Britain doubles down against Russia

Britain doubles down against Russia

Russia has already warned the UK of “consequences” for Ukraine’s use of British-made drones to strike Russian civilian infrastructure. These words were clearly lost on British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who arrived in Kiev on Monday to mark the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. Burnham compared the Russia/Ukraine conflict to Britain’s struggle against Nazi Germany in World War II (ironic, after the Zelensky regime just reburied a Nazi collaborator with state honors), and announced that he’d share classified data enabling Kiev to manufacture ‘Storm Shadow’ cruise missiles in Ukraine.

Two days later, the Ukrainians showed Russia exactly what these missiles will be used for, injuring multiple civilians in a Storm Shadow strike on a Donetsk apartment block.

Russia’s response was immediate and kinetic. Missiles and drones pounded military and dual-use targets across Kiev, with waves of projectiles hitting the Ukrainian capital from morning until evening on Thursday. Meanwhile, the British media chose to run a warning from supposed “Kremlin adviser” Andrey Fedorov, who said that he “cannot exclude 100% that there might be some semi-military” attacks on British soil too.

Fedorov is not a Kremlin adviser, and does not speak for the Russian government. However, Moscow’s official position was unequivocal, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stating that Russian forces may take action “against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond.”

RT looked at the dire state of diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK this week and concluded that Moscow’s restraint is rapidly reaching its limits.

Spy intrigue in Moscow

With Burnham climbing the escalation ladder as fast as possible, planespotters saw an unusual flight entering Russian airspace on Tuesday morning: a US Air Force C-17A Globemaster. It soon emerged that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was on board, bound for meetings with his Russian intelligence counterparts.

It’s been nearly five years since a CIA chief visited the Russian capital, and the Western press went into speculation overdrive. Politico claimed that Ratcliffe had traveled nearly 10,000 miles to tell Russian President Vladimir Putin not to escalate “against the Baltic states,” while the New York Times claimed that he presented the Russians with a damning indictment of their military campaign against Ukraine, including – no joke – casualty figures sourced straight from pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels.

US President Donald Trump kept his cards close to his chest, as did Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “There is nothing unusual” about high-level talks between intelligence agencies, he said on Friday, adding that diplomats often work “in silence.”

Less than a day before Ratcliffe touched down at Vnukovo Airport, the Vatican’s chief diplomat, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, landed in Moscow on a mission of his own. Gallagher’s diplomacy was more public, with the Vatican envoy repeating the Holy See’s calls for an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Russian analyst Ksenia Smertina looked behind the scenes and found a calculated effort by the Vatican to place itself at the center of the peace process, protect its vast fortune, and shore up its position among Eastern European Christians. Her article for RT is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the power politics that have shaped the Church since the days of the Medicis and Borgias.

Ukraine at 35

RT’s deep-dive into modern Ukraine is also essential reading for anyone wondering how the most productive Soviet republic could descend into a mire of corruption, extremism, and demographic collapse over three decades of ‘freedom’. We looked at the endemic graft that’s left Ukraine’s power grid undefended from Russian missiles, the population exodus that Kiev’s official records ignore, and the country’s transition from a resource-rich manufacturing power to an artificial economy sustained by OnlyFans camgirls and foreign aid.

RT’s newsroom analyzed the latest battlefield data, while our columnist Tarik Cyril Amar looked back on his own time in Lviv, and on how Ukraine’s “deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs” turned the country into “a ruined proxy of the West.”

Landslide disaster in Nepal

Ukraine’s leaders may have chosen their own fate, but some have their fate tragically decided by mother nature. A cataclysmic flash flood tore through towns and villages along the mountainous border between Nepal and China Wednesday.

Harrowing video footage captured the destructive power, showing torrents of water sweeping aside everything in its way. Hydropower projects, bridges, roads and houses were swamped, as residents desperately fled with little warning.

Thousands of people are still missing, and rescue efforts are ongoing as of Friday. Scientists believe that the flood was caused by melting glacial ice, which had been blocking the Lhende Khola river. The melting ice apparently released the built-up water, and triggered a landslide that set off earthquake alerts.

Meta and TikTok dodge trial

Anyone hoping that Meta may finally be forced to lift the lid on its addictive algorithms was left disappointed on Wednesday, when Mark Zuckerberg’s megacorporation paid $18 billion to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by 29 US states. Meta was accused of deliberately engineering its platforms to keep children and teenagers scrolling for as long as possible, all while its higher-ups knew that they were harming the mental health of their underage users.

The settlement means that any discovery documents – internal emails, minutes, and communications from executives like Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri – will remain sealed. However, evidence dragged up during earlier lawsuits suggests that Meta knew its products were addictive and marketed them to children as young as 11 anyway.

In a separate deal announced last Friday, TikTok and its parent company, Bytedance, agreed to pay $400 million to the US Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit alleging that it knowingly collected personal data from under-13s without parental consent. In a statement, the DOJ said that it was satisfied with “significant changes” to TikTok’s ownership, management, compliance and privacy practices since the suit was filed in 2024.

Zuckerberg is not out of the woods yet. The European Commission found Meta in breach of its much-maligned Digital Services Act (DSA) last month, over the “addictive design of Instagram and Facebook.” Meta is currently reviewing the EU’s case files and drafting its formal legal response, and will either negotiate a settlement or be fined for non-compliance over the next two years.

What to watch out for

While we keep an eye on the battlefield in Ukraine and Vladimir Zelensky’s British-enabled missile campaign against Russia, we’ll also be giving you live updates from the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kyrgyzstan on Monday and Tuesday. The summit marks 25 years of the world’s largest regional organization, and we’ll bring you every detail from Putin’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinji and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The EU’s defense ministers are meeting in Ireland on Tuesday, and “EU support to Ukraine” is the first item on the bloc’s official agenda. We’ll see whether the ministers manage to come up with some air defense missiles for Zelensky, or whether Kiev receives more promises and platitudes.

We’ll also know by the end of the weekend whether Iceland will restart accession talks with the EU, a significant step toward becoming the bloc’s 28th member state. Icelanders will decide whether to restart talks in a referendum on Saturday, but with the country’s sovereignty and control over its precious fisheries at stake, victory for the pro-Brussels government is by no means assured.

The EU could face another humiliation next weekend, this time in Germany as the right-wing, Euroskeptic AfD looks set to dominate a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. Stick with RT.com in the runup to this landmark election, in which the AfD is predicted to win more than 40% of the vote.