Under the change of US-Russia relations, there are currently some speculations about the direction of China-Russia relations. To expose the falsehood of these speculations, it's important to share some facts about the China-Russia relationship. They've been strategic partners since 1996. They participated in the forming of the Shanghai Five, also in 1996, which later evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the engines of the multipolar world order. China and Russia then signed the Treaty on Good-Neighborliness and Friendship Cooperation in 2001.

China and Russia are also founding members of BRICS, which functions as an economic-financial complement to the SCO's role in accelerating multipolar processes across the world. Apart from co-founding these two institutions, the other tangible manifestations of their strategic relations are trade and military-technical cooperation. Trade mostly comprises commercial products, technology and energy, including nuclear power cooperation.

The country's rivals will always seek to weaken it, the president has said.

Western sanctions are not a temporary measure but rather a tool for applying strategic pressure on Russia, President Vladimir Putin has said. The country's rivals will always seek to weaken it, he added on Tuesday, speaking during a meeting of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) in Moscow.

According to the president, a total of 28,595 sanctions have been imposed against Russian companies and individuals in recent years, more than all other restrictions against other countries combined. He added:

"The West does not intend to hold back, threatening new sanctions and churning out these packages one after another. Sanctions are not temporary or targeted measures; they are a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure on our country. Even if sanctions against the country are eased, the West will find another way to throw a wrench in the works."

Since 2014, the United States and the European Union have imposed a wide range of restrictions on Russia in response to Crimea joining the country following a violent, Western-backed coup in Kiev. The measures covered sectors such as defense, energy, banking, and trade.

Washington is set to withdraw from a European campaign aimed at prosecuting alleged aggression, the newspaper has reported.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is retreating from initiatives aimed at investigating and prosecuting alleged Russian crimes linked to the Ukraine conflict, the New York Times reported on Monday.

According to sources cited by the newspaper, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) will withdraw from the EU-backed International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA), established to investigate Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Iran for the alleged crime of international aggression.

The US became the only non-European ICPA member when it joined in 2023. Sources have told the NYT that Washington had informed EU countries about its imminent exit ahead of a formal announcement.

US government officials reportedly justified the withdrawal by citing a broader reduction in expenditures. The DOJ had pledged $1 million to support European investigators when US participation was initially announced.

Additionally, Washington is curtailing operations of a DOJ team known as WarCAT, formed in 2022 to train Ukrainian prosecutors on charging and trying Russians for alleged war crimes, according to NYT sources.

Employees of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have entered the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) amid opposition from the nonprofit, which insists it is an independent agency, not part of the executive branch.

President Donald Trump singled out the organization, along with several others, in a February 19 executive order aimed at reducing the federal government's size. Since then, his administration has taken steps to terminate staff and eliminate programs within these targeted organizations.

The institute's CEO, George Moose, condemned Monday's move, stating, "DOGE has broken into our building."

After fervently denying that they relied on financial support from the US government, the supposedly "independent" Russian language paper Meduza has been thrown into existential crisis following the Trump administration's pause on foreign development assistance

Alexey Kovalev, a self-described "Russian journalist currently living in exile for fear of persecution back home," had spent much of his career at Meduza, the leading opposition media outlet in Russia. Since leaving the paper under mysterious circumstances in the summer of 2023 and relocating to London, Kovalev has split time writing commentaries for Foreign Policy and attacking reporters at The Grayzone, whom he has falsely painted as Russian assets, while calling for their imprisonment.

"The Grayzone is Russia's US-based disinformation laundromat," Kovalev ranted in a July 2024 blog post. "This conspiracy blog's founders, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal, help the Kremlin disseminate its false narratives in exchange for favors from a senior Russian government official Dmitry Polyansky, the country's deputy ambassador to the UN. They act as unregistered foreign agents and should be investigated by the Department of Justice for possible FARA violations."

Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry has said Tuesday that over 400 people were killed overnight and into the morning by Israeli airstrikes following the collapse of the fragile two-month ceasefire.

Local officials say the death toll is expected to climb higher through the day as many are still buried under the rubble. The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders desribed, "We woke up, at around 2am local time, to 20 minutes of airstrikes and heavy artillery, just like the past 15 months of war."

