to live the dream of my president, John Mahama, who said Ghana is open for business. Before I came here, I organized a business forum for Ghanaian investors who want to travel to Russia. I invited the Russian ambassador in Ghana, Sergey Berdnikov, to listen to what Ghanaians think.

There are a lot of things that Russians can get from Ghana – culture, tourism, gold, cocoa products. I also spoke about organizing an African tourist festival in Moscow so we can demonstrate what we have. Most Russians do not know what we have in Africa or what we have in Ghana. It [the engagement] should not be one direction. We should also have a situation where we can demonstrate what Ghana has for Russia.

Q: And how does Ghana view Russia’s role on the African continent and its influence within international organizations, like the UN?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: I attended the last African Union meeting in Addis Ababa in 2016, which I believe was the final one that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe attended. He made a passionate appeal to the UN, urging them to reconsider the composition of the organization, particularly the Security Council, and to give Africa a stronger voice.

When the UN was initially formed, only four African countries were involved. Today, Africa has 54 countries, so why do we still lack representation on the Security Council?

It is crucial that we move from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, where all our voices can be heard. Russia has always supported us with goodwill.

‘Russia is on the side of peace’

Q: Several African countries have faced mounting pressure from Western countries to reassess their growing ties with Moscow amid the Ukraine conflict. Despite this, the majority of the continent’s leaders have remained resolute in their non-aligned position. How does Ghana navigate its diplomatic relationships with Russia while balancing its long-standing ties with Western governments?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: We are a non-aligned country. The principle Ghana has maintained is to look forward, as Kwame Nkrumah said.

I lived through four presidents in the Soviet Union, right from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, and I knew what it stood for. I have read the history behind the relationship between Russia and Western Europe, NATO, and between Russia and Ukraine. It is a slippery area. Russia is on the side of peace, and I think that we will pray that a peaceful resolution will come to fruition.

So basically, Ghana’s relationship with any country is based on truth. Whichever partner wants to be peaceful, we want to go there. My president, Mahama, said we are resetting the economy. In resetting the economy, we need the whole world to join us. And Russia being Russia, and I know what it can do for other countries. I don’t want Ghana to be left out.

I would have thought that the whole of Africa should come together to fight one agenda. Africa has a huge population. We have all the mineral resources, human resources, and mineral resources. Africa is the world’s El Dorado, but it is not allowed to develop them.

Any leader who stood up to develop it, his life was truncated. I want to say, with Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was killed just because he wanted to nationalize their resources. Kwame Nkrumah’s role was truncated just because they thought it was too much for the West. Look at what is happening to Burkina Faso right now, to the young man, [its military leader Ibrahim] Traore. I’m happy he’s getting a lot of support from Russia.

So, for development, we know where we should go; we should turn towards that area where they give us support.

Energy expertise

Q: Energy cooperation is one of the pillars of Ghana’s foreign policy, and Russia is regarded as a vital partner in this field. What do you think about Russia’s expertise in the energy sector?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: There is a program in which one of Ghana’s Ministry of Energy officials visited Russia for an energy forum. An agreement, or nearly signed agreement, has been made to introduce Russian technology to Ghana. One such initiative involves floating energy systems, where barges are placed on the sea or a lake to generate and supply energy to the rest of the country.

Several other initiatives are also underway. The Minister of Energy has had discussions with Russia, and I’m pleased to report that they will be returning this year to continue these talks.

Why Ghanaian students ‘should grab the opportunity’ to study in Russia

Q: Education is a cornerstone of Africa’s partnership with Russia. At the 2023 Russia-Africa summit, President Putin announced a significant increase in educational support, revealing that the number of federal scholarships for African students had risen by 150% over the past three years. What advice would you offer to Ghanaian youth who have the opportunity to study in Russia?

Dr. Koma Steem Jehu-Appiah: They should grab the opportunity with both hands; study the language and immerse themselves in the culture fully. In the field of medicine, for instance, there are a lot of new developments in Russia, and I believe that we should take advantage of that for our country.

We have been bombarded with Western propaganda, so most of them have turned away from the good from Russia. I studied medicine and Russian language here, and my wife met me here in the same school, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.

I’ve traveled throughout the world to several places. I got the opportunity to go to Asia, went to Japan, and visited many other places, including the US, Canada, and several others.

I say the best place to live is Moscow. Not because I’m here as ambassador, but because of what I’ve experienced.

The price of Brent crude oil rose to $126 on Thursday as US-Iran talks stalled and reports that US President Donald Trump may extend the blockade of Iranian ports.

It hit $126.3 for the first time since March 2022, when the Ukraine conflict escalated. Prices later eased to $125.30. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil also rose 10.5% to $110.5 per barrel, as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz continues to face disruptions.

On Wednesday, media reports, citing White House officials, said Trump ordered a plan to prolong the blockade of Iranian ports “for months” in a bid to pressure Tehran to consent to a more favorable peace deal.

The Iranian authorities insisted that they will keep preventing vessels from the US and its allies from going through the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for some 25% of global crude trade, for as long as the country is being harnessed.

Tehran has also warned that it is ready to launch “unprecedented military action” to lift the US blockade of its ports.

