For the first time the governments of Russia and North Korea have issued coordinated statements of high-level confirmation that North Korean troops were sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine, having been deployed months ago.

The statements described that the large foreign troop contingency helped liberate Russia's Kursk border region, after a Ukrainian incursion and occupation which stretched all the way back to last August.

Putin said Monday that the population would never forget the 'heroic' feats of North Korea's special forces.

"We will always honor the Korean heroes who gave their lives for Russia, for our common freedom, on par with their Russian brothers in arms."

He further declared they had helped defeat the "neo-Nazi formations" sent by Ukraine and that this was based on "solidarity" and "genuine comradery".

The struggle will continue even after the US leader puts the EU and UK in their place, Dmitry Medvedev has said.

Western European leaders are waging a "quiet war" against US President Donald Trump, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed.

Washington's current tariffs standoff and disagreements on NATO spending with the EU and UK is not only an economic but also an ideological conflict, Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said on Tuesday:

"I have no doubt that [Western] Europe will be put in its place [by the US], but at the same time the Europeans will continue their quiet war against Trump. They will try to wage a war against him on all possible fronts, observing the rules of decency on the outside. What will come of it - we will see."

Two overarching taboos reign on the - now shattered - collective West:

1. Can't define the Ukraine regime as Nazi.
2. Can't condemn the psychopathological Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The taboos happen to be inextricably linked to the Forever Wars deployed non-stop by the Empire of Chaos/Zionist axis.

Lesser Hybrid Wars though - even carrying the horrifying prospect of turning nuclear - are allowed to come and go. Especially if they are part of the current war on BRICS, a sub-section of the war of factions of the West against the Global Majority.

So let's go to Kashmir - to the sound of Jimmy Page's hypnotic riff. Both India and Pakistan are escalating the war of decibels. Turkey is offering weapons - to Pakistan. Iran offered a mediator role: no takers.

The motive for the war is as dodgy as they come. An all-male tourist bus packing a bunch of merry tourists is roaming around Indian-held Kashmir. Passengers include a just married 26-year-old lieutenant of the Indian Navy - but without his wife (what kind of honeymoon is that?) Another passenger is Nepalese. The bus is attacked by shady splinter goons loosely affiliated with the Salafi-jihadi Lashkar-e-Taiba outfit.

The Empire has been all over the Indian front. The current US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard was previously fully funded by Prime Minister Modi's circles. Eyeliner-loaded VP J.D. Vance recently visited India - complete with family Taj Mahal photo op. Then Modi went to visit Saudi Arabia - invited by MbS. After the Kashmir bus terror attack, Hindutva fanatics went on a cyber-attack spree.

The crude tactics spell out classic Divide and Rule. Double whammy: revamped weaponization of India, and destabilization of a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) China front: the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). A thing of beauty: splitting BRICS from the inside.

None of that, of course, legitimizes the ghastly Pakistani military, which have thrown in jail, on spurious charges, the man who was trying to bring Pakistan to respectability: Imran Khan.

It's up, once again, to the adults in the room, any room - Russia - to de-escalate. This could be ideally performed inside the SCO - where both India and Pakistan are members, side by side with Iran. Moscow chose to take the initiative, by itself.

Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko met with both India's Ambassador to Russia, Vinay Kumar, and Pakistan's Ambassador to Russia, Muhammad Khalid Jamali.

Russian terminology is essential: not only there was a call for both parties to "engage in constructive dialogue". Moscow stressed, "we are ready to counter the global terrorist threat together." The operative word is "global". Delhi and Islamabad don't seem to be getting the message - yet.

The leaders of European NATO members can't accept their declining relevance, Nikolay Patrushev has said

European NATO members are risking nuclear war by escalating military tensions with Russia, according to Nikolay Patrushev, national security adviser to President Vladimir Putin.

Patrushev accused Western powers of "deploying their military machine against Russia and becoming delirious with nuclear apocalypse scenarios." The destabilization is originating from Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London, the senior official told TASS in an interview published on Tuesday.

Everyone is expecting news on a Ukrainian settlement this week. The diplomatic activity is real and intense, and the visible signs suggest something significant is underway. There is little point in trying to guess which of the leaked plans are genuine and which are misinformation. What is clear is that Russia is being offered a choice between "a bird in the hand and two in the bush." The trouble is, the elements necessary for any sustainable agreement are still scattered among the various birds.

Currently, discussions naturally revolve around territory. This is a sensitive subject, particularly since the territories under consideration are already under Russian control. The bird's wings are clipped, however: legal recognition of Russia's sovereignty over these lands seems unrealistic, at least in the near term. De facto recognition, with a pledge not to attempt to return them by force, could be the achievable result. In today's global atmosphere, it is naive to view any legal agreement as genuinely final. Yet territory was not the true cause of this conflict.

Amid mounting casualties and fleeing citizens, Ukraine faces the grim option of forcing more of its population into military service.

