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Independent researcher/writer based in Hong Kong since 1997. Reformed academic. My long-form, analytical articles are collected here https://laura-ruggeri.medium.com/ email: lauraru852@yandex.ru
Biden admits an increase in gas prices in the US due to anti-Russia sanctions.
"It is probable that gas prices could increase as much as 3-4 cents a gallon,” the US president said. The US imposed its most aggressive sanctions on Russia’s oil industry yet as the Biden administration claims it's looking for last-minute ways to boost Ukraine’s leverage in possible peace negotiations after Donald Trump takes office. This is wishful thinking. If anything, these sanctions will boomerang like all the other sanctions imposed on Russia. The US is already dealing with high inflation and any increase in energy prices will worsen the problem and have a devastating effect on Americans’ livelihoods. The US miscalculated when it imposed harsh sanctions on Russia - not only has the Russian economy weathered the impact and grown to become the first-largest economy in Europe and the fourth in the world, but the West is facing the negative effects of the economic restrictions it imposed.
The West has opened a "Pandora's box of unintended consequences" by enforcing restrictions on Russia.
The most obvious of those consequences has been the resurrection of inflation, which had been long buried for more than four decades. Sanctions were the trigger for its revival as they resulted in higher prices for Western consumers. Food and energy prices have soared, partly because Russia is one of the world's largest exporters of oil and grain. @LauraRuHK
The United States has imposed new sanctions against the Russian energy sector.
The new sanctions target the following companies:
Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegaz and their subsidiaries;
the Russian-Serbian oil company NIS;
about 100 vessels involved in the transportation of Russian hydrocarbons and associated with Sovcomflot, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft;
Gazprom Neft's Moscow and Omsk refineries, as well as Surgutneftegaz's Kirishi refinery;
more than 30 Russian oilfield service companies, including RN-Drilling and HEF Technologies;
the joint venture of Norilsk Nickel and Rosatom - the Polar Lithium company;
gas liquefaction plants of Gazprom and Novatek in the Leningrad Region - Gazprom LNG Portovaya and Cryogas-Vysotsk;
Rosneft's Vostok Oil project in the Krasnoyarsk Territory;
"Ingosstrakh" and "AlfaStrakhovanie".
As for individuals, the new US sanctions affected:
head of Rosatom Alexei Likhachev;
Deputy Director General for Ensuring State Powers and the Budget Process of Rosatom Sergey Novikov;
Deputy Ministers of Energy of Russia Roman Marshavin and Eduard Sheremettsev;
the heads of Bashneft and Zarubezhneft Vladimir Chernov and Sergei Kudryashov;
General Director of Tatneft Nail Maganov;
the heads of Gazprom Neft and Lukoil, Alexander Dyukov and Vadim Vorobyov;
the son of the co-owner of Lukoil, billionaire Vagit Alekperov.
The United States has changed its sanctions policy: now restrictions can be imposed against any person who has worked or continues to work with the Russian energy sector.
After the start of the special operation in Ukraine Western countries have stepped up sanctions to put additional pressure on Moscow.
Nevertheless, Russia is coping with this pressure - the West itself acknowledges that the restrictions it imposed are ineffective. At the same time, the states that have joined the sanction regime do not have the courage to admit the failure of this anti-Russian policy. (Source: RIA Novosti) @LauraRuHK
#Greenland - The US is creating airfield infrastructure in Greenland for fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons, Russian Ambassador to Denmark Vladimir Barbin told RIA Novosti. The modernization of US Military Space Base Pituffik (formerly Tula) is underway including a radar station worth billions of US dollars and infrastructure for the F-35, which are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Such fighter jets have already used the base's airfield during exercises.
