“Russia! Russia! Russia!”

Boris Yeltsin had earned a reputation for the unexpected, from ordering tanks to attack his rebellious parliament to drunkenly directing a military orchestra in Germany. Yet he saved one of his biggest surprises for last.

“I am leaving. I have done all I could,” President Yeltsin said, slurring his words in a televised New Year address in 1999, as the world prepared to celebrate the new millennium. Russia’s ailing leader still had half a year of his second term left to run and no one had expected him to stand down early.

“Why cling to power for six more months when the country has a strong leader who can be its president, a man on whom nearly all Russians are pinning their hopes for the future? Why stand in his way?” he said.

Canadians’ growing distrust of traditional media — not foreign interference— is driving the rise of alternative and far-right news sources, according to a Department of Foreign Affairs memo.

Blacklock’s Reporter says analysts from the department’s Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM) office debunked allegations that Russian bots were amplifying dissent through conservative media in Canada.

Inside the Russian Political Influence Campaign in Canada

When far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern was summoned to tell MPs about her part in an alleged Russian disinformation operation last month, she told them it was no big deal.

“If you were worried about this alleged Russian money unduly influencing Canadian issues — good news, didn’t happen,” she told the standing committee on public safety and national security, which includes Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Bloc Québécois MPs.

The Russians’ efforts to use Tenet Media as a secret propaganda tool were a failure, Southern told MPs. Few people watched the videos, she said, expert assessments of the project’s impact were inflated and the committee’s investigation was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

“Far-Right” means unbiased journalism.

British security sources believe that the shooting down of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was carried out by the FSB intelligence agency on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

“Of course it’s Putin,” one source said. “Putin as a leader cannot afford to be humiliated in the way that he was. Putin functions on two things: Loyalty above talent… and the consequence of betrayal.”

Another said: “All the mood music, all the habits, all the history point to the FSB. The FSB remains loyal to Putin.”

May 9, Moscow. The annual military Victory Day Parade was held in Red Square, but with fewer soldiers and military vehicles than in other years. The parade had been cut by 35%. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s short, sober speech tried to justify the war of aggression he had launched against Ukraine on February 24.

Putin seemed on the verge of defeat. A month earlier, in an apparent debacle, the Russian Army had hastily left the Kyiv area. Countless Russian soldiers had been wounded and killed; the loss of military equipment was unimaginable. A report from the UK Ministry of Defence on May 15 said that Russia had lost a third of its combat forces and much of its heavy equipment.