Russia-led CSTO military bloc will expand to include dozens of countries, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin believes.

“I think the organization will expand as the world order changes. […] In a few years it will no longer be just six countries, but dozens of states,” Khrenin said in an interview.

The alliance is currently comprised of six member states: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

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Ukraine is counting on American and European taxpayers to keep its economy afloat.

According to Ukraine’s Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko, the country’s GDP will shrink by a whopping 44% in 2022. If the war lasts into fall, painful measures will be needed, involving huge tax rises and spending cuts.

Marchenko admits that he now spends most of his time at work lobbying foreign governments for assistance. America is where he has the highest hopes.

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EU caves to Putin's ruble payment scheme for Russian natural gas.

At least 34 major European energy companies have already opened or are in the process of opening ruble accounts at Gazprombank.

Last month, Putin warned that unless European nations open up ruble accounts in a Russia bank, Moscow will terminate its gas contracts.

Initially, the bloc rejected Putin’s plan, saying that the new payment mechanism would give Putin complete control over the process, breached contracts, and would also be a violation of EU sanctions.

Later, however, the Commission reportedly told EU states that companies would not be in violation of sanctions if they open accounts at Gazprombank as ordered by the Kremlin.

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❗️Ukrainian fighters who spent two months pinned down in Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks finally surrender to Russian forces.

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Realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt take on liberal interventionists Michael McFaul and Radosław Sikorski in a Munk Debate on the Russia-Ukraine War.

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❗️UN chief calls on West to lift some Russia sanctions in order to prevent global hunger.

“Russian food and fertilizers must have full and unrestricted access to world markets,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres.

“Let’s be clear: there is no effective solution to the food crisis without reintegrating Ukraine’s food production, as well as the food and fertilizer produced by Russia and Belarus, into world markets, despite the war,” Guterres added.

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Debate Highlight: Stephen Walt asks Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, about NATO's desire to eventually absorb Ukraine.

According to McFaul, the US was lying when it said in 2021 that Ukrainian membership in NATO was still on the table. He quickly realizes the problem with saying US diplomats can't be trusted.

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Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”

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Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal are continuing to surrender in Mariupol. According to one DPR commander, who’s reportedly overseeing the process, 1800 Ukrainian troops have surrendered thus far.

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Zelensky’s secret police continue arresting Ukrainians suspected of pro-Russian views.

In the latest raid witnessed by Western journalists, SBU special forces detained an old lady in a village that had briefly been under Russian control.

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George W. Bush gets duped by Russian pranksters, admits to fake Zelensky that NATO expansion broke U.S. promise to Gorbachev.

“Listen, times change. […] The U.S. must be flexible adjusting to the times,” said Bush in justifying Washington’s decision to disregard the assurances made to Gorbachev in 1990.

The former U.S. president also admitted that he always felt it was necessary for Ukraine to become a member of NATO and the EU.

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The coming food catastrophe: War is tipping a fragile world towards mass hunger.

From The Economist:

The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn. Nearly 250m are on the brink of famine.

Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil. The war is disrupting these supplies.

The scene is set for a blame game, in which the West condemns Mr Putin for his invasion and Russia decries Western sanctions.

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💰 Ruble reaches four-year high against the US dollar and a seven-year high against the Euro on Friday.

Reaching 57.67 rubles against the 1 dollar represents the ruble’s strongest position since March 2018, as more European companies appeared to be complying with Vladimir Putin’s demand that they switch to paying in Russia’s currency for natural gas.

Last month, Gazprom halted gas flows to Poland and Bulgaria for non-compliance. In Finland, flows on a main pipeline are set to stop in the early hours of Saturday after the country refused to pay in rubles.

“The exchange rate could go even stronger,” said Evgeny Koshelev at Rosbank. “The overhang of hard currency liquidity can’t be absorbed by internal means -- banks are less and less interested since there’s no demand, the population doesn’t have any way of using it.”

As reported earlier, the Russian currency has become the world's best-performing currency in 2022, despite a sharp drop in April, sparked by unprecedented sanctions.

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❗️Top commanders of Azov Battalion, the notorious elite neo-Nazi unit within Ukraine’s National Guard, surrender to Russian forces in Mariupol.

Azov Battalion commander Denys Prokopenko, his deputy Svyatoslav Palamar, and the commander of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade Serhiy Volyna are among the 2439 Ukrainian fighters who surrendered to the DPR and Russian forces at Azovstal, Russian MOD confirms.

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History professor at Yale University argues that Russia is a fascist state.

“People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence,” — writes Dr. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books on fascism, totalitarianism and European history.

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The West has artificially separated the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, says former UN expert.

From Alfred de Zayas’s Twitter:

It is not Russia who wanted to be an enemy of NATO. It is NATO that needed an enemy for its raison d'être and unilaterally assigned this role to Russia.

NATO has done nothing but threaten and provoke since 1991. The Ukrainian tragedy is a direct consequence of our own behaviour as predicted by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen.

Peace in Europe and for the world requires that all Europeans look for and find their common ground. The Russians are very much Europeans and will remain so.

The West has artificially separated the Ukrainian and Russian peoples who have lived together in peace for centuries.

The Ukrainian and Russian languages are extremely close as the Ukrainian and Russian cultures. Their differences are artificially generated for geopolitical reasons.

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European Film Academy president calls for ban on Russian culture.

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Putin has “a black heart” and “Stalin’s taste for blood,” says Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) while explaining to his constituents why he voted for the $40 billion Ukraine aid package.

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Sanctions against Russia will not stop the war in Ukraine, they will only impoverish the citizens of the EU, says Croatian Member of the European Parliament Mislav Kolakušić.

If the EU was serious about preventing wars, it would impose sanctions on the United States, Kolakušić argues.

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“Your mission is to destroy as many Russian troops as you can,” former President Bush tells a Zelensky imposter while reassuring him of continued U.S. support.

George W. Bush was duped into believing he was on a call with the Ukrainian president when, in fact, he was speaking to Russian pranksters.

During the call, Bush also admitted that the U.S. had lied to Gorbachev about not expanding NATO and noted that Russia’s grievances would stop being an issue once Moscow was defeated in Ukraine.

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Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks out against any kind of peace agreement in Ukraine, suggests end goal is retaking Donbas and Crimea, followed by regime change in Russia.

While speaking at WEF, Manchin also noted that he and the strategists he talks to have never seen an "opportunity" like this war to "do what needs to be done" against Putin.

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