France’s presidential hopefuls are turning burning streets, smashed storefronts, and accusations of police brutality into campaign ammunition, RT’s Oumaima Ichchar has reported.

While right-wing firebrand and potential front runner Marine Le Pen blames collapsing state authority, her left-wing rival, Jean-Luc Melenchon, accuses the government of failing to hear the voice of the people.

Nationwide protests began in September over underfunded schools and rising living costs, and escalated into widespread violence last week. Rioters have torched cars, looted or damaged thousands of businesses, and set fire to Limoges’ 143-year-old city hall. The clashes have also left hundreds of protesters and law enforcement officers injured and led to thousands of arrests.

In some of the most brazen incidents, a 15-year-old boy lost a hand to a police grenade, while a 17-year-old girl permanently lost sight in one eye after being struck by a projectile in Mulhouse. Macron, meanwhile, blamed radical-left militants and criminals for much of the destruction, and on Thursday ordered the local authorities to ban protests and restrict officially organized marches.

Le Pen has urged a tougher crackdown on rioters to restore order. “Our country is caught in a vice, if not held hostage, between violence and powerlessness,” Le Pen said, pledging support for police and demanding tougher penalties for rioters. National Rally president Jordan Bardella blamed far-left militants and criminals from the suburbs for the unrest, proposing to suspend family benefits for repeat offenders and make vandals pay for damage.

On the left, Melenchon backed the protests while pointing to a growing disconnect between the public and the institutions. “French democracy is in a very bad way,” the ‘France Unbowed’ leader said, calling for greater public participation and constitutional change.

Meanwhile, Gabriel Attal and Edouard Philippe, two former prime ministers under Macron, sought to distance themselves from their ex-boss, whose approval rating has sunk to a record low of 15%, according to an October Ipsos survey. While Attal insisted that the priority should be the defense of people and property, Philippe called for the “reestablishment of the authority of the state, the punishment of looters and vandals, as well as a detailed method for restoring discussion with high school students and trade union organizations.”

The Eagle’s Nest mountainous retreat built for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in the Bavarian Alps has been devastated by a blaze, the German police have said.

The former tea house for the leader of the Third Reich, which was constructed on the peak of the Obersalzberg in southern Germany in 1938, sits at an altitude of 1,834 meters (6,000 feet).

A fire alarm at the Eagle’s Nest went off on Friday evening, and it was completely engulfed in flames by the time emergency services arrived, the police said.

The high elevation complicated the work of some 200 fire fighters, who were only able to extinguish the blaze on Saturday morning, they added.

“It is damaged to a large extent. The house is unlikely to be saved,” a police spokesperson told Bild tabloid.

According to Bild, the detained person was a motorcyclist whom the officers encountered on their way to the burning retreat, but his involvement in the case currently remains unclear. Investigators believe arson caused the fire, the paper’s sources claimed.

Following reports of the blaze, the Bavarian authorities announced plans to rebuild the structure, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said.

“We will not allow ruins to remain there,” DPA quoted him as saying.

The Eagle’s Nest was one of the few historic building from Hitler’s era to avoid damage by bombing during the World War II. The retreat hosted a museum and a restaurant since the 1950s, becoming a popular tourist destination. It was preserved as “a cautionary reminder of the abysses of the inhumane Nazi dictatorship,” according to its website.

A number of American lawmakers are gearing up to jeopardize the Trump administration’s deal to ease sanctions on Russian diesel through April. They are seeking action against US companies involved in the trade and planning to block the Treasury from issuing such a waiver in the future. 

US President Donald Trump announced the deal earlier this month, weeks ahead of the impending November midterm elections. Under the waiver, Moscow agreed to immediately put 300,000 tons of diesel into the market, followed by larger quantities later on. The deal was reached as US diesel prices hit a record high, surging above $6.50 per gallon in September, with prices in parts of California exceeding $8.

The disruption of global energy markets, caused by the Iran war and the Ukraine conflict, has resulted in rising gas prices in the US, further denting the positions of Republicans ahead of the vote. Diesel is the key fuel type extensively used in agriculture and freight; its price affects the cost of virtually all goods, resulting in further cost-of-living issues. Rural communities, smalltime farmers, and truckers are particularly vulnerable to diesel prices spikes.

“[The companies] should have liability concerns as well as investigative concerns,” the aide told WaPo.

Further action against the diesel deal has been taken by Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-1), an outspoken hawk, Ukraine backer, and proponent of sanctions against Russia. The proposed legislation, titled the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act of 2026, would effectively block Russian oil imports for good.

The bill would nullify the standing Russian oil waiver, “immediately rendering General License 135 ineffective and prohibiting future waivers or general licenses authorizing the importation of Russian energy products,” as well as strip the Treasury from the ability to expend funds “on agreements that violate the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act of 2022,” the legislation that sanctioned Russian energy products, including diesel, in the first place.

Apart from the energy part, the bill also would “reinforce critical intelligence support for Ukraine,” obliging spy agencies to cooperate with Kiev and to “notify congressional intelligence committees within 24 hours of any interruption.”

Billionaire Elon Musk has accused US politicians of putting Kiev’s interests ahead of their own country’s, alleging that American taxpayer money sent to Ukraine is being laundered back into political campaigns.

Writing on X on Friday, the SpaceX founder suggested that financial interests could explain why some American lawmakers remain staunch supporters of Kiev in its conflict with Russia.

“Some of that US taxpayer money comes back through multiple laundry machines to fund political campaigns in America, which is why you see some politicians caring more about Ukraine than America!” Musk wrote, without identifying the beneficiaries.

And some of that US taxpayer money comes back through multiple laundry machines to fund political campaigns in America, which is why you see some politicians caring more about Ukraine than America!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 23, 2026

In March, US outlet Just the News cited a declassified intelligence summary describing a plan to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid earmarked for clean-energy projects in Ukraine into then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Trump shared the report on Truth Social, while then-US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard reportedly asked officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to investigate whether the alleged scheme had been carried out.

Musk also accused Ukrainian elites of profiting from Western assistance while ordinary Ukrainians bear the human cost.

“The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches,” he wrote.

Kiev’s increasingly coercive mobilization campaign has been marked by numerous documented cases of forced detentions and violent confrontations involving recruitment officers. Corruption investigations have also exposed schemes allowing wealthier Ukrainians to evade military service.

Ukraine has been rocked by major corruption scandals involving figures close to Vladimir Zelensky. One centered on his longtime associate Timur Mindich and an alleged $100 million bribery and money-laundering operation at state nuclear energy company Energoatom. The scandal forced senior officials from office, including former presidential chief of staff Andrey Yermak, while Mindich fled Ukraine.

Kiev has moved to block a planned tribute to Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevich, who was involved in the killing of an estimated 100,000 Poles during World War II ethnic purges, officials in Warsaw have claimed.

The reported retreat comes amid a series of disputes between the two countries in recent months over Kiev’s veneration of Nazi-linked figures that have eroded Polish support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

The controversy erupted on Tuesday when the Lviv Regional Council in western Ukraine voted to declare 2027 the Year of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and to celebrate the 120th anniversary of its commander Roman Shukhevich while deciding to organize “cultural, memorial, scientific, and mass media events,” as well as exhibitions and national patriotic rallies on the occasion.

Following the backlash, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki said on Wednesday that officials of Vladimir Zelensky’s office had assured Warsaw that the controversial resolutions would not come into force. On Friday, Tusk echoed the claim, saying that Zelensky had personally signaled he would not endorse the resolution, adding that the Ukrainian leader was “unhappy” with the situation.

This also came after the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called the Shukhevich tribute in Lviv “counterproductive to our current efforts aimed at further developing Ukrainian-Polish relations.” The ministry stressed that the local authorities had sought no advice from government bodies to assess the consequences of their actions.

An unnamed source in Zelensky’s office cited by Ukrainskaya Pravda went so far as to describe the decision as a “catastrophe.” “Ukraine looks erratic. We have just resolved the previous crisis – and now this,” the source said, accusing regional officials of pursuing “cheap one-day hype” despite knowing all too well what the resolution would lead to.

While senior Ukrainian officials apparently distanced themselves from the controversy, the Lviv council’s original announcement remains accessible as of Saturday. Sheremet also previously defended the resolution, saying “This is our history, our heroes, and we must duly honor their memory.”

The dispute is the latest in a series of heated clashes between Kiev and Warsaw over Ukraine’s continued veneration of nationalist figures that collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.

In May, Zelensky awarded an elite Ukrainian special operations unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA,” prompting another diplomatic uproar, with Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripping the Ukrainian leader of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration.

Three people have been killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on the Russian city of Oryol, Governor Andrey Klychkov has said.

The bodies were recovered from the rubble of a civilian enterprise targeted by Kiev on Friday, Klychkov announced on Saturday.

According to the governor, Ukrainian forces used NATO-made missiles in the attack. He shared photos of missile fragments bearing markings in English as evidence of their alleged Western origin.

Klychkov did not specify the type of weapons used, although Russian military bloggers earlier claimed that Kiev had fired British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles.

The governor condemned Friday’s strike as “especially cynical,” saying it took place during rush hour, when people were returning home from work to their families.

Ukrainian attacks continued overnight, with Russian air defenses downing 15 drones over the region, according to Klychkov. A new missile alert was issued on Saturday morning.

Oryol, a city of nearly 290,000 residents, lies approximately 368km southwest of Moscow.

Russia has accused Kiev of deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure to compensate for battlefield setbacks as Moscow’s forces continue to advance.

In response to Ukrainian terrorist attacks, Russia has intensified long-range missile and drone strikes against Ukraine’s military facilities and infrastructure supporting Kiev’s war effort. Moscow maintains that its forces do not target civilians.

The BrahMos corporation is working to add more destructive power and reach to its namesake supersonic cruise missile, following its spectacular combat successes last year.

The operational and functional parameters of the missile are being upgraded, and new versions are in the works, the CEO and managing director of the joint venture between India and Russia, Jaiteerth Joshi, told local media recently.

Named after the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers, the BrahMos is engineered for high-precision, long-range strikes. The missile offers militaries the versatility to engage threats using land, sea, and underwater platforms. 

BrahMos earned its stripes last year when the Indian and Pakistani militaries briefly clashed with missiles and drones, following a terrorist attack on civilians in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state.

As the two militaries tested each other with drones, India fired BrahMos missiles to strike hardened high-value targets, including hangars reportedly housing Pakistan’s US-made F-16 fighter jets. 

India has said there was not a single interception of the BrahMos during the clashes, dubbed Operation Sindoor, and buyer interest has risen since.

BrahMos Aerospace is a joint venture between India’s DRDO and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyeniya. 

BrahMos’ trajectory into the future

BrahMos started as a land-launched cruise missile, but its developers have worked to give it more flexibility and lethality as battlefield needs evolved and expanded.

The missile, which flies at nearly three times the speed of sound and carries a 200 to 300 kg warhead, had an initial range of 290 km but continuous upgrades have extended its reach.

There is also a Block III land-attack variant, which can fly very low and approach targets from unexpected angles – dodging any defenses the enemy may try to throw at it. 

The BrahMos corporation is working on a long and ambitious list of upgrades. At the top of the current development efforts sits a lighter, air-launched variant.

Christened the BrahMos-NG, it can be flown on the IAF’s other fighter jets, including the domestically produced Tejas light combat aircraft. The Su-30MKI will be able to sortie armed with three of these missiles.

The BrahMos-NG will feature higher domestically-produced content and advanced materials. The Indo-Russian joint venture expects to unveil this prototype by 2027-28. 

This long-range version is at the conceptual stage, and the company is discussing further upgrades with its Russian joint venture partner. Joshi has told Indian media outlets in recent interviews that the range-extension program will proceed in phases, with test firings from land, sea, and air to validate the missile’s operational capabilities. 

Also, on the missile maker’s drawing board is a hypersonic version – the new frontier of modern warfare – currently called BrahMos II. 

The concept aims to integrate advanced technologies, state-of-the-art design, and smart materials to field a hypersonic futuristic weapon that will dominate fast-evolving battlefield technology. 

BrahMos II will have an “air-breathing” scramjet engine that would boost it to a top speed of Mach 5. 

BrahMos is seeing high global interest

The missile has already been sold to multiple countries, and many others have shown an interest in buying it.

One of the first foreign customers of the Indo-Russian missile was the Philippines, with Manila signing a $375 million contract in 2022. The first batch of BrahMos missiles was delivered to the country in April 2024, and the second in April 2025. 

In June this year, India confirmed it had a deal with Vietnam to supply the missiles.

Indonesia, which has also evinced interest, has moved forward with procurement plans. 

In addition, over a dozen nations including Malaysia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile, and South Africa have evaluated or expressed a formal interest in the BrahMos missile system.

BrahMos is gearing up for a demand surge

The BrahMos project is a trailblazer in India’s defense industry. It broke the shackles of excessive bureaucratic controls that were once the hallmark of Indian state-owned defense corporations that had forced the country to remain a major arms importer. 

With a burgeoning order book, BrahMos corporation is prioritizing the fulfillment of orders received from the Indian armed forces, for whom the missile is a primary strike weapon. India recently contracted for more BrahMos launchers and fire-control systems, so more of its warships can be armed with the missile. 

The missile maker now has production facilities in four Indian cities: Hyderabad, Nagpur, Pilani and Lucknow. Research and development clusters, nicknamed ‘tech-bricks’ have been set up to work on niche technologies for the next generation missiles. 

The supply chain is being expanded to make it more robust and resilient – and to meet an expected surge in demand. For this, the company will expand the industry partners for each system and subsystem to up to 45, from the current one or two partners. 

India’s arms export ambitions ride on BrahMos 

New Delhi is gradually setting its sights to make a complete transformation from being one of the biggest arms importers to a major defense exporter. 

The federal government’s annual defense production target is $31 billion by 2029, of which defense exports are pegged at $5.5 billion. 

BrahMos will be key to New Delhi’s ambitious goals to emerge as a major global arms exporter.

The Defense Ministry in Moscow has released a series of videos showing its elite Rubicon drone unit intercepting Ukrainian long-range attack UAVs heading deep into Russian territory and striking Kiev’s military equipment, including Western-supplied artillery systems.

On Friday, a Ukrainian drone raid on Moscow temporarily shut down all four of the capital’s international airports, disrupting dozens of flights and triggering an evacuation alert at Sheremetyevo. The same day, Kiev’s missiles struck a civilian enterprise in the city of Oryol during rush hour, killing at least three people, according to Governor Andrey Klychkov.

The attacks came despite renewed diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, with Moscow announcing plans to resume trilateral talks with Washington and Kiev following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with US envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday.

One of the clips published by the Defense Ministry on Friday captured more than 20 interceptions of Ukrainian long-range UAVs by Rubicon’s FPV-drone operators.

The destroyed hardware included FP-2 models, capable of carrying up to 100 kg of explosives to a distance of up to 2,000 km, and Anubis drones with a payload of up to 50 kg, it said.

Another clip showed Russian UAVs ramming numerous medium-range kamikaze-drones such as Ukrainian-made Chakluns and Bliskavkas as well as the Hornets, produced by Swift Beat, a company run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The other three videos featured a montage of successful strikes by Rubicon’s FPV-drones against Ukrainian targets on the ground, with armored vehicles, artillery pieces, robotic systems and communication devices being hit.

One of them captured the destruction of a French-supplied CAESAR howitzer near the village of Zelenoye in Russia’s Donetsk People Republic (DPR).

In another clip, the Russian UAV operators are seen discovering and eliminating a US-made М119 artillery system in an undisclosed location.

The final video shows Rubicon’s drones in action near the city of Krasny Liman in the DPR, where Russian forces are continuing to move steadily forward.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to launch another military operation against Iran, as Washington quietly withdraws diplomatic personnel and relocates troops from bases across the Middle East in moves resembling preparations ahead of the initial US-Israeli strikes in February.

“We may do another little Epic Fury, or they’ll agree,” Trump declared during a campaign rally in Florida on Friday, referring to the military offensive launched against Iran on February 28.

“If they’re smart, they’ll just say, let’s get down to business,” he added, before expressing doubt that Tehran would agree to Washington’s demands.

The Pentagon officially declared Operation Epic Fury over on May 5, despite the continuation of the conflict. The administration has sought to avoid formally characterizing the hostilities as a war, maintaining that the fighting had diminished. Trump reiterated on Friday that previous US strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and defeated the country “militarily, financially and otherwise.”

The diplomatic missions in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will remain open but operate with fewer personnel. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, where nonessential staff and their families were ordered to leave earlier this week, personnel at the other embassies are not required to depart.

A separate intelligence memo sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday claimed that Tehran had intensified efforts to target Americans abroad.

The memo did not publicly identify specific targets or provide evidence substantiating the alleged plots. US officials have denied that the diplomatic withdrawals are connected to preparations for renewed strikes against Iran.

However, the drawdowns coincide with reports that the Pentagon has quietly begun relocating troops from bases in Jordan, Qatar and Kuwait. NBC News reported the movements on Wednesday, with CBS subsequently confirming the reductions.

The Pentagon reportedly presented Trump with options for renewed strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, underground military installations and strategic islands, including Kharg Island, a major oil export hub.

Trump has pledged not to launch new attacks before the November 3 midterm elections, while keeping military action on the table if Tehran refuses Washington’s demands.

A Syrian migrant arrested in Germany on suspicion of raping a teenage girl was released after just 40 days in pre-trial detention and later accused of raping another woman, local media reported on Thursday.

In the wake of the latter episode, the man went into hiding but was eventually captured by the authorities several months later. He was subsequently convicted of raping the teenager and is still standing trial over the second allegation.

The 26-year-old, identified by Bild as Ahmad A., was initially apprehended in late February 2025 over the rape of a 16-year-old girl at a Munich asylum center. However, the teenager could not undergo judicial questioning in time due to her psychological condition.

The delay prompted the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office to request the suspect’s release in early April. Bild quoted prosecutor Juliane Grotz as saying that continued detention would have violated the “principle of expedited proceedings in detention cases” and would have been “no longer proportionate.”

Without the victim’s testimony, authorities could not determine how much longer the investigation would take, they told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

In July 2025, Ahmad A., who was required to report to police twice a week and barred from approaching the teenage victim, allegedly lured a 29-year-old woman to a secluded location, where he and two Yemeni nationals took turns raping her.

Police arrested the suspects in September 2025, with Ahmad A. subsequently convicted of raping the 16-year-old girl. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in November 2025.

The trial over the alleged rape of the 29-year-old woman is still underway, with the next hearing scheduled for October 27.

Also in Munich, local police reported in June that they had arrested two young Syrian migrants on suspicion of raping an 18-year-old German woman they had met at a nightclub.

There have been multiple similar cases involving migrants across Germany in recent years.

Under former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-border policies, more than a million people arrived in Germany from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq at the height of the 2015 immigrant influx. In recent years, the country has also granted temporary protection to an estimated 1.2 million Ukrainians. Germany ranks as the European Union’s top destination for migrants and the world’s third-largest refugee-hosting country, according to UN data.

Amid rising crime rates and a series of terrorist attacks perpetrated by migrants, public discontent with the German government’s handling of illegal immigration has been steadily growing.

The opposition right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which advocates stricter immigration controls, has consistently polled as the country’s most popular party in recent months. According to a recent INSA survey, the AfD enjoys the support of 30% of respondents – 12 percentage points ahead of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s ruling CDU/CSU bloc.

Russia has dispatched three tankers carrying diesel fuel to the United States under an agreement reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Donald Trump, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has announced.

The vessels are already sailing toward the eastern Atlantic coast, Novak said on Friday, adding that most of the additional fuel supplies could come from Russian energy giant Rosneft.

“In accordance with the previously announced agreements to saturate the global diesel market, Russia will ensure additional supplies of diesel fuel to world markets and the United States,” Novak said.

Moscow has eased its restrictions on diesel exports, allowing Russian companies to ship up to 500,000 tons of fuel to international markets in October while ensuring domestic demand remains fully covered. The shipments were arranged with significant assistance from the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), headed by Putin’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

EA Maritime Analytics is tracking the first cargo of Russian diesel heading to the US since Trump’s 9 October announcement. MR tanker Agioi Fanendes (IMO 9798375) sails from Primorsk today with a cargo of ultra-low-sulphur diesel, confirmed by our market sources. Her AIS shows New York as the destination, with arrival expected on 10 November. Cargo size: around 298,000 barrels (40,000 tonnes). On 9 October, Trump said Russia would supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel immediately, followed by 500,000 tonnes in November and 1 million tonnes after that. #MaritimeAnalytics #Diesel #CargoTracking

— Energy Aspects (@EnergyAspects) October 23, 2026

Further deliveries would continue on a regular basis, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the day, confirming that the first tanker had departed for its buyers but not identifying the vessel.

BREAKING: We have now identified three tankers carrying Russian #diesel to the United States. All three loaded at petroleum berths in Russia and are declaring USA as their destination. Diesel is the only known hydrocarbon which the US OFAC currently permits imports of from Russia. #OOTT

— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) October 23, 2026

Maritime tracking groups identified one of the tankers as the Malta-flagged Agioi Fanendes, carrying approximately 40,000 tons of diesel. Reuters reported that the vessel had departed Russia’s Baltic port of Primorsk and was heading toward New York, with an initial estimated arrival date of November 7.

The deliveries follow an October 9 phone conversation between Putin and Trump, after which the American president announced that Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, another million tons shortly thereafter, and potentially further shipments depending on refining capacity. Washington subsequently issued a temporary sanctions waiver permitting Russian diesel imports, reversing restrictions introduced under former US President Joe Biden in 2022.

Trump has repeatedly urged Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to stop attacking Russian refineries, accusing Kiev of exacerbating the worldwide diesel shortage and hurting American consumers and farmers.

Zelensky rejected the criticism on Thursday, calling Trump’s claims “totally false” and accusing the American leader of “deflecting the focus away from Iran.”

US President Donald Trump made “totally false” statements when he blamed rising diesel prices in America on Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, Vladimir Zelensky has claimed, accusing him of “deflecting the focus away from Iran.”

Zelensky’s remarks came amid a growing spat with Trump, who has repeatedly accused Kiev of exacerbating the global energy crisis with continued attacks on Russian oil infrastructure.

Russia has historically been the world’s second-largest exporter of diesel fuel, behind only the United States, accounting for roughly 10% of global exports.

Disruptions to Russian supplies have tightened the global market, driving up prices even in countries that do not directly import fuel from Russia, including the US.

“The volume of diesel exports is so negligible from Russia that it has zero impact on prices in the US. That is totally false information,” the Ukrainian leader claimed during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast on Thursday.

Zelensky accused Trump of unfairly “deflecting the focus away from Iran” and lamented that “everything gets shifted onto us and I’m made the target as the leader of our country.”

According to Zelensky, “the root of the problem” lies in the Strait of Hormuz, where crude exports and other maritime traffic have dwindled to a trickle following the start of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran in February.

Earlier this month, Zelensky similarly hit out at what he described as a “weak decision” by the Trump administration after Washington temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel exports to ease the global fuel crisis.

Washington struck the deal with Moscow after Zelensky had repeatedly ignored Trump’s requests to stop strikes on Russian refineries. “We said, you can do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit the refineries, because that’s a world problem that’s caused,” the US president recounted earlier this month.

“And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel,” Trump lamented, accusing Zelensky of wanting to “make problems for the world.”

Trump also said he found it more difficult to deal with Zelensky than with Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting that Ukraine should get a new leader who would not obstruct Washington’s mediation efforts.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that Zelensky was directly challenging Trump by refusing to accept a deal aimed at easing the global diesel shortage.

In recent months, Ukraine has ramped up long-range strikes on targets inside Russia, including civilian and energy infrastructure, amid continued setbacks at the front. Moscow has denounced the attacks as acts of terrorism and responded with strikes on military-related Ukrainian facilities.

‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.

The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.

Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.

To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.

What was Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office. 

Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.

SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.

What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?

How did this become a scandal?  

Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.

Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.

Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?

“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.

AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.

I wrote this in Nov 2017. Days after FBI revealed multiple strands of Trump-Russia investigation ran through London & I pulled them apart further. It was also when the attacks against me began in earnest. From Cambridge Analytica, LeaveEU & Russian govt 1/ https://t.co/YQB5slJhe8

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 25, 2022

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Has Facebook been punished?

At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.

Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.” 

However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.

In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.

In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.

Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.

Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.

Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.

What about Brexit?

Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.

Is Zuckerberg in the clear?

The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.

woah, it gets worse. In the Meta securities lawsuit for Cambridge Analytica cover-up, plaintiffs just posted deposition list. If they have the courage to 'go to the mat' (as Zuckerberg says) like New Mexico AG has done for over $25B, this could be very, very bad for Team Zuck. 1/3

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) October 22, 2026

Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.

French President Emmanuel Macron has described a deadly shooting near Paris as the country’s first “racist terrorist attack,” appearing to overlook decades of Islamist terrorism, including the deliberate targeting and murder of Christians and Jews.

A gunman opened fire from a car in Trappes and neighboring La Verriere on Friday morning, killing 26-year-old aspiring MMA fighter Pengo Bossio Wangi and injuring five others, including a 12-year-old girl who was shot eight times. Other victims reportedly included a woman wearing a headscarf, a man of North African origin and two school cleaners of African origin.

The suspect, identified as 39-year-old Kevin T., was arrested after a shooting spree lasting approximately 15 minutes. Police recovered a submachine gun from his vehicle and discovered three gas cylinders wired to a timer in his apartment. He reportedly had 13 previous criminal-record entries but was not on a terrorism watchlist.

Visiting Trappes on Friday evening, Macron declared the shooting a historic “turning point” for France.

“This is the first time there has been a terrorist act aimed at killing our compatriots and our children for the color of their skin or what their religion is thought to be,” he claimed. Macron also alleged that the suspect deliberately spared certain people because of their skin color, citing statements allegedly made after his arrest.

In March 2012, Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah murdered a rabbi and three Jewish children at a school in Toulouse. In January 2015, ISIS-linked terrorist Amedy Coulibaly stormed a kosher supermarket in Paris, killing four Jewish hostages.

Christians have also been targeted. In 2016, two ISIS terrorists slit the throat of 85-year-old Catholic priest Jacques Hamel during Mass at a church in Normandy. In 2020, a Tunisian Islamist attacker murdered three people inside the Notre Dame basilica in Nice, beheading one woman.

Jihadists have also attacked broader symbols of French secular society. In November 2015, ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in coordinated attacks across Paris, including 90 concertgoers at the Bataclan music venue. In 2020, an Islamist extremist beheaded schoolteacher Samuel Paty for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on freedom of expression.

Following the backlash, the Elysee sought to clarify Macron’s remarks, telling TF1 that he had specifically meant the first racist terrorist attack motivated by skin color, despite his explicit reference to religion.

The Trappes shooting has also intensified political tensions ahead of next year’s presidential election. Communist presidential candidate Fabien Roussel accused the far right of spreading “racist hatred,” while National Rally leader Marine Le Pen condemned the shooting and its “abject motive of racism.”

France’s anti-terrorism prosecutors have opened an investigation into suspected terrorist murder with a racist motive. The suspect’s precise ideological affiliations remain under investigation.

At least seven people have been killed and some 34 others wounded in a terrorist attack on a Greek Orthodox church in Jordan. The authorities have described the suspects as “extremists” who fled the scene and are still on the loose.

The slaughter unfolded on Friday afternoon in the village of Hmoud in western Karak Governorate, which is home to a sizable Christian community in the majority-Muslim country.

A group of at least three assailants arrived at the local St. George’s Church, where a funeral ceremony was underway. The gunmen attacked the mourners, with the shooting reportedly lasting for about 15 minutes before the suspects drove away from the scene unhindered. No group has claimed responsibility.

CCTV footage from the scene shows the attackers, two of whom were armed with handguns and the third with an assault rifle, firing at people desperately trying to flee the scene, tripping over pews and each other in the process. Highly graphic footage shows the suspects repeatedly shooting wounded victims in the head as they lay on the ground, apparently to finish them off.

Jordanian King Abdullah II has vowed to “confront the terrorist act that targeted Karak with the harshest penalties.” The country’s interior minister, Mazen al-Faraya, confirmed during a news conference that the suspects still remain at large, describing the attackers as a “group of extremists” without providing any further detail. 

The massacre has prompted a major response from the authorities, with Hmoud flooded by assorted security forces. Tightened security measures have also been implemented in the city of Karak, where the bulk of the wounded were transferred for treatment.

