Israel is offering illegal immigrants $3,500 and a one-way ticket home as it begins to crack down on refugees, who face prison if they don't take up the deal. Rights groups are appalled at the move, saying Israel should be doing more to protect them.

Israel says the tough move is necessary to send a message to migrants that making the journey is not worthwhile in the first place. As deterrents it has built a steel fence along the border with Egypt, houses migrants in a detention camp in the middle of a desert, and has stopped issuing work permits to deter would-be migrants

The real Masters of the Universe in the U.S. are no weathermen, but arguably they're starting to feel which way the wind is blowing.

History may signal it all started with this week's trip to Sochi, led by their paperboy, Secretary of State John Kerry, who met with Foreign Minister Lavrov and then with President Putin.

Arguably, a visual reminder clicked the bells for the real Masters of the Universe; the PLA marching in Red Square on Victory Day side by side with the Russian military. Even under the Stalin-Mao alliance Chinese troops did not march in Red Square.

As a screamer, that rivals the Russian S-500 missile systems. Adults in the Beltway may have done the math and concluded Moscow and Beijing may be on the verge of signing secret military protocols as in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The new game of musical chairs is surely bound to leave Eurasian-obsessed Dr. Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski apoplectic.

And suddenly, instead of relentless demonization and NATO spewing out "Russian aggression!" every ten seconds, we have Kerry saying that respecting Minsk-2 is the only way out in Ukraine, and that he would strongly caution vassal Poroshenko against his bragging on bombing Donetsk airport and environs back into Ukrainian "democracy".

The ever level-headed Lavrov, for his part, described the meeting with Kerry as "wonderful," and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the new U.S.-Russia entente as "extremely positive".

So now the self-described "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration, at least apparently, seems to finally understand that this "isolating Russia" business is over - and that Moscow simply won't back down from two red lines; no Ukraine in NATO, and no chance of popular republics of Donetsk and Lugansk being smashed, by Kiev, NATO or anybody else.

Thus what was really discussed - but not leaked - out of Sochi is how the Obama administration can get some sort of face-saving exit out of the Russian western borderland geopolitical mess it invited on itself in the first place.

An unidentified drone reportedly conducted surveillance on NATO's large-scale military exercises in Estonia codenamed Siil-2015 (Hedgehog-2015).

Siil-2015 (Hedgehog-2015), NATO's largest-ever war games in Estonia, were monitored by an unknown drone, according to the Estonian newspaper Eesti Päevaleht; a spate of NATO countries is involved in the drills that are wrapping up on Friday.

Ukraine and China have signed a currency swap agreement worth $2.4 billion, according to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Ukraine expects it will relieve pressure on its currency which has lost above 40 percent against the US dollar in a year.

The three year agreement was signed in Shanghai by the governor of the National Bank of Ukraine(NBU) Valeria Gontareva and the governor of the People's Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan, according to NBU's press release published on Friday.

Ukraine will provide some 54 billion hryvnia and China 15 billion yuan within the swap line.

Russia Direct interviewed Russian and American experts as well as former diplomats to assess the importance of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent high-profile diplomatic mission to Sochi.

Both Russian and American experts have greeted U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Sochi on May 12 with cautious optimism. After all, it was Kerry's first visit to Russia in two years - marking the first time since the start of the Ukrainian crisis that Kerry had set foot on Russian soil.

With both sides admitting that the Ukraine crisis has reached a critical point, steps to preserve the momentum of the Minsk II agreement as well as reach some new consensus on what to do next have become even more vitally important.

In an attempt to assess the results of the meeting, Russia Direct interviewed Russian and American experts as well as former diplomats for their opinions.

Local Dutch broadcaster RTV Noord Holland recently launched an advertising campaign involving posters with the question: "Are other jihad families living in Het Gooi?". The poster refers to two families with children living in the area who, last year, were alleged to be planning to move to Syria and help ISIS. The posters were hung at bus stops in the cities Huizen and Hilversum (Het Gooi is the area around Hilversum). The Muslim community in the Netherlands, as well as non-Muslims have responded with shock, many voicing their concerns that this campaign increases Islamophobia and encourages the assumption that islam and terrorism are one and the same thing.