When Donald Trump states that Greenland should become part of the US and refuses to promise not to use military force to establish control over Greenland we should remember that bullying and bombastic claims that stir controversy are part and parcel of Trump's negotiation tactics. Let's call it overconfidence combined with a stretch goal. A stretch goal is something that is unlikely, something that has a 10 percent chance of occurring, but is nevertheless stated as a goal to improve your bargaining position. The actual goal, consistent with American policy, is to strengthen control over the Arctic, a region of strategic importance and rich in natural resources. If you threaten Denmark with the loss of Greenland you are more likely to extort anything you want from this NATO member. And Washington makes no mystery of what it wants: the militarization of Greenland, a privileged access to its critical mineral resources, the exclusion of China and Russia. Last year U.S. and Danish officials lobbied the developer of Greenland's largest rare earths deposit last year not to sell its project to Chinese-linked firms. Reuters reports that Greg Barnes, CEO of privately held Tanbreez Mining, said U.S. officials who visited the project in southern Greenland twice last year had repeatedly shared a message with the cash-strapped company: do not sell the large deposit to a Beijing-linked buyer. Barnes ultimately sold Tanbreez to New York-based Critical Metals (CRML.O), as part of a deal that will be complete later this year.
"There was a lot of pressure not to sell to China," Tony Sage, CEO of Critical Metals. Barnes accepted payment of $5 million cash and $211 million in Critical Metals stock for Tanbreez, far less than Chinese firms offered. There you go. @LauraRuHK
A newly declassified long memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow who was serving as chief of the U.S. Embassy’s internal politics division at the time, contains both a warning and a scathing criticism of U.S. policies toward Russia.
Merry’s memo, titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway: Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” was written as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s experiment with democracy and free-market economics was in heightened turmoil. The party of his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of his economics policy, had recently lost an election as a result of popular discontent with the policy. Yeltsin mobilized tanks in downtown Moscow to put down an attempted putsch in Russia’s Parliament. Yet, to the frustration of Merry, many senior officials in Washington saw Yeltsin as a still-strong figure and “shock therapy” economics as a success. Merry warned that Russians were disillusioned by the U.S./West and had a less than positive view of democracy because it became associated with poverty, crime and chaos. Merry wrote:
In contemporary American rhetoric, “democracy” and “the market” are treated as almost synonymous terms. … Russians (and most non-Americans) are simply baffled by this vision. … Very, very few Russians impart positive ethical content to market forces, and unfortunately more of these are mafia than economists.
Sadly, very few of the multitudes of American “advisors” in Russia since the Bolshevik demise acquainted themselves with even the most basic facts of the country whose destiny they propose to shape. As a result, to say that America is wearing out its welcome in Russia is no longer a prediction, it is a descriptive fact. Even the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call “assistance tourists” who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs. … Russians of all political persuasions are also less than charmed by the frequently expressed American attitude that their country is a social-economic laboratory to test academic theories."
I found this book in my Santa's stocking and am reading it with great pleasure. Highly recommended. Aaron Good examines the dissimulation and the disaggregation of the state in the context of U.S. hegemony. His account builds on dual state theory which posits that alongside the “democratic state,” there exists an authoritarian “security state.” America’s post–World War II hegemony has been accompanied by the rise of a security state operating in a de facto state of emergency. Aaron Good uses the term exceptionism to describe this phenomenon.
He argues that a supra-national "deep state", a closed network more powerful than the public state, is intertwined with, and has captured, both the “democratic state” and the “security state” (national security council, CIA, FBI, Pentagon etc.) to advance the interests of a transnational capitalist class. @LauraRuHK
Last year Telecom Italia SpA, the country’s former phone monopoly, sold its landline network, a strategic asset, to the US private equity firm KKR & Co. The grid sale was the first of its kind for a European phone company, and it was strongly backed by Meloni government. On Monday the Italian government confirmed it is in talks with Elon Musk’s SpaceX over a possible €1.5 billion deal for secure telecoms, Bloomberg reported.
The deal had been in the works for more than a year. According to the Bloomberg report, the contract would last five years and has already been approved by the Italian intelligence services and Ministry of Defense. If successful, SpaceX would provide encryption services for the government and communications infrastructure for the military and emergency services.
Italian intelligence may have approved the deal, but Elisabetta Belloni, Director General of the Department of Security Information (Dis) Italy's top intelligence agency, has officially announced her resignation. Belloni's decision to leave her post ahead of the expiry of her mandate in May seems to be related to disagreements with Alfredo Mantovano, the undersecretary of State delegated to the Authority for the Security of the Republic, who is one of Meloni's closest allies.