As Ukraine's manpower crisis deepens, Kiev is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to fill the thinning ranks of its army. With conscription drives failing and volunteer numbers dwindling, authorities are now preparing to force ever-broader sections of the population - including women and barely adult men - into the front lines.

Despite brutal mobilization efforts, Ukraine's Armed Forces (AFU) remain critically understaffed. Even aggressive recruitment campaigns and tightening draft laws have failed to produce the needed surge in enlistments. Now the government is moving toward slashing the minimum conscription age from 25 to just 18 - sending teenagers straight into a bloody and grinding conflict. At the same time, serious discussions are underway about mobilizing women en masse, a step that would mark a historic escalation in Kiev's attempts to prolong the war.

A Kiev court has accused Viktor Yanukovich of "inciting desertion" for leaving the country with his entourage during the 2014 Maidan coup.

Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has been handed a 15-year prison sentence by a Kiev court for allegedly inciting desertion and organizing "illegal transportation across the state border," Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office announced on Monday.

Yanukovich served as president of Ukraine from 2010 until 2014, when he was ousted during the Western-backed Maidan coup and forced to leave the country. He has since sought refuge in Russia. Shortly after his escape, the Ukrainian parliament officially stripped him of his title as president.

Ukrainian prosecutors have now claimed that Yanukovich's escape in February 2014 was "illegal" and have accused him of taking at least 20 other people across the border with him, including his personal entourage and military personnel. The prosecution alleged that after Yanukovich fled Kiev, a number of state security workers that traveled with him to Russia did not return to military service, constituting desertion.

On Monday, the Podolsky District Court of Kiev said that prosecutors had proven Yanukovich's transgressions and sentenced the former leader in absentia to 15 years in prison, finding him guilty of organizing an illegal border crossing and inciting desertion. Additionally, the court also sentenced Yanukovich's former deputy head of the presidential security service, Konstantin Kobzar, to ten years in prison for desertion and organizing the illegal transfer of persons across the state border.

A regime similar to Kiev's must not be allowed to take root in any nation, the former Russian president has said.

The rebirth of Nazism cannot be allowed in any nation, and Europe may need an international de-Nazification effort, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said.

The senior official, currently serving as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, addressed the threat of Nazi ideology during a public lecture in Moscow on Tuesday, in which he outlined Moscow's foreign policy priorities.

He characterized the destruction of the "Kiev neo-Nazi regime" as a necessary outcome of the Ukraine conflict, before arguing for broader "decisive action by multiple states. All measures need to be taken to ensure that such regimes never arise in any other nation. The price is too high," Medvedev emphasized.

A real de-Nazification is required. Nazism needs to be rooted out not only in Ukraine, but in all of Europe.

Israel is again in the news for all the wrong reasons. However, this time, it is not about the genocide of Palestinians. The regime officials and religious leaders are at the centre of the sexual abuse scandal.

A recent incident of incest involving Israel's minister of illegal settlements, Orit Strook, shocked the world. Strook, a member of the far-right Jewish Power Party and a staunch supporter of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, was accused by her daughter, Shoshana Strook, of incest.

Shoshana has filed a police complaint in Italy, claiming sexual assault by her parents and a brother.

A number of topics remain taboo in discussing the war in Ukraine. Busification, Zelensky's democratic mandate, Ukraine's casualty numbers and anything suggesting that Ukraine cannot win are all off limits. Likewise the problem of alleged neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

One of the most embarrassing episodes since the Ukraine war started in 2022, was when Yaroslav Hunka, was given two standing ovations in the Canadian House of Commons public gallery by MPs during the visit of President Zelensky in 2023. Hunka has been accused by Russia of genocide, because of his alleged involvement in the Huta Pieniacka massacre of February 28 1944 in which more than 500 ethnic Poles were murdered in a village, in what is now western Ukraine. Hunka was a member of the SS Galicia Division, a mostly Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS, which Commissions in Germany and Poland later found guilty of war crimes.

This was shocking because it opened the lid on a topic of conversation that has been largely silenced by the western mainstream media since the beginning of the war: Ukraine's contemporary challenge of far-right ultranationalism. But the Hunka case also illustrates how western authorities airbrushed discussion of nazis in Ukraine after World War II too.

On 13 July 1948 the British Commonwealth Relations Office, what is now part of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, sent a telegram to Commonwealth governments, proposing an end to Nazi war crimes trials in the British zone of Germany. "Punishment of war crimes is more a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual... it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible."

After the conclusion of the Nuremberg War Trials in 1946 the western world faced a new enemy in the Soviet Union. Limited security resources in cash-strapped Albion and its colonies were re-deployed to uncover suspected Soviet agents and Communists, rather than to identify and track down lower-order Nazi war criminals.

Around this time, many Ukrainians fled the Soviet Union to settle in Canada. In the thirty-year period after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Ukrainian population in Canada almost doubled, from 300,000 to almost 600,000 people. While most of them, I am sure, would not have been Nazi collaborators, some, undoubtedly, were. They were joined by lesser numbers of Latvians, Hungarians, Slovaks and others.