QUESTION: You are coming to Belgrade to take part in the celebrations commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the city's liberation from occupation by Nazi Germany. Why, in your view, are such commemoration events important today?

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: First of all, I would like to thank the Serbian leadership for the invitation to visit Serbia and take part in the celebrations commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade from occupation by Nazi Germany.

We are truly grateful to our Serbian friends for the way they treasure the memory of the Soviet soldiers who fought together with the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia against Hitler's occupation troops. During World War II, over 31,000 Red Army officers and soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing on the territory of former Yugoslavia. About 6,000 Soviet citizens fought against the invaders in the ranks of the National Liberation Army. Their courage brought closer our common victory over Nazism and will always be remembered by our peoples as an example of bravery, unyielding determination and selfless service to one's homeland.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the upcoming events. Seventy years ago, our nations joined forces to defeat the criminal ideology of hatred for humanity, which threatened the very existence of our civilization. And today it is also important that people in different countries and on different continents remember what terrible consequences may result from the belief in one's exceptionality, attempts to achieve dubious geopolitical goals, no matter by what means, and disregard for basic norms of law and morality. We must do everything in our power to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Recent US "negotiations" regarding the use of military facilities in Turkey and Saudi Arabia to train "moderate" opposition forces is further proof of the kabuki theater and misinformation that continues to be propagated across Western media.

To those of us who have been closely following developments in the Middle East region, it's incredibly obvious that there's been a longstanding relationship between NATO and regional allies to recruit, train, finance, arm and direct foreign mercenary forces to illegally attack and destroy Syria.


These same subversive strategic alliances have applied similar tactics across the region for decades. Most recent initiatives over the past few years have resulted in the creation of a mercenary force now being called "ISIS", one of the more formidable and well armed Western-backed mercenary monsters the region has encountered.

In complete contrast to Pentagon and US State Department misinformation, embedded and associated clandestine operatives from the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Jordan and other allied NATO and Persian Gulf state intelligence organizations continue to cooperatively plan, coordinate and direct initiatives for their new Frankenstein, "ISIS".

More specifically, the US and Turkey are deceitfully claiming "tense negotiations" and disunity with regard to the use of its bases for operations against "ISIS" and a no-fly zone in Syria. When in fact, Turkey and other NATO members and allies are deliberately coordinating efforts when it comes to reconciling "ISIS" mercenaries. For example, US military officials and Western media have deceitfully described the "bombing campaign" across Syria as a failure.

Even the most inexperienced military analyst can easily determine that coalition "airstrikes" in Syria were deliberately limited in number and effectiveness, as hardly any "ISIS" forces or advanced military infrastructure were even targeted. To give a comparison, over 1000 aircraft and 38,000 combat missions were conducted over a 10 week period during the Kosovo War in the spring of 1999, while less than 50-100 combat missions were made in and around Ayn al-Arab (aka Kobani) over a four week period, with the majority of "airstrikes" occurring in the latter part of the second week of October, well after "ISIS" mercenaries were already in position to wreak havoc on one of the largest and most strategic cities controlled by the PKK and YPG (arch enemies to both Iraqi Kurds and Turkey). Coincidence? Hardly.

The US, Turkey and other NATO members and allies have worked closely together for nearly four years providing air defense operations and clandestine logistics, support and intelligence to train, harbor, arm, prepare and protect mercenaries all along Turkey's border with Syria. Until earlier this year, these same mercenaries controlled nearly all the border crossings between Turkey and Syria.

President Barack Obama's approval rating is at the lowest level of his presidency, a new poll says.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday, 40 percent of Americans approve of Obama's job performance, the lowest score the poll has recorded since he took office. His rating is down 1 point from September.

The survey comes less than a month out from the November midterm elections. A large number of Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates on the campaign trail have been distancing themselves from the White House.

Among independent voters, Obama's approval rating stands at 33 percent.

Forty-four percent of Americans approve of the president's handling of economic issues, compared with 51 percent who disapprove, his lowest disapproval level in more than a year.

But the president's approval rating on his handling of the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has plunged in less than a month. Thirty-five percent of Americans approve of his handling of the threat from ISIL, the terrorist group that the U.S. has conducted airstrikes against in Iraq and Syria. His net negative 16-point rating on ISIL is down 22 points from the end of September, when 50 percent of Americans approved of his handling of ISIL.

The survey was conducted Oct. 9-12 with 1,006 adults on landlines and cellphones. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 points.

The presidents of Russia and Ukraine are to meet at a business breakfast in Milan on Friday, with the fragile peace in Ukraine and gas supplies to Europe expected to dominate. The summit carries hopes of further progress in resolving the crisis.

The breakfast, organized by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is scheduled for Friday, on the sidelines of EU-Asia (ASEM) summit, which starts on Thursday.

"At the request of the European side, there was a phone-in session on the extremely important meeting in Milan tomorrow, where the leaders of the European states and the European Union together with me, the president of Ukraine, will hold the talks with the leadership of the Russian Federation concerning extremely important issues: establishment of peace in Ukraine, securing the peace process, development of the political process, de-escalation of the situation in the east of the country," President Poroshenko said ahead of the meeting.