Later in the day, the head of US Central Command, Brad Cooper, is reportedly set to present plans for a potential renewed military action against Iran to US President Donald Trump. On Thursday, Axios reported, citing sources, that the moves by the Pentagon could include a “short and powerful” wave of strikes on the Islamic Republic’s infrastructure and other targets, the use of ground force to capture parts of the Strait of Hormuz to unblock shipping, and an operation by special forces to seize Iran’s enriched uranium.

There have been no direct meetings between the Americans and the Iranians since the failed talks in Islamabad in mid-April. Another round of negotiations had been expected to take place in the same location at the weekend, but Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly declined to meet Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

According to Pakistani sources, the sides continue to exchange messages aimed at working out a potential deal to end the conflict, which broke out after the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28.

Earlier this week, uncertainty on the oil market was increased further by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, announcing its withdrawal from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the wider OPEC+ on May 1. According to Abu Dhabi, the decision is driven by national interests and is part of a long-term strategy and a “sovereign, strategic choice” aimed at giving it more flexibility over oil output.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit India in May for the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, Moscow has confirmed.

India is the current chair of the group.

“A substantive and in-depth discussion of current international issues and prospects for improving the global governance system” is expected during Lavrov’s visit, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Preparations for the 18th BRICS Summit, to be held in New Delhi in September, which Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to attend, will also be on the agenda.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also slated to visit Moscow later this year.

Lavrov will also engage in bilateral talks with Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar. “We plan to discuss the full range of bilateral relations, including the schedule of upcoming contacts at the highest, high and working levels,” Zakharova said.

New Delhi is set to receive the fourth unit of the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system from Russia in May, PTI reported on Tuesday.

In October 2018, India signed a $5 billion deal with Russia to buy five units of the missile systems, of which three have already been delivered. New Delhi also reportedly plans to place new orders.

Negotiations for the supply and production of the Su-57 fighter jet in the South Asian nation are at a “deep technical stage,” Vadim Badekha, CEO of Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), said in January.

Russia is keen to receive “an unlimited number” of skilled workers from India as part of a labor mobility pact signed during Putin’s visit to India last December.

US President Donald Trump has said he could withdraw some American troops stationed in Germany amid a public spat with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the war in Iran.

“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of troops in Germany, with a determination to be made in the near term,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.

In 2020, near the end of his first term in office, Trump planned to withdraw around 12,000 of the roughly 36,000 American service members stationed in Germany at the time. Former President Joe Biden later deployed additional troops to Germany, citing the Ukraine conflict.

More than 36,000 active-duty troops and 1,500 reservists are currently stationed at bases across Germany, according to CBS.

Trump has chided European allies for refusing to back the US-Israeli war with Iran and declining to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran closed to “hostile” shipping in February. The conflict has also prompted the president to revive his longstanding criticism of NATO, which he described this month as “a paper tiger.”

Speaking to students at a German school on Monday, Merz argued that the US was being “humiliated” by Iran and that the Trump administration lacked a clear strategy in the conflict. He also stressed that Germany was being hit hard by energy price increases caused by the war.

Trump responded by berating Merz on social media. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding: “No wonder Germany is doing so poorly, both economically and otherwise!”

Merz sought to downplay the feud on Wednesday, saying his personal relationship with the US president “remains good.”

“I simply had doubts from the start about what was begun with the war in Iran. That is why I have made that clear,” Merz said, as cited by Reuters.

Meanwhile, oil prices rose above $120 on Wednesday, the highest level since 2022, with uncertainty continuing over the prospects for US-Iranian negotiations.

Italy’s Culture Ministry is investigating the Venice Biennale, the world's most prestigious art festival, after event organizers announced that Russia would be allowed to return to the event after a 4 year ban, Italian media reported on Wednesday.

Russia’s group exhibition, “The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky,” will be accessible to the press and industry professionals during the Biennale’s preview. Despite being scheduled to run from May 9 to November 22, the exhibition will be closed to the general public, organizers said.

Most Western cultural institutions have cut ties with Russia since February 2022 over the Ukraine conflict. Artists, performers, and conductors, as well as globally recognized Russian theatrical, orchestral, and ballet works, have been removed from theater programs in what the Kremlin has dismissed as a pointless attempt to “cancel” Russian culture.

According to Corriere della Sera, following the announcement that the Russian pavilion would reopen, and the EU’s subsequent withdrawal of $2.3 million in funding for the event, inspectors were dispatched to the Biennale Foundation to examine documents and financial records related to the planned reopening. Newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that no “irregularities” were found in terms of compliance with sanctions imposed on Russia.

Officials were also reportedly instructed to review documents related to the pavilions of Iran and Israel. The Jewish sate’s full program is scheduled to go ahead, despite widespread objections from the artistic community.

The European Commission condemned the decision to allow Russia reopen its national pavilion – a complex designed and built in 1913-14 using 17th and 18th Century Russian architectural motifs – that was last year handed over to the event “for cooperation and visibility for activities dedicated to universities, schools, families, and the general public as part of La Biennale’s Educational program.”

Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said he would not attend the opening of the festival on May 9. Last week, the Biennale jury said it would exclude Russia and Israel from award consideration. 

Biennale Foundation chief Pietrangelo Buttafuoco pushed back against the criticism, comparing the institution to “the UN of art, from which no nation can be excluded.”

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini argued that the arts should not fall victim to politics. “I am not for the exclusion of anyone, so I invite the Biennale to go ahead,” he said, as quoted by Euronews.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized the EU's funding cut, calling it “a relapse into anti-culture, a condition that the West has been suffering from in recent years.” In remarks made to TASS, she warned: “Unless they cure it, they’ll remain uncultured forever.”

Police have released bodycam footage showing officers detaining a suspect who allegedly stabbed two Jewish men on the streets of London on Wednesday.

Both victims are in stable condition, while the suspect, a 45-year-old British national of Somali origin, remains in custody, the Metropolitan Police said.

“The suspect also attempted to stab police officers and was Tasered before being arrested. No officers were injured,” police said, adding that the attack had been declared a terrorist incident.

Police are also investigating whether the suspect was involved in a separate stabbing earlier that day in southeast London, which left one person lightly injured.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the incident as an “utterly appalling” attack and thanked the police and Jewish volunteer security guards for their response. “Attacks on our Jewish community are attacks on Britain,” he wrote on X.

The UK has seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents since Israel invaded Gaza in 2023. Last month, a group of young men torched four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in Golders Green, the same neighborhood where Wednesday’s stabbings occurred.

The dramatic events of the first months of 2026 offer a useful lens through which to assess the evolving role of the world’s major powers. Among those often cast as architects of a new international order, China stands out, arguably even ahead of Russia and the United States, both of which remain preoccupied with their rivalry in Europe.

For decades, China’s rise has been one of the central forces shaping global change. As far back as the late 20th century, Henry Kissinger argued that China’s growing importance would prove more consequential than even the end of the Cold War. That judgment now appears prescient. Drawing on vast domestic resources and sustained inflows of foreign investment, Beijing has, in a remarkably short time, established itself as a leading economic power and a confident political actor on the global stage.

A decisive step in this transformation came with the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This ambitious project was designed not only to expand China’s economic reach but to position Chinese capital and infrastructure as the engine of development across entire regions. For many countries in the Global South, it offered an alternative to Western-led models, which have often been accompanied by political conditionality.

In parallel, Beijing has advanced broader concepts such as a “community of shared future for mankind” and new approaches to international security. These ideas have found receptive audiences among a wide range of states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, particularly as China has deepened its investment presence and become an indispensable economic partner.

Against this backdrop, China has increasingly been viewed as a credible alternative to the United States and the West more broadly. Western powers, after all, have long been accused of cloaking self-interest in the language of liberal economic ideals. China, by contrast, has emphasized non-interference and support for political stability in partner countries. Whether entirely accurate or not, this perception has strengthened Beijing’s appeal.

At the same time, China’s growing capabilities have generated rising expectations. Many countries now look to Beijing not merely as a partner, but as a counterweight, or even a potential successor, to Western leadership. Such expectations are partly a product of Western rhetoric itself, particularly the long-standing American claim to global responsibility. They also reflect the desire of many states to diversify their strategic options.

By the time the current phase of global restructuring began, China was widely seen as a power comparable to the United States in its ability to influence events far beyond its borders. Yet recent developments suggest a more cautious reality.

In the face of escalating international tensions, China has consistently refrained from intervening where its core interests are not directly at stake. These interests, it is increasingly clear, are concentrated primarily in its immediate neighborhood. Beijing’s response to events in 2026 illustrates this approach. It reacted calmly to the US strike on Venezuela, despite close ties with the country’s leadership. It has also avoided significant involvement in Cuba’s deepening crisis, even as the island faces unprecedented external pressure.

The same pattern is visible in the Middle East. Following US and Israeli actions against Iran, China has maintained a notably restrained position. This is striking given Beijing’s reliance on Iranian energy and Iran’s membership in organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. Rather than confronting Washington directly, China has focused on maintaining dialogue and protecting its broader strategic interests.

For some observers, this restraint raises questions about whether China is living up to the expectations placed upon it. But from another perspective, it reflects a deliberate and coherent strategy. China appears intent on avoiding direct confrontation with the United States, instead seeking to outmaneuver its rival over the long term.

Such an approach is not without risks. If Washington achieves success in its current initiatives, its confidence may grow, potentially bringing greater pressure to bear closer to China’s borders. In that scenario, Beijing could find itself facing a more assertive adversary in its own immediate environment.

At the same time, China’s current posture invites a broader reconsideration of how great powers define their interests. One of the enduring principles of international relations is that the greatest threats to major powers tend to come from within, rather than from external actors. From this perspective, China’s focus on internal stability and sustained economic growth is both logical and necessary.

Indeed, by maintaining domestic cohesion and economic momentum, China may ultimately draw other states into its orbit, not through coercion, but through the force of example and opportunity. Yet this strategy has its own vulnerabilities. Unlike Russia or the United States, China lacks abundant domestic energy resources and remains dependent on external supplies. This dependence introduces a degree of fragility into its broader geopolitical position.