The king visited the victims at a hospital later on Friday to show support, promising to punish the perpetrators. Abdullah could be seen arriving at the facility in a military field uniform, accompanied by a large security detail.

Serbia is heading into a snap parliamentary election on October 25 following nearly two years of anti-government protests sparked by a deadly railway station canopy collapse.

Former Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is running for prime minister against a fragmented opposition seeking to capitalize on the protest movement. The result could reshape Serbia’s political landscape and its delicate balancing act between Russia and the EU.

What is Serbia voting for, and why does it matter?

Voters will elect 250 members of the National Assembly, with 126 seats needed for a majority. A total of 18 electoral lists, comprising 2,418 candidates, are contesting the election, including the ruling coalition, student-backed candidates, established opposition parties and representatives of national minorities.

The vote will test whether the protest movement can challenge the ruling coalition at the ballot box.

What led to the snap election?

The crisis began after a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed on November 1, 2024, killing 16 people. Protesters blamed the disaster on alleged corruption and failures of government oversight.

Demonstrations intensified after students and lecturers involved in a vigil commemorating the disaster at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts on November 22, 2024 blocked traffic, prompting drivers to clash with the crowd; some of the motorists were later identified from photos posted online as Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) officials.

Students began blockading university faculties, demanding the release of documents relating to the station’s renovation, accountability for attacks on protesters, an end to the prosecution of detained demonstrators and increased funding for public universities.

Serbian Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned in January 2025 following another attack on students, but the protests continued. A major rally in Belgrade on March 15 attracted an estimated 275,000 to 325,000 people, according to the organization Arhiv javnih skupova.

Parliament elected a government headed by Djuro Macut in April, but the student movement demanded snap elections on May 5.

Vucic has accused foreign organizations and intelligence services of financing the protests, alleging on Thursday that outside actors were seeking to remove him from power.

Serbia was the victim of perhaps Europe’s first ‘color revolution’ in 2000, when the opposition, having received extensive funding and training from the National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI), and USAID, as well as support from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (operating in 2000 as the Fund for an Open Society – Yugoslavia), brought down the government.

Has Vucic lost power, or is he trying to hold on to it?

Vucic resigned as president on September 27, saying he intended to campaign in the parliamentary election without holding the presidency.

He now heads the ruling coalition’s electoral list and is running for prime minister.

Who is running, and who could form a government?

The ruling camp is led by the ‘Aleksandar Vucic – United Serbia’ coalition, built around the SNS. Its longstanding partner, Ivica Dacic’s Socialist Party of Serbia, is running separately under the ‘Factor of Stability’ banner.

The main challenger is the ‘Student List – Students Are Winning,’ which emerged from the protests and includes lecturers, professionals and public figures.

Marinika Tepic and Zdravko Ponos’s ‘European Serbia’ and Milos Jovanovic’s ‘Authentic Right’ are also running independently. Some opposition groups have backed the students rather than fielding their own candidates.

The latest opinion polls offer conflicting assessments of support for the two main contenders.

An Ipsos survey published on October 22 put Vucic’s coalition at 47.4%, compared with 40% for the Student List and 3.2% for Dacic’s Socialists. The poll surveyed 3,624 respondents between October 20 and 22.

Latest Serbia Ipsos Poll modelled out 🔵SNS: 125 seats 🔴STU: 105 seats ❤️SPS: 8 seats 🟦NADA: 0 seats 🟢SVM: 6 seats 💚SDAS: 2 seats 💠SPP: 2 seats 🔹KSLP: 1 seat 🟤RUS: 1 seat 🔵SNS largest party, 1 short of a majority https://t.co/9pjH9MA8Ts

— Poliwave Europe (@PoliwaveEU) October 22, 2026

A survey published on October 20 by Nova srpska politicka misao (NSPM) instead gave the Student List 44.5% and Vucic’s coalition 42.7% among decided respondents. The telephone survey of 1,050 people was conducted between September 25 and October 5.

Serbia, NSPM poll: Student list-*: 45% (+5) SNS+-EPP: 43% (+5) SPS/JS~S&D: 3% (-2) ES-S&D: 3% (-1) NADA~ECR: 3% (+1) +/- vs. July 2026 Fieldwork: 25 September - 05 October 2026 Sample size: 1,050 ➤ https://t.co/ekzxpjD9df https://t.co/9EKrcxnWOe

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) October 20, 2026

An online survey published by Nacija TV on October 21 showed a much narrower gap, with Vucic’s coalition at 42.9% and the Student List at 42%. The poll surveyed 1,204 respondents between October 16 and 18.

An earlier Faktor Plus survey, published on September 21, put Vucic’s coalition at 48.6% and the Student List at 37.1%, based on 986 respondents interviewed between September 16 and 20.

National minority and smaller parties could become important in coalition negotiations if no major group wins a majority.

What unites the opposition, and what divides it?

The groups challenging Vucic differ on key foreign policy issues, particularly relations with the EU, NATO, and Russia.

The Student List has said it would maintain Serbia’s refusal to impose sanctions on Moscow. Its representative Jovo Bakic has proposed a referendum on EU membership and opposed joining NATO.

European Serbia supports alignment with EU foreign policy, including sanctions against Russia, a position advocated by Tepic.

Jovanovic opposes EU membership and sanctions against Moscow, while Socialist representative Snezana Paunovic supports EU accession but has criticized the bloc’s current policies.

Territorial tensions: Where do the parties stand on Kosovo and Republika Srpska?

Kosovo remains one of Serbia’s most sensitive political issues. The province declared independence in 2008, a move recognized by the US and many of its allies. Belgrade still considers Kosovo part of Serbia, as do Russia and China, and some 90 other countries.

The declaration followed NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, conducted without authorization from the UN Security Council. Belgrade’s relations with the ethnic Albanian-led authorities in Pristina remain tense.

The Student List has also rejected recognizing the so-called Kosovo precedent. In a memorandum published in May, it described Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia and called for a negotiated settlement in accordance with the Serbian Constitution and international law.

Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority constituent entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose autonomy is guaranteed under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, is another touchstone.

Vucic has maintained close ties with its leadership while supporting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territorial integrity. Former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik has openly backed Vucic’s coalition, urging Serbian citizens living there to vote for it.

The Student List has sought support among Serbian voters in Republika Srpska but has not outlined a comparably detailed policy toward the entity. Some Bosnian Serb opposition politicians have backed the students, while others have refused to take sides.

Belgrade and Brussels: The beatings will continue

Serbia applied to join the EU in 2009 and received candidate status in 2012. Accession negotiations began in 2014, but no new negotiating chapters or clusters have been opened since 2021.

Brussels has made further progress toward EU membership conditional on the normalization of relations with Kosovo and alignment with the bloc’s foreign policy, including sanctions against Russia, as well as other judicial, media, and governmental reforms.

Serbia’s accession process has remained stalled while other candidates have moved forward. In July, eight EU member states opposed advancing talks with Belgrade, while Montenegro, Albania, Ukraine, and Moldova have made progress toward membership.

Vucic has expressed frustration with the slow pace of EU enlargement, warning in July that candidate countries should not expect major breakthroughs in the coming years.

Kos has also warned against allowing prospective EU members to develop dependencies on outside powers that could conflict with the bloc’s interests.

“We should not risk our future members building dependencies on others that run counter to our long-term interest,” she said.

The commissioner identified Russia as an adversary in the enlargement process and criticized the influence of US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement on European politics.

Vucic has maintained that Serbia intends to pursue EU membership while preserving its independent foreign policy.

What makes the ties between Serbia and Russia so strong?

Serbia and Russia share longstanding historical and cultural ties, reinforced by their Orthodox Christian traditions and Slavic heritage.

Relations were further shaped by NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, which Moscow strongly opposed. Russia has since backed Belgrade’s position on Kosovo at the UN Security Council and refused to recognize the province’s independence.

Under Vucic, Serbia has maintained diplomatic and economic cooperation with Moscow while refusing to join Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict.

In an interview with Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak published on Tuesday, Vucic said European leaders regularly pressed him on the issue.

”We are not sitting on two chairs; our only chair is Serbia,” he said.

Do Russia and Serbia have an energy deal?

Energy remains central to the relationship. On September 30, Russia’s Gazprom extended its gas supply agreement with Serbia for another three months, until December 31, on unchanged terms, according to Srbijagas CEO Dusan Bajatovic.

Following talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, Vucic said Serbia was paying around €318 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, compared with a market price of approximately €868 at the time.

The latest extension secures supplies through the beginning of winter but leaves arrangements for 2027 unresolved.

The future of NIS, which operates Serbia’s only oil refinery, also remains uncertain following US sanctions over its Russian majority ownership. Hungarian oil and gas company MOL has been negotiating the purchase of the Russian stake.

Where would each party take Serbia if they win?

Vucic has emphasized his determination to preserve Serbia’s sovereignty and keep the country out of a war with Russia, which he said he believes the EU is preparing for.

”I do not want Serbia to be part of that war, and I would not allow Serbia to be part of that war,” he said in an interview with TV Prva on Wednesday.

He accused Western governments of seeking to install politicians who would follow their instructions.

How could the election affect relations with Moscow?

The next Serbian government will face decisions on future Russian gas supplies, the ownership of NIS, and the country’s military exports.

Russian observers will monitor the election at Serbia’s invitation, according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The delegation will include representatives of both chambers of the Russian parliament and the Central Election Commission, with Russian officials also participating in international monitoring missions.

Moscow has said it hopes to maintain close ties with Belgrade after the election. Zakharova described the relationship as rooted in “strong fraternal traditions, a shared worldview, and respect for genuine values.”

She added that “continuity in these ties will serve the national interests of both countries and help strengthen peace and stability in the Balkans.”

Witkoff returns to Russia

US envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in St. Petersburg on Wednesday to present a new set of peace proposals to Russian President Vladimir Putin. As was the case in every round of talks so far, Moscow found little to agree with in the terms put forward by Kiev and its European backers, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told reporters afterwards. 

That the US would even consider meeting with Putin rubbed the Europeans the wrong way. Speaking after Witkoff met Zelensky in Oslo on Tuesday, EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas accused US President Donald Trump and his envoys of “trying to push Ukraine into surrender.”

Kallas is in an unenviable position. Trump has proven able and willing to negotiate with Putin above the Europeans’ heads, as he did when he waived sanctions on Russian diesel. Faced with the prospect of being cut out of an eventual peace deal, the EU is reportedly searching for an envoy to represent Brussels’ interests at the negotiating table. As anti-Russia hardliners, Kallas and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have essentially ruled themselves out; French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are drowning in domestic turmoil and watching their legitimacy collapse in real time; and the supposed ‘compromise candidate’ trumpeted by EU media, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, is a potentially toxic choice.

EU leaders, Putin remarked on Thursday, suffer from “a kind of political schizophrenia.” The Europeans “now go so far as to constantly speak of a ‘Russian threat’ and even discuss preparations for a war with Russia” against the will of their citizens, he explained. “They will hopefully realize that it is better to live in harmony with Russia – a path that truly serves the interests of their own peoples.”

The only European official present at the St. Petersburg meeting was von der Leyen’s chief of staff, Bjorn Seibert.

Zelensky scorned again

Zelensky signaled his disapproval with the Witkoff-Putin meeting in as clear a manner as possible; firing drones at St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad Region. His own meeting with Witkoff in Oslo didn’t go so well either. The New York Times reported that the US envoy “reproached Zelensky for his sharp responses” to Trump’s recent assertion that Zelensky “doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and “should have this war settled a long time ago.” Zelensky spent the rest of the week trying to dress up a ceasefire as a new idea that hadn’t been discounted dozens of times already by Moscow.

The deepening rift between Kiev and Washington is one of multiple diplomatic crises facing Zelensky. 

South Korea pulled diplomats from the Ukrainian capital over Ukraine’s refusal to apologize for exposing the secret transfer of North Korean POWs to Seoul, a move that the South Koreans warned could endanger the POWs’ relatives in North Korea and undermine stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) confirmed on Wednesday that it is investigating National Bank of Ukraine chief Andrey Pyshny in a graft probe reportedly aimed at Zelensky’s inner circle. One day earlier, NABU accused Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency of stealing $5 million by purchasing drones at inflated prices.

RT has covered the rampant graft in Kiev extensively in our ‘State of Corruption’ series, which you can read here. 

France fails

Just as corruption has come to define Zelensky’s Ukraine, the fiery collapse of the social contract now defines the closing stages of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France. After mass protests over rising prices and deteriorating social conditions degenerated into riots last week, almost 3,000 people were arrested this week as violent unrest continued to plague the streets of French cities.

Macron has refused to accept that his migration policies may be to blame for the riots, which Trump claimed are being led by “migrants, jihadists, and communists.” His government has also refused to change course on an austerity budget that will do little to alleviate the protesters’ economic concerns.

Instead, the French president has ordered military personnel into the streets, banned “illegitimate” protests, and imposed localized curfews. Whether he can count on the police to enforce these measures for much longer is unclear: France’s largest police union said on Thursday that it intends to sue the French state for creating the conditions that led to the riots, and leaving officers “betrayed and abandoned” to handle the violence without adequate training or protection. 

The EU’s Cold War in the Arctic

The Starlink wars return

The EU and its member states may be Ukraine’s leading backers, but the US provides Zelensky with something that the Europeans don’t have: access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. Ukraine depends on Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade version, to guide its drones, connect to NATO headquarters, and receive real-time updates from Palantir’s battlefield management software.

As long as this dependence exists, the US holds a powerful instrument of leverage over Zelensky. While nobody in SpaceX or the US government has taken responsibility for throttling Ukraine’s access to the network earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal claimed this week that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk – who has condemned Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian oil refineries – personally ordered that the Ukrainian military’s access to the network be restricted.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied that the government played any role in the slowdown, saying that “it sort of happened” accidentally. However, a turn of phrase by Rubio suggested that the connection problems may have been deliberate, and intended as a warning to Zelensky: “Ukraine,” he said on Wednesday, “would not exist as a sovereign state” without US support.

Moscow is well aware that Kiev uses Starlink to strike civilian targets as well as military ones. Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed this week that two of the seven drones that struck a female dormitory at a college in Starobelsk in May – killing 21 people – were guided by SpaceX’s network. As long as Kiev continues to use this system, it remains a potential source of escalation between Russia and the US.

What we’re watching

We’re keeping a close eye on three consequential elections over the coming days, starting on Sunday with a presidential election in Brazil and parliamentary elections in Serbia. The showdown between Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro is an intensely personal battle between two bitter rivals, with the potential to pull another Latin American nation into the orbit of the US and reshape the future of the BRICS group. 

In Serbia, former President Aleksandar Vucic is now running for prime minister, in a snap election pitting his ruling coalition against a new political faction put together by the organizers of anti-government protests raging in Serbia since 2024. Vucic’s coalition has a narrow lead, but accusations of foreign interference are flying, and we’ll know by Monday whether Vucic’s gambit paid off.

Few world leaders have been as consequential as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perennially on the verge of prosecution over multiple corruption scandals and facing mass protests, Netanyahu’s political fortunes changed with Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel in 2023. Three years later, Netanyahu has managed to achieve almost all of his war aims – leveling Gaza, diminishing Hezbollah in Lebanon, neutering Syria, and leading the US into war with Iran. 

However, with the Iran war stalled and Netanyahu offering no plan for a post-conflict Gaza, dissent has returned, and polls suggest that his right-wing coalition will fall up to 10 seats short of the 61 needed to govern. The closing of polls on Tuesday night may signal the start of a lengthy process of political horse-trading, with Netanyahu’s future no clearer than it is now.

For more on these stories as they develop, stick with RT.

Former BBC Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood has appeared in a London court on two additional sex offense charges, British media reported on Friday.

The 69-year-old faces a total of 17 charges involving nine women, including allegations of rape and sexual assault. The alleged offenses span more than three decades, from 1983 to 2016.

The two additional charges were announced by London’s Metropolitan Police in September. They concern the alleged indecent assault of a girl aged 16 or 17 in west London in 1991 and the alleged sexual assault of an 18-year-old woman in south London in 2004.

Former Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood in court charged with two further offences https://t.co/1OAT99G8aq

— ITV News (@itvnews) October 23, 2026

During Friday’s hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Westwood indicated that he would plead not guilty to both charges, according to court officials cited by British media. He has already pleaded not guilty to the original 15 charges, including four counts of rape.

Among the earlier allegations is the rape of a woman in a hotel in 1996. Westwood is also accused of several indecent assaults on BBC premises during the 1990s, as well as sexual offenses at other locations in London and elsewhere in England.

Westwood was one of Britain’s best-known hip-hop DJs, working for BBC Radio 1 and Radio 1Xtra between 1994 and 2013.

In February 2025, the BBC apologized after an independent investigation found evidence of bullying and misogynistic behavior by Westwood. The broadcaster admitted it had been “too deferential to high-profile individuals” and missed opportunities to address complaints about his conduct.

The main theme of the Russia-Ukraine conflict this year has been the so-called ‘war of cities’, characterized by mutual strategic strikes on targets in the rear. In the first half of the year, Kiev had managed to bolster its strike capabilities and even attempted to pressure Moscow into accepting its terms for a ceasefire.

However, by fall, the situation shifted dramatically. Russia began deploying new jet-powered drones, such as Banderol and Geran-4/Geran-5 UAVs, and significantly increased the intensity of its ballistic strikes. Meanwhile, Ukraine has exhausted its stocks of Western-supplied interceptor missiles, and its own domestically produced air defense systems have proven ineffective against high-speed jet-powered UAVs and ballistic missiles. 

We will examine the specific targets that Russia has struck in Ukraine’s rear, and the rationale behind these attacks. We’ll also take a look at the targets it deliberately avoids, along with measures taken to minimize risks to Ukrainian civilians.

Industrial enterprises

In the early years of the military operation, Russia targeted Ukraine’s defense industry facilities – both old Soviet plants like Yuzhmash in Dnepropetrovsk and new, smaller enterprises focused on drone assembly and munitions production.

In response, Ukraine began relocating and dispersing production to any available industrial facilities or even warehouses. This strategy was openly discussed in Ukrainian propaganda as a crucial element of resilience against Russian assaults.

As Russia increased its striking capabilities, it adopted a broader approach, targeting all industrial facilities based on a straightforward principle: if a facility can be used for drone assembly, it qualifies as a legitimate military target.

Ammunition depots

Soviet military doctrine emphasized storing ammunition in centralized depots far from residential areas. Munitions were kept in shelters designed in such a way that the destruction of one would not affect the others.

One of the largest such depots, the 65th Rocket and Artillery Arsenal in Balakleya, sustained damage from a series of explosions even before the military operation. Control over it was handed from one side to another multiple times. It still contains tens of thousands of tons of expired munitions, which have been repurposed for use in attack drones.

The situation mirrors that of the industrial sector. In order protect ammunition from airstrikes, it is moved out of the isolated weapons depots and hidden in any available facilities. Western missiles are transported from Poland to these locations as well.

The consequences of this approach are dire: an attack leads to the detonation of ammunition, gravely endangering the surrounding residential areas. On August 29, 2026, a strike on a warehouse operated by Fire Point in the village of Milaya resulted in the death of 38 civilians.

Logistics networks

Lacking a proper military supply system, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have relied on civilian infrastructure for military logistics since the ATO in Donbass in 2014-15. A key player in this strategy has been the courier service Novaya Pochta. This approach was touted as innovative – modern, cost-effective, and efficient – and gained traction not only in Ukraine but also in Russia.

However, there are two sides to every coin. From the start of the war, Russia has targeted Novaya Pochta warehouses, and in 2026, it began systematically destroying them. In addition to Novaya Pochta, major retail and marketplace chains like Epicentr and Rozetka also came under fire, followed by other logistics companies in Ukraine.

Russia’s reasoning is straightforward: if Ukraine employs civilian infrastructure for military purposes, then all such facilities become legitimate military targets.

Energy sector

Electricity forms the backbone of any support system. Without it, production halts, communication falters, and supplying the army becomes increasingly difficult. Based on this logic, since 2022, the Russian military has systematically targeted Ukraine’s electricity generation, reducing its capacity from 50-55 GW before the war to just 12-15 GW during the winter of 2025-26.

Simultaneously, energy consumption in Ukraine declined; heavy industry ground to a halt, rolling blackouts were implemented, and some consumers turned to autonomous power sources like generators. Consequently, Ukraine transformed from Europe’s largest electricity exporter to an importer.

At the core of Ukraine’s generation capacity are three nuclear power plants, which, for obvious reasons, remain untouched by Russian attacks. Instead, this fall, Russian forces have focused on electrical networks, targeting distribution substations and transmission lines. For example, one of the two power line crossings over the Dnieper River in Kiev was destroyed, significantly hampering power supplied not only to Kiev, but to the entire territory of eastern Ukraine.

Attacks on Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants – which generate both electricity and heat – continue as well. The goal isn’t to freeze the residents of Kiev, but to dismantle Ukraine’s unified energy system, breaking it into isolated segments that can be dealt with individually.

Oil and gas industry

Before the war, Ukraine had only one operational oil refinery in Kremenchuk, which had been running at about 15% capacity since 2014. Since 2022, it has faced relentless attacks and has completely ceased operations. Now, Ukraine relies entirely on imported fuel.

Ukrainian gas production facilities across the country and in the Black Sea are regularly attacked. The latest attacks occurred on October 12 in Kharkov Region. 

Another target is the underground gas storage facility in Stryi, located in western Ukraine. One of the largest such facilities in the world, it was part of a vast gas transportation system from Russia to Europe and is currently not used for its original purpose. This facility is a challenging target; while drone strikes can damage surface infrastructure (which is relatively easy to repair), even a nuclear explosion might not destroy the storage facility itself. 

In the absence of better targets, this summer, Russia specifically targeted gas stations in both frontline areas and Kiev. The goal was to disrupt military logistics. Reports estimate that over 200 gas stations were destroyed nationwide during the summer months.

Data centers

Until this fall, Russia refrained from striking Ukrainian data centers. However, these facilities are as integral to military infrastructure as any other component; they facilitate troop command, communications, and logistics management. They support critical Ukrainian systems like Obereg and Rezerv+ recruitment centers, the electronic procurement platform Prozorro, and the Diia Unified State Web Portal of Electronic Services. Disrupting these systems would undoubtedly undermine Ukraine’s military operations.

In the past month, Russia has targeted various data centers, including Bi-Mobile in Kiev, De Novo Data Center, NewTelco, United DC, as well as Kievstar, Parkovy, and Vodafone telecommunications centers. 

Despite these disruptions, the unified digital environment of Ukraine remains largely intact. In response, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) struck several Yandex data centers in Russia.

In this ‘war of cities’, the fate of data centers and the resilience of communication networks are being monitored particularly closely worldwide, with many countries considering the security of their own networks. 

Ports and maritime traffic

Up until this year, Russia had largely turned a blind eye to Ukraine’s maritime trade. Despite intermittent attacks on warehouses, the Black Sea ports in Odessa, Illichevsk, and the Danube ports of Izmail and Reni continued their operations, exporting local grain and metal while importing fuel, heavy machinery, and, of course, weapons.

However, in the spring and summer of this year, Ukrainian naval and aerial drones systematically began targeting Russian maritime traffic in the Black Sea, striking everything from tankers to bulk carriers laden with grain. In retaliation, Russia quickly imposed a complete maritime blockade on Ukraine, implementing it in its most severe form – attacks were directed not only at the ports but also at commercial vessels approaching or leaving them.

From a legal standpoint, all commercial vessels capable of transporting weapons or troops are considered by Russia as legitimate military targets. The same universal logic applies here – if a ship can carry weapons, it is a target. 

These strikes have been incredibly painful for Ukraine. Without the ability to export goods over land, the country has effectively lost crucial revenue streams and one of its last remaining sources of budgetary funding. Additionally, there have been disruptions in the supply of transformers, fuel, and, according to certain reports, heavy weaponry – all of which were transported by sea.

According to several experts, this maritime blockade threatens to cost Ukraine up to 10% of its GDP.

Other targets

In addition to the aforementioned categories, Russia is attacking a wide range of military and dual-use targets.

Locomotives: Since the start of the Russia's military operation, over 300 mainline diesel and electric locomotives have been rendered inoperable. With the number of remaining working locomotives decreasing, the transportation capacity of the railways is nearing exhaustion. Both railway depots and trains are being attacked.

Trucks: The AFU takes pride in how they’ve adapted civilian trucks for launching long-range drones. However, this makes any cargo truck a legitimate military target for Russia and has led to the destruction of dozens of such launch platforms, which are tracked through intelligence efforts.

Bridges: Major bridges are undoubtedly attractive strategic targets, but they are also difficult to destroy. There are currently 22 crossings over the Dnieper River, and none have yet been destroyed by long-range strikes. In the past month, there have been multiple attacks on bridges in Kiev, but so far, they continue to operate. 

Land border crossings with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania are another bottleneck in Ukraine’s transportation logistics. To safeguard the border crossings from ongoing attacks, the authorities have begun relocating them entirely to neighboring territories.

Lastly, there are a few specific targets mentioned in intelligence reports. For example, on July 24, Russian forces bombed a weapons exhibition near Kiev attended by prominent figures from Ukraine’s defense sector.

What targets doesn’t Russia strike?

Russia has refrained from targeting civilian and humanitarian facilities such as residential buildings, hospitals, and schools. Hits on these types of structures are often due to the operation of air defense systems. The structures are sometimes struck by debris from intercepted missiles and drones, or even accidentally struck by interceptor missiles. Russian officials maintain that the strike on the Okhmatdet hospital in Kiev on July 12, 2024, was caused by an interceptor missile launched from the Norwegian-supplied NASAMS system. 

Water supply and sewage facilities are not attacked by Russian forces. Throughout the conflict, there have been no recorded strikes on this critical infrastructure. However, during attacks on Kiev and other major cities, water outages frequently occur, indicating that backup generators at vital infrastructure sites are not operational.

Observers are particularly surprised by the immunity of the government district in Kiev, leading to jokes about it being the safest place in Ukraine. This could suggest some kind of behind-the-scenes agreements.

Overall, even Ukrainian and Western analysts acknowledge that Russia continually enhances the accuracy of its strikes while improving its management, guidance, and navigation systems. Russia has established a communication network for drones using mesh networks and has developed and implemented the Susanin optical navigation system, which provides 1-meter strike accuracy even in conditions of heavy electronic interference.

If Russia’s ultimate goal were to terrorize the civilian population, there would be no need to develop such complex and expensive systems. It could simply fire indiscriminately at Kiev. But with such an approach, there would’ve been tens of thousands of civilian casualties – one may consider the example of Gaza. 

Currently, in Kiev, as well as in other rear cities across Ukraine, estimates indicate that up to 95% of residents disregard air raid warnings and remain above ground during alerts. Moreover, local authorities have eased air raid protocols to keep the city functioning. 

Cut through the corporate damage-control flimflam – ‘technical’ issues and ‘mistakes’ but no politics, they say – and the Oversight Board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has just had to deny but really admit that its platforms have been caught trying to influence Brazil’s upcoming presidential elections.

In essence, they have favored the challenger and US favorite Flavio Bolsonaro, commonly referred to as ‘Flavio’ in Brazil, and harmed the incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, usually called ‘Lula’.

Meta, to be clear, hasn’t (sort of) fessed up because Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth has suddenly discovered a conscience. Instead, it was pressure from Brazilian investigative reporting that forced the company’s hand.

Whatever effect the American meddling will have on the election result, one thing is already certain: It has made the contest and the fierce political struggle behind it even more polarized than before. A few days before the decisive and very close final round, Lula and Flavio are trying to have each other excluded from the election; when dealing with a badly divided country, just leave it to Washington to make everything even more vicious.

The crude attack on Brazil’s electoral integrity is anything but a surprise. Historically speaking, it’s the bad old normal rejigged for the social-media age. In Brazil, as throughout Latin America, the US has a long history of brutally intervening in domestic politics, featuring highlights such as a full-blown coup in 1964 and massive subversion by a lawfare-spying-propaganda campaign in the 2010’s.

Brazil’s post-coup dictatorship was no short intermission either. It ended only in 1985. Washington to Brasilia: Regime change plus two decades of military rule – that’s what you get for not knowing your place in our backyard.

