“Kyiv in talks with Japan and Canada for extra aid as Zelenskyy government considers spending cuts and tax hikes” “… [D]eadlock in … Congress over a $60bn aid package for Ukraine has left Kyiv desperately looking for alternative donors …. Ukraine has allocated nearly half of its $87bn budget … to defence-related expenditure, but its domestic revenues are just $46bn, […]
» Read more
“The [EU] [reportedly] is unlikely to confiscate Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe, despite G7 plans to discuss the legality of such a move at a meeting in February …. The EU, United States, Japan and Canada froze some $300 billion of Russian central bank assets in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine … [including roughly] $200 billion … held […]
» Read more
“… Kremlin-controlled Rosatom … continues to be the dominant source of fuel for the world’s nuclear power stations — supplying about half of global demand …. Western nations are racing to reconstitute their own processing capacity …. [U]ranium ore needs … a vast industrial process …. Rosatom is … in every part of the supply chain, from ore extraction to […]
» Read more
(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org) Moscow blaming West at every turn: Vladimir Putin attacked the West on May 9, claiming that Russia’s future depended on the outcome of the war in Ukraine, as he attended a slimmed-down military parade to mark victory over Nazi Germany in WWII, MT reports. “A real war has once again been unleashed against our motherland,” he […]
» Read more
“… the melting polar ice cap has opened up the Arctic, disappearing what used to be an impenetrable barrier between North America and Russia. … NATO is rushing to try to catch up. … ‘Russia is increasing its military presence in the Arctic,’ said … a [NATO] spokesman … [NATO is] ‘monitoring Russia’s Arctic buildup carefully.’ In fact, Russia has […]
» Read more
“On March 8, the Globe and Mail reported that ‘Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has known for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in Nazi-occupied Poland.’ … Her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was a Nazi propagandist for Krakivski Visti (Crakow News), supervised by German intelligence officer Emil Gassert. Its printing […]
» Read more
… Obama’s former ambassador to Russia says Canada is showing a ‘sign of weakness’ by not pushing ahead with a promised U.S.-style Magnitsky Act that would punish Russians deemed to be human-rights violators with visa bans and asset freezes. … McFaul, who served as the U.S. envoy to Moscow from 2012 to 2014 and before that was … Obama’s special […]
» Read more
The Ottawa Citizen reports on concerns over the prospects for open military conflict between NATO and Russia. A couple of months before he retired in July, the head of Canada’s air force provided a blunt assessment of what might emerge from the current military mission to Ukraine. “We pray that our ongoing NATO mission isn’t accompanied by the escalation of […]
» Read more
(Interfax – June 10, 2015) Russia currently does not maintain any relationship with the G7, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. “We have no relations with the G7, what relations could there be?” Putin told journalists following negotiations with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on June 10. At the same time, “if our partners want it, we will be developing active […]
» Read more
Canada has spent the last year aggressively imposing sanctions on Russian and Ukrainian players with ties to the simmering conflict in eastern Ukraine, but experts say there’s no evidence that the penalties are having any political impact on the Putin government. …
» Read more