Ultimately, for a power of China’s scale, the disruption of foreign economic ties could prove deeply destabilizing. A loss of geopolitical standing that limits access to global markets and resources would go beyond simply weakening China externally, it could undermine the internal stability that its leadership prioritizes above all else.

In this sense, China faces a fundamental dilemma. To withdraw too far into its own sphere of influence risks exposing the limits of its economic self-sufficiency. But to engage too deeply in global conflicts carries the danger of overextension.

For now, Beijing has chosen caution. Whether this strategy will prove sustainable in an increasingly volatile world remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that China’s dependence on the global economy will shape its choice, and their consequences, for years to come.

This article was first published by the Valdai Club and edited by the RT team.

A Democratic-led effort to limit US President Donald Trump’s authority to use military force against Cuba without congressional authorization has failed in the Senate.

The Republican-majority Senate’s vote on the measure on Tuesday narrowly dismissed it as out of order in a 51-47 tally on grounds that there are no active hostilities with Cuba.

Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who introduced the war powers resolution in March, said it was needed as Trump’s blockade of the island had caused “humanitarian crises across Cuba,” including disruptions to medical care, shortages of clean water and rising food prices.

Trump imposed an oil blockade on Cuba in February, tightening the decades-old US embargo by threatening sanctions against countries and companies that ship crude to the island. He has repeatedly hinted at possible regime-change operations against the socialist government in Havana, pledging “a new dawn for Cuba” and warning that it is “next” after he is “finished with this,” in reference to the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran.

Trump said his policy of “peace through strength” – including the raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January – had been “very, very successful.” 

Cuba has faced nationwide blackouts and severe fuel shortages in recent months, after Venezuela – once its main oil supplier – halted shipments under US pressure.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez condemned Washington’s “ferocious blockade” of fuel supplies, calling it a “brutal onslaught” on the country’s economic system.

The situation briefly eased in late March, when a Russian tanker delivered 100,000 tons of crude after reportedly bypassing the US blockade. Trump later said that Washington doesn’t “mind having somebody get a boat load” into the island, as “they need to survive.” Moscow has said it will maintain support for Cuba amid the tightening blockade.

The Irish government has agreed to put in motion a plan to terminate government-provided accommodation for Ukrainian migrants, as well as cut benefits for those living in rentals.

An estimated 125,000 Ukrainians have received temporary protection in Ireland since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. According to local media reports, Dublin has spent more than €438 million ($516 million) on housing support for roughly half of them.

The government sealed the scheme to cut housing benefits for Ukrainians who arrived in Ireland before March 2024 on Monday. The move is set to affect some 16,000 Ukrainian migrants living in state-provided accommodation, save for those unable to live on their own and “highly vulnerable.” 

Asked on Tuesday what exactly constitutes the latter category, Prime Minister Micheal Martin admitted that the government was still fleshing it out, adding that it would likely include “women and children and people with disabilities and so forth, elderly or frail people who need support.”  

The withdrawal of state-provided accommodation will begin in August, with those affected to receive a minimum of three months’ notice. The properties used to house the migrants will be returned to tourism, alternative use, and potentially private rental, according to local media.  

Apart from ending state-provided accommodation, the government opted to sharply reduce the Accommodation Recognition Payment Scheme from €600 to €400. The move, expected to be implemented in September and completed by March of next year, will affect a further 42,000 Ukrainians residing in hosted accommodation.

The government plans have been harshly criticized by pro-migrant groups and opposition politicians, who slammed them as “immoral and unethical” and bound to become “really problematic” for many Ukrainian families.  

Last week, Irish Migration Minister Colm Brophy said the government has been considering offering payouts to Ukrainians to encourage them to leave and repatriate. The minister argued that Dublin had offered unique benefits to Ukrainians, pointing out that no other EU states had such programs.  
 
An estimated 4.35 million Ukrainians are registered for temporary protection across the bloc. In recent months, numerous EU states, including the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Hungary, have moved to curb social programs for Ukrainian migrants.

A Ukrainian media outlet has published what it claims to be transcripts from surveillance recordings of Timur Mindich, businessman and longtime associate of Vladimir Zelensky who is accused of orchestrating a major corruption scheme.

Mindich, who fled Ukraine for Israel last November shortly before being indicted and is now contesting an extradition request, was wiretapped by Western backed anti-corruption bodies. Some of the recordings, said to capture conversations at a luxury Kiev apartment, have been used as evidence in the case against him and his associates.

On Tuesday, Ukrainskaya Pravda (UP) released an hour-long video in which a journalist reads what was described as partial transcripts of the ‘Mindich tapes’. The outlet did not provide the original audio or clarify how the material was obtained, but said it was the first installment in a planned series.

Who is Timur Mindich?

Originally a subordinate within the orbit of Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, whose media empire offered Zelensky opportunities as a comedian and producer, Mindich reportedly emerged as an independent power broker during Zelensky’s presidency, which extended beyond constitutional limits under martial law.

Mindich is the main suspect in an investigation conducted by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) into an extortion scheme in the state-owned atomic energy company Energoatom, that reportedly caused about $100 million in losses.