And the lawfare-spying-propaganda campaign of the 2010s – in part disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden – targeted and removed two Brazilian presidents. One of them, Lula, even ended up in prison, before his convictions were annulled in 2021.

Yet, while there is a long, sad history of American attacks on Brazilian democracy and sovereignty, the stakes are especially high now, perhaps as high as they have not been since the 1964 coup. For one thing, the choice Brazil’s voters are facing is stark: Flavio Bolsonaro, the favorite not only of the US but Donald Trump personally, stands for the Bolsonaro family empire itching to strike back. His father Jair Bolsonaro is currently doing time for trying to instigate a coup. If his son comes to power, Brazil will face a great, dirty settling of scores and severe danger of sliding into authoritarianism again.

Politically, Lula and Bolsonaro Jr. could not be more different: Lula is on the left; Flavio – like his father – very solidly on the right. More importantly, the rivals represent diametrically opposed ideas of Brazil’s place in the world. Brazil is not only an important G20 member, but Lula belongs to the founding generation of BRICS and is a proponent of the rising multipolar world order in general. He demands reform at the UN, especially its Security Council, and openly challenges the predominance of the US dollar, arguing for alternatives for payments, investments, and reserves.

Lula has also castigated Israel’s genocide in Gaza and compared it with the Nazi Holocaust, for which Israel has declared him persona non grata, while Brazil has joined South Africa at the International Court in accusing Israel of genocide.

The only other country cherished with equal fervor by the whole Bolsonaro family is – surprise, surprise – Israel. Go to a Bolsonaro rally and you are likely to see three flags: Brazil’s, that of the US, and of Israel.

And then there is China. Due to its demographic and territorial heft, its location, and its rich agricultural and industrial resources, Brazil is the prime prize in Washington’s dialing up to 11 of its traditional backyard colonialism. Lula has not only been bold enough to openly call it out but to declare that his country will never be a US colony when defying a typically Trumpian tariff attack.

What is worse from Washington’s perspective, he has worked hard to increase Brazil’s resilience by seeking connections beyond Latin America and especially with China. Beijing has been Brasilia’s main economic partner since 2009, with their trade volume reaching a record $171 billion last year. Brazilian exports to China exceed its combined exports to the US and the EU; and Brazil is now at the top of Chinese investment abroad.

The recent American de facto conquest of Venezuela was also a lesson in what Washington likes to do to those in its backyard daring to engage with America’s favorite hate object across the Pacific. But Brazil is no Venezuela; subduing it in one rapid cloak-and-dagger operation is impossible.

Yet the dark arts of interference have worked before. Recall that, in 1964, one of Joao Goulart’s unforgivable sins was to talk to China. By comparison, Lula’s determined policy of deep engagement with Beijing is off the American scale of intolerable rebelliousness. And for a reason: Without breaking Brazil once again, the continental cage the Donroe Doctrine is designed to rebuild sturdier than ever remains, at best, half-finished. And an unsubdued Brazil will always be an example of resistance.

The stakes could not be higher: sovereignty and, most likely, democracy itself for Brazil; strategic imperial triumph or failure for the US.

This article was first published on Substack

Anduril Industries CEO Palmer Luckey is working to clone and genetically engineer dogs for the American military, in a venture backed by the CIA and a biotech billionaire who plans on resurrecting prehistoric creatures.

Texas-based startup Warhound unveiled the project on Thursday, announcing $200 million in funding and a $1.2 billion valuation. The venture brings together Luckey, a major player in the burgeoning defense-tech sector, and Ben Lamm, whose biotechnology company has promised to revive the long-extinct wooly mammoth.

Warhound will be headed by David Spirk, the Pentagon’s first chief data officer and a former senior adviser at Palantir, a major US defense-tech company supplying AI and data analytics software to military and intelligence agencies. Its backers include In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture capital firm and one of Palantir’s first investors.

“This is the sci-fi future we were promised,” Lamm said, describing the prospect of producing genetically enhanced working dogs.

Despite its billion-dollar valuation, Warhound has yet to secure a customer or determine how much its genetically engineered dogs will cost. Luckey and Lamm are no strangers to hawking vaporware, however. As RT explored in our ‘Wired for War’ series, Anduril Industries – which is valued at $90 billion – has produced only two combat-tested weapons systems, which failed during US military trials and were rejected for use by the Ukrainian armed forces.

Lamm’s company, Colossal Biosciences, is valued at $10-12 billion. Although the company succeeded in birthing three extinct dire wolf puppies last year, it is unclear how long the pups will survive, and Lamm admitted in August that he would likely be unable to resurrect the wooly mammoth for at least another decade.

Luckey and Lamm plan to outfit their designer dogs with advanced body armor and sensors linked to Anduril’s battlefield awareness system, which unlike Palantir’s flagship ‘Gotham’ system, is still in its prototype stages. The company is reportedly considering a subscription-style model under which the Pentagon would pay for a continuous supply of trained animals rather than purchase them individually.

In 2019, Chinese scientists unveiled Kunxun, a cloned police dog produced from the genetic material of an animal renowned for its crime-solving abilities. The project aimed to reproduce elite working dogs while reducing training costs.

The push to engineer military animals raises ethical and welfare concerns. Animal cloning has been linked to pregnancy complications, developmental abnormalities, and health problems in newborns. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has documented such risks in livestock cloning, although healthy clones that survive their first weeks generally develop normally.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered a blockade of the occupied West Bank in the aftermath of a deadly shootout between IDF troops and two suspected Palestinian gunmen at a security checkpoint.

The incident unfolded on Friday in the southern West Bank at the temporary checkpoint at the Judea Junction on Route 35. An AFP photographer who witnessed the shootout reported the two Palestinian suspects armed with a handgun and an automatic rifle exchanged fire with Israeli soldiers. Five Israelis were wounded in the attack, with two servicemen succumbing to their wounds in hospital, while the gunmen were killed on the site of the shootout, which lasted more than 20 minutes, according to a preliminary Israeli military investigation.

The Israeli military described the incident as a thwarted “terror attack” without specifying the intended target of the suspects. Netanyahu vowed a “very extensive” retaliatory operation in the aftermath of the incident, announcing the demolition of the entire neighborhood the attackers come from and displacing its residents, as well as requesting the cancellation of all political meetings on October 23.

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir demanded even more severe retaliation, calling for the dissolution of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA). No evidence, however, has emerged thus far linking the PA to the incident.

“The Palestinian Authority must be dissolved and demilitarized, and all terrorist infrastructure must be completely wiped out,” Ben-Gvir, known for extremely hostile anti-Palestinian rhetoric and assorted controversial stunts, said.

The deadly shooting comes ahead of the high-stakes legislative election in Israel scheduled for October 27. The upcoming polls are the first voting to take place since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing Gaza war. The prolonged conflict has prompted repeated allegations against Netanyahu of deliberately dragging out the hostilities to keep his grip on power. The latest opinion polls put the incumbent PM in a tight race with Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the IDF, and the prospects of Netanyahu losing his post remain high.

Russia will retaliate against Austria for expelling four of its diplomats over alleged misconduct, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Dmitry Lyubinsky has said.

The warning follows Vienna’s decision to declare four Russian diplomats personae non gratae over alleged violations of diplomatic rules, without publicly presenting evidence of wrongdoing.

“A response will follow inevitably,” Lyubinsky told TASS on Friday. He did not specify what retaliatory measures Moscow could take.

Austria announced the expulsions earlier on Friday, citing findings by its security services. Three of the diplomats were stationed at the Russian Embassy in Vienna, while the fourth worked at Moscow’s delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), dealing with military security and arms control.

The Austrian Foreign Ministry accused the four of engaging in “activities incompatible with their diplomatic status” and ordered them to leave the country. It did not identify the diplomats or provide details of the alleged violations.

Austrian media have sought to link the expulsions to alleged Russian espionage, although Vienna has provided no public evidence to substantiate the claims. According to the magazine Profil, the country’s Defense Ministry circulated a warning to military personnel and reservists in August about supposed Russian intelligence operatives, complete with the names and photographs of 21 individuals.

The warning reportedly prompted a wave of reports about suspicious contacts, though their nature and credibility remain unclear. Profil also claimed that disagreements between Austria’s Defense and Foreign Ministries had delayed the expulsions. None of the allegations have been publicly substantiated, and no evidence directly implicating the four Russian diplomats in espionage has been presented.

Austria has expelled 18 Russian diplomats since 2020. Despite its longstanding military neutrality, Vienna has joined EU sanctions against Moscow and provided political and financial assistance to Ukraine.

The diplomatic standoff escalated again in May, when Austria expelled three Russian Embassy employees over allegations that antennas installed on diplomatic buildings in Vienna were being used to intercept satellite communications. The Russian Embassy dismissed the accusations as “outrageous,” “unjustified” and politically motivated, warning of a harsh response.

The latest surge in diplomatic activity surrounding the conflict in Ukraine follows a familiar pattern, although each round brings its own peculiarities. This time, US President Donald Trump is particularly angry with Vladimir Zelensky, whom he increasingly blames for the failure to end the war.

Their personal animosity has been evident since their first meeting of Trump’s second term in office, more than 18 months ago. But there’s now an additional factor, and it’s American domestic politics.

With the Republicans facing a difficult election, Trump needs a political success. There is little time for major achievements, but powerful images can still make an impression and stabilizing the fuel market through diplomacy with Moscow offers precisely that opportunity.

Peacemaking in a bloody conflict is an achievement in itself, but voters are generally more concerned about their own finances and Trump understands this, so he appears to have returned to the conviction he held from the outset that Zelensky is more susceptible to pressure than Moscow.

Russia has established the limits of its flexibility and shown little inclination to retreat from them; Washington, meanwhile, failed last year to bring Ukraine and its European backers into line. Indeed, they even briefly managed to persuade Trump that Kiev could fundamentally reverse the military situation, but now the pendulum has swung back.

He remembers how the Ukrainian leadership sought to assist the Democrats during the 2020 presidential campaign and he appears to be interpreting Kiev’s current behavior in much the same light: as an attempt to help his domestic opponents. Trump rarely forgives such conduct, hence the increasingly harsh rhetoric.

Knowing the president, one might expect this attitude to endure, but it would be a mistake to assume that his hostility towards Zelensky guarantees a successful peace settlement.

A policy favorable to Moscow commands little support within the American establishment, regardless of party affiliation, so opponents will exploit every opportunity to obstruct it.

Western Europe, meanwhile, is determined not to be excluded from negotiations and its governments have continued to resist a settlement they believe would serve Russian interests.

Trump can be pushed in one direction or another, but fundamentally changing his outlook is another matter, because for all his apparent unpredictability, he’s remarkably consistent in his underlying worldview and once he forms an opinion, he rarely abandons it.

These, however, are questions of personality and political psychology, so what of the settlement itself?

The negotiations remain opaque, as genuine diplomacy generally does and their direction can only be inferred from indirect signals.

Western commentary tends to identify territory as the principal obstacle and there’s some justification for this, as the course of military operations has progressively elevated territorial questions beyond the importance they held at the beginning of the conflict.

Vladimir Putin has consistently warned that rejecting Russia’s proposed settlement terms would mean confronting less favourable conditions later, and that’s precisely what has happened, particularly regarding territory, yet territorial concessions are not the whole story.

The broader principles of European security, both military and political, remain central. They were, after all, the decisive considerations behind Moscow’s decision to use force in 2022.

Indeed, we might suggest that security, understood in its widest sense, has become, or is about to become, the central issue in negotiations, and this is inseparable from the territorial question.

The less confidence there is in durable agreements on mutual guarantees and military restrictions, the greater the incentive to expand buffer zones and diminish an adversary’s capabilities over the longer term, so territory, in other words, becomes a substitute for security arrangements that neither side believes it can trust.

Following the meetings in Oslo and St. Petersburg, American representatives have spoken of substantial progress, while Europeans describe a convergence of positions and the emergence of new ideas.

For now, diplomacy continues along its familiar trajectory, with another expert-level trilateral meeting expected in November to address technical questions, following two previous rounds.

Yet the combination of developments suggests that the military phase of the conflict may be approaching a significant turning point, even if its conclusion remains some distance away.

Yuri Ushakov has expressed hope that the end is approaching and that may be optimistic, but the alternatives are becoming clearer: either serious peace negotiations encompassing the full range of disputed issues, or a transition to a new level of escalation.

The first option requires credible security guarantees and technical arrangements alone will not suffice, so what’s needed is a stable political framework capable of surviving changes in circumstances and leadership.

This is also the context in which the possibility of a trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China and the United States is being discussed.

The proposed gathering at next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen has generated considerable speculation, but whether it will happen remains uncertain. Even if it does, there will be no new Yalta and no sweeping grand bargain because the international environment simply does not permit such an outcome.

Nevertheless, a meeting between Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump would carry considerable significance.

Within an increasingly complicated international landscape, it would demonstrate the level at which the world’s most consequential decisions are being made, a level commensurate with the scale of the challenges. Perhaps that, in itself, would yield a new perspective.

This article was first published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and was translated and edited by the RT team 

Millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control are unable to vote in the upcoming parliamentary election that will shape their lives, RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij reports.

Ahead of the October 27 vote, Dubenskij visited East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank to examine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of Israel as the Middle East’s “only true democracy.”

In East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and later annexed in a move rejected by the UN, many Palestinians hold permanent residency rather than Israeli citizenship. They pay taxes, social security, and VAT, but cannot vote for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

“We are really helpless, voiceless,” one resident told RT. Another described the frustration of facing the consequences of an election without being able to influence it.

Although Palestinian residents who obtain Israeli citizenship can vote, those who spoke to RT opposed taking that step, arguing it would amount to recognizing Israeli sovereignty.

Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti argued that the occupation and different legal systems applied to Palestinians and Israeli settlers contradict Israel’s democratic claims.

“Two different laws for two people in the same area is nothing but the description of apartheid,” he told RT.

Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook, meanwhile, has advocated allowing Palestinians to remain while denying them a parliamentary vote. “They can stay here as human beings, of course,” she said, but stressed that they “shouldn’t be able to vote for the Knesset.”

Barghouti further accused Israel of obstructing internal Palestinian elections. The Palestinian Authority cited Israel’s refusal to guarantee voting in East Jerusalem when it canceled elections in 2021.

For Palestinians interviewed in Ramallah, the priority is to be allowed to hold their own elections rather than voting under occupation.

Watch the full report below.

US troops have been warned against using inside information to bet on prediction markets, the Associated Press has reported, citing a directive issued by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who said such wagers could expose military plans and influence operational decisions.

The memo, dated Tuesday and reviewed by AP, covers platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi, where users wager on real-world events, including elections and military action.

The directive bars the use of both classified material and other official information unavailable to the public, with violators facing disciplinary action or criminal charges under military or federal law.

“Our enemies watch movements in these markets,” Hegseth wrote. “When an American service member, intelligence professional, or other Department civilian engages in a financial transaction on a military outcome, they create a signal.”

The directive follows the prosecution of a US Special Forces soldier accused of profiting from advance knowledge of the January operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Prosecutors allege that Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke used information obtained through his involvement in planning and executing the raid to place more than $32,500 in Polymarket bets, earning over $400,000.

Most of the wagers were allegedly placed on January 2, hours before the attack on Caracas. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty.

The controversy has extended beyond the military. Newly created Polymarket accounts placed suspiciously timed bets shortly before Trump announced an April US-Iran ceasefire, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. The White House later warned staff against trading on confidential information.

The scandals have intensified scrutiny of prediction markets, which several US states have accused of sidestepping gambling laws and consumer protections. The Trump administration, however, has argued that the platforms should remain regulated by federal financial authorities rather than under individual states’ gambling laws.

The president’s family also has business ties to the industry. Donald Trump Jr. serves as a strategic adviser to Kalshi and holds an investment in Polymarket through his venture firm, 1789 Capital.

Moscow and Kiev have agreed to a temporary ceasefire in the frontline town of Alyoshki in Russia’s Kherson Region to allow humanitarian aid deliveries and civilian evacuations following mediation co-ordinate by US First Lady Melania Trump, the Kremlin has confirmed.

Located near the front line in Kherson Region, which voted to join Russia in a 2022 referendum, Alyoshki has been largely cut off from essential supplies and basic services for months under a Ukrainian siege. Drone attacks and remotely laid mines have hampered aid deliveries and evacuation efforts, leaving an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 civilians in the town trapped, many of them elderly.

The White House announced the agreement earlier on Friday, saying both sides had agreed to suspend all military operations in Alyoshki from October 29 to allow humanitarian aid deliveries and prepare for civilian evacuations through a designated safe passage.

Melania Trump, who had previously expressed willingness to support humanitarian efforts in Alyoshki, described the situation as “dire,” calling the town a “frontline war city on the brink of disaster.”

“The remaining population is comprised primarily of elderly residents who urgently need medical attention, medicine, food, and clean water,” she said.

Civilian representatives from Russia and Ukraine will assess residents’ needs and help organize evacuations to either country, depending on the residents’ wishes, the first lady said.

Peskov also acknowledged the work of Russian human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova and her Ukrainian counterpart Dmitry Lubinets in arranging the operation.

Moscow has accused Kiev of deliberately creating the humanitarian crisis by targeting civilian supply routes and obstructing aid deliveries. Russian Foreign Ministry envoy Rodion Miroshnik previously described the situation as a “medieval blockade using modern methods,” accusing Ukrainian forces of preventing residents from leaving.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, discussed the crisis during a phone call earlier this month. According to the Kremlin, the two leaders agreed that Russian human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova would maintain contact with Melania Trump’s office over humanitarian efforts.

Thousands of Indian Umrah pilgrims remain stranded in Saudi Arabia with airlines extending flight suspensions following attacks on the kingdom’s airports.

Affected travelers and their families have spoken to RT about canceled flights and difficulties in returning home, and appealed for more help from the Indian government.

The disruptions come amid a wave of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia. An Indian national was killed and two others injured in a strike on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam on Wednesday.

Indian carrier IndiGo on Friday extended cancellations to Jeddah, Medina, and Dammam until October 27, while flights to Riyadh will remain suspended until October 31. Akasa Air has also suspended services to Riyadh and Jeddah until October 27.

Mohammed Yahad, an Umrah pilgrim stranded in Medina, told RT that two tickets for his group had been canceled. He said he was safe and in contact with his family back in India, while his travel agent was providing food and accommodation.

”No one from the Indian Embassy has contacted us yet,” he said.

Around 3,000 pilgrims have returned to India on available flights over the past week, alongside more than 10,000 others traveling on scheduled services, India’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

Indian lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi separately estimated that around 4,000 pilgrims remained stranded in Mecca and Medina.

Their travel agent later confirmed that he had been moved safely to Mecca. The agent was also covering food and accommodation, but their return could take another week, Ansari said.

”I would like the Indian government to speak with the Saudi government and find a solution to this problem,” she told RT.

Indian Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said Friday that the government was assisting pilgrims still awaiting their return. Indian diplomatic missions in Riyadh and Jeddah are coordinating with airlines and tour operators and have established round-the-clock helplines.

A video going viral on Ukrainian social media appears to show a police officer choking a woman until she loses consciousness as she protests an attempt to forcibly mobilize a man.

The footage was reportedly recorded in Odessa this week, although few details about the incident have emerged since.

The altercation began when officers attempted to forcibly remove the driver of a parked car and put him into their vehicle, according to local media, prompting witnesses to intervene. One of the protesters, a woman, was placed in a choke-hold by an officer and soon collapsed to the ground, apparently fainting. Reports said she subsequently required medical assistance.

Some outlets suggested the detention was part of Ukraine’s notorious military mobilization campaign. Police have not issued an official statement, and there is no confirmation that the incident involved so-called “busification,” the practice of forcibly detaining potential recruits that has plagued the draft.

The mandatory conscription of fighting-age men, conducted to replenish losses in Kiev’s fight with Russia, has been marred by widespread corruption and abuses of power, as repeatedly documented by Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmitry Lubinets.

The woman diagnosed with Nigeria’s first Ebola case in more than a decade did not travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), the Swiss government has said. The statement contradicts claims by Ugandan authorities that she had visited the country where the current outbreak began.

The patient is a 42-year-old Ugandan-born Swiss national married to a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja. She is believed to have contracted the virus while traveling with her husband in Uganda, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs told Reuters on Thursday.  

Uganda’s Health Ministry initially reported that the woman was a Nigerian national who had visited eastern DR Congo on business before traveling through Uganda. The ministry said the source of her infection remained unknown and stressed that Uganda had no active Ebola cases. However, the Swiss government later denied that the woman had traveled to DR Congo, while the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said they had received no confirmed information about such a visit.

The Africa CDC is also investigating whether the woman may have come into contact with a Kenyan Ebola patient, as both traveled through Uganda’s Entebbe airport on October 3.

Nigeria confirmed the infection on October 20. The woman returned to Nigeria on October 3 after spending about two and a half weeks in Uganda, the BBC said. According to the WHO, she developed symptoms four days later and sought medical care on October 11. She remains in isolation and is showing signs of improvement, while her husband is also isolated but has no symptoms. Nigerian Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate warned from “any panic,” stressing there was “no evidence that it has gone into the communities,” as authorities stepped up contact tracing and monitoring.

Uganda recorded 20 Ebola cases earlier this year, mostly imported from DR Congo, before being declared free of the disease in August.

Fourteen Indian sailors on board a yacht which was attacked in the Red Sea on Thursday have been rescued, New Delhi’s mission in Yemen has said.

“Reports suggest that all 14 Indian nationals are safe and located around Hodeidah in Yemen,” the Indian mission in Yemen said in an X post on Friday. The embassy will continue to work to ensure their well-being, it added. 

On Thursday, the embassy said Indian officials were working to find out more details about the reported strike on the yacht. It said information was sparse due to the conflict in the region.

“We have reached out to different parties to establish the circumstances and facts of the incident and hope to update as soon as authentic information becomes available,” it said in the X post.

Reports suggest that all 14 Indian nationals are safe and located around Hodeidah in Yemen. We will continue to work for ensuring their well being.@MEAIndia

— India in Yemen (@IndiaInYemen) October 23, 2026

“The Saudi enemy is targeting an Indian yacht near Zuqar Island, carrying 14 people of Indian nationality, according to preliminary information,” Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree posted, according to an NDTV report. “The Yemeni Armed Forces are rescuing them and will provide more details later.”

The incident comes after an Indian national and a Saudi citizen were killed in an attack by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Dammam airport on Wednesday.

Houthi fighters have unleashed a wave of attacks against Saudi Arabia as retaliation for the kingdom’s backing of the Yemeni government they oppose.

Russia remains ready to negotiate a lasting settlement in Ukraine but will achieve its objectives regardless, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin on Thursday. He also outright rejected “schizophrenic” claims in Western media that Moscow could be seeking a war with Europe.

Putin’s comments followed nearly three hours of talks with US envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. Witkoff brought new peace talk proposals following his own discussions with Vladimir Zelensky, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s Chief of Staff Bjoern Siebert, and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in Oslo.

The new diplomatic engagement comes after Putin’s October 9 agreement with US President Donald Trump on Russian diesel supplies, whereby Washington eased fuel export restrictions while engaging with Moscow on broader economic cooperation.

Lasting peace, rather than a temporary pause

Putin confirmed Russia’s readiness to resume trilateral contacts with the US and Ukraine, focusing on security arrangements for both countries after a final settlement. The goal is to achieve definitive peace agreements, rather than “a suspension of hostilities for some short period,” he stressed.

The Russian leader also stated that he agrees with Witkoff’s argument that such discussions would also need to address Europe’s wider security architecture.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov previously suggested the talks could resume around mid-November, potentially in Abu Dhabi.

Putin said an agreement was possible, but insisted that “all the goals of the special military operation will be achieved” one way or another.

European claims that Russia poses a military threat and preparations for confrontation amount to “political schizophrenia,” Putin said, arguing that European populations do not want war with Russia and explicitly rejected suggestions that Moscow is preparing to attack them.

“We do not want, we are not preparing for any war with Europe,” he said.

Putin described inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia as unrealistic, expressing hope that its opponents would recognize that peaceful relations better serve their own populations.

‘Historic Russia’ and the territorial question

Asked about Zelensky’s recent comments to Fox News that he would be willing to give up 25% of his territories in order to freeze the conflict on the current battle lines, Putin rejected the premise.

“It is not their territory, it is the territory of historic Russia,” he said, citing residents’ votes for independence and subsequently for reunification with the Russian Federation.

He acknowledged that the issue remained disputed, but argued that describing these developments as Ukraine losing territory was inappropriate.

Putin called it “incomprehensible” that Kiev expects that “the entire world should pay them, fight for them, supply them with weapons, ammunition, equipment,” and stressed that Russia has no desire to fight Ukraine.

“If Ukraine’s current leadership wants to wage war, let them fight. But why do they think everyone should pay for it and supply them with weapons?” Putin questioned.

He noted that much of this desire for war can be attributed to foreign countries that want to fight against Russia in order to weaken it and have promised support to Kiev.

However, Putin stressed that these foreign entities are prepared to fight until “the last Ukrainian” and questioned whether Ukraine’s leadership similarly treats its citizens as expendable cannon fodder.

Putin accused Ukrainian authorities of rounding up men “like stray dogs” and forcibly sending them to the front, undermining motivation. He also argued that nationalist groups that carry out this so-called “busification” do not always bear the frontline burden themselves.

Shared history and missed opportunities

Putin said Moscow had sought a negotiated resolution with Kiev since 2014, including through the Minsk agreements intended to settle the Donbass conflict. He blamed Ukrainian authorities for repeatedly rejecting opportunities to reach an agreement before Russia’s military operation began in 2022.

He described Ukrainians as a people closely related to Russians, pointing to genetic research that has shown they are “one people.” However, he acknowledged that some wished to identify differently and said Russia accepted that reality.

“We are ready even now to negotiate and seek solutions to this difficult, complicated situation,” Putin said. “Everything can be agreed upon.”

All four of Moscow’s international airports – Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo, and Zhukovsky – have resumed operations after a drone attack on Friday. An alert triggered an evacuation from Sheremetyevo, Russia’s busiest airport, which appeared to be the main target of the latest Ukrainian raid.

The alarm prompted the airports to temporarily suspend all operations, halting arrivals and departures, according to Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency. The shutdown affected all four international airports serving the Russian capital, which together handle roughly 200,000 passengers and more than 1,000 aircraft arrivals and departures on a typical day.

Sheremetyevo announced an evacuation during the raid, escorting passengers off aircraft and leading them to shelters. The evacuation order was lifted later in the day, with airport officials warning that flight delays and schedule disruptions could persist as airlines worked to restore normal operations.

Sheremetyevo, located northwest of Moscow, is the main hub for Russia’s flag carrier Aeroflot. It handles around 111,000 passengers daily, serving destinations across the country as well as in Asia, the Middle East, and other regions.

Domodedovo, southeast of the capital, handles approximately 39,000 passengers daily, while Vnukovo, southwest of Moscow, serves around 49,000. Both operate domestic and international services, including flights to Türkiye, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Zhukovsky, the smallest of the four airports, is located southeast of Moscow near the city of the same name. It handles approximately 4,000 passengers daily, primarily on routes connecting Russia with neighboring countries and other international destinations.

Moscow’s three largest airports – Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo – handled a combined 40.4 million passengers in the first seven months of 2026, down 3.5% from the same period last year, according to Rosaviatsia figures analyzed by Interfax. Domodedovo recorded the steepest decline, with passenger traffic falling 13.2% to 6.9 million. Vnukovo saw a 1.4% drop to just over 9 million passengers, while Sheremetyevo, the capital’s busiest airport, reported a 1% decline to 24.5 million.

Russian air defenses shot down 155 Ukrainian drones over Moscow and the surrounding region overnight, according to Russian authorities. Earlier on Friday, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported that 19 of the UAVs had been intercepted on approach to the capital.

Moscow-bound flights have been diverted to other airports, including Pulkovo in St. Petersburg, which confirmed it was receiving aircraft originally destined for the Russian capital.

India will not cut off Russian crude supplies even if the current US push for it to take in more Venezuelan oil to cool global fuel prices masks the larger goal of weakening New Delhi’s energy ties with Moscow.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Mumbai on Tuesday that India diversifying its energy supplies is a “smart thing to do.”
 
Some analysts see a hidden geopolitical and economic goal behind those words and Rubio’s push for Indian conglomerate Reliance to buy and refine more Venezuelan oil.