The statement further said, "We are appalled and outraged by these new unacceptable massacres of civilians." But Israel has blamed Hamas for the truce's collapse, also as dozens of Israeli captives (including bodies of the deceased) still remain in the Gaza Strip.

Let's start with that phone call. The is quite sober - but it does reveal a few nuggets. There is no comprehensive deal - yet - between Moscow and Washington. Far from it: we are just in the initial tentative stage of talking and talking about several interconnected dossiers.

President Putin gave absolutely nothing away. The agreed-upon pause on attacks on energy infrastructure - not energy and (italics mine) infrastructure - spells out as Putin imposing a stop on dangerous Ukrainian hits on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.

That may be lost among all the Western hysteria; but there are two absolute conditions expressed by Moscow for anything in this riddle to start complying with objective reality - and not muddle along as a reality show narrative trainwreck:

1."The settlement in Ukraine must take into account the unconditional need to eliminate the root causes of the crisis, Russia's legitimate security interests."

2."The key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict should be a complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence information to Kiev."

U.S. special envoy Witkoff is spinning that ceasefire "details" will be ironed out on Sunday in Saudi Arabia. No matter the amount of shrieking, Kiev will have to accept it.

Putin-Trump did not spend over 2 hours just talking hockey, hazy Black Sea navigation prospects and a quite limited energy infrastructure missile strike one-month pause.

In this incandescent juncture, what matters is off the record. And that might as well have been Iran. And the prospect of serious Hard Rain fallin'.

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

A certain psychopathological entity in West Asia is obsessed to ram all its opponents through the mouth of a graveyard. Putin must have had the chance to explain to Trump that Russia respects the UN Charter and abides by international law. Russia and Iran - top BRICS members - signed a comprehensive strategic partnership last January in Moscow. Russia provides detailed ISR/air defense/EW intel to Tehran.

Turkish authorities detained the mayor of Istanbul on 19 March for alleged corruption and links to "terrorism," prosecutors said.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, considered a prominent rival to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was arrested at his home by police on Wednesday morning. A number of his aides have also been detained, and arrest warrants for at least 100 more people were issued.

According to the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office, Imamoglu and others have been accused of "running a criminal organization, membership of a criminal organization, corruption, bribery, fraud, illegally obtaining personal data and corruption in a public tender."

Imamoglu and several others are also accused of "aiding" the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - outlawed in Turkiye - by participating in an "urban consensus initiative" aimed at bolstering the Kurdish group's influence in last year's local elections.

Members of the Peoples' Democratic Congress (HDK), a union of left-wing political parties in Turkiye - have also been detained or are being investigated.

President Vladimir Putin has solved the problem of how to conduct telephone calls with Donald Trump's personality cult.

Following Trump's tweeted claim in the early morning of Tuesday that "many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to" the telephone call which took place over two hours of the early Moscow evening, ended without agreement on any "final" point.

Trump has remained uncharacteristically silent. The only tweet he has issued since the call with Putin has been an attack on a "Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama".

The US media have remained in the dark, while detailed results have been compiled and published by the Russian media. According to these sources, Putin agreed to the creation of "expert groups" to work on the military, political, and economic end-of-war settlement. This is a signal that the efforts by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to continue the war on their terms will be excluded, and that the Russian military advance westward will continue on all salients. Russian targeting of British, French and US military units on the battlefield, at Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov and at staff bunkers in western Ukraine will continue.

In response to Trump's demand for a 30-day ceasefire - the Anglo-American proposal which was announced with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah on March 11 - Putin said no. Instead, he agreed to suspend the Russian electric war campaign, and for thirty days halt strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on condition that Trump will reciprocate with a stop to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

No agreement was reached on Trump's attempt to save the encircled Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Instead, Putin agreed that Ukrainians who surrender on the battlefield will not be shot. Putin also offered an exchange of prisoners of war, 175 to 175; and the return from Russian hospitals of 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

Two-hour phone call yields agreement on sparing energy and infrastructure.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin took the first steps toward ending the war between Russia and Ukraine as they agreed to an 'energy and infrastructure ceasefire.'

The partial ceasefire agreement will be in effect for 30 days. Talks for a permanent peace will 'begin immediately' in the Middle East although Putin told Trump that he has several conditions he wants met in order for the fighting to end.

'The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace. These negotiations will begin immediately in the Middle East,' the White House said in its readout of the call.