He has also been reported to be the chief beneficiary of Fire Point, a former casting company founded in 2022 that later claimed about $1 billion in sales of kamikaze drones and long-range missiles, although he has described the alleged connection as “mythical” and slanderous.

Remarks by Kolomoysky that Mindich lacked the brains to run a serious criminal operation fueled suspicions that he was merely a patsy for the real mastermind.

What’s on the tapes?

Three separate conversations that Mindich allegedly held last year are described. One was with Sergey Shefir, a business partner of Zelensky and his first chief of staff. Another was with Rustem Umerov, who was defense minister at the time of the recording. A third was with a woman identified as Natalia, who reportedly oversaw a luxury construction project for Mindich and Andrey Yermak, Zelensky’s second chief of staff.

According to transcripts cited by UP, Mindich and Shefir discussed a separate bribery case of former Unity Minister Aleksey Chernyshov, who has since been embroiled in the Energoatom scandal. They reportedly spoke about raising funds for Chernyshov’s $2.7 million bail in coordination with “Andrey” and “Smirnov” – said by the outlet to be Andrey Yermak and one of his aides.

Shefir also reportedly said he was happy to be free of media scrutiny after leaving office, adding that he no longer had to hide visits to Mindich. He further urged Mindich to give an interview denying allegations that he was profiting from his government connections.

The recording involving Natalia concerns a residential development that the outlet described as a controversial project allegedly linked to Zelensky, Yermak, Mindich, and Chernyshov. In the conversation, Mindich reportedly laments having to mothball construction because of unwanted attention following Chernyshov’s downfall.

Mindich’s purported conversation with Umerov appears to suggest that the businessman was effectively running Fire Point. He allegedly pressed Umerov for additional funding, discussed an investment proposal from an UAE investor, and how shareholders could receive $300 million in cash, and claimed the company could undercut an unnamed American rival if given sufficient resources.

Mindich also reportedly urged Umerov to approve a shipment of body armor supplied by his firm that the ministry had refused to certify. That exchange was later cited in an indictment leaked to the press in November.

What new crimes do the tapes reveal?

None, by UP’s own account.

The outlet argued, however, that publishing the records was in the public interest because they appeared to confirm close ties between Mindich and senior government officials, including Zelensky and people in his inner circle.

A “Vova” – a familiar form of Zelensky’s first name – is mentioned several times in the recordings.

Are the transcripts real?

Ukrainskaya Pravda is considered a reputable major publication known for sources within law enforcement.

Leaks to the media are a longstanding tool of political infighting in Ukraine, as in many other countries. Whether the material came from investigators or from Mindich’s defense team, which has legal access to evidence in the case, remains unclear.

However, the outlet’s report is broadly critical of Mindich and his government associates.

How has the Ukrainian government reacted?

With silence.

Mindich declined to comment to UP, while the office of Rustem Umerov, who now heads the National Security and Defense Council, said it does not comment on fragmentary recordings of questionable authenticity.

Following the publication, an opposition lawmaker called on Umerov to testify before a parliamentary committee in mid-May.

Is the timing of the Mindich tape leak significant?

Some Ukrainian outlets, such as Strana.ua, have suggested the leak came after the EU approved disbursement of a €90 billion ($105 billion) assistance package intended to bankroll Kiev. The funding lifeline reportedly helps avert a likely Ukrainian government shutdown.

The speculation is that Zelensky is being pressured to appoint EU-approved candidates to lead other law enforcement agencies that do not enjoy the same institutional independence as NABU and SAPO.

Last year, as investigators were getting close to charging Chernyshov, Zelensky had parliament approve a reform placing the anti-corruption bodies under the authority of the Prosecutor General’s office, a post he can appoint under presidential powers.

Zelensky later reversed the changes after mass protests broke out across the country, critical coverage appeared in mainstream media, and Kiev’s Western backers reportedly threatened to freeze all funding.

Notably, Ukrainskaya Pravda and Strana.ua are both mentioned in the leaked transcripts, with Mindich and Shefir reportedly speaking of them approvingly as news sources.

The United Arab Emirates’ decision to withdraw from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is a natural move, a top Russian policy expert has said.

Membership in any organization is relevant when it corresponds to national interests, Russian International Affairs Council General Director Ivan Timofeev said on an RT India panel. “When the perception of the national interest changes, it’s reasonable to expect that a state or member changes its stance.”

Timofeev added that given the current tensions in the Middle East, it is natural to expect a major player like the UAE to “strive to keep more free hands in terms of supplies... extraction [and] other factors which determine its national income.”

Though the Iran war significantly triggered the decision, the origins of this move emerged beforehand, he said. “But what is clear is that the attack against Iran stimulated and galvanized this way of thinking.”

Russia has welcomed the UAE’s move as a “sovereign decision.”

Also speaking on the panel, the host of RT’s New Order, Afshin Rattansi, noted that the UAE is already preparing for the post-war scenario. “There will be conversations in Delhi at the BRICS summit exactly about what a multipolar world means for energy resources,” he said.