Several people have compared the campaign with the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War. Ali Osman, board member of Moslims in Dialoog, for instance, said: "It is not the same, but back then it also happened in steps. First the Jews were not wanted anymore, then they became second-rate citizens. That also seems to be the case here."

As a reaction to this recent uproar, Paul van Gessel, director of RTV Noord Holland that is responsible for the campaign of bigotry and jingoism, told the current affairs show Dit is de Dag:

'We focus on a theme which is important in a region,' 'Jihad fighters are an issue in Het Gooi. We are a journalistic organisation and we ask questions.'

How exactly a handful of alleged IS-supporters in an area with approx. 220,650 inhabitants (or about 0.005% of the population in the area) translates to "Jihad fighters" being ''an issue'' in the region is beyond me. If there truly was a Jihad-issue in Het Gooi, the problem could have been dealt with in a different manner. Instead of hanging up posters that exacerbate the disadvantageous social and economical position in which Muslims in Holland find themselves, they could have made efforts to educate people (Muslims and non-Muslims) about the real origins and purpose of ISIS. Investment could also have been in spreading information about the difference between someone committing violent acts in the name of a religion and the other peaceful followers of that same religion. This would have helped to alleviate the stress that the average Dutch Muslim has to deal with and discourage young adults of Muslim faith from falling prey to ISIS propaganda.

Alas, Paul van Gessel and others appear to have a different goal in mind.

It was not the traffic jams in Moscow, nor the police reinforcements, and not even the nightly roar of hundreds of tanks running down my street towards Red Square to rehearse for the parade - it's the media, who made me sick. And here's why.

No more war stories! Over the last couple of months an avalanche of words has been wading through my brain, trying to persuade me that what's good is good, what's bad is bad, that the grass is green and the water is wet, that Hitler started the War, and that Stalin won it.

We get this in May every year, OK. But this time it was just too much of a good thing. And not because something was wrong with the war movies, documentaries and veterans' interviews, but because it felt as if the widows shed their tears and the heroes shared their memories not with us, heirs of the victory, but with a bunch of foreign politicians and a herd of extremists who this year decided to extend the anti-Russian sanctions on our war memories. Why? Maybe because some in Europe feel that what we, Russians think about the war is a lot different from what the rest of the world considers being true? But is it? And if it is, is there anything frightening about it? Here - in a nutshell - is what the story looks like from our side:

For the Soviet people the Second World War started in July 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia. We call it "The Great Patriotic War", likewise the fight with Napoleon back in 1812, when the Russians also had to drive foreign invaders away from their home. The Great Patriotic War was a part of the Second World War, though the Soviet propaganda never really cared a lot about the battles on the Atlantic, in the Far East and Africa. Because of that we consider these events insignificant, compared to the dramatic fighting in Europe, in which the Soviets lost, by some estimates, up to 35 million soldiers and civilians.

Yes, we do know what stands for Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Bulge, but we are absolutely certain that the main forces of our common enemy were sent to conquer Russia. Out of 177 Wehrmacht divisions 136 were fighting on the Eastern front. That means, all in all, considering another 53 divisions of Hitler's satellite countries, the Red Army withstood the might of 237 divisions! No wonder there isn't a military campaign in history that can be compared to the battles for Moscow, Kursk and Stalingrad - which were the turning points not only for the Great Patriotic War, but for the whole of WWII. After winning those three glorious victories the Red Army started chasing the Nazis back West.

Terrorists attacked the Macedonian city of Kumanovo on 9 May, but one wouldn't know that by reading the Western media's reaction to the tragedy, despite the fact that they typically mention that 8 police officers were killed and another 37 wounded during the firefight. The media's disingenuous 'reporting' reeks of ulterior motives, which is evidenced most visibly by their reluctance to use the word terrorist without putting it in questionable quotation marks, but also takes more subtle forms such as casting suspicion on the government for complicity in the attack and/or inferring that the attack was some type of legitimate protest reaction.