“A key US goal is to weaken the Indo-Russian relationship by steering India farther away from Russian crude,” geopolitical analyst Brahma Chellaney posted on X on Thursday.

“Washington’s underlying diplomatic objective is to get India to substitute Russian oil with US crude and US-controlled Venezuelan oil.”
 
Washington imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods in August 2025 to pressure New Delhi over its Russian oil purchases, arguing that Moscow’s energy revenues were helping finance its military in the Ukraine conflict. The penalty was withdrawn in February this year.

Last week, US President Donald Trump also waived separate sanctions and steep tariffs targeting major buyers of Russian energy under a recently passed law, citing ongoing US efforts to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict.

During his Indian tour, Rubio sought to get India to buy more U.S. energy as well as more oil from Venezuela, whose export revenues are directly deposited into an account controlled by the U.S. Treasury, with Washington determining when, how much and for what purposes the funds are released. Rubio wants the world’s largest oil-refining complex in Jamnagar to process more Venezuelan crude. Washington appears not to be content with India’s rapid emergence since May as a top global buyer of U.S.-sourced and U.S.-controlled energy supplies. The U.S. has already become India’s largest supplier of both liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). At Washington’s urging, India has also become the largest destination for Venezuelan oil exports. A key U.S. goal is to weaken the Indo-Russian relationship by steering India farther away from Russian crude. While Rubio framed India’s efforts to diversify its energy portfolio as a “smart thing to do,” Washington’s underlying diplomatic objective is to get India to substitute Russian oil with U.S. crude and U.S.-controlled Venezuelan oil.

— Dr. Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) October 21, 2026

“What America is trying to do is gain greater control over the international oil market,” Jindal School of International Affairs adjunct professor and former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, Anuradha Mitra Chenoy, told RT.

“India will continue purchasing Russian oil,” she added.

Russia remains India’s largest oil supplier amid global energy disruptions. Russian crude made up more than half of India’s oil purchases in July, although the share fell to 33.5% in September as Middle Eastern supplies recovered and competition from China intensified, Reuters reported.

Venezuela produced approximately 1.16 million barrels per day of crude in September, compared with Russia’s 8.43 million, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). India’s Russian imports alone exceeded Venezuela’s entire output that month.

India, looking to widen its crude basket amid the global uncertainty, has already expanded Venezuelan purchases substantially. New Delhi’s Venezuelan imports surged from $255 million in all of FY2026 ended March, to $3.6 billion in the April-August period this year, data shared by the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) think tank showed.

India is a fast-growing major economy and one of the few bright spots amid the macroeconomic headwinds blowing across the world. The IMF forecasts it to grow at 7% this year and next.

Sustaining that growth depends heavily on the availability and affordability of energy, Chenoy pointed out. “India cannot simply abandon Russian oil because Washington wants it to.”

Why Venezuelan oil cannot easily replace Russian crude

Venezuela’s Merey grade is being offered at around $25 per barrel below benchmark Brent, but that cost advantage disappears when the $35-a-barrel freight to India’s west coast is added in, energy analyst Natalia Katona told the Indian Express.

The discounts on Russian crude have also narrowed and freight costs risen, making its delivered price comparable to some Middle Eastern grades, particularly Iraqi oil, reports said.

Still, it would be tough for Venezuelan oil to compete with Russian crude, let alone replace it for Indian buyers, because of the limited production, higher cost, and specialized equipment needed to refine the heavy grade.

Reliance’s Jamnagar complex, which can process around 1.4 million barrels daily, is among the refineries equipped to handle the Venezuelan grade.

From the American perspective, Merey has one advantage that likely prompted Rubio to rush to India amid higher fuel prices back home: it can produce a higher volume of diesel.

However, that is not a great reason for India to replace Russian crude with Merey.

An anti-corruption court in Kiev has ordered the arrest of a man who held a senior position under former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko.

The widening scandal over an alleged protection racket exposed in early September is one of several to have rocked Vladimir Zelensky’s government, prompting multiple people close to him to flee the country for fear of prosecution. Kravchenko left Ukraine before parliament could dismiss him.

The latest suspect has been identified by the media as Ivan Timoshenko, who headed the Information Technology Department under Kravchenko before also resigning.

Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court ordered Timoshenko detained at the request of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), which is investigating the alleged protection racket involving scam call centers at the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO). The court set his bail at $177,000.

The anti-corruption agency described Timoshenko’s role as crucial to the operation. He allegedly maintained direct contact with fraudsters protected by the network and collected payments from them. NABU also accused him of ensuring the group’s internal security, maintaining secrecy and recruiting new members.

According to media reports, Timoshenko and Kropiva previously worked together in Ukraine’s cyberpolice, the PGO, and the Odessa regional administration.

Both returned to prosecutorial work in 2025, after Kravchenko took charge of the PGO. Their return followed an unsuccessful attempt by Zelensky’s government to curb NABU’s independence, which prompted Western donors to threaten to suspend aid to Kiev.

European governments should stop worrying about their growing dependence on American AI, US tech giant Palantir’s top executive for the UK and Europe has said. Instead, they should focus on the advantages the products offer, particularly against Russia, Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley believes.

The European Commission is frantically trying to reduce reliance on American tech and the US in general.

“Europe is going to have to accept some dependency,” Mosely told Bloomberg News this week.

The Commission estimates that the bloc relies on foreign providers for over 80% of its digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property. However, many are skeptical that replacement is possible. In a Wire’s 2025 survey cited by the European Parliament, only 16% of regional IT leaders said the bloc could achieve digital sovereignty within five years, with almost 60% citing US dominance as a key obstacle.

“We cannot depend on the goodwill of certain partners who, as we’ve seen in recent days, are capable of cutting off access to models,” Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said when announcing the decision in June.

Berlin has reportedly chosen the same French competitor over Palantir for Germany’s domestic intelligence agency BfV.

Similar moves to ostracize the American firm have been reported in Spain and Denmark, as well as the non-EU nations of Switzerland, Norway, and the UK.

One of Palantir’s flagship products is Maven, an AI-powered system that processes vast amounts of intelligence data to help identify targets and generate strike recommendations for troops. It accelerates the so-called “kill chain,” allowing the military to consider substantially more potential targets than human personnel previously could.

Originally developed as a Pentagon project, Maven involved Google until 2018, when employee protests prompted the company to withdraw from the initiative. NATO purchased its own version of the system for use at its European headquarters in March 2025.

“I can provide categorical reassurance that where customers have bought our software, they are in full operational ‌control of ⁠that software,” Mosley assured in a separate interview with Reuters concerning NATO’s purchase.

There are no kill switches. There’s no ability for Palantir or the US government to reach in and switch it off.

The US government has a track record of restricting foreign access to flagship AI models. The French prime minister’s remark about a lack of goodwill was a reference to Washington’s blockage of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 tool, which lasted for almost three weeks.

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 270 prisoners of war each, the Defense Ministry in Moscow announced on Friday. The returning Russian servicemen are currently in  Belarus, where they are receiving assistance before being transported home for treatment and rehabilitation.

Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova is working with the freed servicemen in the neighboring country, according to the ministry. The troops will receive medical and psychological assistance before being transferred to Russian Defense Ministry facilities for further treatment and rehabilitation.

Prisoner exchanges between Moscow and Kiev are generally conducted on an equal basis, unlike the repatriation of fallen soldiers, which has frequently involved Russia handing over significantly more bodies than it receives.

Such disparities are typical of repatriations, unlike prisoner-of-war swaps, which are generally conducted on an equal basis. Pro-Kiev commentators have long argued that the imbalance does not reflect the actual ratio of battlefield casualties, as advancing Russian forces are better positioned to recover the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. However, Thursday’s exchange, which followed Kiev’s claims of a major offensive near the city of Liman, showed no significant change in the proportion.

A foreign national has been beaten to death by a group of around 50 people during a protest march in the South African city of Durban, police said on Thursday. Anti-immigrant demonstrations and violence against migrants have been continuing for months.

According to police, two men broke away from a march in central Durban and approached the victim, who was standing by the roadside. He was then allegedly assaulted by a group of about 50 people and pronounced dead at the scene. The authorities believe the victim was in his late 30s or early 40s, but his identity and nationality have not yet been released.

“Police are following several leads and using all investigative aids to identify possible suspects,” the South African Police Service (SAPS) said in the statement. Investigators are working to identify those responsible. The police have also not confirmed the purpose of the march.

In June, thousands of migrants, mostly from Malawi, gathered in Durban seeking assistance to return home. They said they feared for their safety after an anti-immigration group demanded that undocumented foreigners leave South Africa by June 30. 

In September, South African Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi announced that the authorities had processed 86,596 foreign nationals for deportation or repatriation between June 14 and August 20. Malawians accounted for the largest group, followed by Zimbabweans and Mozambicans.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned attacks against migrants and announced measures to strengthen border controls and immigration enforcement. He previously stated that “xenophobia, Afrophobia, or any other form of intolerance” has “no place” in South Africa.

The latest killing follows other deadly incidents linked to anti-immigrant unrest in South Africa. In late May, two Mozambican nationals were killed during violent protests in Mossel Bay, where around 50 makeshift homes were also set on fire.

India has questioned Western nations for imposing climate-related trade barriers on developing economies despite Europe’s historical contribution to the climate crisis the world is facing now.

Wealthy countries built their economies using fossil fuels but are now imposing additional costs on poorer nations, Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal told the Berlin Global Dialogue on Thursday.

“Who’s responsible for this mess in the first place?” Goyal asked, referring to the West’s carbon emissions, and challenged the European Union’s environmental trade restrictions.

India accounts for around 17% of the world’s population but has significantly lower per capita emissions than Europe, Goyal pointed out.

The minister questioned the $100 billion annual climate finance commitment made by wealthy countries to help developing economies address climate change. The target, first agreed upon during UN climate negotiations in 2009, was extended through 2025 under the Paris climate process.

📹 ‘Who’s Responsible For This Mess?’ Piyush Goyal Gives Europe A Climate History Lesson Goyal reminded Europe that it built its economies on cheap coal, questioning its climate demands on India despite the country having “one of the fastest growing clean energy program.” https://t.co/ji6ShNq0BH

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) October 23, 2026

“Eleven years later, we haven’t seen a nickel or dime of that. It’s all promises,” Goyal said.

He argued that the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) fails to recognize the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, under which developed countries are expected to shoulder a greater burden in addressing climate change.

The mechanism places carbon-related costs on imports of steel and other emissions-intensive products. Brussels has justified it by saying it ensures imported goods face carbon costs comparable to those paid by European manufacturers.

India’s concerns echo a position adopted by BRICS leaders at their September summit in New Delhi. The declaration opposed unilateral and discriminatory carbon border measures that could undermine developing countries’ efforts to address climate change.

US President Donald Trump has invoked a Cold War-era national security law to boost domestic oil production and refining, as rising fuel prices threaten the Republicans’ chances in November’s midterm elections.

Speaking on Thursday at a Republican campaign rally in Iowa – an agricultural state where farmers have been hit hard by the oil crisis – Trump announced that his administration would use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to provide up to $150 million to expand American refining capacity and produce diesel and gasoline “at record levels.”

He also predicted that the Iran and Ukraine conflicts would end soon, sending gasoline and oil prices “tumbling down.” 

Enacted in 1950, the DPA allows Washington to financially support industries deemed essential to national defense. In a presidential memorandum, Trump designated domestic petroleum production, refineries, pipelines, and storage facilities as critical to national security, arguing that private companies could not expand capacity quickly enough without federal intervention.

Vice President J.D. Vance had earlier announced plans to invoke the law to expand a Delek-operated refinery in Tyler, Texas, although such projects typically take months, if not years, to complete.

Fuel prices in America sharply rose after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran in late February, disrupting global energy supplies. According to the US Energy Information Administration, average gasoline prices have climbed from $2.94 per gallon immediately before the conflict to $4.28 in the week ending October 19, while diesel has jumped from $3.81 to $6.28 over the same period.

The Trump administration has sought to tackle the fuel crisis through several emergency measures, including releasing 172 million barrels from strategic oil reserves, relaxing gasoline-blending requirements, temporarily easing diesel regulations, and announcing additional subsidies for struggling farmers.

In early October, Trump also announced a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to release more than 300,000 tons of Russian diesel onto global markets, with additional supplies expected later. He has also repeatedly pressed Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries, which he blamed for rising fuel prices.

The president’s pressure sparked pushback from Zelensky, who called Trump’s diesel deal with Moscow “a weak decision” and “not fair and not honest” while refusing to comply with the refineries ultimatum. In response, Trump suggested that Ukraine should “get a new president” instead of Zelensky, whose term expired more than two years ago, while calling continued Ukrainian strikes a “disgrace.”

An employee of a German immigration office and her husband have been arrested for allegedly assisting a human smuggling ring which brought Indian men into the country through sham marriages in exchange for hefty payments, Bild has reported.

The Cologne branch of the immigration office told the tabloid on Thursday that it has revoked the residence permits illegally issued by the criminal group, which involved two other people.

According to Bild, the smuggling ring exploited the EU’s family reunification program to bring in the Indians.

The foreign nationals arrived in Cyprus, where they entered fictitious marriages with Bulgarian women whom they had never met before, it said.

A member of the Cologne immigration office, identified as Subha L., then processed and approved the applications for residence permits by the Indian males despite the irregularities in their paperwork, the report read.

A lawyer for one of the suspected smugglers told the WDR broadcaster that the scheme had allowed more than 20 Indian men to enter the EU.

Subha L. was arrested along with her husband in December 2025 and remains in per-trial detention. She has been dismissed from her job, the Cologne immigration office said. The trial for the four suspected members of the criminal group is scheduled to begin in February.

The immigration office said it tightened workflow controls following the scandal to ensure any suspicious cases are identified more promptly.

An MP for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party accused the Cologne immigration office of failing to execute its duties and called for it to be audited by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

“We are witnessing a growing loss of control within an agency that views itself as a ‘welcoming authority’ rather than an immigration authority,” Seif told the Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper.

Illegal immigration has again become a contentious topic in the EU this year after more than 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta in late July. Up to 8,000 foreigners still remain scattered throughout the territory, straining local resources and prompting protests by residents.

Despite the number of arrivals subsiding since the EU migrant crisis of 2015, the foreign-born population in the bloc reached a record 64.2 million last year, expanding by 20.2 million since 2010, according to a report published by the Center for Research and Analysis on Migration at RFBerlin in April.

Germany continues to have the largest number of immigrants in the EU, with 18 million foreign-born citizens, making up 21.2% of the country’s population, the paper said.

The US has accused Canadian officials of attempting to interfere in American elections, citing politically targeted trade measures, anti-Trump advertising campaigns and meetings with Democratic politicians ahead of next month’s midterms.

In a fact sheet published on Wednesday, the US Embassy in Ottawa accused Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government of openly seeking to influence American politics.

“The Canadian government brushes off concerns about potential interference in US elections, even as its ministers and premiers openly describe plans to influence American politics in official documents and public appearances,” the embassy stated.

The document singled out Canadian Industry Minister Melanie Joly, citing her remarks about deliberately targeting Republican-leaning states with retaliatory tariffs in response to US President Donald Trump’s trade policies.

Washington also questioned Joly’s meetings with Democratic officials in Boston and Chicago in September, as well as an anti-tariff advertising campaign launched by Ontario Premier Doug Ford featuring former US President Ronald Reagan criticizing protectionist trade policies.

The embassy also highlighted a recent appearance by Canadian Consul General Bernadette Jordan alongside two Democratic congressmen at a Vermont roundtable on trade tensions, just three weeks before the midterms. It also cited a Canadian government billboard campaign targeting 12 mostly Republican-voting states and Washington, DC.

The embassy also cited Liberal lawmaker Anthony Housefather’s campaigning for Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida, and listed 11 Canadians who had been charged or sentenced in 2026 for illegally voting in previous American elections.

The accusations followed a warning from US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, who said Washington was closely watching Canadian political activities ahead of the November 3 congressional elections.

“We’re monitoring it, we’re evaluating it and if some of it becomes election interference then America will respond to it,” Hoekstra said.

Ottawa has rejected the allegations. Carney insisted that Canada’s measures were intended to protect its workers and businesses from American tariffs, while Ford denied any interest in meddling in US elections. Joly defended her meetings with American politicians as normal diplomacy, pointing out that she had engaged with both Republicans and Democrats.

In September, Carney revealed that his government had examined the possibility of US military action against Canada, describing the scenario as an “extreme tail risk” that nevertheless warranted contingency planning. Ottawa, meanwhile, has been seeking closer military and economic ties with Europe to reduce its dependence on Washington.

Hundreds of houses have collapsed after a powerful earthquake struck Tibet, killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more, according to local authorities.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Nagqu region of northern Tibet at 10:33 PM local time on Thursday. 

The death toll stood at 16 on Friday morning, with 46 people injured, including 11 seriously, according to the latest figures released by local disaster relief authorities. At least 339 houses and 20 livestock sheds collapsed, the Associated Press reported, citing government officials.

Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed residents rushing into the streets as buildings shook.

🇨🇳⚡️ — Emergency authorities report that a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Tibet's Nagqu City has caused the collapse of 339 homes, triggered severe infrastructure and transit disruptions, and prompted the activation of a Level-II emergency response. #China #Tibet #Earthquake #BreakingNews

— X-K (@ConflictRadarME) October 22, 2026

The shallow tremor struck at a depth of approximately 10 kilometers, according to Chinese seismologists. The US Geological Survey estimated its depth at 18 kilometers, placing the epicenter in a sparsely populated mountainous area.

Sixteen people were killed and 32 others injured after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Baqen County of Nagqu City in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region, according to the city's emergency management bureau. https://t.co/BERNm8mcXy

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) October 23, 2026

More than 1,600 local personnel have been mobilized for search-and-rescue operations. Emergency supplies, including 1,000 prefabricated housing units, some 3,000 tents, beds and winter clothing, have been dispatched to assist displaced residents.

Xi orders all-out rescue efforts after Xizang earthquake https://t.co/GrKXDa8oGE

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) October 23, 2026

The earthquake also triggered rockfalls that forced the closure of a major highway, while railway services were temporarily suspended for safety inspections. Communications were disrupted in parts of the affected region, complicating rescue operations.

The latest disaster comes less than two months after a massive ice-and-rock avalanche near the Tibet-Nepal border unleashed catastrophic flooding, killing more than 1,450 people in Nepal and dozens in China.

Thursday’s tremor was the strongest to hit the Nagqu region in five years, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

Authorities have warned that the casualty figures could rise as rescue teams continue searching damaged buildings and assessing the destruction.

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a crackdown on public demonstrations, ordering authorities to ban protests and restrict even officially organized marches as nationwide unrest over soaring living costs and deteriorating public services continues.

The restrictions, announced Thursday following an emergency meeting with intelligence chiefs and senior ministers, come ahead of another wave of demonstrations planned for Saturday, after some of France’s worst street violence in years.

Macron said local authorities would prohibit deemed “illegitimate” gatherings organized by individuals or groups deemed to lack authority, while demonstrations arranged by recognized organizations, such as trade unions, would be considered for approval but could be required to use alternative routes.

“The general recommendation is that there should be no demonstrations in the coming days,” Macron declared, insisting the measures were necessary to restore calm and protect businesses and public buildings.

The announcement significantly tightens restrictions on mass gatherings in a country where the right to protest is constitutionally protected. Under French law, authorities can prohibit demonstrations if they are believed to pose a threat to public order, although such decisions must be proportionate and can be challenged in court.

A Paris administrative court overturned a police ban on a student demonstration on Thursday, allowing thousands of protesters to gather despite official objections. The rally proceeded peacefully under heavy police presence, according to AP.

France has been gripped by escalating unrest since protests over teacher shortages and deteriorating school conditions spread into a broader movement against rising prices, inequality and cuts to public services.

Around 550,000 people joined demonstrations last Saturday, which descended into clashes with police, arson and widespread looting. Nearly 2,500 people have since been arrested, while approximately 1,000 police officers and gendarmes were injured, according to figures reported by French media.

Even police unions have turned against the administration. Alliance Police Nationale has announced plans to sue the state, accusing officials of abandoning officers during the riots and failing to provide adequate equipment and clear instructions.

Macron has also clashed with US President Donald Trump, who blamed France’s turmoil on uncontrolled immigration and radical groups. The French leader dismissed comments by foreign politicians about the unrest as “stupid” and “unacceptable.”

A British museum has removed ancient Egyptian mummies from public display, citing a lack of “consent” from the deceased and drawing accusations of excessive political correctness.

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, is one of the country’s most popular cultural attractions, drawing more than 1.3 million visitors annually. Its collections include Egyptian antiquities and mummified remains that have been exhibited for years.

Among the items taken off display were a painted coffin containing the remains of an Egyptian priest named Nekht, a mummified male head, a right foot, and a right hand recovered from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, the Glasgow Times reported on Thursday.

My daughter has a book on the ancient Egyptians and has been quite animated by it so we took her to Kelvingrove Museum to see their mummy. Except, it’s no longer there. All ‘human remains’ gone with the following sign up in place of exhibits that have been there for years. https://t.co/DKGOx4VjpR

— Jonny McFarlane (@jonnyrmcfarlane) October 17, 2026

The changes came to public attention after a visitor said he had taken his daughter to see an Egyptian mummy, only to discover that it was no longer there. He shared a photograph on X of a museum notice stating that the remains had been removed “as a mark of respect.”

Mummies have been removed from display at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow because of a 'lack of consent from the deceased individual'. A Glasgow Life spokesman said: ‘The removal of human remains from display at Glasgow Life museums reflects contemporary museum practice. ‘The International Council of Museums’ revised Code of Ethics, published in June 2026, states that museums “should uphold the inherent dignity of human remains and promote respect for their significance”. ‘The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations 2025 report, “Laying Ancestors to Rest”, also raises ethical concerns about the display of ancient Egyptian human remains due to the consistent disregard of the potential wishes of the ancestors and the intention of the communities that originally laid them to rest.

— UNN (@UnityNewsNet) October 22, 2026

Glasgow Life, which operates the museum, said the move reflected contemporary museum practices, citing revised ethical guidelines published by the International Council of Museums in June. The guidelines call for human remains to be treated with dignity and respect.

“In the absence of such consent, we believe removing ancient Egyptian human remains from display is more respectful to the deceased individuals,” a Glasgow Life spokesperson said.

The decision drew criticism from Scottish Conservative politician Murdo Fraser, who described it as “woke madness.”

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education and a former adviser to the British prime minister’s policy unit, also condemned the move as “virtue-signaling, woke nonsense.”

“It is not possible to seek permission from those who died thousands of years ago,” he said, adding that museums in Egypt continue to exhibit mummified remains.

Glasgow Life said it is also working to remove further archaeological human remains from Kelvingrove and plans to remove a coffin and mummified remains from the nearby St Mungo Museum afterward.

The controversy follows a similar decision by Manchester Museum, which removed the 2,700-year-old mummified remains of an Egyptian woman named Asru in September after more than two centuries on public display.

The survivors of the deadly Ukrainian drone attack on the Starobelsk college in May have spoken to RT about the emotional scars left behind by the tragedy that killed 21 students in their sleep.

Multiple waves of kamikaze UAVs struck the dormitory of the Starobelsk Professional College, located in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), on May 22. The building partially collapsed as a result of the strikes, killing 21 people and injuring 42 others, mostly teenage girls studying to become teachers. The Ukrainian military subsequently targeted first responders with additional drones, according to investigators.

Twenty students who survived the attack on the dormitory that fateful night came to Moscow on Wednesday at the invitation of Russia’s Commissioner for Human Rights Yana Lantratova.

Lantratova and the students discussed their professional aspirations, with the official noting that some of them have already become volunteers in various projects. She also said that the human rights commission’s doors are open to survivors wishing to undertake an internship there. The official gifted a bus to the college as well as tablet computers to its students.

“Especially during the first week, it was absolutely terrifying. I was afraid of every single loud noise,” the survivor told RT.

Another student shared a similar experience of lingering trauma, saying that following the attack, “any loud noise, even just something falling was terrifying. My heart would immediately start pounding violently.”

President Vladimir Putin vowed “inevitable punishment” for the Starobelsk massacre, and several days later, Russia launched one of its largest retaliatory drone and missile strikes, targeting Ukrainian military command facilities, air bases, and defense industry enterprises.

Major US banks have detected outside artificial intelligence agents operating inside customer accounts, with some appearing to attempt actions beyond users’ instructions, Axios reported on Thursday.

AI agents are designed to complete tasks on users’ behalf, potentially making purchases, paying bills or moving money. Customers often give them permission and login credentials, but this can violate banks’ rules requiring account holders to log in themselves.

Lenders including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are racing to contain the risks, according to Axios, citing people familiar with the matter. Some have tracked agents contacting call centers or apparently acting independently of customer instructions.

Bank executives described the situation as “horrifying,” according to the outlet. One said lenders struggle to distinguish between authorized assistants and agents that have gone rogue.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi have now started restricting outside agents’ access, while Morgan Stanley has reportedly begun blocking them from its platforms. Chase has also urged customers not to share usernames and passwords with AI agents.

The banks have also expressed fear of losing profitable deposits. The Financial Times reported last week that AI assistants could move customers’ cash to banks offering better rates, forcing lenders to pay more interest to keep those customers.

The concerns come amid a string of reports of AI agents acting beyond their instructions and accessing outside systems without permission. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that OpenAI shelved its planned GPT-6.1 Astra model after testing revealed more deceptive behavior than its predecessors. The system sometimes failed to disclose its actions to human operators and attempted to use potentially unsafe external tools.

Financial regulators have warned that autonomous systems could also destabilize markets. Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden warned in June that agents reacting alike to the same signals could buy or sell simultaneously, making market swings more severe.

She urged regulators to consider emergency “kill switches” that could halt trading if faulty AI systems triggered a market meltdown.

Repeated claims by European officials that Russia poses a threat of war to their countries amount to “political schizophrenia,” President Vladimir Putin has said.

He made the remarks on Thursday while speaking to Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin after participating in the Union of Theatre Workers congress at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

Putin strongly denied the repeated allegations that Moscow has been gearing up for war with Europe in any fashion, dismissing them as a part of the ongoing “anti-Russian campaign” on the continent.

“They now go so far as to constantly speak of a ‘Russian threat’ and even discuss preparations for a war with Russia – which, in my view, amounts to a kind of political schizophrenia. But I hope that it will pass,” Putin stated.

The Ukraine conflict has clearly demonstrated that Russia cannot be defeated on the battlefield, the president argued, adding that the idea of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on the country was “simply not realistic.” Putin expressed hope that those still entertaining such a scenario would “come to recognize the realities of modern life.” 

“They will hopefully realize that it is better to live in harmony with Russia – a path that truly serves the interests of their own peoples. If you look at the political processes currently underway in Europe, it becomes evident that the European peoples have no desire to go to war with Russia,” the president stated.

In fact, Russia does not want to fight Ukraine either, Putin said, pointing at the shared past and the longstanding ties between Russians and Ukrainians. Still, Kiev itself chose war in 2014, when it opted to fight the people of then-Ukrainian Donbass, who had rejected the Maidan coup, the president said, adding that Ukraine has also rejected Moscow’s repeated attempts to mediate that conflict.

The Russian president also touched upon the territorial issues between Moscow and Kiev, pointing out that the loss of formerly Ukrainian regions should not be treated as such, since they were never Ukrainian in the first place.

“It is not their territory, it is a part of historic Russia,” he stressed, adding that local residents voted to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia.

Russia remains ready to resolve the Ukraine conflict through diplomacy, Putin said, reiterating Moscow’s willingness to resume trilateral talks with Washington and Kiev.

“The purpose of these negotiations will be to discuss how to ensure the security of both Ukraine and Russia following the conclusion of peace agreements, specifically, definitive, long-term agreements, rather than a mere temporary cessation of hostilities,” the president said, adding that the discussions should involve a wider all-European security architecture.

Moscow announced it was ready to resume the trilateral talks following Putin’s meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov subsequently said the next round could take place in Abu Dhabi around mid-November.

European countries will inevitably resume economic cooperation with Russia, following Washington’s lead, Russian presidential aide Kirill Dmitriev has predicted. Politicians who continue to blame Moscow for their domestic problems rather than address them risk losing power, he warned.

Dmitriev, who also heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, made the remarks on Thursday at the 19th Verona Eurasian Economic Forum in Istanbul.