The Middle East war has triggered the biggest global energy supply shock on record and will drive a sharp rise in commodity prices, pushing inflation higher and slowing economic growth worldwide, the World Bank has warned. 

Attacks on energy infrastructure and shipping in the critical Strait of Hormuz have cut global supply by about 10 million barrels per day in the early stage of the US‑Israeli war on Iran, according to the bank’s Commodity Markets Outlook released on Wednesday. 

Energy prices are set to jump by 24% this year to their highest level since 2022, while overall commodity costs will rise by 16%, the World Bank said, adding that the war has triggered “the biggest energy supply shock in history.” 

Prices could climb further if the conflict intensifies, with oil potentially averaging $115 per barrel this year under the bank’s more severe disruption scenario.  

Natural gas prices are also forecast to rise, with the EU particularly exposed to supply disruptions and higher import costs. Regional natural gas futures have surged in recent weeks. 

The shock will ripple far beyond oil and gas, according to the report. Fertilizer prices are projected to climb by 31% this year, driven by a 60% surge in urea, raising concerns over agricultural output and food affordability. Prices for metals such as aluminum, copper and tin are also expected to hit record highs. 

“The poorest people, who spend the highest share of their income on food and fuels, will be hit the hardest, as will developing economies already struggling under heavy debt burdens,” said World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill. 

Brent crude briefly topped $117 per barrel on Wednesday, its highest level since March, amid supply concerns and after the UAE announced plans to exit OPEC, adding further uncertainty to global oil markets. 

“The current situation is likely to keep inflation elevated globally, especially as disruptions in oil and commodity markets persist,” Iranian economist Peyman Molavi told RT, warning that uncertainty around Hormuz remains a key risk for further price increases. 

He added that the UAE’s decision could increase market volatility by giving producers more freedom over pricing and output. 

Talks between Washington and Tehran remain stalled, with US President Donald Trump reportedly rejecting an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the naval blockade while postponing nuclear negotiations to a later stage.

Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with his US counterpart Donald Trump on Wednesday, during which the two discussed issues including the Ukraine conflict and the crisis in the Persian Gulf, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said.

During the conversation, Putin expressed his support to Trump in light of the latest attempt on the US president’s life at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday. The Russian leader “strongly condemned” the incident, underlining that “political violence was unacceptable in any form,” Ushakov told journalists.

The Russian president backed Trump’s decision to extend the ceasefire with Iran, warning against renewed hostilities between the US-Israeli side and Tehran. Moscow is ready to mediate in the standoff and maintains contact with all the sides, Putin said, according to Ushakov.

“At the same time, the Russian president emphasized the inevitable, extremely dire consequences not only for Iran and its neighbors, but for the entire international community, should the US and Israel resort to the use of force again. And, of course, a ground operation on Iranian territory is regarded as a completely unacceptable and dangerous option,” the aide stated.

Putin and Trump also extensively discussed the Ukraine conflict and efforts to bring the hostilities to an end, Ushakov said. The two presidents “expressed essentially similar assessments of the behavior of the Kiev regime led by [Vladimir] Zelensky,” which has been “incited and supported by Europeans” to prolong the conflict at any cost, the official added.

“The American president emphasized the importance of a swift cessation of hostilities and his readiness to facilitate this in every possible way. His representatives will continue contacts with both Moscow and Kiev,” Ushakov added.

During the conversation, which lasted over 90 minutes and was initiated by the Russian side, the US leader praised the recent Easter truce announced by Moscow. Putin, in turn, proposed declaring a temporary ceasefire with Kiev during the upcoming Victory Day celebrations, Ushakov said.

“Trump actively supported this initiative, noting that the holiday commemorates our shared victory over Nazism in World War II,” he added.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said he had a “very good conversation” with Putin, “mostly about Ukraine.” 

“I think we’re going to come up with a solution relatively quickly, I hope. I think [Putin would] like to see a solution, I can tell you, and that’s good,” the US president said.

Footage appearing to show Israeli soldiers looting homes in southern Lebanon and filming themselves “joking around” while damaging property has emerged on social media.

The images come amid the fallout from the report by Haaretz last week alleging that looting by Israeli troops was widespread, with commanders turning a blind eye. The outlet cited testimonies from soldiers who described troops taking “significant amounts of civilian property,” including televisions, furniture, and motorcycles.

The incidents allegedly took place during Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon following renewed fighting with Hezbollah earlier this month.

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has said “if” these incidents occurred, they would run contrary to the values of the IDF.

Watch the full report by RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij below.

The United Arab Emirates has announced its withdrawal from OPEC and the OPEC+ format effective May 1, 2026, ending nearly six decades of membership. This marks the largest institutional disruption to the oil production coordination system since the establishment of the expanded OPEC+ format in 2016 and is perceived by the market as a step towards weakening the group’s ability to influence global oil prices.

At the same time, the move reflects Abu Dhabi’s strategic course towards maximizing its own production and increasing its market share, while maintaining its image as a ‘responsible supplier’ and relying on the long‑term growth of global energy demand.

