🚨🗣'Ask the US' – Kremlin on whether Putin–Trump talk lowered threat of Tomahawk deliveries to Ukraine

More statements by Kremlin spox Dmitry Peskov:

💬Russia remains open to a peaceful settlement in Ukraine

💬Putin–Trump call details will remain confidential

💬Lavrov & Rubio will announce their meeting location themselves

💬Putin–Orban call details to be released shortly

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🚨🇭🇺🇷🇺Orban expressed his willingness to provide conditions for a possible Russia–US summit in Hungary during phone talk with Putin

Russia's President Vladimir Putin briefed the Hungarian PM on the main points of his conversation with US President Donald Trump.

He noted that upcoming contacts with American officials are expected to discuss the next steps toward a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, including the potential for a high-level Russia–US meeting in the Hungarian capital.

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💣 West 'marching towards disaster' – retired US Lt. Col.

Ukraine’s combat capacity is “collapsing — nothing can reverse it,” retired US Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis wrote on X.

👉 Davis noted that peace negotiations are “the only viable options left” as he warned the US against doubling down on bellicose rhetoric instead of diplomacy.

To keep “going down this path” may result in war with Russia, he concluded.

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🚨Trump to hold meeting with China's Xi in South Korea in couple of weeks

The US president believes relations with China can go well, but only if a “fair” agreement is reached.

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🚨🇷🇺💥 RUSSIAN MOD WEEKLY UPDATE: HUGE GAINS AND DEVASTATING UKRAINIAN LOSSES

⚡️PRIVOLYE IN THE DNEPROPETROVSK REGION LIBERATED

⚡️PESCHANOYE & TIKHOYE IN KHARKOV REGION LIBERATED

The village of Peschanoye is situated near the border with the Lugansk People's Republic, 22 kilometers southeast of Kupyansk. Russian troops are expanding their zone of control east of the Oskol River, which will secure the flanks and rear of the group advancing on Kupyansk.

The liberation of Tikhoye will enable the Russian army to continue the battle for Volchansk and thereby secure the Russian border area by creating a buffer zone.

Privolye serves as an excellent bridgehead for expanding the section of the border controlled by the Russian army between the Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk regions.

🔸 Russia’s military liberated 8 settlements over the past week

🔸 Black Sea Fleet forces destroyed 6 Ukrainian unmanned boats 

🔸 The Russian Armed Forces unleashed one massive and seven group strikes against Ukraine’s military-industrial complex enterprises and the energy facilities powering them

🔸 Air defense superiority: 36 guided aerial bombs, 18 HIMARS rockets and 1,304 Ukrainian drones eliminated

🔸 Ukrainian losses: 10,685 troops killed or wounded

Read about origins of Russia's special military op HERE

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🪖🔥 Russia hits Ukrainian drone facility near Kharkov with Iskander missile

Russian forces have delivered a major blow to Ukrainian drone operations, striking a UAV launch site near Kharkov with an Iskander tactical ballistic missile.

The Russian Defense Ministry reports:

🔹 65 long-range Ukrainian drones destroyed

🔹 Five UAV launch systems destroyed

🔹 30 militants killed or injured

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🚨🇺🇸US to furlough thousands of nuclear arsenal workers next week due to government shutdown - Energy Secretary

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🇵🇱Polish court frees Ukrainian suspect in Nord Stream bombing case

A Polish court has released Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Zhuravlev, suspected of involvement in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, and refused a German extradition request.

👉The judges ruled that since the blast occurred in international waters, outside German jurisdiction, German law was inapplicable.

🔊The court also accepted the defense argument that Zhuravlev "might not receive a fair trial in Germany," noting that German judges are "appointed by politicians."

The presiding judge added that a Ukrainian citizen cannot be held criminally liable for damaging infrastructure belonging to Russia, calling the act a “military operation, not sabotage.”

💬Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk welcomed the decision. “The Polish court refused to extradite the Ukrainian suspected of blowing up Nord Stream 2 — and released him,” he posted on X. “Right decision. Case closed.”

📍The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were damaged by explosions in September 2022. While Germany, Denmark, and Sweden described the incident as likely sabotage, Russia opened a terrorism investigation and repeatedly requested access to the findings — but got response.

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh later alleged that US Navy divers placed the explosives during NATO’s Baltops 2022 exercises, a claim Washington denies.

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🇷🇺 🇺🇸 Trump’s Putin summit plans, Tomahawks U-turn are dual blows to Zelensky - analyst

💬 “The possibility that the US will deliver Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine was unclear from the beginning. It might have been just an attempt to pressure Russia, but it could also have been a real consideration from Trump. Now the possibility has been reduced considerably,” Swedish Armed Forces vet and veteran geopolitics analyst Mikael Valtersson told Sputnik.

🟠 Russia’s president will get “a good opportunity to convey the message to Trump about the dangers of introducing Tomahawk missiles on the battlefield” at the summit, with the meeting, and potential freeze on the missiles’ delivery, blows “in the face of Zelensky, who hoped to get a positive decision on Tomahawks during his meeting with Trump,” Valtersson said.

🟠 Budapest is a perfect venue for the next Putin-Trump meeting, according to the observer, given Hungary’s status “as a neutral and reasonable country when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine,” especially compared to other European powers’ escalatory actions and rhetoric.

💬 “Viktor Orban's Hungary has been ostracized by most other EU countries as a ‘pro-Russian, conservative and nationalistic regime’ and country. The fact that Trump decides to meet Putin in Hungary is therefore a clear slap in the face of the woke and globalist leaders of most European countries,” Valtersson says.

