Russia has been seeking to expand its influence in Latin America, especially since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent international isolation.
Russia’s way of enlarging its influence in Latin America is comparable to its tactics in Africa, where it has primarily sought influence through arms deals, the use of its mercenaries, election interference, and disinformation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to former US security contractor Edward Snowden on Monday.
Putin signed a decree offering Snowden citizenship, making him one of 75 foreign nationals to have been offered the path to citizenship by Russia.
The decree was published on Russia’s government website.
MOSCOW (AP) — A gunman opened fire in a school in central Russia Monday, killing 13 people, including seven children, and wounding 21 others.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said the shooting took place in School No. 88 in Izhevsk, a city about 960 kilometers (600 miles) east of Moscow in the Udmurtia region. It identified the wounded as 14 children and seven adults.
The governor of Udmurtia, Alexander Brechalov, said in a video statement that the gunman shot himself.
‼️🇷🇺 The schoolgirl told the details of the tragedy in Izhevsk.. 💔#Russians #Izhevsk pic.twitter.com/wUoowJczdw
— Maimunka News (@Tb4O2u9c7MmZPmR) September 26, 2022
But what is it for? This is the question that the media in Russia, China, Iran and half a dozen countries were posing all last week in the wake of a summit in Samarkand that brought their leaders together as members or aspiring members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
The Russian media, echoing President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the summit, say the SCO is designed to end “the unipolar world “by creating a “multipolar system”.
The Chinese media offer a different version. The SCO is meant to offer a new political system for the whole world as an alternative to the Western democratic model.
“Europe Should Be Grateful to Erdoğan”: The quote is the praise Russian dictator Vladimir Putin bestowed upon Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Translated into realpolitik, what Putin is saying is: “Russia is grateful to Erdoğan’s anti-Western ideology.” He is right. Erdoğan is bringing NATO member Turkey more and more into Russia’s orbit.
Russia has described the decision not to invite its representatives to the Queen’s funeral as “profoundly immoral” and “blasphemous”.
Leaders and dignitaries from around the world have been invited to the late monarch’s state funeral, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin and others were snubbed.
Iran and Russia have been strengthening their alliance recently, growing it gradually to such an extent that the Wall Street Journal wrote on August 27 that the two countries were “forging tighter ties than ever,” as both countries face continued international isolation.
In recent months, Russia and Iran have signed a multitude of agreements, especially in trade, oil and gas, and military cooperation.
Vladimir Putin’s forces are being forced to source equipment from North Korea and Iran as the impacts of sanctions and military losses in Ukraine bite, defence experts believe.
British defence intelligence analysts think that Moscow is “increasingly sourcing weaponry from other heavily sanctioned states” as its own stockpiles are depleted.
An update published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence pointed to claims that Ukrainian forces had shot down an Iranian-made drone as evidence of Moscow’s use of systems sourced from Tehran.
Ukraine claimed it shot down the drone near Kupiansk as part of the offensive that has punched through Russian lines around Kharkiv on the eastern front.
The image suggested the Shahed “suicide drone” had been shot down by Ukrainian forces and had not detonated on impact as designed, though little information was released by the authorities in Kyiv.
If it makes everyone feel better, Justin relies on South Korea to pull its fat out of the fire:
Canada has asked the government of South Korea to produce and deliver more artillery rounds to backfill supplies that Ottawa sent to war-torn Ukraine.
(Sidebar: this article is dated June of this year.)
What’s worse is that Justin will bore South Korean president Yoon Sok-yeol later on this month.
Poor Mr. Yoon.
The Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation was once a small, obscure list of autocrats that posed no real threat. Not any more, writes Matthew Campbell
Authoritarian world leaders including President Putin of Russia and President Xi of China will gather this week in Central Asia for the annual summit of an obscure organisation which has attracted little global attention since its founding in 1996.
That is about to change, for the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is poised to take a bold step. In a development certain to irritate Washington, it is granting membership to Iran, a country regarded in America as a state sponsor of terrorism.
“One would think the Tsar is back!” This is how a colleague covering the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2006 commented after a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the facilities provided for journalists covering the “historic event.” Historic because this was the first time that Russia, admitted as a full member of the club of “great powers” in 1997, was hosting the summit.
Putin wore his usual disdainful grin like the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo.
To show that Russia is back, Putin had chosen the Konstantinovsky Palace as the venue for the G8 summit. The elegant chateau had been started in 1714 by Peter The Great as a Russian answer to the Versailles Palace in France.
The chairman of Russia’s Lukoil oil giant, Ravil Maganov, has died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, reports say.
The company confirmed his death but said only that Maganov, 67, had “passed away following a severe illness”.
Russian media said he was being treated at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital and died of his injuries.
Maganov is the latest of a number of high-profile business executives to die in mysterious circumstances.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who oversaw detente with the West, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 91.
Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost” towards the West, underpinned by summits with US President Ronald Reagan to curb the nuclear arms race, paved the way for the end of the Cold War, made him one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century. At home, however, his move to decentralise the Soviet economy, a strategy know as “perestroika”, precipitated an economic collapse that hastened the end of the Soviet Union.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has delivered a stark warning about Russia’s and China’s growing presence in the High Arctic, listing several recent steps by Moscow to increase its military strength in the region.
Speaking Friday at a news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Cold Lake, Alta., Mr. Stoltenberg noted that the shortest path to North America for Russian missiles and bombers is over the North Pole.
President Putin has revived a Soviet-era award for women who have ten or more children as Russia faces a demographic crisis that has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
Joseph Stalin established the “Mother Heroine” title in 1944 to encourage large families after the death of tens of millions of Soviet citizens during the Second World War. More than 400,000 women received the award before it was scrapped after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In his meeting in Tehran with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised what he called “Your Excellency’s pre-emptive initiative” in launching “Special Operations ” against Ukraine.
He claimed that if Putin had not invaded Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have started a war against Russia to regain control of the Crimean Peninsula.
Although later removed from the official media in Iran, the remarks started a debate in Tehran’s decision-making circles about the Islamic Republic adopting a similar strategy by going on the offensive against its “enemies”.