The UAE’s withdrawal objectively leads to the potential growth of global oil production, and as a consequence, to downward pressure on prices in the medium term – especially after the unblocking of the Strait of Hormuz. It is already being described as one of the most notable institutional shifts in the energy market over the past decade. The Emirati authorities present this step as a “strategic re‑evaluation project” aligned with national economic interests, rather than a one‑off conflict over quotas.

From an economic perspective, the issue is not just about how many barrels Abu Dhabi and Dubai will produce but about the very architecture of global oil coordination. OPEC and OPEC+ are ceasing to be a monolith even in the formal sense: One of the largest and most flexible producers is moving into ‘independent mode’, transforming the market from a quota‑cartel structure into a more fragmented and sensitive one – a market driven not only by economics but also by geopolitics.

Why the UAE wanted out

In recent years, tensions have been building up between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over the issue of quota allocation within OPEC+. The UAE invested in expanding production capacity but was restricted in its ability to monetize it due to collective commitments to cut output. In fact, even before the official announcement in 2026, the UAE repeatedly signaled dissatisfaction with the level of its quotas and a desire for greater autonomy in making production decisions.

Official statements from the UAE government and Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei stress that the decision to withdraw from OPEC constitutes a sovereign political decision in the field of energy policy, adopted following a “prolonged and thorough review” of the national strategy. The official wording highlights several key motives:

• Alignment with the UAE’s long‑term strategic and economic vision and the evolution of the country’s energy sector.
• Primary emphasis on national interests and strategic priorities, ensuring the continued perception of the country as a responsible and reliable supplier.
• The anticipated sustainable growth of global energy demand in the medium- and long-term perspective justifies the expansion of the UAE’s own production and investments in the capacity foundation.

The key economic factor behind the decision is the significant expansion of the UAE’s production capacity and the drive to fully monetize it outside the constraints of a rigid quota system.

It should be noted that the UAE’s current production stands at around 3.4-3.5 million barrels per day (bpd), with plans to increase capacity to 5 million bpd by 2027 through investments in upstream projects.

Over the past several years, the UAE has invested substantial resources in expanding its production base, including through the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, thereby enhancing both nominal capacity and the quality of its crude oil, as well as improving environmental performance (low carbon intensity). However, within OPEC and OPEC+, a portion of this capacity has effectively remained underutilized due to existing restrictions. This has caused economic dissatisfaction and prompted the search for a more flexible operating regime.

For the UAE, where GDP growth and fiscal sustainability are closely tied to hydrocarbon exports, the ability to more aggressively ramp up production as global demand recovers and grows is seen as a way to accelerate the monetization of resources ahead of a potential structural shift in demand towards low‑carbon sources. In this context, leaving OPEC is perceived by Abu Dhabi as a means of protecting national revenue from external constraints and the asymmetry of interests within the organization.

The primary economic motive for the UAE’s exit from OPEC can be summarized briefly: The country no longer intends to keep its production capacity within the limits set by the collective system when it believes it can produce and export more than the quotas allow. This has been explicitly stated by UAE officials, who point to the need to “revise production policy and strengthen autonomy in managing the oil and gas sector.”

The medium-term goal is to increase production by more than 30% and strengthen the UAE’s position as a key supplier to fast-growing Asian markets, including China and India. The authorities stress that OPEC quotas, at a time when the country is completing large-scale investment cycles in oil and gas projects, begin to look like an artificial brake on potential.

Against this backdrop, leaving OPEC appears to be part of a broader diversification strategy. The UAE is simultaneously developing traditional oil export flows, natural gas, petrochemicals, and low‑carbon sectors, including renewable energy. In this model, oil and gas are not an end in themselves but a source of capital for further diversification. Consequently, any restrictions on export volumes automatically slow down progress along this trajectory.

The benefits and risks for the UAE

The financial benefits are clear. In the short and medium term, the country gains the opportunity to ramp up exports when prices are favorable, reallocate flows towards more solvent markets, and accelerate the implementation of infrastructure and petrochemical projects, using waves of high prices as a ‘capital catcher’.

This could lead to a significant increase in export revenue and faster accumulation of foreign exchange reserves – which is particularly important for an economy actively participating in global financial flows.

However, the economic risks are also significant.

Firstly, leaving OPEC weakens the collective market-stabilization mechanism, which increases price volatility. In an environment where oil prices become more erratic, budget planning becomes more challenging: Revenues fluctuate sharply, and fiscal buffers and reserve funds must be designed to accommodate a wider range of scenarios.

Secondly, the UAE partially loses the political weight and institutional influence that OPEC+ membership provided. Instead of jointly taking part in shaping the rules of the game, the UAE becomes a major but standalone player whose decisions are perceived by the market as an external factor rather than as part of an institutional consensus. This raises the risk that, in times of crisis, the UAE could be viewed as a destabilizing factor – which in turn could increase pressure from partners and regulators.

The exit from OPEC carries not only economic but also symbolic significance: It demonstrates the UAE’s readiness to pursue its own course amid the fragmentation of the regional security architecture and energy coordination.

