Türkiye is trying to "bring Ukrainian, Russian leaders together" to reach a permanent and fair ceasefire deal, the country's foreign minister has said.

During a press briefing at the Turkevi Center on Friday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, Mevlut Cavusoglu said everyone "sees the role Türkiye has played on the grain deal."

"Everyone knows that if a ceasefire will happen, it will happen via Türkiye's efforts," Cavusoglu said.

The Ukrainian offensive in Kharkov Region, launched earlier this month, led to Russia's armed forces losing control of a number of settlements.

These include the towns of Balakleya, Izium, Kupiansk, Volchansk and a number of villages and small locales. Nevertheless, the Russian army, by concentrating on rearguard battles, was able to avoid significant losses and managed to retreat to the left bank of the Oskol River to regroup.

However, the primary victims of this turn of events were the inhabitants of the aforementioned areas who are now in the hands of Ukraine.

Left behind

There is no exact information about the population of this region. The last census was conducted by Kiev more than 20 years ago, and the country's statistics are known to be wildly inaccurate.

At the outset, we can estimate the pre-war population at 200,000 people. After the outbreak of hostilities, some were forced to flee. The number of refugees depended on the intensity of the fighting. For example, in the Russia-border town of Volchansk, people continued to live normally - they had not heard firing in the city since March - and there has always been humanitarian aid. However, the frontline villages south of Izium were virtually wiped off the face of the earth.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky told French TV on Friday that he is "shocked" that Israel has not sent weapons to help his military fight off Russian forces. Zelensky then claimed that West Jerusalem is under Russian influence.

Zelensky told a group of reporters from numerous French media outlets:

"I am shocked. I don't understand. Israel has provided us with nothing, nothing, zero. I understand that they have to defend their land but I have received information that Israel is exporting its armaments to other countries."

Zelensky was likely referring to Israel's sale of its 'Iron Dome' missile defense system to Cyprus, which was reported last month but not confirmed by the Israeli government. Last year, Israel's defense exports totaled a record $11.3 billion, with 41% of its customers located in Europe.


While Israel condemned Russia's military operation in Ukraine and abided by US sanctions on Moscow, it has not imposed sanctions of its own on Russia, and has refrained from donating weapons to Kiev. Instead, West Jerusalem has sent protective equipment such as body armor and helmets, as well as humanitarian aid.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said that his conservative government could look forward to the "best ever political relationship" with the US if Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024.

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Szijjarto told Fox News:

"We work together with those who are elected here in the US. Well, but we have to be honest: If you look at the relationship, the political relationship under [a] conservative or Republican administration and under [a] Democratic administration, there's a big change."

Former President Donald Trump was an admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, lavishing praise on Orban whilst in office and giving the PM's re-election bid his "complete support" earlier this year. Both leaders have opposed mass immigration and positioned themselves as opponents of liberalism and globalism - and both received backlash from NGOs and the media for these views, with the EU also threatening to cut off funding to Hungary.

President Joe Biden, by contrast, publicly referred to Orban's government as a "totalitarian regime," ended a tax treaty with the Central European nation, and invited every EU leader but Orban to a 'Summit for Democracy' last year.
Szijjarto told Fox:

"Under the term of President Trump, we had the best ever political relationship between the two countries, [the] best-ever relationship. We respect President Trump a lot."

Years of NATO encroachment on Russia and the West's refusal to negotiate over Ukraine left Russia "no choice" but to launch its special military operation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the UN on Saturday. However, Lavrov added that Russia is now shaping "the future of the world order."

"The US and its allies want to stop the march of history," Lavrov declared from the podium in New York, describing how in the aftermath of the Cold War, Washington appointed itself "almost an envoy of God on earth," launching foreign conflicts at will and expanding the NATO alliance deeper into Eastern Europe.

The shifting of NATO's borders to the east and its official declaration of interest in the Indo-Pacific region mean that the US-led bloc "now has the goal of subjugating the Asian area," Lavrov stated. However, it was the West's refusal to negotiate over Ukraine that led Russia to fight back, he continued.

"The West watched in silence as the coup plotters started bombing the east of Ukraine," he said, referring to Kiev's attacks on the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics even after the Minsk agreements had been signed in 2014 and 2015.