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🚀Putin–Trump call freezes Ukraine Tomahawk deal - report

The transfer of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine has been put on pause, Ukrainian MP Yegor Chernev said.

The move followed Thursday’s phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump.

That came at the "worst possible time" for Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, just as Kiev believed Washington’s stance was was becoming more sympathetic, The Spectator reports.

Zelensky will meet Trump in Washington later today.

👉Earlier, US President Donald Trump said he was close to deciding on whether to supply Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine but wants clarity on how Kiev plans to use them. 

❗️Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that deploying such missiles would severely damage US–Russia relations, as their use would require direct American involvement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that any delivery of Tomahawks to Ukraine would be a “colossal blow” to future normalization efforts and reaffirmed that weapon shipments to Kiev make NATO countries direct participants in the conflict.

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🇷🇺 🇺🇸 Russia-Alaska tunnel: sci-fi dream or realistic opportunity for deeper cooperation?

📍 The idea for a 112.5 km long Chukotka-Alaska ‘Putin-Trump Tunnel’ running underneath the Bering Strait is “quite bold,” and not so much in the realm of science fiction as might seem, says Russian Public Chamber member Alexander Asafov.

💬 “If Russian-American relations were restored…it would become a question of logistics, trade, and various related areas, including tourism. Given the prospective development of high-speed highways and railways to the Far East, the project could become a prototype for a new transcontinental logistics route,” Asafov told Sputnik.

🟧 For it to move forward, Russia-US relations would not only need to be restored to their previous level, but rebuilt from scratch, the observer emphasized.

🟧 Yulia Semke of the High School of Economics’ Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies says the tunnel idea has “symbolic” significance, “drawing attention to the fact that Russia and America are very, very close” geographically, “much closer than America is to Europe.”

🟧 At this stage, however, such a megaproject would need to be economically justified before moving forward, Semke told Sputnik, pointing out that costs could reach $250-$300B.

📍 “This is a missing element in [global] logistics that will greatly facilitate access for US products to Eurasia, and certainly China,” but would first require a “full-fledged, large-scale relaunch” of Russia-US trade ties, which currently lack the guarantees of economic returns needed to justify construction.

👉 In the future, the tunnel “would be an excellent symbol in the context of a new wave of globalization” and “a nice addition to the establishment of full-fledged cooperation” between Russia and the US, Semke summed up.

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🇺🇸Trump hopes Saudi Arabia will join Abraham Accords

US President Donald Trump said he expects Saudi Arabia and other regional states to join the Abraham Accords in the near future.

🗣“When Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump told Fox Business, adding that broader regional participation is “very soon.”

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🗣 Trump’s turnabout on Tomahawks signals ‘boredom’ with Zelensky, pivot to more important issues

🔊 “Trump realizes that having American military and contractors operating and selecting targets in Russia for these missiles from Ukraine is a bridge too far, and it is obvious at that point there would be a hot war between nuclear powers,” says retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, commenting on Washington’s apparent rethink of sending Tomahawks to Kiev.

💬 “Putin has been clear [that] if a weapon can carry a nuclear payload, it will be responded to as such, much as the US would do if threatened similarly,” the ex-DoD analyst explained to Sputnik.

🟠 Busy with his tariff and trade wars and the escalation with oil-rich Venezuela, which is being primed for regime change, Kwiatkowski suspects Trump and his lead negotiator Steve Witkoff are getting “bored with Zelensky.”

“Unfortunately, being bored with a project that isn't paying dividends is not the same as understanding the fundamentals and causes and envisioning a better future for Ukraine, Europe and Russia,” she says.

📍 Nevertheless, Zelensky currently “has less leverage than ever with Trump, and he will restrain himself from directly challenging him.”

🔶 Ukraine’s ‘president’ “is on the downslope in free aid and weapons from his erstwhile allies, and he, his Army and party leadership seems to have adopted a bunker mentality, seeing ever new enemies within. In desperation, however, without a way out, Zelensky and his closest virally anti-Russian compatriots still hold terrorism cards, and a variety of false flag capabilities,” according to Kwiatkowski.

🔶 That makes ending the crisis “more urgent than ever,” with even Europe’s warmongers standing to gain by reversing their domestic and economic troubles.

“When Trump and Putin agree that this war would have never have happened if Trump was elected in 2020…perhaps this is the common idea that can lead to the end of the war and a new era for Ukraine and its people, between East and West, benefiting from healthy trade and neutrality,” Kwiatkowski summed up.

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🇸🇦🔥 Saudi Arabia’s mega-project: 'King Salman Gate' – new city for Mecca

Saudi Arabia has unveiled plans for the massive "King Salman Gate" urban development in Mecca, covering a staggering 12 million square meters near the Holy Mosque.

👉 Key features:

🔶 Capacity increase for 900,000 additional worshippers

🔶 Luxury hotels & residential areas

🔶 Commercial centers & cultural facilities

🔶 New transportation lines

The project aims to dramatically improve pilgrim services while creating sustainable urban growth around Islam's holiest site.

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🇷🇺Putin thanks RT team for steadfastly defending the truth

RT faced a challenging task — “to build its work on a fundamentally new level — and the channel has done this brilliantly,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told an audience at the Bolshoi Theatre on the channel’s 20th anniversary.

👉Putin praised RT for successfully building its work “on a fundamentally new level.”

He said Western media had long abused their monopoly on information, but today “millions of people around the world trust RT.”

💬“Russia’s sovereignty — which it will always defend — depends on the ability to convey objective and unbiased information to people,” Putin stressed.

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