Western institutions like the EU and NATO are actually worse since they confer equal responsibility for the violence on both the terrorists (which they don't even refer to as) and the Macedonian security services, and even the UN has taken to echoing their sly sentiments with all three entities questioning the official course of events and demanding a "transparent investigation". The US and its main Western European NATO allies escalate the rhetoric and actually engage in a form of victim shaming against the country during its official two-day period of mourning by questioning its commitment to "democracy" and not showing any solidarity with it whatsoever in its fight against terrorism. This shameless act (and lack thereof) shows that they and all the previously mentioned actors are in fact implicit supporters of Albanian terrorism against Macedonia and strong proponents of the state destabilization.

Part I of the research demonstrates how unipolar information sources purposely manipulate their coverage of the latest terrorist attacks in Macedonia, while Part II begins by showing how this is also the case for the Western and pro-Western institutions of the EU, NATO, and the UN. The series continues by addressing how the US and its allies have tried to shame and intimidate Macedonia, and then concludes by identifying probable scenarios for how they plan on punishing the proud country for resisting their aggression.

Game Theory analysis confirms what we have been saying all along: In Ukraine, Russia holds all the strong cards.

The Western aim of a unitary Ukraine inside the EU and NATO and allied against Russia cannot happen.

Leonid Bershidsky elegantly summarises a paper that applies game theory to the Ukrainian conflict. Briefly, the paper says that Russia can destabilise Ukraine indefinitely, creating a "frozen conflict" there, and that the West cannot prevent it from doing so.
The West can in theory respond by: (1) military escalation; (2) sanctions; and (3) returning to business as usual with Russia.

The authors of the paper, and Bershidsky himself, appear to think the most likely outcome in the short term is (2) (sanctions), but with a measure of (3) (returning to business as usual), and with (3) prevailing over the long term. Option (1) (military escalation) is not ultimately viable.

We agree.

Bershidsky — rightly, in our opinion — sums up Kerry's visit to Moscow in that way: "Kerry has come to Russia so the sides can agree to disagree on Ukraine and move on to other issues such as Syria and Iran, where constructive interaction is still possible."

Latest reports say that Kerry has warned Poroshenko against any attempt to recover Donetsk airport, which appears to bear that out. It seems that some at least in the U.S. are now at last looking for ways to isolate the Ukrainian conflict from the rest of the U.S. Russia relationship, so that the U.S. can move forward in its relations with Russia on other questions.

This warning from Kerry is incidentally the first time the U.S. has publicly warned Ukraine against a military solution.

Reports that suggest European leaders are now also pressing Kiev to fulfill the political part of the February Minsk Memorandum by entering into substantive constitutional negotiations and by granting wide autonomy to Donbass (previously discussed by us in First Sign of Germany Putting Pressure on Kiev to Implement Peace Deal, Russia Insider, 27th April 2015, and by me on Radio Sputnik, 12th May 2015) point in the same direction.

It should be said clearly however that this is in no sense a "draw", as Bershidsky appears to suggest.

The Israeli authorities have issued a new raft of demolition orders to Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem.

On Sunday, an Israeli court approved the demolition of eight Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Semiramis. The court said the owners must destroy the homes themselves and pay fines of 49,000 shekels ($12,667) by 1 August, Ma'an News Agency reports.

The demolition orders in Semiramis were delivered just days after Israel announced that it will build 900 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish-only colony in East Jerusalem,according to the anti-settlement group Peace Now.

In March, ahead of elections for Israel's parliament, the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to expand settlements in the occupied city.

"We will continue to build in Jerusalem, we will add thousands of housing units, and in the face of all the [international] pressure, we will persist and continue to develop our eternal capital," Netanyahu said.

Rima Awwad, a member of the Jerusalemites Campaign, a group that campaigns for Palestinian rights in the city, said Netanyahu "campaigned on a platform of de-Palestinianization of the occupied city and he is now following through on his promise."