The kind of encrypted telecommunication services being sold by Musk is similar to what the EU is looking to offer through its own IRIS² project, a €10.6 billion network of cyber-secure satellites that has been approved but will only go online after 2030. Meloni's move has already enraged the opposition and drawn the ire of Brussels. @LauraRuHK
Quando si dice le coincidenze, eh? Il fidanzato di Cecilia Sala, Daniele Raineri, anch'egli pennivendolo de Il Foglio, nel 2014 era ad Aleppo con Greta Ramelli e Vanessa Marzullo. Ricordiamo che per la liberazione delle due simpatizzanti degli islamisti anti-Assad il governo italiano verso' al Fronte al-Nusra (legato ad al-Qaida) un riscatto di 12 milioni di dollari secondo alcune fonti (20 milioni secondo altre). @LauraRuHK
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Inspecting China's nuclear missile silos. 😅 During the first Cold War satellite images of these round, fort-like buildings known as Tulou puzzled Western military 'experts' for years, leading to all sorts of speculations.
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Iran expects boom in trade after gaining EAEU’s observer status
🔹Iran expects a major boom in trade ties with members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) after the country gained observer status in the bloc and just months before the two sides enter into a free trade agreement.
#Iran
@PressTV
Russia is ready to restore relations with Georgia
In his year-end interview with TASS, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow is determined to normalize Russian-Georgian relations precisely to the extent that Tbilisi is ready. @LauraRuHK
Vladimir Putin apologised for the fact that the incident involving the Azerbaijani passenger airliner that crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau happened in Russian airspace, offered condolences to the victims’ families and wished a speedy recovery to the injured. An investigation is ongoing to determine what kind of external impact caused a crash landing hundreds of kilometers from Grozny where Ukrainian drones had been spotted and countered by Russian air defense. Western media have been pointing the finger at Russia, they always do, but till the investigation is over it is dishonest to apportion blame. @LauraRuHK
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The EU & NATO made a new round of groundless claims against Russia, blaming its alleged ‘shadow fleet' for damage to an undersea cable connecting Estonia and Finland.
As usual, they produced no proof, just whipped up hysteria to increase NATO military presence in the Baltic Sea and propose sanctions to target the so-called 'shadow fleet'. @LauraRuHK
US citizen Gene Spector, convicted in Russia, handed over data to the Pentagon for the creation by the US of a high-speed genetic screening system of the Russian population, the Russian Federal Security Service says.
On December 24, the Moscow City Court sentenced Spector to 15 years in prison for espionage and upheld the fine of 14 million rubles (around $140,000) imposed by a previous verdict. ▪️Russian experts have long noticed the interest of the American military in the biological materials of Russians. In particular, in 2021, Mikhail Kovalchuk, president of the Kurchatov Institute, said that the United States, as part of a separate program, collected samples of synovial (articular) fluid from Russian residents.
And back in 2017, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov reported that the special services had information that some emissaries and non-governmental organizations had collected biological material from representatives of various Russian ethnic groups. https://ria.ru/20241227/spektor-1991603303.html
The Japanese government approved a draft budget for fiscal year 2025, amounting to 115.54 trillion yen ($732.23 billion), with a record 8.7 trillion yen ($55.4 billion) marked for defense spending, Kyodo news agency reports.
The upcoming defense budget reportedly includes spending on the development of long-range missiles to improve the country's military capabilities to target enemy bases. The plan also provides for boosting the ability to strike adversaries outside of their attack range and increasing drone capabilities. (Source: RIA Novosti) @LauraRuHK
Biden’s Sanctions: Shooting Europe in the Foot, Elevating Russia to Economic Superpower
Joe Biden’s last act of geopolitical sabotage? A sanctions blitz targeting Russia’s oil industry, hitting Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegas, and over 180 vessels tied to Russian energy exports. The goal? Starve Russia of revenue. The result? Elevating Russia to an economic superpower while Europe crumbles under the weight of its own hubris.
Since 2014, the West has imposed over 40,000 sanctions on Russia, the most sanctioned country on Earth. And what has it achieved? Far from collapsing, Russia’s economy has catapulted. Moscow is now the fourth-largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan and Germany, a feat unimaginable a decade ago. Meanwhile, Europe, the sanctions’ biggest cheerleader, faces energy crises, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation. Russia says thank you for the sanctions, we couldn’t have built this Eurasian economic fortress without you.
