Tugendhat, Conservative MP: "The Kremlin is at war with Europe and its allies in Beijing are helping."
Russia has been conducting warlike acts against every European democracy for years, but Britain is asleep at the wheel — The Telegraph.
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2006 — Litvinenko poisoned in London.
2018 — Skripals poisoned with Novichok in Salisbury.
2024 — GRU plot to assassinate Rheinmetall CEO Papperger. Same year, incendiary devices disguised as pillows sent through DHL, nearly brought down a cargo plane over Europe.
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Estonia spends 3.4% of GDP on defence, committed to 5.4% by 2026-2029. Poland: 4.5%, rising to 4.8%. Lithuania: 4%, committed to 5-6%.
Britain: 2.4%.
Tugendhat: We have chosen not to believe in the devil. But he is alive and walks among us.
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Czech President Pavel: if Russia's violations of NATO airspace continue, the alliance will have to shoot down unmanned, or manned , aircraft.
Russia does not understand nice language. They mostly understand the language of power. — The Guardian. 1/
Pavel proposed asymmetric responses: switching off Russia's internet or satellites, cutting Russian banks from the global financial system.
"Not killing people — but sensitive enough to make Russia understand this is not the way they should go."
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Pavel on how Russia calibrates its provocations: When I asked them why they do provocative actions — overflights, close encounters over battleships in the Baltic — their answer was 'because we can.'
That's exactly the kind of behaviour we allowed.
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Former Ukrainian FM Dmytro Kuleba: Poroshenko already understood Normandy was really a 3+1 format: Russia, Germany and France on one side, Ukraine on the other.
Not because Berlin and Paris wanted us destroyed, but because they imagined peace through Ukrainian concessions. 1/
Kuleba: In Paris, Putin realized Zelenskyy had become president of Ukraine. He expected a show-business Zelenskyy from the post-Soviet world.
Instead, Zelenskyy came as president — and refused the Minsk algorithm Russia had pushed onto Ukraine with Germany and France. 2/
Kuleba: The main goal is not to break one specific person, but to break Ukrainians’ will to resist.
One way is to spread “the authorities are bad” until society starts eating itself. Different actors add their interests, and it becomes a cumulative bomb. 3/
Two years ago a Ukrainian seven-year-old boy named Oleh was declared an orphan and placed with the family of a Russian paratrooper from Pskov Oblast.
In 2022 his adoptive father served in the unit that killed civilians in Bucha — Ukrainska Pravda. 1/
Oleh is one of 37 children taken from the Donetsk orphanage “Teremok” on February 18, 2022 — six days before the full-scale invasion. That day 626 orphans were taken from occupied territories to Russia. 2/
Oleh was lifted by his arms and carried onto a bus. The children were born after 2014 — in occupation. They waved through the windows. 3/
Russia’s elites start to believe Putin is leading the country into a dead end — but still expect him to escalate the war, not stop it.
One businessman close to the Kremlin: “There is profound disappointment in Putin,” The Guardian. 1/
Putin publicly projects calm and control.
Days after reports claimed he was hiding in a bunker fearing assassination or a coup, Kremlin TV showed him casually driving his former schoolteacher to dinner at the Kremlin carrying flowers in jeans and a light jacket. 2/
Behind the image, cracks are spreading.
Russian officials, business figures, and Western intelligence sources describe growing frustration over the stalled war, economic decline, internet shutdowns, and “senseless, self-destructive decisions.” 3/