Since her release from Russian captivity last month after nearly two years, Ukrainian airwoman Nadia Savchenko has called for talks with Russia-backed separatists about the war in eastern Ukraine and further prisoner exchanges.

And to the critics who have dismissed prospects of such talks as impossible, she has a message: Try a stint behind bars.

"I have spent two years in jail for nothing," Savchenko told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service in an interview. "Try to do the same. If you want to persuade people that you are right, try to spend time in jail."

Savchenko, 35, has raised hackles among some Ukrainian officials for saying she is willing to negotiate directly with separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine, where more than 9,300 have been killed since hostilities erupted in April 2014.

But after her experience on the frontline of the war, in Russian captivity, and visiting eastern Ukraine recently, she says such direct talks are crucial, as are conciliatory steps like an amnesty for locals who took up arms against Kyiv but did not commit serious crimes.

"If we can't make peace, then [the war] will last forever," she said. "And that has already become a burden for everyone. Everybody is fed up with that. People are tired. People want to live in peace."

After a NATO meeting in Brussels, the alliance's secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, confirmed that it plans to deploy four multinational battalions in the Baltic States and Poland, while President Putin has ordered snap inspections for Russia's military.

On Tuesday, NATO agreed to deploy a new 4,000-strong force in the Baltic States and Poland, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after a meeting of the block's ministers in Brussels.

The move is seen as part of an effort aimed at protecting its Eastern European allies from Russia, which NATO apparently perceives as a threat.

The four battalions will reportedly be provided by Britain, the US, Germany, and possibly Canada, and is to be deployed in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland on a six-to-nine month rotating basis, becoming NATO's biggest military buildup since the Cold War, diplomats told Reuters earlier.

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter also promised that "there will be a continually present armored brigade combat team, which will bring in its own equipment with each rotation."

These days you may get hugs from many common people in the Middle East or Latin America when you say that you are Russian, but such emotional outbursts are mainly intuitive. After being bombarded by extremely effective and negative Western propaganda for years and decades, people of the world still know very little, if anything, about two enormous countries that have been proudly resisting the Western imperialism - Russia and China.

I recently spent five weeks in Latin America, where the West openly supports the entire wide spectrum of counter-revolutionary movements, literally overthrowing one progressive government after another. I worked alongside the left-wing intellectuals there, helping to define the way forward, to rescue the Process.

But I was shocked by how little is known there about both Russia and China - for decades two natural allies of the patriotic Latin American Left.

"Are you for Putin or against?" And: "Is China really as capitalist now as we read?"

These were two most commonly asked questions.

Tens of German special forces troops entered the Syrian territory on Tuesday joining French and US troops that are participating in a military operation near the northern Syrian city of Manbij, Arab media reported.

The Al Mayadeen pan-Arabic TV channel noted it was the first announcement of the German forces' presence in Syria.

German servicemen are supporting their Western allies' forces stationed near the Tishrin hydropower plant, the channel said, citing its sources.

Vladimir Putin saved Russia from the scavengers of the Yeltsin era. What's more, he's fundamentally re-forming the world's biggest country in ways few understand. Unfortunately, most of this select group are bitter enemies of the notion of a Russian led world. While think tanks and "new world" evangelists in the west promise change and progress, Putin and his colleagues are at work, resolutely forging a new Russia.

Many people believe that Russia under Putin is a totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, fanatical followers of the Russian president defend his moves as an effort to hammer out some pseudo-American form of democracy. But both of these ideas about the idealism of Vladimir Putin are false. Many have sought to study Putin, while simply applying their own ideologies either "for or against" what they believe Putin is. The reality is, there is a "third way" of reshaping Russia's future. Putin, by far the best read leader in the world today, has derived a Russian strategy based in part on the teachings of the Russian religious and political philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Few corporations in the world are as loathed—and as sinister—as Monsanto. But the threat it poses to people and planet could be reaching new heights, as the World Health Organization has recently upgraded Monsanto's main product as carcinogenic to humans.

