Today's relationship between Moscow and Washington is, in some respects, worse than the most challenging moments of the Cold War, because the US believes that Russia is declining and doesn't see it as a force to be reckoned with. That's according to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of the country's Security Council. He told Moscow daily Kommersant, in comments published on Tuesday:

"I'm not talking about a situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis, when everything was hanging by a thread at all. But in some ways, the current situation is worse. And it is worse because our partners assume that Russia can be neglected.

"In the past, the US believed that the Soviet Union was not a friend, but an adversary to be taken seriously. And now they believe, at least for the time being, that Russia is a dying country. That [Russia] can be disregarded and can be neglected in foreign policy discourse, and that is why they have made many mistakes."

In his opinion, Western nations have let power go to their head, especially since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. But, even before that, foreign countries were not as willing to escalate with Moscow as they are today, he says.

Russian banks may be blocked from using SWIFT, a payment system that enables reliable and secure financial transactions, as part of restrictions against Moscow, in what one official has called a potential "spiral of sanctions."

"It's no secret that there are threats, primarily from the United States, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system," said Dmitry Birichevsky, director of the Economic Cooperation Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Speaking on RIA Novosti on Monday, the diplomat noted that Russia has concerns that SWIFT could get caught up in a "spiral of sanctions," led by Washington.

However, the senior official doesn't think America will act on this threat any time soon. Noting that Russia would be able to come to payment agreements with their trading partners anyway, he said:

"I'm actually confident that we won't be disconnected from SWIFT anytime soon, and maybe never. Since 2014, Russia has been working on its own payment system. This system already exists. We all use the MIR card. It is also accepted in a number of neighboring countries and in Turkey. Negotiations are also underway with other partners."

Russia has announced that it will revamp and upgrade its military presence along its European borders in response to a reported buildup by the US-led NATO bloc, as well as stepping up the presence of both its navy and warplanes.

Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Monday that more than a dozen new units would be formed in the Western Military District, which covers much of the European portion of Russia, following increased activity in the region.

"The actions of our Western colleagues destroy the security system in the world and force us to take adequate countermeasures. We are constantly improving the combat composition of our troops. By the end of the year, about 20 formations and military units will be set up."

Shoigu added that the move would be "synchronized with the supply of modern weapons and military equipment" and that 2,000 new pieces of hardware would be deployed throughout 2021. This, he argued, was a necessary response to the presence of NATO troops, vessels and cruise missiles in the region.

June brings my quarterly request for donations. Your financial support for the website tells me that my efforts are valued and worthwhile. Your donations support me in standing up to the smears. Telling the truth in America in these days is a punished, not a rewarded, activity.

The United States is best understood today as the Disunited States. There is less unity than in 1860. Civility is gone from debate; indeed, debate itself is gone. Integrity and respect for truth have lost out to worship of money and the rule of power. Ideology has shoved aside facts.

Money and power are all. We have seen this in the intentional exaggeration of the Covid threat for Big Pharma profits and the institutionalization of arbitrary government power over civil liberty. Today, with the exception of some free Red states, such as Florida, in the Disunited States our exercise of our civil liberty requires the government's permission. You are free only by the government's permission. In other words, the US Constitution has lost its authority. We now live under the authority of the power seekers.

Government and corporate spying have destroyed privacy, another Constitutionally protected right.

Education has been replaced with cult indoctrination. In blue states and in some local school districts of red states, white American students are taught that they are racist by nature. They are infused with personal guilt for slavery that ended 156 years ago. Speech codes are imposed that prevent any challenge to the propaganda masquerading as education. The brainwashing of white Americans is imposed by law in blue states such as California, Washington, Oregon, and New York. Parents who complain are fired by their corporate employers who have imbibed the Critical Race Theory kool-aid. No American who works for a US corporation has freedom of speech.

US President Joe Biden has promised to return to the Iran Nuclear Deal but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists there "must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he believes there's no bigger threat to the country than "the existential threat posed by Iran's attempts to arm itself with nuclear weapons," reports Haaretz.