Biden’s latest stunt, slapping new restrictions just before leaving office, is designed to hurt not just Russia but also Europe and the incoming Trump administration. Higher energy prices will cripple Europe further, forcing it to rely on overpriced U.S. LNG while its industries bleed jobs. Meanwhile, Trump will face a tangled web of sanctions, ensuring any attempt to end the Ukraine conflict or ease tensions with Moscow will face insurmountable obstacles. This is less about helping Ukraine and more about preserving the globalist agenda.
Let’s call it what it is: the sanctions have boomeranged. They’ve crippled Europe, inflated global energy prices, and pushed Russia into a sovereign, self-sustaining economy. Moscow now commands not just military supremacy but an economic dynamism rooted in Eurasia, free from Western control. These sanctions forced Russia to pivot eastward, solidifying its ties with China, India, and the Global South. The West’s unipolar fantasies have created a multipolar reality, Russia as a rising Eurasian powerhouse, while NATO allies sink into irrelevance.
Europe isn’t a victim, it’s a willing accomplice in its own destruction. NATO’s vassals, from Berlin to Brussels, have hollowed themselves out for a U.S.-led proxy war that’s drained their economies and shattered their sovereignty. And Biden? He couldn’t care less. For the globalists, Europe is expendable—a pawn sacrificed to contain Russia while the U.S. reaps the spoils of LNG sales and geopolitical chaos.
Meanwhile, Russia thrives. Its energy sector adapts, its economy grows, and its military dominance remains unmatched. What was meant to isolate Russia has only strengthened it, forcing it to build a Eurasian-focused economy immune to Western pressure. Europe? It’s left with empty promises, cold winters, and shuttered factories.
This isn’t just about sanctions—it’s about the collapse of the unipolar order. The globalists are playing their final hand, and it’s failing spectacularly. The lesson? You can’t strangle a nation that’s already building its own future. Russia thanks you, Joe Biden. The sanctions worked, but not in the way you intended.
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Olaf Scholz is blocking the allocation of an additional 3 billion euro military aid package to Ukraine, which is being promoted by Foreign and Defense ministers Annalena Baerbock and Boris Pistorius. The ministers would like to provide new assistance before the Bundestag elections, which are scheduled for the end of February this year. The article states that experts at the German Ministry of Defense have even prepared a list of weapons, which includes three IRIS-T air defense systems, including shells, missiles for Patriot, 10 howitzers and ammunition.
However, Scholz's office unofficially made it clear that it would not approve an additional package of military assistance to Ukraine. The Chancellor does not want to present the new German government with a fait accompli. @LauraRuHK
🇮🇹🇮🇷 Prisoner swap - Tehran released Cecilia Sala, the Italian journalist arrested last month for violating the laws of the Islamic Republic, and Rome will soon release Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, who was detained at Milan airport at the request of the United States. Giorgia Meloni got Donald Trump's OK to turn down a US extradition request for the Iranian engineer so he could be freed in a prisoner swap, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Read more here /channel/LauraRuHK/9549
The Biden administration on Jan 7 added 11 Chinese companies to its list of "military companies" including Tencent Holdings, the world’s largest gaming publisher, and Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), a key battery supplier to Tesla. Neither of them appear to have business dealings with the PLA.
Since the first list was put out in 2021, as mandated by a law passed in the waning days of Donald Trump’s first presidency, it has expanded to 134 companies – including four of China’s top 20 in terms of market capitalisation, which together are valued at almost $1 trillion (S$1.36 trillion). ▪️While the list carries no specific sanctions, unlike the US Commerce Department’s Entity List, it still discourages US companies from dealing with its members.▪️ It is an approach that risks backfiring on Washington, according to Mr Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who called the latest addition “unwise”.“ If the US tries to decouple from Chinese companies and their global reach, the US is not just decoupling from China,” Mr Mahbubani said, “it is decoupling from the rest of the world too.”
Although the list comes at the end of President Joe Biden’s term, one major proponent of tagging CATL and other major Chinese companies has been Mr Marco Rubio, who is nominated to become secretary of state in President-elect Trump’s second term. Tencent, China’s most valuable company, is seen as a pioneer in China’s internet and private sector, creating a so-called everything app that Mr Musk has held up as a model for X.