Former President Donald Trump posted his support of Cayler Ellingson on Truth Social on Friday, offering condolenses to the family of the teen that was killed over the weekend by a man afraid of "Republican extremists."

"Cayler Ellingson of North Dakota," Trump began, "a great Republican Patriot with an unlimited future ahead, was struck by a truck and killed. The person that did this was a deranged Democrat maniac who was angry that Cayler was a Republican. The Media doesn't want to cover this horrible event because of the politics involved. If it were a MAGA Republican that drove that truck, it would have been the biggest of all stories. We LOVE Cayler, AND WILL NEVER FORGET! Warmest condolences to Cayler's family & friends."

Ellingson was killed in the early hours of Sunday morning nearly one week ago. Shannon Brandt, the man who pursued Ellingson in his car, later admitted to police that he feared that the 18-year-old was a "Republican extremist" who was seeking to harm him. After he hit the teen with his car, he fled the scene of the crime and failed to render aid, in violation of North Dakota law.

Geopolitical tectonic plates are reelin' and rockin', and the sound is heard all around the world, as the twin baby bears DPR and LPR plus Kherson and Zaporozhye vote on their referendums. Irretrievable fact: by the end of next week Russia most certainly will be on the way to add over 100,000 km2 and over 5 million people to the Federation.

Denis Pushilin, head of the DPR, summed it all up: "We're going home". The baby bears are coming to Mama.

Coupled with the partial mobilization of up to 300,000 Russian reservists - arguably just a first phase - the raise-the-stakes consequences are immense. Exit the previous soft format of the Special Military Operation (SMO): enter serious kinetic war, not hybrid, against any actor, vassal or otherwise, that dares to attack Russian territory.

There's a very short window of Chinese-coined crisis/opportunity for the collective West, or NATOstan, to negotiate. They won't. Even as anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows that the only way for the Empire of Chaos/Lies/Plunder to "win" - outside of the cover of The Economist - would be by launching a first-strike flurry of tactical nuclear weapons, which would meet a devastating Russian response.

The Kremlin knows it - President Putin has publicly alluded to it; the Russian General Staff (RGS) knows it; the Chinese know it (and have called, also publicly, for negotiations).

Instead, we have hysterical Russophobia reaching a paroxysm. And from the deer-caught-in-the-headlights vassals, an extra toxic sludge of fear and loathing.

Implications have been sharply and rationally addressed at The Saker and by Andrei Martyanov. On the realm of social network "influencing" - a key component of hybrid war - cheap entertainment has been provided by everyone from frightened Eurocrats to crappy retired U.S. generals threatening a "devastating strike" against the Black Sea Fleet "if Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine".

One of these specimens is a mere P.R. front man for an Atlanticist think tank. He was properly disposed of by the now totally unplugged deputy head of Russia's Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev: "Retired idiots with general's stripes do not need to scare us with talk about a NATO strike on Crimea."

Freak out on a moonage daydream? Oh yeah. Tawdry wet dreams, stripped off the Bowie glow.

Moscow will treat any potential attacks on Donbass as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions after the referendums on joining Russia as attacks on its own territory, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has confirmed. Voting in the two Donbass republics as well as the two southern Ukrainian Regions started on Friday.

Responding to a media query on whether the areas would be treated as Russian land, Peskov replied: "Definitely." He also said that the country's constitution would come into force in these territories as soon as they joined.

Russia's former president and the deputy head of the nation's Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that Russia would not hesitate to use "all means available" to defend its territory. "An encroachment on Russian territory is a crime," Medvedev said earlier this week. He also stated that Donbass joining Russia would make the "geopolitical transformation [of] the world irreversible."

Russian gas supplies are critical for Germany, and will remain so in the foreseeable future despite Berlin's attempts to diversify its energy sources, Saxony's Minister-President Michael Kretschmer warned.

In an interview with the newspapers belonging to Germany's Funke Mediengruppe on Saturday, Kretschmer said: "We are already witnessing that we can't do without Russian gas." The official added that the sanctions imposed by Berlin over Russia's offensive against Ukraine have "contributed to this shortage situation."

The "Augury" platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. "It's everything. There's nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity," one cybersecurity expert said.

Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world's internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people's email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard.

Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that's part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden's office with Motherboard.