Poroshenko stressed that "the whole world has high expectations" of the meeting between the two leaders

Charities must record when their employees use social media to campaign or comment on political issues, the Electoral Commission has said, adding that it would monitor social media activity to confirm posts comply with lobbying laws.

Speaking at the annual Charity Law Association conference last week, the Electoral Commission's head of policy, Kate Engles, said charities should consider whether campaigns could be classed as "political" even if they do not endorse a party or candidate.

"The activity and spending can be covered if it doesn't specifically mention parties or groups of candidates. That's to cover where people are trying to get around the rules and say they are doing something else," she said.

While charities may be non-partisan, the charity commission says social media activity, particularly relating to political campaigns, could "reasonably be regarded as intended to influence voters" to vote in a particular way at a local or general election.

Therefore, the Commission argues the costs incurred in creating and distributing social media should be accounted for by the charities themselves.

Palestinian Authority asked the international community for $4 billion to reconstruct Gaza, claiming they will link the Strip's future to the two-state solution.

Nations pledged $5.4 billion to help rebuild Gaza at a donor conference in Cairo on Sunday, a sum that far exceeded the Palestinian Authority's expectations.

Half the amount pledged "will go to rebuilding Gaza and the assistance will be distributed in response to the daily needs of the Palestinian people," Norway's Foreign Minister Borge Brende said in comments translated into Arabic on Egyptian state television.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas had asked for the more modest sum of $4b.

The largest pledge of $1b. was from Qatar, which has close ties to Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza. Kuwait and United Arab Emirates promised $200 million each and Turkey pledged $200m.

The Catalan government has given up plans to hold a November 9 referendum on independence from Spain, a regional party leader told AFP.

Catalan President Artur Mas announced the cancellation of the November 9 referendum at a meeting between the parties seeking Catalonia's independence and the regional government. The cancellation is because of a lack of legal guarantees, El Pais newspaper reported. Instead, the government will hold a public participation process ‒ a series of town hall meetings and debates ‒ on the political future of the province.

"The (regional) government has determined that the consultation can't take place," Joan Herrera of the Initiative for Catalonia, a political party in the province, told reporters following the meeting.

In the meantime, while the participatory process is finalized, the pro-independence groups will seek to get the most out of the provincial laws on consulting the Catalan people, which the Constitutional Court failed to suspend when it originally blocked the non-binding vote at the end of September.

It will be difficult for Western companies to come back to Russian markets as their refusal to cooperate with Russia under sanctions would seriously damage their reputation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

"It is obvious that the decline in mutual confidence is bound to have a negative impact on both the international business climate in general and on the operation of European and American companies in Russia, bearing in mind that such companies will find it difficult to recover from reputational damage," Putin said in an interview with Serbian newspaper Politika ahead of his visit to Belgrade, scheduled for October 16.

The president also said US sanctions against Russia's financial sector would blemish the reputation of the US banking system as a reliable investment partner.

Belgian law enforcement officials opened an investigation Friday into an alleged jihadist training camp in the Ardennes region of northeastern Belgium, according to local media reports.

Photos of so-called combatants at the site were recently posted on Facebook.

Sporting combat fatigues, balaclavas and bullet proof vests, the men stomp around the sylvan Belgian countryside, wielding what appears to be dummy guns and looking incongruously menacing in the Western European forest.

But in a tiny European nation that has seen a disproportionate percentage of its population joining jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, the photographs sparked alarm, prompting a police investigation into the possibility that Belgium's Ardennes region was being used to train would-be jihadists, Belgian media reported on Friday.

Western countries must acknowledge their policy faults and stop their mechanical repetition to improve relations with Russia and the security situation in general, Russia's representative to NATO has said.

"One of the main levers that could really shift the European security situation for the better could be work on mistakes," Aleksandr Grushko said at a public discussion in Moscow on Monday.

"We and our Western partners, first of all Europe, must recognize that their policies of the past few years are only deepening the dividing lines between Russia and Europe, and this is extremely dangerous," the Russian diplomat added.

"The West must eventually acknowledge the fact that the mechanical implementation of its recent policies is leading itself into a dead end."

Grushko also said that the continuing crisis in Ukraine was proof that a single security structure based on the non-division principle was impossible in Europe. "Regretfully, today we can state that the political project that sought to unite Europe, Eurasia or the Europe-Atlantic region has failed."

In addition, the Russian envoy said that Russia's input in the European security structure was the greatest among all the countries, and it was because of Russia's efforts that Europeans can feel safe spending only between 1.6 and 1.8 percent of its GDP on defense and security.

Grushko also blamed the United States for undermining regional security in Europe by pressing for the new missile defense system. In particular, the diplomat promised that Russia would take measures in reply to the transfer of a new military base in Romania to US command.

"The United States is gradually implementing its Euro Missile Defense program. They either do not consider the regional security interests or plainly ignore them," the Interfax news agency quoted Grushko as saying.