The Russian official hailed Trump’s readiness to restore dialogue with Russia and reverse a “very dangerous situation where top nuclear powers don’t communicate.”

Commenting on Europe’s problems, including high energy costs and mass migration, Dmitriev accused European politicians of “using Russia as a boogeyman” to distract from more fundamental issues, warning that they have come to believe their own narratives and are unwilling to correct their mistakes.

However, Dmitriev argued that attitudes within the EU were beginning to shift, with more voices calling for renewed dialogue with Moscow. “Cooperation with Russia economically will be inevitable,” he said, adding that “as soon as we do more deals with the US, European companies” will want a piece of the action, too.

“Once people start paying double, triple their bills of energy in Europe, the resumption of energy supplies from Russia is absolutely inevitable and politicians who refuse that will lose in any way possible,” Dmitriev argued.

“Once people are rational, once people stop reading fake stories in the media, once they stop sort of living in this matrix of fake narratives…, they’ll understand that only through dialogue, through cooperation, through working together, we can go forward successfully.”

Dmitriev also argued that many of today’s “great leaders,” including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, prioritize national sovereignty over what he described as the “failed policy of globalism.”

On October 18, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Manama, where he attended the ninth ministerial meeting of the Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council strategic dialogue and held separate talks with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The following day, he traveled to Tehran to meet with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian.

In Manama, discussions centered on de-escalation in the Persian Gulf, maritime security, and Russian proposals for a collective security framework, while bilateral meetings provided an opportunity to clarify individual countries’ positions. Lavrov and his Kuwaiti counterpart stressed the need to reduce tensions quickly and agreed that a political and diplomatic settlement is the only viable way forward. In Tehran, regional affairs featured alongside Russian-Iranian cooperation, with Moscow reaffirming its commitment to economic and investment agreements despite the deteriorating security environment.

Diplomacy between the Gulf’s two shores

The trip aimed to prevent a new divide between Iran and the Arab monarchies from becoming entrenched, as the consequences of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran are affecting the security of the entire region. Yet rebuilding trust also requires acknowledging that the Gulf states have their own grievances against Tehran over strikes on their territory and threats to maritime routes.

During the Manama talks, Arab representatives explicitly said they hope Moscow would use its relationship with Iran to convey their concerns. Discussions also covered Yemen, maintaining the ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian access, and the resilience of energy and food supply chains – the various and interconnected sources of instability plaguing the Middle East.

Russia could mediate efforts to de-escalate tensions and mitigate the deterioration in relations between Tehran and the Gulf monarchies, since it maintains close ties with Iran while developing political, economic, and energy cooperation with the Arab states. These relationships allow Moscow to relay messages, identify the scope for compromise, and facilitate direct dialogue, which can easily give way to competing ultimatums during a crisis.

However, this two-way access does not mean Moscow can dictate what its partners actually decide, and its closeness to Tehran may raise questions among Arab participants. The effectiveness of Russian mediation will ultimately depend on whether the parties themselves are willing to negotiate, acknowledge one another’s concerns, and take practical steps to address them.

Inclusive security as an alternative to permanent crisis

In Manama, Lavrov once again presented Russia’s updated concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf as a potential contribution to a lasting settlement. The proposal continues a longstanding initiative rather than a document developed solely for this visit. As early as June, he reported that updated proposals had been circulated to regional capitals and that Moscow was receiving initial responses.

The approach rests on the premise that the Arab monarchies and Iran must take part in a shared framework, because attempts to secure one group of states by isolating another reproduce the causes of confrontation. Confidence-building measures and regular contact are intended to reduce uncertainty gradually, while the Gulf countries and their immediate neighbors should have the decisive voice in shaping the regional order.

An earlier Russian concept circulated at the United Nations in 2019 already envisaged a gradual normalization of conditions, respect for sovereignty, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the development of collective security mechanisms. The current proposals can be assumed to carry over the same spirit, even if specific provisions have changed or been updated.

The practical value of this model will depend on whether broad principles can be translated into agreed procedures for preventing incidents, protecting civilian infrastructure, and keeping maritime routes open. These arrangements could provide the first steps towards a more stable order, whereas an attempt to resolve every political disagreement at once could obstruct even limited measures to ease tensions.

Why expensive oil does not make war good for Russia

Western media and expert debates, including those focused on Middle Eastern politics, frequently portray Russia as a beneficiary of the war, arguing that disruptions to Gulf supplies drive up energy prices and create opportunities for Russian exporters.

A short-term price benefit is certainly possible, but to assume that war gives Russia a strategic advantage is analytically unsound, because the country’s national interests are not limited to a single source of export revenue. Additional income from commodity sales says little about the cost of damaged partnerships, postponed investment, and worsening conditions for long-term projects.

The Middle East matters to Russia as a political and economic partner, and stable relations depend on predictable institutions, transport routes, and financial transactions. A prolonged war raises shipping and insurance costs, complicates infrastructure agreements, and forces partners to divert resources from development toward immediate security needs.

This is evident in Russia’s cooperation with Iran, where its projects require a stable operating environment. In Tehran, Lavrov spoke of Russian specialists gradually returning to the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, as well as prospects for cooperation in hydrocarbon production and transportation. A protracted war creates additional risks for these activities, and higher oil prices cannot remove them.

Moreover, a sustained energy shock can weaken the global economy, while the resulting decline in demand limits exporters’ initial gains. Even if some consequences of a Middle East war can benefit Russian suppliers in the short term, claims that Moscow wants endless war in the region are superficial at best. Russia’s strategic interest lies in the region’s long-term stability, which would allow it to preserve partnerships, markets, and opportunities for economic engagement.

The transformation of the world order and the erosion of Western hegemony give Middle Eastern states greater scope to pursue independent policies, but a redistribution of international influence does not in itself resolve regional disputes. If dependence on external guarantees is merely supplemented by new competing patrons, while mechanisms for direct dialogue remain weak, the Middle East will continue to serve as an arena where local conflicts intersect with rivalry among major powers.

Regional autonomy requires that neighboring states agree on rules for coexistence, even when their foreign policy priorities and perceptions of threats differ substantially. A durable system will require mutual respect for sovereignty, a rejection of imposed military solutions, and recognition that lasting security cannot be built on another state’s permanent vulnerability.

Russia can support this process by providing diplomatic channels and helping identify a workable sequence of agreements, but only the countries of the region can build a peaceful future. External mediation delivers results when it supports an existing willingness to compromise, while even substantive initiatives can remain on paper if that willingness is absent.

Lavrov’s visits to Manama and Tehran highlighted an opportunity to connect urgent de-escalation with discussions about a more durable regional order. Seizing this opportunity will take time and difficult political decisions, because the parties will need to constrain their own use of force, rebuild damaged trust, and accept reciprocal obligations. Moscow can mediate this process, but its outcome will depend on the desire and readiness of the Gulf states and Iran to reach an agreement.

Billionaire tech investor and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has expressed regret over the US war against Iran, warning that it could ultimately lead to International Criminal Court warrants for the Trump administration and have broader implications for the US, Politico reported on Thursday.

The outlet cited a transcript of a lecture given by Thiel earlier this month, part of the series of private events held in Nashville.

Thiel, a staunch backer of US President Donald Trump, has expressed doubts over the Iran war, which was launched by the US and Israel earlier this year, suggesting that it has exposed America’s weaknesses.

“I’m skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it. There were a lot of mistakes that were made,” Thiel said, as quoted by Politico.

Maybe we don’t have the hard power. Maybe we’re going to lose the soft power war.

While reiterating his support for Trump, he warned that the war could backfire for the administration and lead to legal troubles with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Trump administration has had a hostile relationship with the ICC, particularly over the decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

“I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran,” Thiel said.

He also claimed that George W. Bush-era neocon figures such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been colluding with the ICC against Trump. “I read the Cheney family’s Trump derangement syndrome as an attempt to buy favor with the [ICC] and avoid prosecution. Probably too late,” he said.

Palantir has been heavily involved in the hostilities, as its products have been used by the US military. The use of AI products was reportedly linked to one of the worst mass-casualty events of the war – the strike on a school in Minab on the first day of the conflict, which killed at least 156 civilians, predominantly schoolchildren. According to media reports, the facility was targeted based on outdated data used by Palantir’s analysis and surveillance software.

Indian and Russian air force crews practiced joint drills in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region as part of the wider inter-service Indra-2026 military exercise.

The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Indian Air Force (IAF) teams engaged in joint operations in Su-30SM fighter jets during the drill. The focus of the operations was on actions against small, low-flying targets and destroying carriers of short- and medium-range aerial weaponry.

The personnel also performed air combat maneuvers at medium and low altitudes, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday.

The Su-30SM is a modernized version of the Su-30MKI model, the IAF’s workhorse fighter jet. It has been modified with Russian-specific avionics, radar, and communication systems and has extreme agility.

The IAF is also running its own program to upgrade and make its Su-30MKIs more lethal and survivable, under the ‘Super Sukhoi’ program, at the state-backed Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.

The $7.5 billion modernization program aims to upgrade an initial batch of 84 Su-30MKI fighter jets, with plans to eventually expand to over 200 more aircraft, extending the fleet’s service life through 2055.

Russia’s Rosoboronexport agency earlier highlighted that the modernization program can be performed with significant involvement from the Indian defense industry, while the facilities involved in the manufacturing of the Su-30MKI can be used for co-manufacturing of the Russian fifth-generation Su-57E fighter jet, if India decides to go ahead with Russia’s proposal.

The exercise’s aim was to build operational capabilities in deploying special forces units and for search-and-rescue operations in hazardous and difficult terrains.

The maritime phase of the drills took place in the Gulf of Peter the Great near Vladivostok over the weekend and involved the Russian Pacific Fleet corvette Aldar Tsydenzhapov and the Indian Navy frigate INS Sahyadri

The land exercises will end on Friday, with troops practicing joint command and control and operations against simulated armed groups.

The US-Israeli war on Iran has caused an “unprecedented” shock to global energy markets, removing some 3 billion barrels of oil supply, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser has warned.

The war launched in February effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil and LNG artery, sending crude prices up roughly 50%. Despite Gulf exports recovering to a reported 80% of pre-war levels, renewed attacks on vessels have kept markets on edge, with Brent hitting a five-month high above $112 this week. Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and shipping have compounded the crisis, threatening another vital trade chokepoint, the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

In an interview with Al Arabiya Business aired on Thursday, Nasser said the nearly eight-month crisis had deprived global markets of an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil.

The figure is equivalent to nearly a month of global oil consumption and reflects cumulative supply losses caused by disrupted shipping, reduced production and logistical bottlenecks.

Nasser warned, however, that even an end to the crisis could bring fresh pressure on oil markets, as recovering consumption and a rush to replenish depleted reserves will likely fuel another demand surge.

“Once things return to normal, we expect additional demand of around 3 million barrels per day – about 2 million from consumption growth and another 1 million just to replenish the reserves countries have drawn down during the crisis,” he said, noting that the added demand could keep markets under strain long after shipping routes reopen.

Fresh escalation fears

Meanwhile, fears of another escalation are growing as US-Iran talks remain deadlocked. Reports on Wednesday claimed Washington was quietly pulling troops from bases in Jordan, Qatar and Kuwait, evacuating some diplomats and their families from Saudi Arabia and preparing similar withdrawals elsewhere. Similar precautions were taken ahead of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.

The moves follow US President Donald Trump’s rejection last month of Tehran’s proposal to reopen Hormuz in exchange for lifting the US blockade of Iranian ports, easing oil export restrictions, unfreezing Iranian assets and ending regional hostilities, including Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

The world’s first documented human infection with the Shamonda virus has been reported in France, where a hospitalized patient later died, according to the health authorities.

The insect-borne disease, which has circulated among livestock for decades, was previously believed to be incapable of infecting humans.

In a joint statement on Thursday, the French Health and Agriculture Ministries confirmed that the patient, who had a severely weakened immune system, died in early October after being hospitalized in Lyon.

“Until now, the Shamonda virus was considered non-transmissible to humans,” the ministries said, according to AFP. They described the infection as the first confirmed detection of the pathogen in a person.

The patient developed severe neurological complications that the authorities believe were linked to the infection. However, investigators have still not established conclusively whether the virus was responsible for the death.

Despite the unprecedented case, the French authorities said there is currently no indication of a wider threat to public health. They stressed that the patient was severely immunocompromised and that no other human infections have been identified.

The Shamonda virus belongs to the orthobunyavirus group and was first identified in Nigeria in the 1960s. It is transmitted by tiny biting insects known as Culicoides midges and has been detected in livestock in Africa and Asia.

Other viruses that have crossed from animals to humans include HIV, Ebola, and bird flu. The Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus widely believed to have originated in bats.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has confirmed the unprecedented human case and is working with the French authorities to assess its implications.

Health officials are continuing epidemiological and laboratory investigations to determine how the patient became infected and whether other cases may have gone undetected.

France’s leading police union has announced that it is set to sue the state, accusing it of leaving officers “betrayed and abandoned” during a wave of violent nationwide protests.

The union’s planned legal action comes in the wake of unrest last week, when around 550,000 people took to the streets over rising prices and deteriorating school conditions. Demonstrations descended into rioting across Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux, with businesses looted and buildings set on fire. According to Le Monde, 997 police officers and gendarmes were injured, including seven seriously.

Speaking on Thursday, union representative Stanislas Gaudon criticized successive governments over what he described as a “20-year lack of political courage” in security policy.

“Police officers will not be shields for political spin, nor scapegoats for an administration that refuses to take responsibility for its decisions,” the union stated last week.

Alliance also directly challenged Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez over conflicting instructions from the police hierarchy.

“Mr. Minister, is your administration lying to you? Or are the police deliberately being sacrificed on the altar of political communication?” it asked, demanding an investigation into the chain of command.

The protests first erupted in September over staff shortages and deteriorating conditions at a high school near Paris before spreading nationwide. Thousands of students have demanded better education funding and an end to public spending cuts, accusing the government of prioritizing weapons over schools. The unrest has triggered massive arrests and accusations of excessive police force.

Police tactics have meanwhile come under scrutiny after a 17-year-old protester lost a hand in a grenade explosion in Saint-Étienne. His lawyer has filed a complaint against Nuñez over the use of controversial riot-control weapons. The government has defended the police response.

The unrest comes as President Emmanuel Macron’s government cuts public spending while increasing military expenditure and weapons supplies to Kiev. France has raised its 2026 defense budget by €6.7 billion despite mounting public debt.

Further protests are expected this weekend, while the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and other unions have called for a nationwide strike beginning November 5.

Major US news outlets amplified fabricated election polls showing gains by Democrats, giving a bogus months-old polling operation national credibility before investigators exposed its invented data.

Wedgewood Polls, which appeared in June, secured coverage from publications including Newsweek, the Daily Beast, and The Hill. Its surveys also entered polling databases maintained by the New York Times, election analyst Nate Silver, and other prominent aggregators.

On Tuesday, however, after researchers at election analysis website FiftyPlusOne confronted it, Wedgewood admitted that almost all its surveys were fake. It described the deception as an experiment testing how easily a fictitious firm could gain recognition.

“We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: how easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary? The short answer: Far too easy,” the group said in a press statement.

Wedgewood noted that despite having no history, formal credentials or real data, it was added to multiple major polling aggregators, was treated as a legitimate data source, and was being cited on air by mainstream outlets like MS NOW.

The group added that “out of curiosity and for our own internal baseline,” it actually carried one genuine crowdfunded poll in Nebraska during its run.

The admission prompted a mass cleanup across mainstream media. The Times removed 15 Wedgewood surveys, election tracker Decision Desk HQ removed 17, and Newsweek retracted three articles and corrected others.

The figures also reached campaign publicity. A Democratic Senate campaign in Mississippi cited a fabricated result as evidence of “massive momentum.”

Other invented results damaged candidates. Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow said a bogus survey showing her support collapsing helped dry up donations and demoralize volunteers before she withdrew from the Democratic Senate primary in July.

Questions about Wedgewood had circulated for months, but its surveys continued entering news coverage and polling databases. FiftyPlusOne eventually exposed the fabrication by examining underlying survey records and checking inconsistencies with the platform the firm claimed to use.

The revelations come less than two weeks before the November 3 midterms, which will determine control of Congress. Republicans are defending narrow majorities in both chambers as President Donald Trump campaigns amid dissatisfaction over living costs and the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is once again fighting for his political future, in a runoff election against Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro. After a dirty campaign, voters will decide on Sunday whether Brazil maintains its leftward trajectory or lurches to the right.

Bolsonaro defeated Lula in the first round of this year’s presidential election, beating the incumbent left-winger by 47.03% to 45.16% on October 5. With neither candidate winning an outright majority, ten runners-up were eliminated and a runoff called for October 25.

Who are the candidates?

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, more commonly referred to as ‘Lula’, has been a mainstay in Brazilian politics since the 1980s. After serving two terms as president from 2003 to 2011, he was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2017 for alleged involvement in a corruption and money laundering scheme within the state-run oil company Petrobras.

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court struck down his conviction in 2021, and Lula returned to politics the following year, defeating Jair Bolsonaro by a margin of just 0.11%. In power, Lula has increased government spending to tackle poverty, handed subsidies to industry, and hiked taxes on the wealthy. Meanwhile, his government has deepened trade and diplomatic ties with Russia, China, and the rest of the BRICS group, while criticizing US intervention in Latin America.

“Brazil,” he said in a speech at the UN General Assembly last month, “does not fit into anyone’s back yard.”

A senator since 2019, Flavio Bolsonaro is the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, who was placed under house arrest last year after the Supreme Federal Court found him guilty of attempting to overturn his 2022 loss to Lula. A social conservative, Flavio Bolsonaro has promised to slash government spending, deregulate industry, crack down on crime, and rein in the power of the judiciary. If elected, he has promised to pursue amnesty for his father.

Bolsonaro favors closer relations with the US, and has said he would join US President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Latin American drug cartels. He has signaled he would “consider leaving” BRICS, accusing the organization of “provoking the United States by proposing that the dollar should no longer be the currency for international transactions.”

Should Bolsonaro win, he would fall into a growing camp of right-wing leaders in Latin America, including Presidents Javier Milei of Argentina, Abelardo de la Espriella of Colombia, Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.

What are the key issues?

CNN Brazil identified “corruption” as the second issue atop voters’ list of concerns. Bolsonaro also leads Lula on fighting corruption, according to Bloomberg, albeit by a smaller margin of 4%.

Bolsonaro is currently a subject in two money laundering probes, but he has fired off corruption accusations at Lula, citing the involvement of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes in one of these investigations. Moraes, a close political ally of Lula and the man responsible for jailing Bolsonaro’s father, was accused of taking bribes from the banker at the center of the probe.

Economic concerns are the third most pressing issue for voters, according to the CNN poll. Lula has made his economic record a central pillar of his campaign, pointing to Brazil’s rising wages, falling unemployment, and modest economic growth during his tenure. The president enjoys a narrow lead over Bolsonaro when it comes to tackling poverty and inequality, but Bolsonaro is seen as a stronger candidate when it comes to taming inflation and reducing Brazil’s national debt, according to Bloomberg’s poll.

Who’s interfering in the election?

Meta claims that technical problems were to blame, and insists that any allegations of favoritism are “simply false and unsupported by the facts.” Whatever the explanation, Meta’s platforms are vital to both Lula and Bolsonaro, as other social media platforms – among them Google, TikTok, and X – have banned political advertising in the runup to the election.

Brazilian Attorney-General Jorge Messias has accused the US of election meddling, pointing to the White House’s awarding of a $1 million grant to right-wing groups “countering lawfare and censorship in Brazil” – essentially groups opposing Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court.

“Disagreements between governments are inherent to international relations,” Messias wrote on X earlier this month. “What cannot be tolerated is for foreign political interests to seek to interfere in the functioning of Brazilian institutions or to influence, directly or indirectly, choices that belong exclusively to the Brazilian people.”

Bolsonaro’s supporters view the court as a political instrument in the hands of Lula. Justice Moraes ordered the mass suspension of social media accounts over the spread of so-called “misinformation” in the runup to the 2022 election, with the overwhelming majority of accounts suspended being pro-Bolsonaro ones. 

One day after the first round of voting this year, Moraes issued an arrest warrant for Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, who lives in the US. Eduardo Bolsonaro had lobbied the Trump administration to campaign for his father’s release from house arrest.

Bolsonaro has accused Lula of using the machinery of state to boost his campaign. Bolsonaro’s lawyers have called for Lula’s disqualification over his use of the government’s Gov.br system to promote his social programs, his use of government databases to obtain citizens’ contact information in order to send campaign messages, and his use of public funds to produce campaign videos.

What do the polls say?

Lula and Bolsonaro are neck-and-neck in the polls, with every major survey taken up to this month within a margin of error. According to a Quaest poll released after a televised debate between the candidates on Sunday, Bolsonaro leads the leftist incumbent by 45% to 44%. Another poll by PoderData places both candidates in a 50-50 dead heat.

Although the race is too close to call, one historic constant is likely troubling the Lula campaign: since Brazil introduced presidential runoffs in 1989, no candidate has ever won a runoff after losing the first round. However, the first-round gap between Lula and Bolsonaro this month was the smallest in Brazilian presidential election history, at just 1.87%.

With his family persecuted – as he sees it – by Lula’s judiciary, the election is deeply personal for Bolsonaro. For Lula, who is 80 years old, this runoff may be the last of his political career, and the last chance to preserve the leftist state and multipolar foreign policy he’s spent decades building. Whoever wins, this election will be watched in Washington, Moscow, and beyond.

When will we know the result?

Polls close in Brazil at 5 PM Brasilia Time (10 PM Central European Time) on Sunday, and results will begin to emerge around an hour later as ballots are counted. A winner will likely become obvious within hours – in 2022, Lula’s victory was confirmed less than three hours after polls closed.

For more on the election and analysis of the results, stick with RT.

Algeria and Niger have signed a military cooperation agreement following talks between defense chiefs in Algiers, the Algerian Ministry of National Defense announced on Wednesday. The deal marks another step in the restoration of ties between Algeria and its Sahel neighbors following a diplomatic rift last year.

The agreement was signed at a meeting between Algeria’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Said Chengriha, and Niger’s defense minister, Lieutenant General Salifou Modi, who arrived in the country leading a military delegation. The two sides discussed strengthening bilateral military and security cooperation and addressing shared challenges.

Chengriha reaffirmed Algeria’s willingness to consider proposals aimed at improving cooperation. “I also wish to reaffirm to you our readiness in the People’s National Army to study any Nigerien proposal that would enhance military and security cooperation,” he said.

The move follows a broader rapprochement between Algeria and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), comprising Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, which began earlier this year. 

Relations deteriorated in April 2025 after Algeria shot down a Malian drone near their shared border, claiming it violated Algerian airspace, prompting all three AES members to recall their ambassadors. Bamako rejected the accusation and said the aircraft was destroyed over Mali.

Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the Faculty of International Relations at MGIMO and a member of the Scientific-Expert Council under the Security Council of the Russian Federation, discusses why Western Europe is so afraid of a direct confrontation with Russia, how the US is shifting the burden of the Ukraine crisis onto the EU, why the “pyramid of trust” surrounding Kiev is crumbling, and when the Ukraine conflict might come to an end.

His interview, first published in Russian by TASS, was translated and edited by the RT team.

America sails away, Europe gets the bill

Evgeny Kuznetsov: You have noted that the US is seeking to extricate itself from the Ukraine crisis by shifting the burden onto Western Europe. If Washington does indeed distance itself, are these Europeans prepared, politically and economically, to assume the role of Ukraine’s principal “security guarantor”?

Ukraine was well suited to this role, as a large state with substantial armed forces, motivated to confront Russia. But the limitation of such a strategy is that you can’t fully control the behavior of the “sword.” Nor is it entirely resource-efficient, there’s a limit to the resources that can be allocated to it, and if no turning point is reached in the confrontation, further support yields no additional gains in effectiveness.

The Americans realized early on that many of their interests in this crisis had been achieved and prepared to withdraw. They did what a maritime power usually does when it decides to turn its attention elsewhere as they sailed back to their own region. The main difference between a maritime power and a continental power lies in the freedom to choose where to deploy military forces. A maritime power can choose where to deploy them and launch strikes across various parts of the world’s oceans. This is usually carried out in the form of raids, as large-scale expeditionary campaigns rarely prove successful. The US decided it was time to leave.

But they didn’t want the withdrawal to be accompanied by the collapse of the Ukrainian regime. The US incorporated its withdrawal and the reorientation of its priorities towards East Asia into its policy towards its NATO allies. It handed over responsibility for supporting Ukraine to them and assumed the role of “moderator” as a negotiator who, rather than being the instigator of the crisis, is steering it towards a resolution. US strategic documents state an interest in bringing the Ukraine crisis to an end.

Yet the US behaved treacherously toward both Ukraine and its European allies, saddling them with this burden without warning. The Western Europeans lack military resources, technological capabilities, strategic thinking, and awareness of their own interests comparable to those of the Americans, qualities that enable them to weigh up causes and consequences, to discern what is achievable and what is not by military means, and to identify where their bloc’s interests lie in this crisis.

These Europeans currently have a financial instrument of considerable weight at their disposal, in essence, the only one they can draw upon. They are using it wastefully, given the domestic debt of most major European states is approaching or exceeding 100% of GDP. They can’t obtain external compensation for their military expenditure, and there’s no hope of a Ukrainian victory.

If there were any hope, they would be counting on recouping their losses through Russian resources, through new deals with Russia on new terms. None of these hopes is being realized.

Geography is a constant, an immutable part of the foreign policy system. Governments and historical circumstances may change, but geography remains unchanged.

The course towards a long-term confrontation with their largest neighbor, a source of many benefits for the Western European economy, which they have now lost, demonstrates the narrowness of their vision. Domestic political processes in the EU suggest that, following the Americans’ example, it is time for these Europeans to reflect on what their interests are, which of these are achievable in the course of the Ukraine crisis, which are not, and what the possible trajectory might be. So far, the Western Europeans haven’t made any good moves.

When there are no good moves, it is better to pass a turn and stop making mistakes. So far, as our President [Vladimir Putin] put it, it looks like a series of mistakes, one after another.

Big spending, little strategic power

Evgeny Kuznetsov: Won’t they get tired of playing this game?

Andrey Sushentsov: Western Europeans states don’t possess the full strategic autonomy enjoyed by Russia and the US, and are not entirely capable of acting collectively from a unified position. Every major decision requires the consensus of nearly 30 countries.

The European Commission doesn’t have a very substantial budget of its own but relies on the budgets of the nation states. Despite the single currency, debt is measured separately for each country.

There is no unified army. It’s a far cry from even the most loosely organized confederation. They would carry strategic weight if they were capable of acting in unison, but there’s no sign of this. Western Europeans are terrified of being directly drawn into a military crisis with Russia. Speculation about sending troops into Ukraine always ends with the caveat that this will only happen once a lasting peace and a ceasefire have been achieved.

In part, their enthusiasm is fueled by what they perceive to be the relatively low cost of supporting Ukraine and this proxy conflict. They have no qualms about Ukraine. They are indifferent to what will become of it, its borders or its population. They express rhetorical outrage, flock to summits, pose for “family photographs,” and make categorical statements. But in essence, this is a gathering of onlookers who are not directly involved in the military crisis.

Russia as the glue holding Europe together

Evgeny Kuznetsov: The EU is not abandoning its plans to impose ever more restrictions on Russia. Incidentally, Brussels has also added you to its sanctions list. At the same time, some European leaders are calling for dialogue with Russia. Is that possible at present?

Andrey Sushentsov: Western Europeans are using the Ukraine crisis as a platform for unity, to become a more cohesive entity. Their strategic lack of autonomy, the prominent role of the Americans, and their internal fragmentation mean that the only platform for solidarity is an anti-Russian one.

The relevance varies from country to country. For Southern Europe, it’s not so obvious. For Spain, despite its anti-Russian government, Palestine and the Middle East are more important. The Baltic states and Northern Europe have an alarmist and militaristic outlook. Some share a border with us. The people in charge are a peculiar lot; one can expect all sorts of things. But no one wants to involve their armed forces in the Ukraine crisis, as North Korea has done on our side.

They are using Ukraine to strengthen their own agency and take steps towards coordinated action. These steps are not particularly effective. However, joint plans are being drawn up and substantial funding is being allocated.

