The World Blog by humble servant.

The Ukraine crisis has shown that the West is still isolated from the rest of the world, which continues to live “under dictatorships, autocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, authoritarian or totalitarian systems,” former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said. In an article for Il Giornale published on Thursday, Berlusconi hailed the West’s “balanced, firm and above all united response” to the “undeniable aggression from the Russian side against a neutral country.” “From this point of view, Russia has already lost its game: If it considers the West an opponent, today it faces an opponent much more united and more determined than in recent years,” Berlusconi wrote. However, in his opinion, the Ukraine conflict has revealed “a very bitter reality.” “Russia is isolated from the West, but the West is isolated from the whole world,” he said. The former prime minister explained that only 1.4 billion people live in systems “that can be broadly defined as free and democratic, ...

Russian airstrikes have destroyed foreign-supplied tanks in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, Moscow said on Sunday. Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said during a regular briefing that Russian forces carried out airstrikes “on the outskirts of Kiev, destroying the T-72 tanks and other armored vehicles that were supplied by Eastern European countries and kept in railcar repair facilities.” The spokesman did not specify where the tanks came from, but Poland previously said it had donated T-72 tanks to Ukraine. Konashenkov said that military targets were also hit in Donbass, as well as in eastern and southern Ukraine, including multiple rocket launchers and a US-made mobile counterfire radar. Ukraine’s General Staff earlier reported that Kiev was among the areas hit by Russian forces. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that one person was hospitalized. On Saturday night, the Donetsk authorities said Ukrainian troops shelled the city, killing five civilians and wounding...

If a new wave of government assistance is not released immediately, some 500,000 small businesses in the UK will go bankrupt within weeks, the chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) Martin McTague has warned. “We don’t have any problem with the way the chancellor dealt with consumer needs,” McTague told BBC Radio 4’s Today program earlier this week, commenting on the latest £15 billion ($19 billion) cost-of-living package released by the UK government. “But there is still a massive problem with small businesses,” he said. “They are facing something like twice the rate of inflation for their production prices, and it’s a ticking timebomb. They have got literally weeks left before they run out of cash and that will mean hundreds of thousands of businesses, and lots of people losing their jobs.” McTague also cited the latest figures revealed by the Office for National Statistics, which showed that 40%, or two million, of UK small businesses had less than three months’ w...

Russia’s sanctions against Gazprom’s former German subsidiary may cost Germany around €5 billion ($5.36 billion) in additional expenses per year, the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported on Sunday, citing sources within the industry. On March 31, Russia’s state energy giant and major gas exporter Gazprom exited Gazprom Germania in response to Berlin’s move to put the company under a trusteeship amid the Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia. Moscow subsequently stopped supplying gas to the company, which had amounted to some 10 billion cubic meters per day, and on May 11, Gazprom Germania was put under sanctions by Russia. The company is now forced to buy gas on the wholesale market under new contracts to continue servicing its supply contracts with German municipal utilities and regional suppliers. These contracts may be significantly more expensive than those with Russia’s Gazprom, with the difference amounting to some €2.5 billion ($2.68 billion) per year after resale to utility compa...

Inflation in the US is a consequence of mistakes by American financial authorities, which they have conceded themselves, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. He added that the EU's problems, in this regard, are down to short-sighted energy policies in Brussels, Either way, the situation has nothing to do with Moscow or its actions in Ukraine, Putin insisted. Attempts to blame the turmoil in Ukraine for the skyrocketing cost of living in the West amount to dodging responsibility, Putin declared in a TV interview that followed his meeting with the African Union head Macky Sall in Sochi. Pretty much all governments resorted to fiscal stimulus to support the population and enterprises affected by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Russia did so “much more carefully and precisely,” without disturbing the macroeconomic picture and fueling inflation, Putin argued. In the US, by contrast, the money supply grew by 38% – by $5.9 trillion – in less than two years, in what he termed the ...

The restrictions imposed by the US and its allies against Russia and Belarus will only exacerbate the looming global food crisis by affecting the fertilizer trade and sending food prices even higher, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. In a special TV interview on Friday evening following a meeting with African Union head Macky Sall in Sochi, Putin accused Western leaders of trying "to shift the responsibility for what is happening in the world food market." The root causes of the crisis lie with US financial policies during the Covid-19 pandemic and Western Europe's over-reliance on renewables and short-term gas contracts, which have led to price hikes and rising inflation, Putin has said. The unfavorable situation on the world's food market did not begin to take shape yesterday, or even from the moment Russia launched the special military operation in the Donbass and Ukraine. "It began to take shape as early as February 2020 in the process of combati...

Russian energy giant Gazprom said this week that gas exports to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline have continued to grow. The deliveries are part of “a bilateral long-term contract between Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC),” the company said on its official Telegram channel. The 3,000km (1,864 mile) cross-border pipeline started official deliveries of Russian natural gas to China in 2019. The so-called eastern route’s capacity is 61 billion cubic meters of gas per year, including 38 billion cubic meters for export. In 2020, Gazprom supplied 4.1 billion cubic meters of gas to China via the Power of Siberia. The agreement on gas supplies via the pipeline was reached in 2014, with Gazprom and CNPC signing a 30-year contract. The $400 billion agreement is Gazprom’s biggest deal ever and the Power of Siberia is the first natural gas pipeline between Russia and China. According to Gazprom, it is currently working on the Power of Siberia 2 project, which involv...

While 90% of black voters backed Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, just 70% approve of his job performance two years in, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll published on Saturday. Less than a quarter of respondents “strongly approve” of the president’s performance, an ominous note ahead of what is shaping up to be a difficult mid-term election for the Democratic Party, and 28% disapprove (either “strongly” or “somewhat”) with Biden’s work in office. Additionally, just 60% of black voters say Biden is keeping most of his major campaign promises, while 37% say he is not. From the sky-high cost of living – climbing ever higher due to record inflation – to voting rights and policing reform, Biden’s perceived failure to deliver on the issues his supporters care about have given many of them second thoughts about whether they’ll even go to the polls at all come November. Just a fifth of respondents thought Biden had budged the needle on criminal jus...

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is puzzling over why no one at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has exposed the client list of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – and over why no one in the legacy media appears to be chasing the story. “Only thing more remarkable than DOJ not leaking the list is that no one in the media cares,” Musk said on Saturday in a Twitter post. “Doesn’t that seem odd?” Musk attached the comment to a meme entitled “Things I’ll never see in my life,” showing illustrations of a fire-breathing dragon, a dinosaur and a unicorn, along with the words “Epstein-Maxwell client list.” Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender, died in a New York City jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of child sex trafficking. His death was ruled a suicide, a claim disputed by critics, many of whom speculated that he was killed to prevent him from identifying his powerful clients. Ghislaine Maxwell’s family ‘fear for her safety’READ MORE: Ghislaine Maxwe...

Trade turnover between Russia and China is expected to reach $200 billion as soon as by the end of the current year, according to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov as quoted by TASS. “We, quite obviously, will be able to achieve a trade turnover of $200 billion earlier then it had been set by our leaders. We can achieve this goal much earlier, it is possible by the end of this year,” Morgulov said on Wednesday at the 7th international conference ‘Russia and China: Cooperation in a New Era’. The official emphasized the inviolability of relations between Moscow and Beijing and the failure of the latest attempts by Western states to drive them apart. Russian trade with China surgingREAD MORE: Russian trade with China surging The two nations have been cementing ties over the last several years, including announcing a “no-limits” partnership in February. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and has repeatedly criticized the unprecedented Weste...