Impact on global oil trade

From a supply-side perspective, the UAE’s departure implies the potential introduction of additional volumes into the market in the medium term – 1 to 1.5 million bpd – as production expands and transportation infrastructure is restored. Combined with a possible reaction from other producers, this leads to the following:

• a reduction in the market’s overall fear of a supply deficit, and as a consequence, downward pressure on forward quotations.
• a weakening of the influence of OPEC+ signals and strengthening of individual producers’ strategies.
• a further shift in the market’s center of gravity towards competition among major independent players (the US and others).

From a short‑term perspective, the market could react to the UAE’s exit as a ‘risk shock’. Any news about quota revisions, increases in production volumes, or disruptions in logistics in the Strait of Hormuz area will amplify volatility. At the beginning of this scenario, both upward and downward price spikes are possible as market participants revise their forecasts regarding future supply levels and prices.

In the medium term, the key question is whether other producers will follow the UAE’s lead and whether real discipline will be maintained among the remaining OPEC+ members. If so, relative stabilization is possible – albeit with higher baseline volatility. If not, the market could shift to a mode in which supply is driven not by coordination but by individual decisions, leading to more frequent and severe price fluctuations.

For the global economy, this implies increased uncertainty in energy costs, more complex planning of investment programs, and higher risk premiums in financial markets. In importing countries, rising oil price instability exacerbates challenges in managing inflation and jeopardizes the sustainability of budgets and the balance of trade.

Russia’s challenges and opportunities

From a geoeconomic perspective, the UAE’s exit from OPEC fits into a broader trend of fragmentation in global energy governance and the growing role of regional and bilateral ties. For Russia, this creates both risks to budget revenues and an opportunity to deepen bilateral energy and financial-investment cooperation with the Emirates within the evolving architecture of the global oil market.

Regarding Russia’s reaction to the UAE’s withdrawal, the initial public response came from Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, who directly linked it to the prospect of increased global production and lower prices in the future. According to him, the UAE’s departure means the country will be able to produce as much oil as capacity allows and bring it to the market without restrictions. If other OPEC countries begin to act in a similar way, total supply will rise and prices will fall.

Siluanov stressed that current prices are mainly supported by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the associated supply risks, while the surplus supply effect he projects will materialize once shipping is restored. At the same time, the Russian side explicitly notes the preservation of close relations with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as its interest in continuing coordination within an expanded producer format even as OPEC+ weakens institutionally. This aligns with Russian energy diplomacy, which aims to maintain informal coordination channels and strengthen bilateral cooperation with key regional players. For Russia, this creates both challenges and opportunities.

Among the key challenges are the potential drop in oil prices, which directly affects budget revenues and development financing capabilities, and the weakening of collective coordination mechanisms through which Russia has been able to influence the market via OPEC+.

The opportunities include: Deepening energy, investment, and financial cooperation with the UAE as an increasingly independent geoeconomic player interested in diversifying its partners; developing joint projects in logistics (bypassing the Strait of Hormuz and using alternative routes), oil, and petroleum product trade, as well as in the area of sovereign wealth funds and payment infrastructure, with a focus on de-dollarization; Using the bilateral format to align approaches to market stabilization during critical moments – complementing, rather than replacing, formal OPEC+ mechanisms.

The UAE’s exit from OPEC and OPEC+ should not be interpreted as a collapse in prices or the outright disintegration of the cartel. Rather, it represents a transition to a new regime in which the role of collective quotas diminishes and the importance of national economic interests, geopolitical games, and individual market decisions increases.

For Russia, the key challenge is to adapt its budgetary and energy policies to a potential decline in prices amid rising supply, while simultaneously deepening strategic partnerships with the UAE and other major exporters in Asia and the Middle East. In the context of growing fragmentation in global energy governance, it is the combination of flexible domestic policy and active geoeconomic diplomacy that can mitigate risks and transform the structural shift into sources of additional influence and resilience.

The beginning of fuel loading at the first unit of the Russian-build Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant has paved the way for the start of experimental production of nuclear energy in Bangladesh.

Reporting from Rooppur, RT India correspondent Rujuta Thete notes that the nuclear power plant will supply 10% of national needs once it becomes fully operational.

Fuel loading at the first unit is expected to be completed within the next 45 days, officials said. After that, the reactor will be brought to a minimum controlled power level, followed by a gradual increase in output. Electricity will then be generated on a trial basis and fed into the national grid.

With a planned capacity of 2,400 megawatts across two reactors, the facility will add Bangladesh to the list of more than 30 nations operating nuclear power reactors, Rosatom noted in a statement. The estimated project cost is about $13 billion, with Russia providing a state loan covering 90% of that amount. The Russian side has also undertaken long‑term obligations for nuclear fuel supply, technical maintenance, and management of spent nuclear fuel.

Bangladesh’s Science and Technology Minister Fakir Mahbub Anam said that the plant’s first reactor is expected to begin commercial operation in August, with an initial supply of about 300 megawatts. Full‑scale production is expected by December this year or early 2027.

The project is seen as a potential game‑changer for a country facing a severe energy crisis amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Bangladesh heavily relies on energy imports for its electricity and industrial needs, sourcing roughly 95% of its oil and gas from Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Iraq. India is also a major electricity supplier, providing around 15-17% of Bangladesh’s power through grid connections and supplying diesel via pipeline.