One unresolved issue is the restructuring of the Western European defense industry; it’s fragmented and produces around 15 different types of main battle tank with guns of varying calibers. Standardization is a major and difficult challenge. A catalyst is needed. In other words, they are, to some extent, tackling an internal challenge.

Peace alongside Russia – or a strategic dead end

Evgeny Kuznetsov: Do the NATO Europeans want to sit at the negotiating table with Russia, representing a “united Europe,” in order to compensate for their strategic lack of autonomy?

The US doesn’t resolve such issues, nor does Russia. We can afford to take strategic, autonomous, purposeful and consistent action. These Europeans take a step back, a step forward, two steps back; they look over their shoulders and seek consensus.

It’s in Russia’s interests to invite them to the negotiating table only if it is clear that these Europeans prioritize a stable world on the continent, based on the principle of “peace alongside Russia,” rather than against Russia. The “peace against Russia” approach is inherently unstable and a dead end for Western Europe. It dooms them to fall behind, to strategic defeat, and to never becoming a true player on the world stage. The more internal contradictions there are within the bloc regarding priorities, the more fragile it becomes, and the Russian question is gradually becoming precisely such an issue.

Ukraine’s ‘pyramid of trust’ is crumbling

Evgeny Kuznetsov: You said that the “pyramid of trust” surrounding Ukraine will soon crumble. When will this finally happen?

Andrey Sushentsov: From the Russian perspective, the logic behind this crisis is that we are waging a war to wear down our opponents and deplete their resources. We are targeting their rear lines and breaking their “continental sword.”

We are demonstrating that their strategy is irrelevant; its objectives are unattainable. And the resources they are expending will, over time, be needed in ever-greater quantities. The existing ones are becoming obsolete, as are the systems for utilizing them on Ukrainian territory. They need to be replenished and rebuilt.

Building infrastructure is extremely costly; in wartime conditions, it is simply impossible. In time, Western countries themselves will realize the unviability of this strategy. The opposition within those countries is already openly voicing its outrage and stating that this is a dead end.

There are increasingly insistent calls for the Ukrainian leadership to take a realistic view of the situation and understand what is achievable and what is not. The “pyramid of trust” is crumbling. One after another, the parties involved are adopting an increasingly detached stance on this issue.

Their primary and secondary hopes have not been realized. Now they are almost left high and dry. We must admit, it was a mistake.

No one wants to take responsibility for it. It has not only a political but also a financial dimension. Who should be held to account for the hundreds of billions of euros spent on a strategically futile venture that has antagonized Russia and undermined security on the continent?

That is why we are talking about a short-term historical perspective. It may come to an end in the coming months, or perhaps in the coming years. But we are not talking about a decade-long war. The point is that this will still remain a crisis with its own distinct phases, and we are currently in the final phase of its resolution.

An Indian national and a Saudi citizen were killed in an attack on Dammam airport on Wednesday night, authorities have said.

Two other Indians were amongst the injured, Saudi authorities informed the Indian Embassy in Riyadh.

At least eight people were injured, according to media reports quoting Saudi’s General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA). Those included Saudi, Indian, Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese nationals, according to reports.

The US mission in Riyadh has issued an alert for more possible attacks.

“We are ascertaining further details and contacting the affected families,” the Indian Embassy in Saudi said in an X post on Thursday. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and loved ones of the deceased, and we wish speedy recovery of the injured.” 

“We strongly condemn the continued attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, including the attack on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam and Saudi Aramco’s Shaybah oil field in the Eastern Province on October 21,” India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement.

The MEA also said that attacks on civilians and critical infrastructure are completely unacceptable and must “cease immediately.”

Our statement on attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia ⬇️ 🔗 https://t.co/CT1ZHRz8q4 https://t.co/gbwyQ5Vpjr

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) October 22, 2026

Earlier on Wednesday, two people were killed when Saudi air defenses intercepted a drone heading toward Aramco’s Shaybah oilfield, the kingdom’s energy ministry said.

The incidents come amid a wave of attacks unleashed by Houthi rebels against Saudi Arabia as retaliation for the kingdom’s backing of the Yemeni government.

In all, 13 people were killed and hundreds injured when the Houthis struck the King Khalid International Airport last week.

The US State Department on Wednesday directed its diplomats and their family members in its missions across the country to leave the kingdom.

Politicians advocating for annexation and further military operations could decide Israel’s next government despite holding only a handful of parliamentary seats, RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij reports.

With 37 parties competing for the Knesset’s 120 seats on October 27, Israel’s proportional representation system gives smaller factions leverage in coalition negotiations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud faces rivals including Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar, and Yair Golan’s left-leaning Democrats. In her report, Dubenskij examines the Religious Zionist Party (RZP), which currently holds seven seats and is led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Smotrich has called for territory as far as the Yellow Line in Gaza and the Litani River in Lebanon to be annexed. His ambitions also extend to the occupied West Bank, which he calls Judea and Samaria.

The minister has also advocated for taking all of Gaza for “Zionist and security reasons” and described withholding food and water from its population until hostages were returned as potentially “just and moral.”

Fellow party candidates Zvi Sukkot and Orit Strook have taken similar positions, advocating for more hostility, expanding Israeli settlements, and taking over territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The election comes amid continuing Israeli attacks in Gaza and southern Lebanon, along with escalating settler violence in the West Bank. Recent olive-harvest attacks have targeted Palestinian farmers, European diplomats, and American photojournalist Heidi Levine.

Dubenskij examines how a party with just seven seats could help shape the next coalition and its policies.

Watch the full report below.

Russian news agency Sputnik has opened an editorial office in Johannesburg, South Africa, expanding its African coverage alongside a second newsroom in Tanzania’s commercial hub of Dar es Salaam.

The centers launched on Tuesday employ dozens of local journalists producing English and Swahili content, including podcasts for partner radio stations across Africa. The agency says those stations reach a combined audience of more than 100 million listeners.

South African Deputy President Paul Mashatile welcomed the Johannesburg opening, saying it reflected growing cooperation with Russia and would broaden the range of perspectives available to audiences.

“We welcome Sputnik’s commitment to amplifying African voices and telling African stories,” he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a video address that the offices would improve access to verified information without ideological filters. He thanked both governments for supporting the newsrooms and accused Western countries of suppressing dissenting views through censorship and double standards.

Sputnik Africa began operating in 2022 and publishes in five languages, including Swahili, Amharic and Oromo. It is part of the Rossiya Segodnya media group.

The expansion comes despite Western restrictions on Russian media. The EU and UK have banned numerous Russian news outlets since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, including RT and Sputnik. Moscow has denounced the EU-wide ban as an attempt to silence coverage of the conflict that contradicts Brussels maximalist political stance.

Russia has handed over the remains of 252 Ukrainian soldiers killed in the conflict and received the bodies of 25 Russian troops in return, according to multiple reports.

The transfer reportedly took place on Thursday in Belarus near the Novaya Guta border crossing with Ukraine. Officials and media outlets in all three countries confirmed the details of the repatriations.

Footage from the scene shows monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross overseeing the transfer.

The disparity in the number of bodies returned is typical, unlike prisoner-of-war swaps, which are generally conducted on an equal basis.

Pro-Kiev commentators have long argued that the imbalance does not reflect the actual ratio of battlefield casualties, as advancing Russian forces are better positioned to recover the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. However, the latest round, which followed Kiev’s claims of a major offensive near the city of Liman, showed no significant change in the proportion.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine officially publishes comprehensive figures for its military casualties. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has cited death tolls that even pro-Kiev commentators consider implausibly low. In July, he claimed that “about 50,000” Ukrainian troops had been killed, down from the 55,000 deaths he reported in February.

Many Ukrainian battlefield casualties are classified as missing in action, which allows the cash-strapped government to defer compensation to the families of the fallen soldiers.

On three separate days in mid-June 2025, Russia unilaterally returned 1,200 bodies to Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron has slammed as “stupid” and “unacceptable” remarks by foreign leaders about the unrest gripping France, in an apparent swipe at US President Donald Trump, who blamed the violence on Paris’ lax border policies.

France has been rocked by some of its worst riots in years, sparked last month by teacher shortages and crumbling schools before escalating into nationwide protests over inequality, soaring living costs and public service cuts.

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets over the weekend as demonstrations descended into clashes with police, arson and looting. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested, around 1,000 officers injured, hundreds of businesses looted and buildings torched, with damage estimated at “hundreds of millions of euros.”

Trump pours fuel on the fire

Trump claimed that “migrants, jihadists, and communists” had “conquered, looted, and burned” France, accusing Macron of failing to secure its borders. He urged European leaders to “close their borders,” before seizing on the unrest to rally Republicans ahead of the November 3 midterms, warning that scenes of “burning steeples and raging fires” were “what the Radical Dumocrats want to do to AMERICA” with their own migration agenda.

Macron isn’t amused

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Macron accused outside actors of manipulating information about the events to their gain.

“There was foreign manipulation of information, which gave rise to unacceptable and stupid comments from many people, including foreign leaders,” he said. “We have had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false… These people annoy me.”

Asked whether he was referring to Trump, Macron replied: “Among others.”

President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that foreign leaders — including those “on the other side of the Atlantic” — were seeking to exploit France’s tense social climate for political gain following a weekend of street violence and looting.

Protests over soaring living costs… pic.twitter.com/XlitrzVoK6

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 21, 2026

While there is no clear evidence that migrants have played a disproportionate role in the unrest, multiple videos posted online have shown protesters waving Palestinian flags alongside French ones.

They said the riots and destruction in France were about the cost of living and schools.

Then explain the Palestinian flags and keffiyehs.

Allowing mass third-world migration is why France is done. pic.twitter.com/jDr733vcOx

— TaraBull (@TaraBull) October 19, 2026

French authorities have largely blamed the violence on radical far-left groups and opportunistic criminals, without linking its organization to immigrants. Meanwhile, politicians across France’s political spectrum blamed Macron and his government for the unrest, accusing the administration of undermining public services and failing to maintain order.

Macron leaves the building

His absence drew criticism of an “absent president” and left rivals Marine Le Pen, who leads first-round polling for April 2027 with 32-36% support, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, to dominate the debate at home.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has ordered curfews ahead of fresh protests, with gatherings banned near Paris landmarks including the Louvre and Champs-Elysees for three days. France also plans to deploy 1,000 counterterrorism troops to reinforce police on Saturday, October 24. Lecornu is due to meet mayors of riot-hit cities on Thursday to coordinate efforts to prevent further violence.

Russia, the usual suspect

In his remarks, Macron also dismissed suggestions of foreign interference in the unrest itself, citing a lack of evidence. His remarks followed a flurry of Western media speculation seeking to blame the riots, which spread from France to Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Albania, on outside meddling – with Russia once again cast as the usual suspect.

Outlets such as The Financial Times and the Telegraph, citing “anonymous” sources, reported that several EU governments had asked intelligence agencies to investigate possible Russian involvement. The FT expanded the suspect list to Iran and Algeria, claiming some officials had even demanded a formal EU probe.

Yet the allegations have apparently failed to convince even Brussels. According to Euronews, the European Commission has declined to launch an investigation, citing insufficient evidence.

The speculation follows a familiar pattern of EU officials invoking “hybrid warfare” and the alleged “Russian threat” amid domestic turmoil. Just this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accused Moscow and Minsk of “weaponizing migration,” linking them to the summer crisis in Spain’s Ceuta, where an estimated 70,000 migrants crossed from Morocco, sparking a border emergency and political fallout over EU migration policies. However, yet again, she presented no evidence connecting either country to the crisis.

Moscow says look closer to home

Moscow routinely dismisses allegations of interference and claims of a Russian threat as “absurd” fabrications, accusing EU leaders of using the narrative to deflect blame for their own policy failures and distract from mounting domestic crises.

Responding to Rama’s accusations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told him to look closer to home.

“These are citizens of your own country who took to the streets to protest. Don’t shift your responsibility onto others. Deal with your own domestic problems,” she said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, described the unrest sweeping the EU as evidence of “a major crisis… bordering on chaos.”

Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote has bought a roughly 25% stake in Kenya’s fuel pipeline operator as part of a wider push to expand petroleum distribution across the continent.

The Nigerian industrialist announced the acquisition at the Financial Times Africa Summit in London on Wednesday. Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC) operates pipelines and storage facilities supplying Kenya and other regional markets.

“We bought 25% of their pipeline network for the distribution of petroleum products,” Dangote said.

The purchase involved 4.5 billion KPC shares worth $335 million, bought at a slight premium to the last-traded price, the FT reported. Dangote said the acquisition and planned network expansion formed part of a continent-wide fuel distribution strategy. “We are going very aggressively with that,” he said.

Dangote also plans to invest $1.5 billion in expanding the pipeline network as part of a wider African refining, storage, and distribution business, the FT reported.

Kenyan President William Ruto said on Tuesday that private investors had acquired a quarter of KPC from public entities, without identifying the buyers. The government sold a 65% stake through an IPO earlier this year to raise revenue, with the company listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange in March.

Dangote already operates Africa’s largest refinery near Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. The roughly $20 billion facility began commercial operations in 2024, helping the country reduce its reliance on imported fuel. In September, the company launched a $1.6 billion public offering to help finance an expansion intended to double its capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day.

US President Donald Trump has said he expects the finalization of a “much different kind” of trade deal with India soon, boosting hopes that a breakthrough is near after months-long negotiations appear to have stalled over bilateral trade concessions.

Earlier this month, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the negotiations hit a “plateau,” making further concessions difficult for both sides.

India, which currently faces 10% tariffs on exports to the US, has sought an advantage over its competitors in South Asia in the American market. In return, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is willing to allow market access to US companies, apart from some sectors in which local industries could be harmed.

“They want to make a deal. We’re going to make a deal. Pretty close, yeah… It’s going to be a much different kind of a deal than we’ve done,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Tuesday.

The US president did not explain what he meant by a “much different deal” and did not provide a time frame.

A trade deal would offer a significant boost to a host of India’s export-oriented sectors, including pharmaceuticals, engineering goods, textiles, electronics, and information technology-related services, NDTV reported.

The recent passage of the Russia sanctions act – which gave Trump the authority to impose up to 100% tariffs on Russia’s top oil buyers, including India – frayed ties and threatened to stall the trade talks.

Trump, however, suspended these sanctions last week, in what was seen as a conciliatory gesture to New Delhi.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will co-chair the plenary session of the third Russia-Africa Summit in Moscow on October 29 alongside Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye, the current chair of the African Union, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced on Wednesday.

The two-day summit, scheduled for October 28-29, will bring together Russian officials and African leaders to discuss trade, investment, security, and broader economic cooperation. The agenda will also include peaceful nuclear energy, independent payment systems, food security, digitalization, and artificial intelligence.

“We have effectively reached the final phase of preparations. Work is being carried out in close cooperation with our African partners,” Zakharova said. 

Putin is expected to hold bilateral talks with African leaders and meet with heads of regional organizations on the sidelines of the summit. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will host a working breakfast for his African counterparts on October 28. Zakharova said a substantial package of intergovernmental agreements and commercial contracts is expected to be signed during the event.

Last month, Zakharova said Western governments were pressuring African states to boycott the gathering and described the interference as a continuation of colonial-era practices. Lavrov also accused France of trying to dissuade African leaders from attending, warning that President Emmanuel Macron would use a visit to Africa to exert pressure.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry official Tatyana Dovgalenko said Western countries continued to exert diplomatic pressure on African governments and had even resorted to financial blackmail to prevent their participation.  

The European Commission will not revive a proposal to seize Russian sovereign assets immobilized at the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear to finance Ukraine, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has said.

Approximately €210 billion ($236 billion) in Russian central bank assets have been frozen in the EU, most of them held at Euroclear. Brussels has been using profits generated by the funds to support Ukraine through a so-called “windfall tax,” but has stopped short of confiscating the principal over concerns about the legal consequences. De Wever has repeatedly raised those risks at meetings of EU leaders.

“One colleague came to tell me in the hallway that it was as if I had run a flamethrower over that debate,” the prime minister told Belgian lawmakers on Wednesday, according to local media, referring to discussions last year. De Wever was briefing the Belgian parliament on the meeting.

“Not everyone experienced the discussion,” he said. “New leaders have emerged who are developing a discourse that I was able to nip in the bud last year.”

The proposal that De Wever considers a nonstarter nevertheless received support in various forms from Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, among others, during last week’s European Council summit.

EU leaders previously considered using approximately €185 billion ($208 billion) in Russian sovereign assets held in Belgium to finance Kiev. After De Wever demanded collective guarantees against potential financial and legal consequences, they instead agreed last December to raise €90 billion ($101 billion) through EU borrowing.

Kiev has deemed the foreign financing available for 2026-2027 insufficient, with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky requesting an additional €70 billion ($79 billion) last week. The EU has made no new funding commitment and reportedly plans to seek further contributions from other potential donors, particularly the UK and Canada.

Russia and Türkiye have called for South Africa’s swift return to G20 activities after the US barred the country from participating during America’s presidency amid tensions over Pretoria’s domestic policies and foreign ties.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Pankin and his Turkish counterpart, Berris Ekinci, discussed the issue during consultations in Moscow, according to a Russian Foreign Ministry statement released on Tuesday. They said any changes to G20 membership must be agreed on by consensus, with greater representation for countries of the Global South and East.

The diplomats also discussed preparations for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Atlanta on October 30-31 and the leaders’ summit in Miami December 14-15. They stressed that the forum should remain a platform for equal dialogue on global economic challenges.

Russia and Türkiye are both members of the G20, which comprises 19 countries, the EU, and the African Union.

US President Donald Trump announced in November 2025 that South Africa would not be invited to the Miami summit, saying it demonstrated that it is “unworthy of membership.” 

Trump also accused Pretoria of refusing to hand over the G20 presidency to a US Embassy representative. South Africa said it would breach protocol for President Cyril Ramaphosa to hand over to a junior diplomat. The transfer later took place at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation between officials of similar rank.

The South African presidency said US punitive measures are based on “misinformation and distortions.” Prior to the Johannesburg summit, Ramaphosa also rejected US pressure against issuing a joint declaration without Washington’s support. He told reporters on November 20 that South Africa “will not agree to be bullied.”

Relations have since deteriorated, with the US announcing visa restrictions in September against officials and people it accuses of enabling racial discrimination, uncompensated land seizures, and inciting violence against minorities in South Africa. US Ambassador Brent Bozell also criticized Pretoria’s ties with Russia, China, and Iran, pledging to challenge its “geostrategic drift” toward America’s competitors.

Ramaphosa warned on Monday that South Africa, which already faces steep US tariffs, must prepare for possible exclusion from America’s preferential trade program for African countries.

A Kuwait-flagged tanker carrying 21 Indian seafarers was struck by an unidentified projectile in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, the second time the ship was attacked in less than two months. All crew members were reported to be safe following the attack.

The oil-products tanker MT Al Dasma was hit about 11 nautical miles west of Bukha, Oman, sparking a fire that was later extinguished. The vessel remained stationary following the strike, according to maritime security reports.

India is monitoring the situation and remains in contact with the ship’s management company to ensure the crew’s safety, Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Wednesday.

“All 21 of our Indian crew members, along with the rest of the crew are completely safe,” Sonowal posted on X.

⚠️ IMPORTANT UPDATE ⚠️ On Oct 21, Kuwait-flagged oil product tanker M/T AL DASMA, carrying 21 Indian seafarers, was struck by an unknown projectile while transiting the Strait of Hormuz. All 21 of our Indian crew members, along with the rest of the crew are completely safe. We are continuously monitoring the situation and remain in close contact with the ship management company to ensure the ongoing security and wellbeing of our seafarers.

— Sarbananda Sonowal (@sarbanandsonwal) October 21, 2026

The tanker was previously attacked on September 7, southeast of the Strait of Hormuz, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The vessel was damaged in both incidents, with no pollution reported.

Indian crews have been caught in several recent attacks on commercial ships in the Middle East. On October 16, the tanker MT ST 3, carrying 15 Indian seafarers, was struck by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz. All crew members were reported safe.
Five days earlier, two Indian sailors were reported missing after the tanker MT Petro Dolphin was struck near Oman. Another tanker, MT Valthera, was hit the same day, but all 11 Indian seafarers aboard were unharmed.

The Antigua and Barbuda-flagged bulk carrier Cape Dao also sank near the strait on October 14, weeks after an attack killed an Indian seafarer.

The IMO had recorded 119 confirmed maritime incidents and 24 seafarer deaths across the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Middle East as of October 21.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy said Thursday that four vessels allegedly involved in illegal oil transfers were struck and caught fire in the northern Persian Gulf on Wednesday.

New Delhi previously condemned the recurring attacks on commercial shipping and called for immediate de-escalation through dialogue and diplomacy.

“Attacks on commercial vessels, seafarers and civilian infrastructure must cease,” India’s Foreign Ministry said on October 11, stressing the need to protect freedom of navigation and the uninterrupted flow of maritime commerce.

The US military has quietly begun withdrawing troops from bases across the Middle East, while Washington is ordering diplomatic personnel to leave several missions in the region, NBC News reports.

The moves come as President Donald Trump considers launching a new wave of attacks on Iran, and the withdrawals resemble preparations made by the Pentagon and State Department ahead of the initial US-Israeli strikes in February, NBC reported on Wednesday, citing two US officials and two people familiar with the matter.

US troops stationed in Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait are among those being relocated, according to the report. Washington reportedly intends to maintain a limited presence at its regional bases, including personnel responsible for air defenses and security.

Ahead of the February 28 attack, the Pentagon withdrew large numbers of troops from potentially vulnerable bases to shield them from expected Iranian retaliation. Tehran accused Washington of using Gulf residents as “human shields” after thousands of US service members took shelter in civilian hotels and office buildings.

The State Department has also ordered non-essential personnel and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, citing escalating attacks by Yemen’s Houthi movement against civilian airports and other critical infrastructure.

Reuters reported that Washington is preparing additional diplomatic withdrawals across the Gulf, citing US officials, but State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott described reports of further withdrawals as “inaccurate.”

Some of Trump’s advisers, including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, have reportedly advocated resuming military operations to increase pressure on Tehran. Others have warned against launching another major campaign without a clearly defined objective.

Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday, holding closed-door talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just days before Israel’s October 27 parliamentary elections. Netanyahu is seeking another term amid mounting criticism of his handling of the wars in Gaza and Iran. Trump has endorsed his reelection bid.

The US-Israeli war against Iran, launched on February 28, has entered its eighth month, disrupting global energy markets and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has offered to restore normal navigation through the vital waterway within seven days if Washington lifts its naval blockade, eases oil sanctions, and agrees to a broader cessation of hostilities.

Trump has rejected the Iranian proposal as “unacceptable,” while his administration continues to consider whether additional military pressure could force Tehran to accept their terms.

Two OpenAI agents disabled security monitoring systems during testing, with one later denying it had done so, the company has revealed.

The disclosure follows a string of similar incidents in recent months involving autonomous AI agents, which can independently plan and carry out tasks using external tools.

In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI said that the incidents occurred on October 3 and 6, involving its GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra agents, respectively.

In the first case, the coding agent tasked with creating evaluation tasks using employee feedback collected via Slack disabled automatic alerts to the company’s security team. According to OpenAI, the agent reasoned that the user’s prior instruction not to send messages on the team communication platform during the process applied to all notifications, including security alerts.

OpenAI said that it was investigating why the agents disabled the safeguards and working to prevent similar incidents. While the behavior may have resulted from “benign overpersistence” by the agents to complete the task, the company said that it was also “developing evaluations to test whether models might have a propensity to evade misalignment monitoring in particular.”

Last month, the Wall Street Journal, citing Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, reported that the company had scrapped the release of its GPT-6.1 Astra model. The decision reportedly came after internal testing had found the model to be more deceptive than its predecessors and apt to employ potentially unsafe external tools without first seeking the user’s permission.

Also in September, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that an OpenAI agent had hacked his country’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, with the company failing to report the breach for nearly three months.

Earlier, in July, OpenAI disclosed that its models had escaped their sandbox during cybersecurity testing, accessed the internet, and hacked into the servers of the Hugging Face online repository for AI models and datasets.

Earlier this month, Anthropic released a report detailing instances of “unintended” actions by its AI models, including Claude Haiku 4.5 providing a bogus tip to Philadelphia police regarding an ongoing homicide investigation.

Calls to halt AI development or impose tighter regulations on the industry have grown louder.

Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has warned that increasingly powerful AI could eventually escape human control, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has also urged governments to adopt a more active role in imposing safety standards on the industry.

However, US President Donald Trump has brushed off such concerns, saying that restrictions on AI development could allow China to overtake the US in the technological race.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, too, has argued that the world must absorb some “bad things” resulting from AI development, including hacks and scams, as the benefits afforded by the technology far outweigh the drawbacks.

A US judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties for deceiving Facebook users about the privacy of their personal data, in a landmark ruling stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed the harvesting of personal information from millions of Americans for political campaigns.

New Mexico District Judge Francis Mathew issued the ruling on Wednesday, following a jury verdict in September finding Facebook’s parent company responsible for nearly 44 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws.

The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on an American corporation.

The case arose from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it emerged that the British political consulting firm obtained personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent.

woah, it gets worse. In the Meta securities lawsuit for Cambridge Analytica cover-up, plaintiffs just posted deposition list. If they have the courage to 'go to the mat' (as Zuckerberg says) like New Mexico AG has done for over $25B, this could be very, very bad for Team Zuck. 1/3

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) October 22, 2026

The information was collected through a third-party personality quiz application that exploited Facebook’s system for accessing users’ friends’ data. Cambridge Analytica used the information to develop psychological profiles of voters and deliver targeted political advertising, including during the 2016 US presidential election.

The company was established in 2013 as the American political-data arm of the British SCL Group, a private contractor specializing in behavioral influence, psychological profiling, and strategic communications. SCL also marketed influence and research services to defense clients, including the UK Defense Ministry.

The scandal also exposed connections to Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley data-analysis company with extensive contracts involving US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. A 2018 New York Times investigation revealed that at least one Palantir employee advised Cambridge Analytica’s researchers during the company’s 2014 efforts to harvest Facebook information.

Palantir denied having a formal business relationship with Cambridge Analytica, maintaining that the employee acted in a personal capacity.

Attorney General Raul Torrez hailed Wednesday’s judgment as a warning to Silicon Valley that even the largest technology companies could be held accountable for violating consumer protection laws.

Meta has denied misleading users and plans to appeal the ruling, arguing that the unprecedented penalty is unconstitutional. Responding to the jury’s verdict last month, the company also invoked freedom of speech, insisting that Facebook is a forum for free expression.

Numerous websites worldwide, including government-run pages, temporarily went dark after the AI-assisted discovery of critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, which powers around 70% of the web globally.

On Wednesday, the developers of the popular open-source programming language, which helps websites run and display content, issued an urgent security alert over “critical remote code execution vulnerabilities.”

The flaws could allow hackers to take control of affected websites, prompting the release of urgent fixes, with all PHP users “strongly encouraged to update immediately.”

Cybersecurity agencies worldwide, including the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, the Australian Signals Directorate, and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security, issued their own alerts, advising users to apply the patches immediately and prioritize internet-facing systems.

The announcement prompted France’s Interior Ministry to temporarily shut down prefecture websites, with local government pages also unavailable. In neighboring Belgium, the Foreign Ministry similarly took its websites offline on Wednesday. In the Netherlands, the National Cyber Security Center, the websites of all major political parties, and at least one port took similar precautionary measures.

In Denmark, the national school communication platform was temporarily shut down; in Finland, the government’s public web services went dark.

The flaws in PHP were identified by two cybersecurity companies, Calif and Wiz, in August. PHP developers have since worked on fixes, while keeping the discovery under wraps to prevent malicious actors from exploiting the vulnerabilities.

The cybersecurity companies said they made extensive use of AI models in the process, including Google’s Gemini 4 Argon and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

Wiz stated that the “underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve.”

Poland has accused Kiev of making unacceptable “suicidal” moves after the Ukrainian city of Lviv dedicated 2027 to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its leader, Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevich.

To celebrate the 120th anniversary of Shukhevich’s birth and mark 85 years since the creation of the militant group that perpetrated mass killings of ethnic Poles, Jews, and Russians, the Lviv Regional Council decided on Tuesday to organize “cultural, memorial, scientific, and mass media events,” as well as exhibitions and national-patriotic rallies.

