Putin’s two-day state visit to one of his strongest allies comes just as his country’s forces pressed an offensive in the most significant border incursion since the full-scale Ukraine invasion began.
A populist who has courted both sides of politics,he has been compared to Donald Trump and staged a shock political comeback after stepping down in 2018.
There is a creeping acceptance of views branding Australia and its allies as imperialists and using whataboutism to deflect moral arguments against tyrants. Much of it is home-grown.
For Russia’s elite,passing on family wealth has become more complex than ever.
Ukrainian authorities said they arrested two officers in the agency responsible for protecting senior government leaders and accused them of developing the assassination plot.
Vladimir Putin is throwing everything he has got at ramping up Russia’s war machine. But it does not include one previously reliable source of cash.
Investor James Baillieu,the nephew of former premier Ted Baillieu,says the war in Ukraine has been wiped off the news cycle and the Australian government doesn’t care.
Authorities paint a picture of a network of associates,some blood relatives,travelling across Europe by bus with library cards sometimes under assumed names to scout rare Russian books.
The propaganda exercise comes ahead of a May 9 military parade to commemorate the end of WWII,which has become a homage to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Lack of attention to the “Global South” has come back to haunt now that Western interests are threatened by an axis of Russian,Chinese and Iranian authoritarianism.
The intelligence community has found “no smoking gun” that the Russian president was aware of the timing of Navalny’s death or that he directly ordered it.