During the first Trump administration, the US government sought to ban WeChat – Tencent’s messaging service that has evolved into a payment, a social media and an online services platform – citing national security concerns.
CATL is not only a major supplier to Tesla but also to many of the world’s biggest carmakers, including Stellantis to Volkswagen. ▪️China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) on Tuesday expressed firm opposition to the US' addition of 11 Chinese companies to its "Entity List" urging the US to immediately stop its wrongdoing and vowing to take necessary measures to protect Chinese entities' rights and interests. https://www.straitstimes.com/business/economy/us-blacklist-of-chinas-tech-giants-risks-even-faster-decoupling
Last month the Russian army liberated the village of Shevchenko, in the Donetsk People's Republic. You may have never heard of it, but on the eastern outskirts of this village, in the Velikonovoselkovsky district, is one of the largest lithium deposits in Europe. This was reported in his telegram channel by military correspondent Boris Rozhin.
A stone's throw away lies Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk) — the largest coking coal mine in Ukraine and one of the largest in Eastern Europe, is located 10 km west of Pokrovsk. The mine produces coal for coke production needed in steelmaking, which is Ukraine's second-largest source of foreign currency after agriculture.
US and European corporations are getting nervous... Russian forces are steadily advancing and bringing under their control the resource-rich part of Ukraine Western elites had set their eyes on. Let's not forget that when the Soviet Union was dissolved Ukraine received (for free!) mines and factories, hydroelectric power plants and nuclear power plants, gas pipelines and ports built by generations of Soviet workers. @LauraRuHK
Tulou had two main functions: communal living and defense. Each earth building usually holds the extended family of a single Hakka clan. These structures espoused equality and unity as family areas were the same size and shape, and everyone lived under the same roof, sharing communal areas.
Most Tulou have three or four floors with different functions: the first floor is used for kitchens and dining rooms; the second floor is for grain stores; and the third and fourth floors are used for bedrooms. The main building materials are clay, sandy soil and gray tiles, with bamboo strips playing the role of rebar in modern construction.
The foundation walls are three meters wide, able to withstand an earthquake, fire, or any attack at that time. The outer walls are mostly thicker than 1 meter.
On December 16 the Italian police at the request of the United States arrested an Iranian citizen, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, 38, the CEO of Sanat Danesh Rahpooyan Aflak (SDRA), an Iranian company specializing in precision measurement equipment and head of Illumove SA, a Switzerland-based company focused on manufacturing motion capture equipment. All activities of these companies were conducted under the legal and financial oversight of the Swiss government. He was arrested at Milan airport while preparing to travel to Switzerland. Hostage-taking of Iranian nationals under the pretense of circumventing unilateral US sanctions constitutes a violation of international law. Tehran on Friday repeated its demand that Italy release the Iranian businessman. This case is becoming a test for Italian authorities - they acted on a US request rather than an international warrant, and at the same time are seeking the release of an Italian journalist, Cecilia Sala, who was arrested in Tehran for violating the laws of the Islamic Republic. Cecilia Sala works for il Foglio, an Atlanticist newspaper dubbed "the voice of the CIA" in Italy, and hails from a well-connected family - her father is an independent Director of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, was a JP Morgan's senior advisor and member of the Greenmantle Think Tank. @LauraRuHK
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I will be on holiday (and offline) for a few days. Best wishes for the New Year.
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The United States, in its efforts to pressure China over the Taiwan issue, employs methods very similar to those previously used to establish an anti-Russian foothold in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in his year-end interview with TASS.
"We do not make assumptions about the plans of the future US administration; this is the work of political scientists. If we assess the overall situation in the region, it continues to deteriorate. The US and its satellites declare their commitment to the 'one China' principle but insist on maintaining the status quo, which implies preserving the current situation indefinitely," the minister said when asked about the Taiwan issue and the impact of the new Donald Trump administration on the processes in the region.
