Singapore's prime minister-in-waiting Lawrence Wong warned that the U.S. and China may "sleepwalk into conflict" if they don't engage with each other and de-escalate rising tensions over Taiwan.

In an interview on Monday with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, Wong said the relationship between the world's biggest economies was on a "very worrying" trajectory in the wake of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and China's subsequent military drills around the island.

Wong, now serving as deputy prime minister and finance minister, said at the Finance Ministry office overlooking the central business district.

"We are starting to see a series of decisions being taken by both countries that will lead us into more and more dangerous territory. As they say, no one deliberately wants to go into battle, but we sleepwalk into conflict. And that's the biggest problem and danger."

Berlin has plans to subjugate Eastern Europe and has designs on the lands that it lost in the past, Adam Glapinski the head of the National Bank of Poland has claimed, adding that his country stands as a bulwark against those ambitions.

Glapinski offered the grim prediction about Warsaw's current diplomatic confrontation with Berlin in an interview with Gazeta Polska, which was published on Wednesday.

Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, Berlin's strategic goal is to "regain in some form their former lands, which are now within Polish borders, and subordinate the entire belt of countries between Germany and Russia," the Polish official said.

Germany's vision for the future of Europe is "the cooperation of two empires: Russian and German, with countries in the middle falling into the spheres of influence of both powers," Glapinski added. Brexit has opened a window of opportunity for that, he believes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not wrong to blame the US for working to prolong the fighting in Ukraine, a high-profile American military expert has told Newsweek.

The respective goals of Washington and Kiev in the conflict contradict each other, claimed Sean Spoonts, a US Navy veteran and editor-in-chief of the Special Operations Forces Report (SOFREP) website.

"It seems like while Ukraine would like to end the war quickly and decisively defeat Russian forces and drive them out of their country, US policy almost seems designed to prolong the conflict hoping to bring about the collapse of Russia itself, both militarily and economically.

"That goes a lot further than [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky's goal, which is to simply get Russian armies out of his country and regain lost territories in Donbass, Lugansk and Crimea."

Ukraine's European benefactors made a big show of rushing military aid to Kiev in the early months of Russia's special military operation, but the torrent has waned to a trickle since then, with no new pledges being made in July. One military expert said Europe is running out of both equipment and willpower to support the "horribly corrupt regime."

Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, told Sputnik on Thursday that NATO's policy of giving Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons that so quickly get destroyed is "inefficient and counterproductive" from both a political and a national security point of view."

The more Europe invests its military capacity into Ukraine, the weaker Europe gets," Ritter said.

Washington has harmed the bloc to serve its own interests, a top Putin ally has warned

The United States has doomed the EU to hunger, cold and isolation by pressuring the bloc to cut its ties with Moscow, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Friday.

He wrote on Telegram that Washington would "stop at nothing to cling to its power over the world as it throws under the bus the citizens' welfare and the economies of European countries to achieve this end."

He noted that natural gas in the US costs $333 per 1,000 cubic meters. "At the same time, Washington sells it to Europe for a price which is 7.3 [times] higher, rendering the EU economy uncompetitive," he wrote, adding that the eurozone's annual inflation rate had hit a record 8.9%.

The Democrats' "Inflation Reduction Act" - which according to the Congressional Budget Office will raise taxes on the middle class to the tune of $20 billion - not to mention unleash an army of IRS agents on working class Americans over the next decade, was made possible by Bill Gates and (in smaller part) Larry Summers, who have been known to hang out together.

The bill, of course, was signed yesterday.

More and More Are Seeing Through the Lies

As Amnesty International confirms the inconvenient truths, which many independent journalists and political observers already knew, about the Ukrainian army's behavior in Donbass, it's worth examining how manipulating the truth has become — not only an everyday occurrence but a central element of the West's proxy war in Ukraine.

An increasing number of mainstream journalists, commentators and ordinary individuals who had rushed to "Stand with Ukraine " are finding the inconvenient truths about the Zelensky regime and its Army harder and harder to ignore.

Military-ruled Myanmar plans to import Russian gasoline and fuel oil to ease supply concerns and rising prices, a junta spokesperson said, the latest developing country to do so amid a global energy crisis.

The Southeast Asian country has maintained friendly ties with Russia, even as both remain under a raft of sanctions from Western countries - Myanmar for a military coup that overthrew an elected government last year, and Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a "special military operation".

Russia is seeking new customers for its energy in the region as its biggest export destination, Europe, will impose an embargo on Russian oil in phases later this year.

Aleksandr Darchiyev, Director of the North America Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in an interview with TASS a few days ago that declaring Russia a "state sponsor of terrorism" would mean "Washington crossing the point of no return with the most serious collateral damage to bilateral relations".

Recall that the US Senate recently passed a resolution calling on the State Department to recognise Russia as a "state sponsor of terrorism" because of "the events in Chechnya and military operations in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine". This initiative is also supported by the US House of Representatives. However, according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the US administration believes that including Russia on the list of "countries that sponsor terrorism" will not have a real effect. Blinken also said that the measures already taken against Russia are almost equivalent to measures against any other "state sponsor of terrorism". Therefore, they say, we are talking about a "similar effect". Blinken also stressed that the State Department is studying this issue in order to determine how much the inclusion of Russia in the list of "countries that sponsor terrorism" will comply with American law.

The United States, according to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at one time admitted to financing the Al-Qaeda terrorist organisation and the Afghan Mujahideen during their war with the "Soviets" in the late 1970s and early 80s. The terrorists "thanked" their benefactors in a peculiar way. After September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden became the United States' number one enemy. Other Western intelligence agencies have also collaborated with jihadists in the Middle East and other parts of the world, performing various "special tasks", preparing coups and creating hotbeds of tension in a number of countries. The United Nations subsequently designated some of these organisations as "terrorist" ones.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that the West is trying to contain the formation of a multipolar world by activating old conflicts to preserve its hegemony.

Speaking at the 2022 Moscow Conference on International Security, Putin said the Western countries are striving to hold the countries and peoples in chains of the neocolonial order.

"Their (Western) hegemony means stagnation for the whole world, for the whole civilization, (it means) obscurantism, the abolition of culture, and neoliberal totalitarianism," he said.

In an attempt to preserve their domination, the US and its allies rudely interfere in the internal affairs of the countries, organize coups, civil wars, provocations, use blackmail, and pressure to subdue states to its will, Putin added.

"In these conditions, we have decided to conduct a special military operation in Ukraine in full compliance with the UN Charter.