Tag Archives | President Vladimir Putin

A scheme proposed by the European Commission will allow EU companies to pay for Russian gas in rubles without violating EU sanctions.

Ukraine’s government has placed Vadim Rabinovich, a lawmaker and Jewish community leader, on a list of 111 people it called traitors in the war with Russia.

Like Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’, propaganda is pouring out of the U.S. that is shaping our perceptions of the war in Ukraine. It is produced by the CIA, it is pronounced by the State Department and it is published by the media. It is coming from everywhere.

On March 27, the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper hosted a webinar called “Stop the War Lies: Voices from Donbass.” This was a unique opportunity for the U.S. anti-war movement to hear directly from people in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), whose voices are silenced by the Western mass media’s pro-Ukraine war propaganda.

The West has made a snap judgment about who is responsible for the massacre at the Ukrainian town of Bucha with calls for more stringent sanctions on Russia, but the question of guilt is far from decided, writes Joe Lauria.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook what he referred to as a “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.”

After the three-hour meeting in Turkey, Russia said it has decided to drastically cut back its military activity near Kiev in order for peace talks to progress. According to TASS, top Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the talks were “constructive.” 

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists.

“I would strongly advise everyone to pay attention to the fact that the majority of the media talk less about the task of denazification, i.e. about the eradication of Nazism, fascism of the Banderamodification. It is understandable.” –

Wars disturb and delude. The Ukraine conflict is no exception. Misinformation is cantering through press accounts and media dispatches with feverish spread.

It is impossible not to be moved by the outrageousness of warfare, the ugliness of aerial bombardment, the gruesome fears of civilians who are trapped between choices that are not their own.

Russia’s recognition of the ‘people’s republics’ of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass on Monday is a watershed event.

Under pressure from ultra-nationalists and Russophobes, successive governments in Ukraine have failed to address the grievances of the Russian speaking majority in the Donbass region. Ukraine has also not implemented the provisions of the Minsk agreement signed in 2015 to end the conflict in the region.

Russia says it has no intentions of controlling Ukraine and its military operation is only to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine in an action taken after 30 years of the U.S. pushing Russia too far, writes Joe Lauria.

The Rossiya 1 state television in Moscow broadcast today President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Friday. It conveys a much fuller picture of the grave crisis brewing in the Russian-American relations than what the excerpts in the Russian media sought to convey over the weekend.

To apply a western analogy, while the Sino-Russian partnership has great potential to model itself after the European Union, neither Moscow nor Beijing desires an Eurasian NATO to create synergy for it. 

Boris Kagarlitsky, a veteran left-wing dissident, holds the distinction of having been a political prisoner under the regimes of Leonid Brezhnev and Boris Yeltsin. Now he can add President Vladimir Putin to that list.

Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the “killer” jab a “very bad statement by the U.S. president,” ​that indicated “he doesn’t want to normalize relations.”