The announcement was met with widespread condemnation in Poland, which regards the UPA as perpetrators of genocide against Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia and its leader, Shukhevich, as a key ‘architect’ of the massacres. From 1943 to 1945, Ukrainian nationalist militants murdered an estimated 100,000 ethnic Poles in the regions, which are now largely part of modern Ukraine.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the move a “suicidal tactic,” and Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz called it “unacceptable.” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski condemned the announcement, calling for the resolution’s key sponsor, Lviv regional lawmaker Svyatoslav Sheremet, to be placed on Poland’s travel ban list.

The resolution ultimately vanished from the Lviv council’s website without any explanation. Speaking to Polish media on Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki said Warsaw received assurances from Kiev that the resolution would not be implemented.

“We take on faith the words of the administration of Vladimir Zelensky that this catastrophic decision will not be implemented,” Bosacki stated, calling the disappearance of the resolution from the council’s website a “good sign,” but cautioning against interpreting it as an official cancellation of the celebrations.

Poland regards the UPA and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, as perpetrators of genocide, while modern Ukraine cherishes them as freedom fighters and national heroes.

Earlier this year, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky named a military unit after the ‘Heroes of the UPA’ and established a ‘pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians’ at Kiev’s main military cemetery, where OUN leader and Nazi collaborator Andrey Melnik was reinterred with state honors in May.

First and foremost, it’s important to note a significant decrease in the level of violent crime. Of course, after President Donald Trump’s controversial firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica McEntarfer, for publishing weak labor market figures, trust in American statistics has been considerably shaken. Thus, reports of achieving the lowest murder rate in history – 4.3 cases per 100,000 population – may be politically motivated and deliberately boastful. Nevertheless, a noticeable decline in the rate of murders and other violent crimes has indeed occurred in recent years. This can be attributed to increased federal funding and strengthening of the police force, as well as intensified efforts against illegal immigration during the Trump administration.

A particularly striking aspect of this is the comparison with Canada, which has been and remains a bastion of liberalism in immigration and domestic policy. Unlike the US, where the level of violent crime is traditionally high, Canada has always been perceived as a safe society. But now, everything is changing before our eyes.

Since 2015, the rate of violent crime per capita in the U.S. has decreased by 15.1%, while in Canada, on the contrary, it has increased by 36.9%. As a result, for the first time in history, the land of the maple leaf has surpassed the U.S. in terms of violent crime per capita.

Another significant trend: Gallup polls show that the perception of homosexual relationships as morally acceptable has stopped increasing and even declined in the US The share of those supporting same-sex marriage fell from 71% in 2023 to 64% in 2026. Support for gender transition practices among Americans decreased from 46% to 38%.

As we can see, the MAGA effect is concentrated within the Republican electorate and primarily manifests in the consolidation of Republicans based on traditional values. At the same time, there is an intensifying value conflict between conservative Republicans and the Democratic Party electorate.

Perhaps the most vivid manifestation of the MAGA effect is that in the summer of 2024, the trend of decreasing births among white Americans was replaced by steady growth, and by spring 2026, the proportion of newborns from white families reached 51.5%, the first increase in five years.

Let’s see if this trend can be maintained, but the mere fact of the growth in births among white Americans is quite remarkable – it demonstrates a surge of optimism in the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) community and proves that they still have fight left in them. In an era of victorious globalization, WASPs in the US were already being metaphorically buried with a derogatory epitaph, yet they suddenly breathed life and showed they are ready to fight for their country, which their ancestors built.

It is noteworthy that conservative and religious Americans have twice as many children as their liberal and non-religious counterparts. Thus, the conservative American community reproduces itself (total fertility rate 2.22), while the liberal American environment naturally shrinks by half in each subsequent generation (total fertility rate 1.02), mainly replenishing itself through immigration.

The descendants of pilgrims and pioneers remember that the primary traditional value is the will to live. Everything one needs to know about MAGA can be boiled down to two points. First, it is the rise of the American spirit. Second, it serves as a visual reiteration of a biblical lesson: the salvation of those who are drowning is in the hands of the drowners themselves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump could hold a “historic” three-way meeting at the APEC summit in China, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is scheduled to take place in Shenzhen, China, on November 18-19.

Speaking to the Russian outlet Vesti on Wednesday, Ushakov said Beijing had already begun preparations for the potential talks.

“Everyone is ready for this, but much, if not everything, depends on the Chinese hosts of the summit,” he said.

The possibility of three-way talks was also discussed during Putin’s meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, according to the Kremlin.

Ushakov described the proposed gathering as potentially “historic,” noting that it would be the first meeting of the three leaders in this format.

Putin and Trump last met in person at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025, and have remained in contact by phone, most recently on October 9.

Trump and Xi have met twice so far this year, first in Beijing in May and then at the White House last month.

Trump has previously expressed openness to three-way talks, suggesting that nuclear disarmament could be among the issues discussed.

Asked whether the talks could also contribute to peace efforts in the Ukraine conflict, Ushakov said a single meeting would not be enough. “Even if the meeting lasts one, two or five hours, it still won’t be possible to resolve all the problems,” he said.

Commenting on whether the summit could amount to a “new Yalta,” Ushakov said: “I think that if the meeting takes place, there will be a storm of comments and assessments.” 

The 1945 Yalta Conference brought together Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to discuss the final stages of World War II and the postwar international order.

Slovakia will discuss economic cooperation with Russia, including energy supplies, in Moscow next week, the Slovak Foreign Ministry has said.

The landlocked EU nation has remained a buyer of Russian oil and gas despite the deterioration of the ties between Moscow and the EU in the wake of the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. The country is supposed to phase out Russian energy by late 2027 under the bloc’s plan to replace Russian oil and gas supplies from elsewhere.

The Russian-Slovak intergovernmental commission for economic, scientific, and technical cooperation has been inactive since November 2021 but is now set to meet next Monday, the Slovak Foreign Ministry announced late on Tuesday. The commission will discuss a broad range of topics, including farming, environment, sports, and culture, and focus on energy supply, including nuclear energy, according to the ministry.

“The fundamental topic will be energy and the possibility to cooperate in securing supplies of strategic resources. The Slovak side is also interested in discussing gas supplies and the continuation of oil supplies,” it said in a statement.

Bratislava continues “to base its approach on its European Union and North Atlantic Alliance membership and keeping commitments of this membership” but wants to create room for dialogue, the ministry said.

Last month, Fico warned that Europe was moving dangerously close to a direct clash between NATO and Russia, accusing the West of seeking a “pretext” for a major conflict. He accused EU nations of engaging in increasingly bellicose rhetoric and described the Ukraine conflict as “out of control.”

“The situation has never been as serious and tense regarding the possibility of a pan-European war conflict as it is now,” he said.

The EU has updated its Arctic strategy, and militarism has replaced climate activism as Brussels’ new preoccupation in the frozen north. Despite what the new strategy claims, however, the Arctic is not “the EU’s Northern Neighborhood.”

Unveiled on Tuesday by the European Commission, the ‘Strategy for the Arctic’ describes the region as a “critical” zone for trade, investment, and conservation, and a flashpoint for military confrontation with Russia. 

Today, we adopt our new 🇪🇺 Arctic Strategy. The Arctic is where the tectonic plates of geopolitics collide head-on. It requires us to change our strategic posture. And work with like-minded partners that share our values ↓ https://t.co/B6GvgUOCQk

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) October 20, 2026

“With Russia and China increasing their footprint and ambition, the Arctic has become a front line of global power competition,” top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas said in a statement. “Our revamped Strategy reflects this new reality and puts security firmly at its core.”

To understand just how dramatic this new focus on security is, it’s necessary to turn back the clock to 2021, when the commission released its previous Arctic strategy.

The EU’s green past

Published on October 13, 2021, the strategy opened by describing climate change as “the most comprehensive threat the Arctic is facing.” Russia’s refurbishment of Soviet-era military bases along its Arctic coastline was presented primarily as something that could “further aggravate the consequences of climate change,” and the EU pledged to work with Moscow “to improve environmental and health security,” and to leave military relations with Russia up to NATO and individual member states.

Four months later, Brussels severed relations with Moscow and entered the Russia-Ukraine conflict on Kiev’s side. The title of the 2021 strategy – ‘A stronger EU engagement for a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous Arctic’ – needed an update that reflected the EU’s new militarism.

Brussels claims the Arctic

“Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine has reshaped the security of the Arctic and the EU as a whole,” the new document opens, going on to assert that “the Arctic is not someone else’s frontier. It is Europe’s Northern Neighbourhood and the European Union is part of the Arctic.”

Geography is not exactly on Brussels’ side here. The 27-member union has no coastline on the Arctic Ocean, and only two of its members – Finland and Sweden – have territory inside the Arctic Circle (although a Danish dependency, Greenland left the EU in 1985). Russia accounts for 53% of the Arctic Ocean’s coastline, and 45% of all land inside the Arctic Circle.

To compensate for this, the new strategy proposes that all waters north of 60 degrees latitude be considered ‘Arctic’. The commission argues that this would allow its environmental regulations to “cover the actual footprint of Arctic shipping.” It would also dramatically expand the EU’s ‘Arctic’ territory and population by bringing almost all of Finland and Sweden into the new region, including Finland’s entire 1,340 kilometer border with Russia. It is on this frontier that the EU is preparing for conflict.

War preparations

The strategy sets out a lengthy list of military objectives, with the commission promising to:

• “Deepen engagement with NATO” and hold military exercises focused on moving troops and equipment into the Arctic

• Develop military logistics corridors from central Europe to the Arctic

• Upgrade ports and airports for military use

• Expand icebreaker capacity 

• Expand satellite surveillance of the region and tracking of Russian oil tankers

• Develop polar-capable undersea drones

• Establish a “Maritime Security Hub” and increase data-sharing with NATO

• Deepen military ties with Canada, Iceland, Norway, the UK, and US

The strategy is short on some specifics, and almost all of these goals are presented without an accompanying price tag. The only actual figures listed are €260 million for ten existing European Defence Fund projects, €107 million toward the construction of an undersea internet cable to Greenland, and the €200 million Greenland ‘Partnership Package’, which was announced last month. Although the commission says that this investment package will “support resilience, security and peace in the Arctic,” none of the €200 million in funding is earmarked for explicitly military projects.

‘Shadow fleet’ is an EU euphemism for tankers carrying Russian oil in international waters. Russian oil exporters do not abide by EU sanctions, nor do importers outside the EU. Nevertheless, EU member states have abrogated the authority to seize them, in what the Kremlin considers “flagrant violation of international law” and “outright piracy and robbery.”

Should the seizures continue, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to respond in kind.

The ‘hybrid war’ deception

The EU’s militarization of the Arctic is justified, the document states, as Russia is “pursuing hybrid strategies against its neighbours… from drone incursions and Global Navigation Satellite System jamming to the sabotage of undersea cables.” In the absence of real, verifiable military action by Russia against Europe, EU and NATO leaders have taken to accusing Moscow of waging “hybrid war,” describing drone sightings, fires, and accidents at weapons factories, protests, and even natural disasters as Kremlin-orchestrated plots to destabilize the West. 

Nevertheless, claims of ‘hybrid war’ have persisted in European politics and media, to the point where some analysts view the claims themselves as a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European public, used to justify military spending hikes and welfare cutbacks.

“When you are sure it is the Russians, or almost sure it is the Russians, attribute it to the Russians,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte advised the bloc’s political leaders and intelligence chiefs earlier this month. 

Russia has been holding military exercises in the Arctic for decades, and the refurbishment of its Soviet-era bases in the region has been underway since before the EU published its 2021 Arctic strategy. However, the newly militarized EU is no longer content to handle this matter through old mechanisms – namely the Arctic Council – and insists that countering Russia in the north is its responsibility as well as NATO’s.

The Europeans dictate their terms

The EU’s new strategy calls on Russia to “ensure that freedom of navigation is preserved” along the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a formerly impassable navigation corridor that can now be traversed year-round, thanks to receding polar ice caps and the assistance of Russia’s vast icebreaker fleet. The NSR cuts transit time from China to northern Europe in half, and in August, the first Chinese container ship arrived at the port of Murmansk via this route.

The NSR skims along more than 24,000 km of Russian coastline, and through internationally recognized Russian territorial waters. Russia is the only state capable of rendering assistance to any ships passing through the route, and vessels wishing to pass in winter must pay to be escorted by Russian icebreakers. Moscow retains the right to deny any ships access to the NSR.

Nevertheless, the EU insists that it has a say over Russian maritime policy, even as it vows to “continue to sanction the shadow fleet entering from the Northern Sea Route” and place Russian shipping under satellite surveillance. The latest Arctic strategy states that the EU will “actively engage” with other nations to ensure freedom of navigation in the Arctic, but omits any possibility of engagement with Russia. Only “like-minded partners,” a term mentioned nearly two dozen times in the document, will be consulted.

Diplomatic and economic disputes in the Arctic were previously handled at the Arctic Council. However, seven of the council’s eight members – every one except Russia – stopped participating in high-level Council meetings in March 2022. That same month, the EU joined Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in suspending any activities involving Russia within the separate Barents Euro-Arctic Council.

The EU’s Arctic delusion

In a message released by its embassy in the Netherlands on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry described the document as “another pipe dream of EU hawks.”

“A quick reality check: Russia operates a fleet of 40+ icebreakers. How many does the EU have in total?” the ministry asked. “The Arctic should be a place of cooperation, not confrontation. Maybe it’s time to stop the provocations?”

After spending years pressuring New Delhi to cut back its Russian oil purchases, and isolate Moscow, Washington has now changed tack and is seeking India’s help to bring down elevated domestic fuel prices that are largely of its own making.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who skipped New Delhi entirely on his second visit to India this year, made clear what had brought him to the country – the massive refining capacity of Reliance Industries, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani.

“I’m also here in my capacity as the National Security Adviser,” Rubio said in Mumbai. “Energy is related to national security … we’re going to go see a company that has a tremendous amount of refining capability.”  

President Donald Trump’s administration is showing a new urgency to bring down the high fuel prices that threaten Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections. US retail diesel prices reached a record average of about $6.32 a gallon on Tuesday.

American refineries are already operating at close to capacity, and Washington is working with India to increase refining output and bring more petroleum products to global markets, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in Houston the same day. 

“Energy politics is inseparable from American geopolitics,” Jindal School of International Affairs adjunct professor and former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Anuradha Mitra Chenoy told RT. “The US is using energy as a geopolitical instrument, and that is central to understanding Rubio’s visit.”

From Russian oil tariffs to Venezuelan crude

Washington has regularly used energy sanctions to achieve its geopolitical aims. First it took Iranian, and then Venezuelan, crude off the market with the threat of sanctions. Since the Ukraine conflict began, Washington also pressured India to stop buying Russian crude. The argument was that choking off Moscow’s oil revenues would help end the conflict, which is now in its fifth year. 

New Delhi has maintained that providing affordable energy to its 1.4 billion people is central to its oil-purchasing decisions. India imports about 85% of its energy requirements, and Russia remains one of its biggest sources of oil.

But the pressure reached a breaking point when the US Congress passed a law last month that threatened “bone-crushing sanctions” on major buyers of Russian energy. New Delhi warned that the proposed measures could affect bilateral relations and global energy markets. 

Trump announced a deal with Russia to buy diesel for the domestic market. And cleared the deck for Rubio’s visit by waiving off sanctions on Moscow’s top oil buyers – which includes China and India, allowing Russian oil to flow more freely into global markets.

“None of these tariffs are meant to punish or harm India,” Rubio said in Mumbai, adopting a more conciliatory tone than has come out of Washington until recently.

Why Reliance, and Jamnagar, matter to Washington

Washington’s top diplomat held talks with Mukesh Ambani at Jamnagar in India’s Gujarat state on the second day of his visit. The Reliance refinery in Jamnagar is the largest single-site refining complex in the world, and can process around 1.4 million barrels of crude a day.

It is also one of the few facilities capable of processing large volumes of Venezuela’s extra-heavy crude, which is good for producing diesel – showing its importance to a US administration worried about domestic fuel prices. 

Jamnagar already plays a major part in keeping global fuel prices in check – by selling fuel refined from Russian crude to markets including Europe, which sanctions the same crude.

And it is buying more Venezuelan oil, accounting for more than 74% of the nearly $3.6 billion worth of Venezuelan crude imported by India between April and August, according to figures shared by the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) think tank.

Rubio wants Reliance to buy, and process, more of the Venezuelan crude, which the US now controls after kidnapping the country’s President Nicolas Maduro.

“The refining capability exists,” GTRI founder Ajay Srivastava told RT. “The question is whether expanding purchases makes commercial sense.”

Venezuelan crude is cheaper but it also costs more to refine, he pointed out. He also questioned the wisdom of India buying more of the South American country’s oil, which was once subjected to US sanctions. 

“It would be very unwise for India to stop using Russian oil,” Chenoy said, pointing out that there are only a limited number of major sources available internationally, and Russia remains one of the most important.

Reliance is also involved in a proposed refinery project in Brownsville, Texas, under a long-term agreement to purchase its output. The facility, which Trump called a $300 billion project in March, is designed to process lighter American shale crude. 

The Indian conglomerate “helps utilize and unleash the energy that is being developed in the Western Hemisphere,” Rubio told the Indian Express, describing his visit as an opportunity to identify ways of diversifying energy supplies.

Rubio dodges a Musk-ignited controversy

Ahead of his meeting with Ambani, Rubio had to sidestep the controversy ignited by trillionaire Elon Musk.

The world’s richest man, a prominent donor to the Republican party, had accused Ambani earlier this month of obstructing the launch of his Starlink satellite internet service in India.

Musk targeted Ambani, sarcastically addressing him as “Prime Minister Ambani” and questioning whether his company would allow Starlink to compete in the country.

Reliance also dismissed suggestions that it was blocking competition. 

“Elon Musk is a private citizen,” Rubio told the Indian Express, adding that Musk had the right to express his views.

Rubio also sought to assuage concerns about the India-US trade deal, which has been holding fire despite months of tortuous negotiations. Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman described the talks as deadlocked earlier this month, saying both sides were finding it “very difficult” to make further concessions.

“We are weeks, not months, away from, I think, finalizing it,” Rubio said. “I would say we are about as close as you can be without having executed the agreement.” 

India has been holding off on finalizing the deal as it wants to lock in a competitive advantage in the US market relative to rival exporter nations. 

Pragmatism back on the table

The US administration turning on the charm, so to speak, suggests that Washington’s energy and political interests are taking precedence over its geopolitical considerations and moral grandstanding.

With pragmatism back on the table, Rubio’s visit could mark a step toward easing bilateral tensions and strengthening cooperation beyond the immediate fuel crisis driving the change.

Still India must “carefully examine what it is being asked to commit to, what commercial benefits it can expect, and the risks of future changes in US policy,” Srivastava said.

Residents of New South Wales, Australia could soon have the option to make a final contribution to their garden upon death, after the state’s parliament approved turning human remains into compost as an alternative to burial and cremation.

The bill, introduced by Independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich, cleared the upper house on Wednesday after passing the lower house unanimously last week. It now awaits assent, with a minimum two-year wait before going into force.

Known as ‘terramation’ or natural organic reduction, a body is placed in a vessel with wood chips, straw, and other plant material. Microbes break down the remains, producing material that can eventually nourish trees and gardens.

US operator Recompose says its process takes 8-12 weeks, including a curing period. Remaining bones are mechanically ground down and mixed back in, and artificial implants are removed.

Under the NSW bill, families can take the resulting compost home to nourish a memorial tree or garden, or arrange for it to be placed elsewhere. However, choosing to become garden material remains a personal decision; operators are barred from turning a deceased person’s remains into compost against their written wishes.

“We are running out of burial space [and] that space can cost as much as $50,000 [Australian dollars],” Greenwich told ABC in June. He predicted that composting will become cheaper than cremation, although local prices have yet to be established.

Not everyone is pleased with the proposal. NSW Premier Chris Minns said in June that he felt “a bit weird about it.” Catholic Weekly columnist Michael Cook described it as a “bizarre solution to saving the planet,” arguing that composting conflicts with religious respect for the human body.

Similar human composting practices have already been approved in several US states and part of Germany. England and Wales are considering rules that could eventually allow it.

Israel’s leading political parties hold broadly similar positions on Palestinian statehood and Gaza despite their fierce electoral rivalry, RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij reports. 

With parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27, the report examines whether a change of government would bring any significant shift in the country’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads the right-wing Likud party, has categorically rejected the creation of a Palestinian state.

“There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu declared.

His position is echoed by several political rivals. The leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, has said that the idea of a two-state solution “has died,” while Gadi Eisenkot, head of the centrist Yashar party, has ruled out Palestinian statehood under a government he leads.

Even Yair Golan, leader of the left-leaning Democrats, has described a two-state solution as “too ambitious” for now, instead advocating civilian separation while retaining Israeli security control.

The similarities in position extend to Gaza, where the main parties all support disarming Hamas and maintaining Israeli military involvement, although they differ over who should govern the territory.

Military conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews remains a major point of contention, with disagreements over long-standing draft exemptions triggering widespread protests.

With smaller factions potentially playing a decisive role in forming the next coalition, Dubenskij raises the question of how much Israel’s policies could change after the vote.

Watch the full report below.

Russia and China could finalize agreements on a major new gas pipeline by the end of the year, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Wednesday, in a potential breakthrough that would significantly expand Moscow’s energy exports to Asia.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of talks between Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and his Chinese counterpart Li Qiang in St. Petersburg, Novak said the planned Power of Baikal pipeline was among the issues discussed.

“Our companies – Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation – are negotiating a second route for gas supplies from Russia to the People’s Republic of China,” he said. “We are waiting for our companies to complete commercial negotiations and hope they will reach the relevant agreements by the end of the year.”

Li arrived in St. Petersburg on Tuesday for the regular meeting of the Russian and Chinese heads of government.

Russia already supplies gas to China through the Power of Siberia, a more than 3,000-kilometer pipeline launched in 2019. It carries gas from the Chayandinskoye field in Yakutia and the Kovyktinskoye field in Irkutsk Region through Russia’s Far East and across the border near Blagoveshchensk, connecting to a Chinese network extending toward Shanghai. Its annual export capacity is 38 billion cubic meters (bcm), with deliveries reaching 38.8 bcm in 2025.

The planned Power of Baikal, previously known as Power of Siberia 2, would open a major new energy corridor. The roughly 2,600-kilometer pipeline is designed to deliver up to 50 bcm annually from Russia’s Arctic gas fields on the Yamal Peninsula to China via Mongolia, including the Soyuz Vostok transit pipeline.

Unlike Power of Siberia, which draws gas from eastern Siberia, the new route would tap western Siberian reserves that previously supplied Europe, giving Moscow a major new outlet for gas following the collapse of much of its European market. Novak said the project was renamed Power of Baikal to distinguish it from the existing pipeline and reflect its planned route along the southern shore of Lake Baikal. The precise route remains subject to final commercial agreements.

Gazprom and CNPC signed a legally binding memorandum on the project in September 2025, envisaging deliveries of 50 bcm annually over 30 years. A final supply contract, however, was not signed. Pricing is a key sticking point, with media reports suggesting Beijing is seeking rates close to Russia’s domestic prices, while Moscow has pushed for more commercially favorable terms. President Vladimir Putin said last year that pricing would follow a market-based formula similar to that used for European supplies, stressing that there would be “no charity” on either side.

The expansion comes as Russia accelerates its energy pivot toward Asia in light of Western sanctions and EU efforts to phase out Russian supplies. Before the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022, Europe was Russia’s largest pipeline gas market, with Gazprom providing around 40-45% of the bloc’s total gas imports. Deliveries subsequently plunged as Brussels pursued alternative suppliers and imposed successive sanctions on Russia.

Unlike oil, which can be redirected by tanker, pipeline gas requires extensive infrastructure, making Power of Baikal a key project in Moscow’s efforts to replace lost European demand. Moscow has repeatedly accused Western governments of undermining European energy security through their sanctions policies.

The shift also follows the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that previously brought Russian gas to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea. Novak said on Wednesday that Moscow remains ready to resume deliveries through the one Nord Stream pipeline string out of the four that remained undamaged.

Russia has repeatedly offered to resume energy supplies to Europe, particularly in light of the disruptions to global markets caused by the Middle East crisis, but says its proposals have received no response from European governments.

Russia’s Ural Airlines will start direct flights to Delhi next week, as it seeks to benefit from a spurt in business travel and tourism between the two countries.

The flights will operate from Ural Airlines’ base, Koltsovo Airport in Ekaterinburg, to New Delhi three days a week, on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, the airline told RT India.

The service will start on October 25.

“The decision to launch regular flights was driven by both commercial and strategic reasons,” the airline said, citing strong demand and the availability of a suitable fleet of Airbus aircraft.

Ekaterinburg is the largest transport and industrial hub in the Urals. Direct flights from the city will significantly slash travel time from the Urals and Siberia.

Russian Ambassador to India Denis Alipov recently said the number of airline services to India a week could soon jump nearly fivefold to 71 from the current 15.

“Siberian Airlines (S7) and Ural Airlines are actively working on the possibility of launching regular flights to Delhi from Novosibirsk and Ekaterinburg,” Alipov told RT.

“We are awaiting a response from our Indian partners,” the ambassador said.

Officials in Tatarstan also previously indicated they are in talks with the East-West Group and Russian authorities about launching direct flights to India, including to its financial hub, Mumbai.

India and Russia are similarly boosting ties in the civil aviation sector. Two Indian domestic airlines have signed agreements on buying 85 Russian passenger aircraft, as Moscow and New Delhi move to expand cooperation in civil aviation and manufacturing.

The new services come amid an expected surge in activity in various sectors including tourism, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and food processing, information technology, engineering, and transport and logistics. India and Russia expect bilateral trade to hit $100 billion by 2030.

A Russian Navy training ship has arrived in Namibia as part of a voyage around Eurasia and Africa, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday. The Baltic Fleet vessel ‘Perekop’ docked at the port of Walvis Bay after crossing the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

According to the ministry, the ship covered more than 1,800 nautical miles in seven days. During the journey, cadets from the Baltic Naval Institute continued their practical training, taking part in navigation watches, plotting courses using onboard instruments, and practicing maneuvers through narrow waterways. They also received instruction in ship operations and damage control.

The vessel was welcomed in Walvis Bay by representatives of the Russian Embassy and the Namibian navу. The visitors who toured the ship were briefed on its operations and the training program for future naval officers. The crew and cadets are also to visit local attractions during their stay.

According to Sputnik, the voyage is scheduled to conclude on December 9, 2026, after taking the vessel through four oceans, 14 seas, 23 straits, nine bays, and two rivers, with calls at 20 ports, including 12 overseas.

The ‘Perekop’ is not the first Russian naval ship to visit Africa. In July 2025, another Baltic Fleet vessel, the ‘Smolny’, visited the Republic of the Congo as part of a regional tour that also included Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé and Príncipe. The ship had previously called at several African ports in 2024, including in Namibia, Angola, and South Africa.

The Wall Street Journal has challenged Elon Musk’s denials over alleged restrictions on satellite services used for Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia. The outlet has cited anonymous White House sources who have claimed that the SpaceX founder and Starlink owner had personally ordered restricting the service.

Ukrainian officials last week claimed that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications service and its military-grade version, Starshield, which Kiev uses for frontline drone operations, stopped working on drones traveling faster than 160 kph (100 mph). Neither Starlink nor SpaceX has publicly acknowledged a technical “signal or service failure,” leaving the questions of whether an actual service restriction took place, and if so what could have caused it, unconfirmed. On Saturday Ukrainian Defense Minister Evgeny Khmara said Starlink terminal speeds have returned to 400 kph (248 mph). 

What has Ukraine claimed about Starshield?

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky initially claimed, without evidence, that Kiev had been told “technical malfunctions” had caused a service slowdown. He later shifted the blame to Washington. On NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday Zelensky claimed, again without citing evidence nor being asked to provide it, that an order had come from the US government. According to Zelensky, Kiev had even secretly despatched cars to the EU, where they could drive "legally" at 180kph (110mph) where tests allegedly surfaced discrepancies in Starlink performance between the EU and Ukraine.

Musk has categorically denied that he instructed SpaceX to restrict either service, nor has he confirmed that any restriction or slowdown took place.