"Meanwhile, the Americans are taking provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait, supplying arms to Taipei, and developing a quasi-political dialogue with the authorities there. All of this together undoubtedly contributes to the growth of separatist sentiments. These methods are very similar to those that were once used by the Americans to establish an anti-Russian foothold in Ukraine," Lavrov added. @LauraRuHK
With trade and economic relations between Malaysia and China set to further flourish in the coming years, i expect the US will try to stir the pot and destabilize Malaysia. This is a multiethnic, multicultural and multi-faith federation consisting of 13 states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions: Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo's East Malaysia. US think tanks have been devoting much attention to the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak claiming that the two states have been relegated to the sidelines of the nation’s decision-making process and that Sabah and Sarawak have contributed more to the nation’s revenue, through oil and gas, than they have received. Though only a small number of urban middle-class and professionals inside the Borneo states support the secession option, they are being egged on by a vocal diaspora domiciled in the UK and Australia. As the US and Britain are secretly working with these pro-independence groups, it would be wise to keep an eye on the situation. @LauraRuHK
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The US and UK are planning terrorist attacks on Russian bases in Syria in order to prevent the situation in the country from stabilizing, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has said.
Since the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government earlier this month, Washington and London have set a goal of “maintaining chaos in the Middle East” in order to achieve a lasting dominance over the region, the agency said in a statement on Saturday.
However, Russia’s military presence on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, which still serves as a significant factor in regional stability, has been hampering the realization of their plans, it stressed.
“In order to remove this ‘obstacle,’ British intelligence services are developing plans to organize a series of terrorist attacks on Russian military facilities in Syria,” the SVR said.
The role of the perpetrators of those assaults will be assigned to the fighters of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), who were released from prisons after the regime change in the country, it added.
“According to available information, representatives of the British intelligence service MI6 and the America’s CIA recently tasked Syria-based IS commanders under their control with carrying out a series of attacks on Russian military bases. To do out this dirty work, the terrorists received attack UAVs,” the statement read.
In order to cover up their involvement in the planned Islamic State attacks on Russian bases, the US and UK military commands have instructed their air forces to continue to carry out strikes on IS positions in Syria, the SVR claimed.
The terrorists are being warned about those airstrikes in advance, it added. “London and Washington hope that such provocations will prompt Russia to evacuate its troops from Syria. At the same time, the new Syrian authorities will be accused of being unable to control the radicals,” the statement read. (Source: RT) @LauraRuHK
🇬🇪 The Georgian Prime Minister does not expect the situation to escalate after the inauguration of President Mikheil Kavelashvili on December 29.
"I exclude the possibility that Salome Zurabishvili will not leave the presidential residence. Everyone knows perfectly well that this is a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment. Who wants to take such a step? I am sure that no one will do such a stupid thing," said Irakli Kobakhidze.
(Source: Sputnik Georgia) @LauraRuHK
The US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the latest defense bill for the next fiscal year amounting to $895 billion, mentioned China 107 times, Russia is far behind. People's Daily writes:
The bill reads like a manifesto of Washington's increasingly paranoid agenda to confront China and lawmakers' blatant effort to safeguard the interests of American defense contractors.
Not only does the bill target sensitive sectors like lidar and semiconductor equipment, it also extends to more trivial areas, such as the import of Chinese garlic. This absurd inclusion reveals just how far Washington is willing to go to weaponize its regulatory powers under the pretext of national security. In reality, the mounting military expenditures serve the needs of special interest groups, rather than address real security threats.
The military-industrial complex -- a symbiotic relationship between government officials and private defense contractors -- has benefited from nearly every military conflict the United States has entered over the past few decades.
A report from the "Costs of War" project under Brown University shows that Pentagon spending has totaled over 14 trillion dollars since the start of the war in Afghanistan. One-third to one-half of that total has gone to defense firms, many of which have direct ties to former government officials.
This "revolving door" between government service and the defense industry is one of the most glaring symbols of the corruption at the heart of America's military policy
During the press conference at the end of the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council a journalist touched on a topic that is currently the subject of much speculation among analysts. Andrey Yunashev (Life magazine): Hello, Vladimir Vladimirovich, happy New Year!
You just said that you are constantly in touch with the commanders, both day and night. This means that you have the most complete information about the situation on the front line.
Vladimir Putin: The information I have is complete. Whether it's the most, or not the most complete – it's hard to say, but is extensive enough.
A.Yunashev: And since we noticed that you have a high intuition, what do you personally believe? Do you believe that in 2025 the conflict will end? Naturally, with our victory.
Vladimir Putin: I believe in God, and God is with us. @LauraRuHK