The private military company received almost a trillion rubles in government tenders, TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov has said

Evgeny Prigozhin's holding, which includes the Wagner Group, has enjoyed substantial benefits from working for the Russian government, securing contracts worth hundreds of billions of rubles, Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, said on Sunday.

Speaking on air during his weekly news program, Kiselyov said that Prigozhin's Wagner private military company "has received a little more than 858 billion rubles ($9.8 billion) under the contracts it signed with the state."

He added that under other contracts, Prigozhin's holding Concord, which is also engaged in the catering and media business, had provided services to the tune of 845 billion rubles.

Ukraine urgently needs to show progress on the battlefield, Polish MEP Witold Jan Waszczykowski has suggested. Many EU nations are not interested in the country and would rather restore trade with Russia, he told the Ukrainian media outlet UNIAN.

"Most European nations, such as Germany and France, do not need Ukraine. They need Russia to return to the world economy. They need Russian gas and oil," the veteran politician told UNIAN on Thursday.

He added that Kiev had "three to four months" to show progress in its counteroffensive against Russia. If it fails to deliver, "Europe will push you to freeze the conflict and start negotiations with Russia, as happened in 2015," he explained, calling the scenario "pessimistic."

Dmitry Medvedev has warned a nuclear war could break out should the US deploy weapons of mass destruction to Poland.

A nuclear war could start if the US accommodates Poland's desire for the placing of nuclear weapons there, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has said. Earlier this week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called on NATO to include Warsaw in the bloc's Nuclear Sharing Program.


In a Telegram post on Saturday, Medvedev shared his response to a request for comment by TASS.

European Union leaders committed on Friday to reducing the bloc's dependence on China and debated how to strike a balance between "de-risking" and cooperating in areas such as climate change.

Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins said finding the right stance was "the million euro question", adding the de-risking strategy followed the EU's painful lesson from reliance on Russian gas, which Moscow cut after its invasion of Ukraine.

"What it basically says is (to) assess are we overly dependent in some way on China in trade and how to reduce so that if something changes drastically in the world we're not left high and dry," he said before Friday's EU summit session.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said de-risking was mainly a matter for companies, which would take a few years to diversify.

Hungary is being pressed in several directions due to the Ukraine conflict and surge in migration, and must strive to overcome these challenges, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Faculty of Law Sciences at the National University of Public Administration, which was attended by future law enforcement officers, Orban stated that Hungarians "are living in times when the foundations of the world are shaking," and the epicenter of this earthquake is located in the country's neighborhood.

He pointed to the hostilities in Ukraine to the east, noting that "tens and hundreds of thousands of migrants from the south are besieging our borders."

Against this backdrop, Hungary needs to have a strong government, economy, army, and law enforcement agencies, Orban said. "We must train and arm ourselves... strong people are greatly needed, because the truth is worth little without strength."

"The time will come when weak nations will be lost and the strong will remain. Therefore, we must strengthen our own defense lines and law enforcement agencies every single day," he added.

The best way to verify the failure of the current Ukrainian offensive, at least so far, is the discretion and silence of the media. Had the operation gone differently, it would have grabbed all the headlines. But the sad reality is different: the fearsome German leopards have become an endangered species and a reward of one million rubles is given to the Russian serviceman who catches one of these vermin. Rheinmetall's shares plummeted when the photos of German scrap metal made into phosphatin in the steppes of New Russia began to be published. But the fault lies not with the machines or the brave Ukrainians who dare to crew them, but with their sponsors — those who devised an offensive to satisfy Western investors' need for victories. Because this adventure was not designed on military criteria — but on marketing.

In recent weeks, the prestigious Western press has discovered that the Russians do not fight all that badly, that they seem to know something about artillery and fortification and that they are not just the horde of drunks and incompetents described to us by our "experts."

Moreover, it has been proved that the Muscovite barbarians have an overwhelming air dominance and are very effective in electronic warfare, even more so than the invincible Americans. General Sergei Surovikin, who took over the leadership of the front line of the Special Military Operation in September last year, is to blame for all this. When this general took command, the objectives of the Russian intervention in Ukraine were partly achieved: the essential one, which was to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, and some secondary ones, such as the land link between Crimea and the rest of the Russian Federation, the control of the Sea of Azov and the destruction of the Ukrainian air force and a good part of its army. But the Maidan regime did not fall and the West succeeded in preventing a peace agreement in March and April 2022. Another NATO success was the accelerated rearmament of Zelensky's battered army. The few Russian troops guarding the front were not reinforced after the April political failure and in August-September the Ukrainian offensives in Kharkov and Kherson took place.

The first one was a success due to the poor coverage of that front, but the Russians managed to withdraw without great losses and after brilliant rearguard battles in Krasniy Liman, where they broke the Ukrainian encirclement twice. The army of Kiev paid for its military success with a very high number of casualties, because Russian air superiority compensated in part for the low density of its ground forces. At Kherson, the Ukrainian offensive was a bloody failure, especially at the Ingulets, where the ford of that river cost thousands of dead in front a Russian line that remained unmoved. It was Surovikin's fear that the Noya Kakhovka dam would burst and leave his thirty thousand men cut off from communication — which made him to take the most difficult decision of the Russian intervention: to abandon Kherson and withdraw to the right bank of the Dnieper. Political rather than military defeat for Russia and spectacular propaganda success for Zelensky.