The WSJ cited anonymous sources who contradicted him, alleging on Tuesday that he personally ordered speed limits on Ukrainian hardware connected to the satellite network.

Even the WSJ's sources accounts differed. Some claimed that Musk acted unilaterally; others said he consulted senior administration officials, including President Donald Trump, before making the decision. The outlet also claimed that SpaceX representatives contacted the White House to coordinate their accounts of whether the restrictions had been agreed on with the administration. 

What has the US government said about Starshield?

Musk earlier insisted that Starshield is owned and controlled by the US government, meaning any speed or usage restrictions are determined by the US military and ultimately Trump – who denied that he ordered the restrictions, though he said on Monday he “would like to find out” who did. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent both said the administration was not behind the restrictions, with Bessent rebuking Zelensky for making “reckless” allegations.

Relations between Zelensky and Washington have effectively collapsed in recent weeks over sanctions on Russia and Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. Both Musk and Trump have sharply criticized Ukraine’s attacks on Russian diesel refineries, blaming them for global fuel shortages and soaring prices at the pump.

Speaking at the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump warned Zelensky that he is “going to have to want to make a deal.” He also criticized the cost of supporting Kiev, saying the US has received “absolutely nothing back” except “grief, death and tremendous monetary loss.”

What did Kiev say about Starshield?

Despite Zelensky’s evidence-free assertions and there being no record in the public sphere to support it, the Western press and Ukrainian diplomats are echoing the claims regardless. Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington, Denis Senik, said on Tuesday that Kiev is still “waiting for the official response from contacts with the Pentagon and SpaceX” to understand what happened. 

What did the Kremlin say about Starshield?

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that Moscow is unaware of the reported Starlink restrictions, but stressed that “overall, of course, it would be better if such amazing technology… was not used for military purposes at all.” Moscow has condemned Western military assistance for Kiev, arguing that it only prolongs the conflict and obstructs peace efforts.

Is there any proof Starshield was slowed down?

There is no proof on the public record or in the public domain that the Starshield was affected. The only suggestions supporting the idea such an incident took place are Vladimir Zelensky's uncontested claim that Ukrainians sent cars to the EU with Starlink terminals to compare data and the claims of an anonymous Ukrainian officer who told German media giant Axel Springer's Global Reporter's Network, seemingly during the alleged service restriction, that all operations were on hold. 

Russia is ready to resume three-way negotiations with the US and Ukraine to discuss security arrangements for when the conflict has ended, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said.

The announcement followed nearly three hours of talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff at Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. Jared Kushner joined by video link after illness prevented him from traveling.

Ushakov said Putin told Witkoff that Moscow was “in principle, ready to resume” trilateral negotiations in mid-November, with the main topic being a post-conflict security system for Russia and Ukraine. Witkoff indicated that Trump would welcome the proposal, the aide added.

The presidential aide noted that earlier attempts to restart trilateral talks were derailed by Kiev having carried out massive attacks on Moscow and other cities during Russia’s recent parliamentary elections. Polling stations were targeted on the main voting day, with election commission personnel killed.

However, the situation has since been “re-evaluated, taking into account the signals received from the Americans,” Ushakov said, adding that Putin had praised the mediation efforts of Trump, his administration, and special representatives in seeking mutually acceptable solutions.

Beyond Ukraine, the participants discussed the October diesel agreement, under which Washington eased sanctions on Russian fuel exports. Both sides said the deal served their interests and would help stabilize global fuel markets. Other joint economic projects are also approaching implementation, Ushakov added.

Russia, Ukraine and the US last held talks in Geneva in February, following two rounds in Abu Dhabi. Further negotiations, however, were put on hold after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran, disrupting access to the UAE.

Ushakov told Russian media that Abu Dhabi was again being examined as a possible venue for renewed talks, noting that Putin has yet to choose the members of a future Russian delegation.

Asked by reporters whether the Ukraine conflict was approaching its end, Ushakov suggested it is “moving in that direction.”

Washington has been involved in nearly two dozen regime change operations across the Middle East, each ending in disaster, US Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack has said.

Barrack criticized American efforts to manipulate the region and impose change through military force during an interview at the Global Security Forum in Qatar on Tuesday. He warned that his remarks would be “real” rather than “diplomatic.”

“If you take the greater Middle East, including the Levant, the Gulf, the Caucases, Central Asia, North Africa, we’ve had 23 regime changes. None of them have worked,” he said, stressing that the US had been involved in all of them in one way or another and bore responsibility for the outcomes.

The diplomat added that “kinetic reactions have never worked” either, referring to US military interventions and their “unintended consequences.” The latest US-Israeli war on Iran, which began in late February, has also plunged the region into chaos.

Barrack acknowledged that fomenting “conflict and controversy” had previously benefited Washington because “the more off base the region was, the more [Washington] could manipulate fossil fuels for its own benefit.” That is no longer the case, he said.

The envoy contrasted the proposed approach with the arrangement Washington reached with Saudi Arabia in 1974 following the oil shock triggered by the Yom Kippur War between Israel and several Arab nations.

Under the old arrangement, Saudi Arabia continued pricing its oil exclusively in US dollars and invested much of its revenues in American assets, while also purchasing US weapons and expecting American troops stationed in the region to rescue it in case of a major conflict.

The US confrontation with Iran, culminating in two open wars since 2025, has crumbled the foundations of that relationship.

Barrack urged friendly Middle Eastern nations to temper their expectations of American assistance, saying the US is not offering “a commitment to open seas and open trade at any cost.” Washington should “do a better job of defining: here’s what we’re willing to do, here’s what we’re not willing to do,” he added.

“We leave Israel out of this because it’s so delicate to talk about,” Barrack said.

He also acknowledged that the Israeli government was reluctant to make any concessions on national security and described a “failure” of the Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements Israel signed with several Arab nations in 2020.

Libya’s eastern-based parliament has approved a disputed maritime agreement with Türkiye, drawing condemnation from Greece and Cyprus over competing boundaries and energy rights in the Mediterranean.

The House of Representatives voted unanimously on Tuesday to endorse the agreement, which was first signed in November 2019 between Ankara and Libya’s internationally recognized government in Tripoli. Lawmakers also overturned a 2020 decision to sever political ties with Türkiye.

The agreement demarcates maritime jurisdiction between the two countries in an area contested by Greece, Egypt, and Cyprus.

The Greek Foreign Ministry called the parliamentary decision “unilateral [and] legally unfounded,” saying the deal disregards Greek islands’ rights to maritime zones between the Turkish and Libyan coasts.

“The memorandum remains illegal, null and void, contravenes international law of the sea, and infringes upon the sovereign rights of states in the region,” the ministry said in a statement.

Ankara welcomed the vote, saying the agreement safeguards “the mutual rights and interests” of both countries under international law and the principle of equity, while deepening cooperation between Türkiye and Libya. “Türkiye will continue to work with all partners to foster trust, stability and peace in the Mediterranean basin, in line with its commitment to international law,” the Foreign Ministry stated.

Greece and Egypt signed an overlapping maritime agreement in 2020, which Türkiye rejects. Athens also approved offshore exploration south of Crete by a consortium led by Chevron last year, prompting Turkish objections.

The move on Tuesday comes amid improving ties between Türkiye and Libya’s eastern authorities, who are aligned with military commander Khalifa Haftar. Ankara helped Tripoli repel his forces’ 2019-2020 campaign to capture the capital, but has since expanded diplomatic contacts and investment in the east. The country remains divided between Abdul Hamid Dbeibah’s government in the capital, Tripoli, in western Libya, and an eastern administration led by Osama Hammad and backed by Haftar.

Poland does not have enough Patriot air defense missiles to hand over to Ukraine, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has said, urging other NATO members to supply Kiev with the scarce interceptors.

In an interview with the Polish Press Agency published on Monday, Sikorski warned of growing pressure on Western air defenses, citing the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran.  

“Following the attacks on Iran, the shortage of interceptor missiles has indeed increased, and Russia is producing more missiles than we have interceptors to neutralize them. This is a real problem,” he said.  

“There are NATO countries that still have such resources to contribute, but Poland is not one of them,” Sikorski said, adding that Warsaw “can only join the calls for countries possessing Patriot missiles to share them with Ukraine.”  

Poland has emerged as one of the EU’s most rapidly militarizing nations, with defense spending reaching 4.7% of GDP. Warsaw has also been one of Kiev’s staunchest backers, pouring billions into military and other aid while serving as a crucial hub for Western arms shipments.  

Yet Poland now faces delays in replenishing its own arsenal, with deliveries of US-made PAC-3 MSE Patriot interceptors pushed back as the war with Iran drains American weapons stocks, Polish General Ireneusz Nowak warned earlier this month.  

Tensions flared again this year after Zelensky awarded a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.” Polish President Karol Nawrocki subsequently stripped him of the country’s highest honor, politicians on both sides renounced state decorations, and Warsaw threatened to obstruct Ukraine’s EU accession.  

The ammunition crunch is spreading across NATO. In July, the Netherlands said it had exhausted its capacity to supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles from its own stocks, having already provided interceptors and helped assemble a complete Patriot system for Kiev.  

Vladimir Zelensky has requested 300 Patriot interceptors from European backers and complained that Washington has approved only some of the missiles purchased through a NATO-backed initiative. The White House has also delayed approving additional transfers as US President Donald Trump presses Ukraine to reach a negotiated settlement with Russia.  

Moscow has repeatedly maintained that Western weapons deliveries prolong the conflict, obstruct peace efforts, and risk drawing NATO countries into a direct confrontation with Russia.

The long-awaited agreement between Libya’s rival factions was finally signed on August 30 under the auspices of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). On that day, the mission gathered the two negotiating delegations at its Tripoli headquarters to formalize the text ironed out during earlier rounds of talks in Rome and Tunis. UNSMIL invited foreign diplomats, media representatives, and Libyan delegations to the event, where UN Special Representative Hanna Tetteh hailed the accord in her opening remarks as “another important milestone in Libya’s journey toward stability and national unity.”

This, however, bore a resemblance to previous diplomatic milestones – most notably the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) signed in Skhirat, Morocco. The LPA established the rules of the political game in the fractured country; rules to which none of the domestic political actors seem fully committed, yet from which none completely depart. In a sense, Skhirat remains the ultimate reference point for every subsequent UN roadmap in Libya.

The August 30 agreement has two main parts. The first is restructuring the High National Elections Commission (HNEC), the agency in charge of organizing elections. In practice, this means replacing its leadership to settle disputes over appointments and regional representation. Although these changes were long delayed by regional quotas and political patronage stemming from the 2015 Skhirat agreement, rivals can still negotiate them with relative ease.

The 24-month timeline to hold elections was also established. However, the countdown is designed to govern the transition only once a single, unified executive authority and unified national institutions are established to oversee the voting process.

The second component concerns the central objective of UNSMIL’s latest roadmap: agreeing on viable election laws, an issue on which the UN has failed to make meaningful progress since the collapse of the planned 2021 elections.

Libya remains divided between rival power centers: the Government of National Unity (GNU), led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in Tripoli, the western part of the country, and the Libyan National Army (LNA) command in the east led by General Khalifa Haftar. These exist alongside two political institutions: the Tripoli-based High Council of state (HCS) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HoR). To break the deadlock, UNSMIL established a smaller negotiating group known as the ‘Smaller Convening’, or the ‘4+4’. It brings together eight representatives from the GNU, Haftar’s military command, the HCS, and the HoR.

The ‘4+4’ format developed alongside (and ultimately eclipsed) UNSMIL’s broader Structured Dialogue. Even before those conclusions were finalized, UNSMIL was already facilitating a parallel ‘Smaller Convening’ behind closed doors – the 4+4 was born. As Hanna Tetteh told the Security Council on June 18, the explicit goal of this smaller format was to bypass the paralysis between the legislative bodies and force an accord on the roadmap’s first two steps: reconstituting the elections commission’s board and resolving the contested electoral framework. Thus, the ‘4+4’ was a deliberate strategy to concentrate decision-making among the political and military figures deemed capable of enforcing an outcome.

After the HoR approved the agreement on September 14, the HCS formally rejected it on October 5, along with the related laws and decisions issued by the House, arguing that they bypassed the constitutional, legal and consensual frameworks governing the political process. In her October 14 briefing to the UN Security Council, Tetteh acknowledged this rejection but maintained that the agreement offers an actionable path to presidential and legislative elections under a single, unified executive authority within 24 months.

She also announced that UNSMIL would meet members of the 4+4 committee later this month to examine the possibility of establishing a broadly representative national mechanism under Article 5 of the agreement in consultation with the Security Council. This proposal implicitly acknowledges that the 4+4 mini-dialogue alone may not be sufficient to advance the roadmap.

Ultimately, the structural core of the August 30 agreement rests on a fundamental contradiction: 4+4 does not equal 1. Combining four delegates from Tripoli’s political-institutional structures, including representatives of the HCS, with four delegates representing the eastern power structure in Benghazi does not produce a unified state. Instead, it seems to function as a shared enterprise in which rival political elites, rather than competing to build a single nation, recognize that their mutual survival depends on dividing power and maintaining exclusive control over the state apparatus.

Setting a 24-month timetable neither offers a guarantee that elections will actually occur; instead, it grants entrenched factions another two years of status quo protection without imposing any penalty for non-compliance.

Still, the UN Security Council appeared to endorse the latest UNSMIL plan. Following Tetteh’s briefing on October 14, the Council reaffirmed its support for the agreement, despite concerns over its implementation and the High Council of State’s rejection.

Last week, the UNSC did not vote to extend UNSMIL’s mandate, which expires on October 31. However, this is largely a technicality, since the Council has already approved UNSMIL’s roadmap.

A German sniper who deserted the Ukrainian military after failing to receive a promised payment has been detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the agency announced on Wednesday.

In footage released by the agency, the man said he had served with German forces in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2010, took part in fighting in Somalia from 2006 to 2008, and later fought as a mercenary in Syria between 2008 and 2010.

The former Bundeswehr soldier said he then served as a sniper with Ukraine’s 25th Territorial Defense Battalion near Donetsk between 2016 and 2018, alongside fighters mainly from Britain and Georgia.

He later moved to Switzerland before returning to Ukraine in November 2025 to sign another three-year military contract the following month. The man said he held the rank of corporal and served as a sniper.

“After signing the contract, I was promised a payment of 100,000 hryvnias ($2,200). However, I did not receive this money and was forced to flee the Ukrainian armed forces,” he said in the testimony.

The detention comes a week after the FSB apprehended Swedish national Freddy Mikael Stalkrantz Lindholm in Russia’s Pskov Region. According to the agency, he crossed the border illegally to carry out sabotage and terrorist attacks on Russian military facilities, posing as a prospective recruit for the Russian Army.

Lindholm previously commanded a drone unit in Ukraine’s Aidar battalion, which Russia has designated a terrorist organization. He faces charges of illegally crossing the border, while investigators are considering additional charges related to terrorism and mercenary activity.

US investigators have also reportedly uncovered a scheme in which Mexican drug cartels sent their members to Ukraine to gain battlefield experience and paid officials close to Vladimir Zelensky for their “training,” Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service said on Tuesday.

At least 20,000 foreign mercenaries have fought for Kiev since 2022, Russian diplomat Yulia Zhdanova told the OSCE Forum for Security Co-operation earlier this month, saying most came from the US, UK, Canada, and Georgia.

Moscow has repeatedly pursued criminal cases against foreign fighters fighting for Kiev, including prosecutions in absentia, and has warned that mercenaries are not entitled to prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions.

The ideological parent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has slammed talk of regime change in the country in the wake of protests in Europe as a deliberate ploy by Western forces.

Citing recent political upheavals in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal and the raging protests in France and Albania, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat, said on Tuesday that such movements were fueled by forces pursuing vested interests inimical to the interests of the country.

“There are many powers in the world that want India to lose,” he said.

RSS, the world’s largest voluntary and Hindu nationalist organization, has between an estimated 4-6 million members across India.

“A storm has blown in from the West,” Bhagwat added. “India is their main target because India is progressing. Regime change will not happen in India.”

The row ignited when a leader of India’s Aam Aadmi Party, Prashant Bhushan, said at a press conference last week: “We want regime change… what is wrong in this?”

Uddhav Thackeray, a former Modi ally in the western Maharashtra state, also demanded “regime change” on Tuesday.

Their comments followed the massive protests by the opposition parties and the youth-led satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) in the Indian capital earlier this month demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over millions of names being cut from the voter rolls following a nationwide revision exercise.

The other opposition parties have not explicitly described the protests as an effort at toppling the Modi government.

“They claim that changing a regime will change the situation, but that has never really happened,” the RSS chief said at a rally. “Problems will remain, and protests are inevitable in a democracy.”

He added that the protests should be aimed at finding solutions.

The CJP’s protests have found resonance across the country, and police action against the protesters has triggered backlash.

The RSS chief slammed the “forces” exploiting social differences by injecting a sense of victimhood among communities. He urged political leaders, protesters, and administrators to refrain from pursuing a divisive agenda.

Ukrainian officials allegedly stole more than $5 million by purchasing over 5,000 drones for the military at inflated prices, according to anti-corruption investigators.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), which exposed the alleged scheme last year, announced on Tuesday that they completed their investigation. The Western-backed agencies, which frequently target Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s inner-circle, put the losses at 254 million hryvnia ($5.65 million).

The alleged scheme operated from May to September 2023, after Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP) received $667 million to purchase drones for the military. Investigators say a department head at the agency, which oversees cybersecurity and secure government communications, rigged contracts for 5,100 drones, paying up to 90% above market prices.

Ukrainian media previously identified all five suspects. The alleged ringleader is reportedly Vladimir Mokrenko, a former procurement chief at SSSCIP. His suspected civilian accomplice was identified as Lviv-based businessman Yury Volyan, reportedly the brother of a businesswoman who is a close acquaintance of Mokrenko.

The other suspects reportedly include another SSSCIP official and two private-sector representatives accused of participating in rigged tenders.

The drone procurement scheme coincided with the final months in office of then-SSSCIP chief Yury Shchigol and his deputy, Viktor Zhora, who were fired in November 2023 amid a separate corruption scandal uncovered by NABU. The two were implicated in an alleged scheme that operated from 2020 to 2022 and resulted in $1.72 million in overpayments for software and related services.

Zelensky’s government has been rocked by a series of corruption scandals involving people close to him since November 2025, when NABU and SAPO accused businessman Timur Mindich, a longtime associate of the Ukrainian leader, of masterminding a $100 million kickback scheme involving state contracts in the energy sector.

Critics accuse Zelensky of presiding over a sprawling corruption network permeating his government, allegedly helping him maintain power and enriching those involved.

NABU’s latest high-profile investigation targeted an alleged protection racket involving scam call centers and officials from the Prosecutor General’s Office. Although he was not personally named as a suspect, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko left Ukraine before being dismissed by parliament last month, according to Ukrainian media. He has denied wrongdoing.

Anti-corruption investigators are reportedly targeting the head of Ukraine’s central bank, Andrey Pyshny, in a series of searches.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) confirmed on Wednesday that its detectives were searching the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the residence of one of its employees. The agency, seen as a Western-backed beach-head for tackling rampant corruption in Ukraine, neither confirmed nor denied media reports that Pyshny was involved.

Pyshny was identified by several opposition MPs and law enforcement sources cited by Ukrainskaya Pravda and the US-funded Ukrainian branch of RFE/RL. Both outlets have a track record of obtaining insider information from NABU.

The central bank chief was previously mentioned in the Ukrainian press as a possible person of interest in the so-called Forest Gump case, a NABU investigation into the alleged laundering of money intended to cover bail for former Energy Minister German Galushchenko.

Vadim Vesyoly, a former adviser to the bank’s supervisory board, has been described by Ukrainian media as an informal overseer influencing its decisions on behalf of Zelensky’s inner circle. Pyshny has denied allegations that he arranged Vesyoly’s appointment in 2023, shortly after the bank was nationalized. Vesyoly’s formal advisory role ended last year, although some Ukrainian outlets claim he continued to wield influence.

Vesyoly’s name surfaced in surveillance recordings linked to Timur Mindich, a longtime associate of Zelensky. Last November, Mindich was accused of masterminding a $100 million kickback scheme involving the state-owned nuclear power company Energoatom.

After Mindich fled Ukraine, Sense Bank and Vesyoly reportedly began dealing directly with Zelensky’s office, allegedly enabling Mudraya to carry out the money-laundering operation. Galushchenko, the former minister whose bail was allegedly financed with dirty money, is also a suspect in the Mindich case.

MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak, one of the lawmakers who first publicized Wednesday’s searches, claimed NABU detectives were pursuing leads concerning Vesyoly’s involvement with Sense Bank and Karpatneftekhim at the central bank.

Nigeria has confirmed its first Ebola case in more than a decade after a woman who recently traveled through Uganda tested positive for the virus in the capital, Abuja.  

The patient arrived in Nigeria in early October and began showing symptoms on October 7, the country’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday. The woman sought treatment at a private hospital on October 11 and was diagnosed with the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola on October 20, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The woman remains in isolation and is receiving medical care. Health authorities have identified 44 people who may have been exposed to the infection.  

The patient was initially treated for malaria-like symptoms, but doctors became concerned after her condition failed to improve, Odianosen Ehiakhamen, an official at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), told Arise TV, as reported by Punch. 

“For the 44 contacts, they are majorly healthcare workers and support staff of the hospital, because everything has happened within the hospital,” Ehiakhamen said.  

Nigeria is the fifth country to report the Bundibugyo virus since the current outbreak began in DR Congo in May, following earlier cases in Uganda, France and Kenya, according to the WHO. Kenya has recorded nine infections linked to an imported case, while the outbreak in DR Congo continues to spread. 

The Ebola outbreak in DR Congo has claimed 4,602 lives, with 9,552 confirmed infections recorded since it began in May, according to the country’s Health Ministry. As of October 18, the virus had affected eight provinces, with Ituri accounting for nearly 73% of all cases. 

Nigeria previously contained an Ebola outbreak in 2014. 

Ghana plans to stop exporting unprocessed mineral ores by 2030 to build domestic industries and retain more of its resource wealth, the West African country’s president, John Dramani Mahama, has announced.

Speaking at the Mining in Motion Summit in Accra on Monday, Mahama said restrictions would be introduced in phases, backed by legislation, requirements for individual minerals, and implementation timetables. The plan covers resources including bauxite, manganese, iron, and lithium.

“I have set a clear goal that by 2030, raw mineral ores should no longer leave our shores,” the president said. Ghana has spent generations supplying foreign industries with manganese and bauxite while importing finished products, losing opportunities for skilled jobs and technological development, he added.

Mahama urged African countries to export manufactured goods, including electric vehicle batteries, cables, and aluminum parts, instead of mineral ores.

Since returning to office in January 2025, his government has expanded local gold refining through the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod). Its partnership with the majority privately owned Gold Coast Refinery in Accra began processing one metric ton of gold weekly in February 2026. From September 1, GoldBod also required licensed self-financing aggregators to refine gold purchased under approved offtake arrangements locally before export.

Other projects include Ghana Manganese Company’s planned $450 million refinery in the country’s western region. Mahama said on Monday that Accra is advancing manganese processing alongside aluminum refining and iron and steel production.

Mahama delivered a similar message at the UN General Assembly on September 24, warning that Western demand for minerals needed for the green-energy transition must benefit Africans. He said Africa’s critical mineral extraction must not repeat colonial-era exploitation, calling for local processing to create jobs and retain more value on the continent.

US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for releasing US Air Force veteran Stephen Hubbard, who had been convicted in Russia on charges of fighting for Ukraine.

Witkoff thanked Putin on Wednesday during talks with the Russian leader at Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg. He expressed gratitude on behalf of Trump and the American people for freeing Hubbard, adding that he had met Hubbard’s son, a priest at a Greek Orthodox church, several days earlier and discussed his father’s detention.

Putin responded that Hubbard was already at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport, preparing to leave the country. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later noted that the decision to release Hubbard was made on “humanitarian grounds,” adding that Moscow and Washington maintain contacts on prisoner swaps.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump confirmed the release, stressing that the US “was not required to give anything in return,” which he described as “an unprecedented situation for Russia.”

Hubbard, 74, is a retired Michigan schoolteacher and US Air Force veteran. He was detained by Russian forces in the Ukrainian city of Izyum in April 2022, shortly after Moscow launched its military operation. Hubbard had been living in Ukraine with his Ukrainian partner since 2014, the year hostilities in Donbass erupted following a Western-backed coup in Kiev.

In 2024, a Russian court sentenced him to six years and ten months in prison on mercenary charges over joining a Ukrainian territorial defense unit and fighting for Kiev in exchange for $1,000 a month.

Hubbard’s sister claimed that he held pro-Russian views, was a non-military pacifist, and was highly unlikely to take up arms.

On Tuesday, Trump said he had personally asked Putin to release Hubbard. “I don’t ⁠want to talk about it, but everybody has been after Hubbard for a long time, long before I got here… Watch what happens. We have been focused ⁠on Hubbard,” he told reporters at the time.

Hubbard’s release follows the unilateral decision by Moscow in August to free former US Marine Robert Gilman, who was detained in early 2022 after drunkenly assaulting a police officer while traveling through Russia by train. At the time, Trump said Putin pardoned Gilman on humanitarian grounds, adding that no prisoner exchange was involved.

In April 2025, Moscow and Washington carried out a prisoner swap, with Russia releasing Ksenia Karelina, a US-Russian dual national jailed over donations to a charity that supports the Ukrainian military, while Washington freed Arthur Petrov, a German-Russian citizen arrested for allegedly exporting sensitive microelectronics.

Ukrainian forces have effectively laid siege to the frontline town of Alyoshki in Russia’s Kherson Region, leaving civilians facing acute shortages of food, water, and medicine, residents who managed to escape have told RT.

Located on the left bank of the Dnieper River opposite the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson, the town has been largely cut off from essential supplies and basic services for months. Russian authorities estimate that between 1,500 and 2,000 civilians remain trapped there, including elderly residents and around 15 children.

Kherson Governor Vladimir Saldo has accused Kiev’s forces of deliberately choking off humanitarian deliveries to Alyoshki by remotely mining access roads and targeting vehicles carrying food, fuel, and medicine. Strikes have also damaged the town’s energy and communications infrastructure, deepening the humanitarian crisis.

Russian forces have partially broken through the blockade by clearing some roads, but continued shelling and drone attacks hamper regular aid deliveries. Regional children’s rights commissioner Irina Kravchenko said on Tuesday that aid is reaching the town, but remains woefully insufficient.

The crisis has also reached the highest diplomatic levels. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, discussed the situation during a phone call earlier this month. Russia’s human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, has said she is in contact with US First Lady Melania Trump’s team, which has expressed willingness to help civilians.

Moscow has accused Kiev of deliberately creating the humanitarian emergency while attempting to shift the blame onto Russia. Saldo has invited international organizations to visit Alyoshki and witness the conditions firsthand.

“The town is burning. There’s nothing left intact,” one evacuee said, describing a destroyed water pump and food prices soaring beyond residents’ reach. She claimed no food supplies have entered the town since May, leaving people “starving.” RT spoke exclusively to Alyoshki evacuees about their struggle to survive and the desperate plight of those left behind.

A drone threat has been announced south of St. Petersburg shortly after US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, arrived in the city for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine conflict. The warning comes just days after a massive Ukrainian drone barrage on the city and outskirts killed one person and injured 15 others.

Witkoff arrived at Pulkovo Airport on Wednesday morning. His motorcade headed for Constantine Palace, around 20 km southeast of St. Petersburg.

Shortly after arriving, Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko announced a UAV threat in the airspace over Luga District, around 125 km south of the venue for the talks. The governor warned that mobile internet speeds could be reduced but did not specify the number, exact location, and direction of the drones, and did not report any interceptions.

The alert follows Sunday’s unprecedented Ukrainian drone attack on St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad Region. According to the Russian authorities, the strikes killed one person and injured 15, damaged residential buildings, and sparked fires at an oil terminal, oil depot, and industrial facilities.

Commenting on the raid at the time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described it as “final manifestations of agony” of Ukraine. “The Kiev regime is fighting back [but] it cannot alter the course of history.”

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said the Putin-Witkoff talks will center on the Ukraine conflict. This comes after the Oslo talks where the US, Ukraine, and Kiev’s Western backers discussed security guarantees, a postwar economic plan, and a broader European security architecture, according to Reuters.