"Whether it is threatening us directly with extermination as a small and concentrated state with atomic weapons, or threatening us with tens of thousands of missiles backed with the threat of nuclear deterrence, it is a threat that threatens the continuation of the Zionist enterprise, and we must fight against this threat to no end," Netanyahu said.

Counting the dead used to be the work of epidemiologists, statisticians and demographers. So was analyzing the numbers and drawing conclusions. In the past year many are counting deaths, but the numbers have no meaning without the context of a relevant time period, population and history. That is, epidemiology.

The most counted country is probably Sweden, a stubborn dissenter that refused lockdowns, mask mandates and contact tracing. By the time of this writing, 14,349 Swedes have reportedly died from the coronavirus. Has the Swedish model failed? Were the lockdowns justified? Were the economic and social upheavals in most of the world an unavoidable necessity?

The answer to all is a resounding no. The first (and not the only) witness: Sweden. To understand the testimony, we need to learn only two concepts: "flu year" and "excess mortality".

Austin also said he won't "lose one minute of sleep" over what China, Russia are doing.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is deflecting criticism by GOP lawmakers, conservatives and others that the U.S. military's latest efforts to be inclusive and attract a more diverse force is weakening America's security.

Austin made the comments in a CNN interview aired Memorial Day in which he also suggested he wasn't concerned about what the leaders of China and Russia are doing.

Wrong again.

Over the weekend Senator Rand Paul and former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo both warned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still up and running, and that evidence points to involvement with the Chinese military in bioweapons research.

Appearing on Fox News, Paul told Jeanine Pirro that he is worried US funding is still being used by the lab to conduct biological warfare experiments.

"I'm very worried that this stuff still goes on and that the U.S. government's been funding it," Paul said, adding "We've got a lot of evidence pointing to this lab now," as the origin of the virus outbreak.

Referring to the gain of function research with coronavirus that is known to have taken place in the lab, Paul warned "it's making it more transmissible to humans and often times making it more deadly in humans."

It's the Nikolai Patrushev-Yang Jiechi show - all over again. These are the two players running an up and coming geopolitical entente, on behalf of their bosses Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Last week, Yang Jiechi - the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee - visited Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev in Moscow. That was part of the 16th round of China-Russia strategic security consultations.

What's intriguing is that Yang-Patrushev happened between the Blinken-Lavrov meeting on the sidelines of the Arctic Council summit in Reykjavik, and the upcoming and highest-ranking Putin-Biden in Geneva on June 16 (possibly at the Intercontinental Hotel, where Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1985).

The Western spin before Putin-Biden is that it might herald some sort of reset back to "predictability" and "stability" in currently extra-turbulent US-Russia relations.

That's wishful thinking. Putin, Patrushev and Lavrov harbor no illusions. Especially when in the G7 in London, in early May, the Western focus was on Russia's "malign activities" as well as China's "coercive economic policies."

Russian and Chinese analysts, in informal conversations, tend to agree that Geneva will be yet another instance of good old Kissingerian divide and rule, complete with a few seducing tactics to lure Moscow away from Beijing, an attempt to bide some time and probing openings for laying out geopolitical traps. Old foxes such as Yang and Patrushev are more than aware of the game in play.

What's particularly relevant is that Yang-Patrushev laid the groundwork for an upcoming Putin visit to Xi in Beijing not long after Putin-Biden in Geneva - to further coordinate geopolitically, once again, the "comprehensive strategic partnership", in their mutually recognized terminology.

The visit might take place on July 1, the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party - or on July 16, the 20th anniversary of the China-Russia Treaty of Friendship.

So Putin-Biden is the starter; Putin-Xi is the main course.

The Russian authorities seem to have come up with a response to air blockade of Belarus, which was introduced by the European Union after Lukashenko's special operation to force the landing of the Ryanair flight in Minsk.

On Wednesday, Air France, Europe's third-largest airline by passenger traffic, was forced to reschedule an evening Paris-Moscow flight because it did not get a permission to enter Russian airspace.

The airline planned to fly around Belarus and requested permission to enter the Russian airspace at a new location, but the usual routine procedure ended with an unexpected result. Russia did not agree to the new route, and the airline postponed the flight until May 27.