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How a trio of power brokers turned Putin’s US strategy into a quiet turf war
Russian President Vladimir Putin's outreach to the Trump administration — once seen as one of Moscow's most coordinated diplomatic efforts — now appears increasingly fractured. Putin's longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, is reportedly losing ground to Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, who aims to take a leading role in Russia's contacts with the Trump administration. Experts caution that Russia's internal dynamics are more nuanced than they appear. "They might be
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25 killed, 122 injured, emergency power outages across Ukraine as Russia launches mass missile, drone attack
Russia launched 476 drones and 48 missiles at Ukraine, including 47 cruise missiles and one ballistic missile, the Air Force reported.
Ukraine war latest live: Ukraine strike on Novorossiysk snarls Russian Black Sea oil exports
Hello, this is Kateryna Hodunova reporting from Kyiv on day 1,365 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Today's top story so far: Ukraine’s Nov. 14 strike on Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, one of Moscow’s main oil export hubs, has delayed oil shipments by two to three days after damaging a jetty at the Sheskharis oil harbor, Reuters reported on Nov. 18, citing its sources. Novorossiysk and a neighboring Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal, which together handle about one-fift
Why Russia cannot help but invade
The planned Trump-Putin summit in Budapest has been shelved. The White House says there's no point meeting unless "we're going to make a deal." Some view this as a setback for diplomacy, but it may well be the clearest moment in a long struggle to curb Russia's appetite for war. Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade first in 2014 and then again in 2022. Western policy has long assumed that peace depends on his will. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, that belief was paire
Parliament fires justice, energy ministers implicated in Ukraine's biggest corruption scandal
Halushchenko is being investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) as part of the Energoatom case, the biggest corruption investigation during Zelensky's presidency. Eight suspects have also been charged, and Timur Mindich, a close associate of President Volodymyr Zelensky, is allegedly the ringleader.
'Killzone' — Devastating scale of Russia's drone terror against Ukraine's civilians laid bare in new report
Russian FPV drones are turning front-line towns on the Dnipro’s right bank into “no right to life” zones, a Truth Hounds report finds, documenting rising civilian deaths in Kherson and Nikopol.
Is Zelensky finally ready to fire his notorious right-hand man, Andriy Yermak?
President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has consolidated an unprecedented level of power within Ukraine's government — wielding influence across parliament, the Cabinet, and key state institutions. Despite his dominance, however, Yermak has remained a controversial figure, often viewed with skepticism both inside Ukraine and abroad. Yermak's reach extends into law enforcement through trusted deputies and places him at the center of high-level diplomatic meetings, frequent
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The Kyiv Independent’s coverage of news on Russia. Spanning eleven time zones across Eastern Europe and Asia, Russia has an estimated population of 146 million people. Russia’s capital city is Moscow, which is home to almost one in 10 Russians. Russia’s official currency is the Russian Ruble.
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At first glance, a YouTube interview with Philippe Marques Pinto looks like one of dozens of others in Ukraine’s long-running campaign to recruit South American soldiers to bolster its ranks in the fight against Russia. “I worked as a private security guard in Brazil, and when I arrived here, I got training, and it was just a question of adaptation,” Pinto says in an April 25, 2025, video for the Foreign Recruitment Center, a channel run by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. But according to police i