With protests against the agrochemical giant held in over 40 countries in May, learn why the global movement against Monsanto is of critical importance to our future.

In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin issues a scathing expose on the corporate polluter, chronicling it's rise to power, the collusion of its crimes by the US government, and highlighting the serious danger it puts us in today.

One couldn't help but notice that the Persian Gulf monarchies have recently started sending their emissaries to Moscow and Sochi way too often. This statement is particularly true when we take a close look at the actions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar - the sole two Wahhabi states in the world that are preaching the twisted form of Islam dating back to 17th century. In sharp contrast to previous years, when Russia was mindful of the role those two states played in fueling the conflicts in the North Caucasus along with the so-called "color revolutions" among those Arab states that were friendly to Moscow, it seems that Russia has now been successfully tricked into an attempt to seek cooperation with those states on different levels, even despite the fact that the four meetings in the Russia- GCC format have led to no actual agreements being signed.

In fact, Moscow understands that Riyadh and Doha are making every effort in preventing Russia from achieving a political settlement in Syria. Those states are not simply supporting the most radical groups in Syria, they are deeply involved in Yemen, Libya and Iraq. And if one can find an explanation for the continuous meetings between Russian and Saudi authorities, since they are imperative for reaching an understanding on the black gold pricing, the contacts with Qatar are quite different in their nature.

"Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US... But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts."—Human Rights Watch

We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year's presidential campaigns.

But until we start addressing the U.S. government's part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism—and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace—we'll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Here's what I know:

The United States, the world's largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world for too long now. Controlling more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market, the U.S. has sold or donated weapons to at least 96 countries in the past five years, including the Middle East.

The U.S. also provide countries such as Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Iraq with grants and loans through the Foreign Military Financing program to purchase military weapons.

At the same time that the U.S. is equipping nearly half the world with deadly weapons, profiting to the tune of $36.2 billion, its leaders have also been lecturing American citizens on the dangers of gun violence and working to enact measures that would make it more difficult for Americans to acquire certain weapons.

Blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government's international activities, is a reality. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America's use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback. We failed to heed his warning.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback: the CIA provided Osama bin Laden with military training and equipment to fight the Soviet Union, only to have him turn his ire on the U.S. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback: the Tsarnaev brothers reportedly credited the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the motives for their attacks.

The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback for America's drone killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback for the horrors our enlisted men and women are being exposed to as part of this never-ending war on terror: the 39-year-old psychiatrist had been struggling to come to terms with when, if ever, is the death of innocents morally justified.

The Orlando nightclub shooting is merely the latest tragic example of blowback on a nation that feeds its citizens a steady diet of violence through its imperial wars abroad and its battlefield mindset at home, embodied by heavily armed, militarized police and SWAT team raids.

You want to put an end to the mass shootings, the terrorist bombings and the domestic extremism?

Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov described as unprecedented the intensity of contacts between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry over Syria.

"Our ministers have never discussed the theme of struggle with the Islamic State and terrorism with such intensity," Ushakov told the media.

He added that Lavrov and Kerry touched upon this theme in telephone conversations practically every day. Also, there are contacts on the same subject between military.

The shooting that killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in Orlando marked the deadliest mass shooting ever in US history. Professor at Georgia State University College of Law, Timothy Lytton, spoke to Sputnik to share his views on the recent incident and the future of guns in the United States.

"The US Congress has generally been unwilling to pass stricter gun laws. They in fact tend to exacerbate tension between pro-gun advocates and gun control advocates. In some sense the shootings that we have seen recently tend to just entrench the two sides and the result is that there is very little movement in changes in terms of gun policy," Lytton said.

He further said that such shooting incidents tend to make the pro-gun advocates say that if the masses had more guns then such incidents could have been prevented.

On the other hand the gun control advocate would say that if there was a law against keeping a gun, the murderer would not have been able to get it in the first place.