American liberals of the communo-fascist bent are now fond of tagging 'white supremacists' (read: white people and political opponents 'deluded' by 'whiteness') with the blame for violence from the right (which is far outpaced by that from the left). Such violence is routinely called 'terrorism' - though it is not - and is furthermore extended to speech that is alleged to have 'caused' the violence. This perverse definition-stretching - so routine on the left so as to be ubiquitous - has produced the idea of so-called 'stochastic terrorism.' Stochastic terrorism is defined as "the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted" or more simply as "the incitement of a violent act through public demonization of a group or individual".

Of course, it is impossible to prove when "public demonization of a person or group" has 'resulted in the incitement' of a violent act. And that is the point, part of a strategy. The WOKE-dominated US government and media are now routinely applying this term to squelch the constitutional free speech rights of their political opponents in an attempt to consolidate their nascent pro-authoritarian revolution from above.

In foreign affairs, this concept is now being played with the loosest interpretation of causality in order to promote US foreign policy. We saw the new 'stochasticism' applied recently when Chief of the US Armed Forces' Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as well as a a host of other US, NATO and European officials blamed Russia for Ukraine's firing an S-300 missile on Polish territory, killing two farmers. The logic was simple (indeed): Russia started the war in Ukraine in February 2022, and so Russian President Vladimir Putin is to blame for the Ukrainian apparent misfire on Poland.

"Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the War in Iraq." — Joe Biden, US President

Russian Revolution Two kicked off the long, hot summer freak show of 2023. Unlike Russian Revolution One (1917), which lasted over seventy years, RR2 clocked out in under twenty-four hours. It didn't propel Russia into a political paroxysm as perhaps expected by crisis engineers in Langley, VA, and Washington's Foggy Bottom. Rather, it energized the resolve of arch-nemesis Vlad Putin, solidified his support among the Russian populace (who turned out singing patriotic hymns along the Neva River when the revolt was quashed), and sunsetted the increasingly rogue Wagner private paramilitary company in its Ukraine duties, now to be taken over by regular Russian Federation army units.

According to commentator Andrei Martyanov — see yesterday's colloquy on Tommy Carrigan's Podcast — Wagner had already gone off the rails in Ukraine, inciting the costly Bakhmut operation on its own to fluff its reputation while preparing for the mutiny executed and aborted on June 24. The fate of Wagner's business manager, Evgeny Prigozhin, remains murky now while he cools his heels in Belarus — a trial, perhaps, at some later date when Ukraine itself stops being a geopolitical psychodrama. He has been publicly branded a "traitor."

It was perhaps the hope of America's feckless Neocon war-dogs that Russia would fall into chaos. This has all along been the hope and expectation of our country's official stated policy. And it turns out to be ever more at odds with the reality of the situation. Mr. Putin aims to conclude this tragic US-provoked misadventure as swiftly as possible now. This ain't no Mud Club; this ain't no foolin' around. It looks more like the last days of disco in Kiev. The question for the people there is: just how much of Ukraine do you want to be left with intact when this thing is over? Go ahead... choose.

Ukraine wants to make some progress on the battlefield in its counteroffensive against Russia before the upcoming NATO summit, President Vladimir Zelensky said on Friday, although he admitted that this would lead to new losses.

Speaking to several Spanish media outlets, the Ukrainian leader stated that Kiev has to "show results" before NATO leaders convene in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11, adding that "every kilometer costs lives."

Zelensky noted that "torrential rains... slowed down some processes quite a bit" and reiterated calls for Kiev's Western backers to continue sending arms to Ukraine. He also claimed that Ukraine's offensive operations conducted last autumn were undermined by the late arrival of artillery.

The bloc is considering using interest generated from the funds to help rebuild Ukraine, Bloomberg reports...

European Union leaders have been discussing plans to impose a windfall tax on profits generated by more than €200 billion ($217 billion) of frozen Russian central bank assets to aid Ukraine's reconstruction, according to Bloomberg.

People familiar with the matter told the outlet that during a summit in Brussels on Thursday, the leaders decided to explore the option, despite a range of unresolved issues on how to use the sanctioned funds.

The EU and its allies have frozen hundreds of billions of euros of Russian central bank holdings as part of its sanctions policy, which are expected to generate around €3 billion in interest. Over half of those assets are reportedly in cash and deposits, while a "substantial amount" of the remainder is in securities.

The windfall option was the least problematic among other ideas explored, Bloomberg reported, adding however that there were legal risks that it could eventually be challenged in court. "Some argue that the interest and profits generated from the funds stem from sanctioned assets that ultimately belong to Russia," the outlet noted.