[🇷🇺] Russia---News & Views

[Saif]

Kremlin denies Trump call, says West not ready for talks

Russia Monday denied a reported call between president Vladimir Putin and US president-elect Donald Trump on the Ukraine conflict and said it saw no signs the West was ready for talks.

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Kremlin denies Trump call, says West not ready for talks
Agence France-Presse . Moscow 12 November, 2024, 01:39

Russia Monday denied a reported call between president Vladimir Putin and US president-elect Donald Trump on the Ukraine conflict and said it saw no signs the West was ready for talks.

The Washington Post said on Sunday that Trump had spoken by phone on Thursday with Putin, telling him not to inflame the conflict.

Trump’s election to the White House has the potential to upend the almost three-year conflict and has thrown into question Washington’s multi-billion dollar support for Kyiv, crucial to its defence.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the report, telling journalists it was ‘false’.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a written statement: ‘We do not comment on private calls between president Trump and other world leaders’.

A senior Ukrainian presidency official also said Kyiv was ‘not informed’ of any call between Putin and Trump.

The Republican said on the campaign trail that he could end the fighting within hours and has indicated he would talk directly with Putin.

Trump has not said how he intends to strike a peace deal on Ukraine or what terms he is proposing.

He spoke by phone with German chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday and the pair ‘agreed to work together towards a return to peace in Europe’, according to Scholz’s spokesman.

But Peskov said ‘there are no preparations’ for Putin to hold talks with Scholz and it was too early to say whether Europe’s position on Ukraine had changed.

‘We see a certain nervousness, various fears among Europeans over the election of Trump as US president,’ the Kremlin spokesman said.

Putin last week ‘repeated that he is open to all talks’, Peskov said, but ‘no preparation is being carried out now. We have not received any signals’.

‘If they say that some signals will come out, then we have to wait.’

So far, ‘European leaders are continuing to try to achieve a strategic defeat of Russia’, Peskov said, while Moscow is ‘continuing our special operation until we achieve all our aims’.

Ukraine has long been pushing the US and Europe to allow it to fire long-range weapons deep into Russia.

Peskov insisted that ‘no kinds of weapons can change’ the dynamic on the battlefield, where Russian forces are making rapid advances in the eastern Donetsk region.

‘Now, when the situation in the theatre of combat is not in Kyiv’s favour, the West is faced with a choice,’ Sergei Shoigu, former defence minister and now secretary of Russia’s security council, said last week.

‘To continue financing Kyiv and the destruction of the Ukrainian population or recognise the current realities and start negotiating.’

Air alerts wailed across Ukraine early Monday as Russian strikes killed at least six people, a day after record drone attacks by both sides.

The Kremlin spokesman had told state media on Sunday that ‘the signals are positive’ after Trump’s victory, because ‘at least he’s talking about peace, and not about confrontation’.

In its report, the Post said that Trump reminded Putin in the phone call of Washington’s sizeable military foothold in Europe.

Several people speaking to the US paper said Trump had expressed the desire for more conversations on ‘the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon’ and briefly raised the question of land.

The Russian president has demanded Ukraine withdraw from swathes of its eastern and southern territory as a precondition to peace talks.

Following Trump’s election, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned there should be ‘no concessions’ to Putin.

Ukraine and many in the West fear any settlement that rewards Putin would embolden the Kremlin leader and lead to more aggression.

Meanwhile, air alerts wailed across Ukraine early Monday as Russian strikes killed at least six people, a day after record drone attacks by both sides and Trump reportedly urging Putin not to escalate the conflict.

Trump’s election to the White House has the potential to upend the almost three-year conflict and has thrown into question Washington’s multi-billion dollar support for Kyiv, crucial to its defence.​

 

[Saif]

Russia paves way to remove Taliban from ‘terror’ list

Russia’s parliament on Tuesday approved a bill that could pave the way for Moscow to lift its designation of the Taliban as a banned ‘terrorist’ organisation.

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Russia paves way to remove Taliban from ‘terror’ list
Agence France-Presse . Moscow 17 December, 2024, 22:26

AFP file photo

Russia’s parliament on Tuesday approved a bill that could pave the way for Moscow to lift its designation of the Taliban as a banned ‘terrorist’ organisation.

Moscow has courted relations with the Taliban since they seized power in Afghanistan after the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from in 2021.

Officials have since been pushing to remove the Islamist group from Moscow’s official list of outlawed ‘terrorist’ groups.

The State Duma passed a bill outlining a mechanism for groups to be legally removed from the list — putting the necessary legal framework in place for an expected future decision.

The bill now passes to the upper-house Federation Council and then to president Vladimir Putin to sign into law.

In a visit to Kabul last month, top Russian security officials told their Afghan counterparts that Moscow would soon remove the Taliban from the list of banned organisations.

Under the proposed system, Russia’s Prosecutor General would file a request with a Russian court outlining that a group has ‘ceased’ its activities ‘in support of terrorism’. A judge could then rule to remove the designation.

The expected move would not amount to a formal recognition of the Taliban government and what it calls the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ — a step no country has yet taken.

Putin called the Taliban ‘allies in the fight against terrorism’ earlier this year, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has called for the West to remove sanctions on Afghanistan and take ‘responsibility’ for reconstruction efforts in the country.

Russia’s allies in Central Asia — Afghanistan’s neighbours — are also pledging better relations with the Taliban. Kazakhstan removed the Taliban from its own list of banned ‘terrorist’ groups at the end of 2023.

The move could boost diplomacy between Moscow and Afghanistan, with both countries facing isolation in the West.

After seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have enforced an extreme form of Islamic law that effectively bans women from public life.​

 

[Saif]

Senior Russian military officer killed in car explosion near Moscow

A senior Russian military officer was killed when a car exploded on Friday in the town of Balashikha just east of Moscow, Russia's Investigative Committee said. It named the officer as Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Force

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Senior Russian military officer killed in car explosion near Moscow
REUTERS
Published :
Apr 25, 2025 19:52
Updated :
Apr 25, 2025 19:52

A senior Russian military officer was killed when a car exploded on Friday in the town of Balashikha just east of Moscow, Russia's Investigative Committee said.

It named the officer as Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and said it had opened a criminal case into the incident.

"According to available data, the explosion occurred as a result of the detonation of a homemade explosive device filled with destructive elements," the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

The statement did not say who might be behind the incident. Several high-ranking Russian military figures have been assassinated since the start of the war in Ukraine in operations blamed by Moscow on Kyiv.

Russian media outlet Baza, which has sources in Russia's law enforcement agencies, said a bomb in a parked car had been detonated remotely when the officer – who lived locally – walked past.

The Izvestia newspaper published video footage showing a person approaching a line of parked cars outside an apartment complex and an explosion that sent parts of a vehicle flying metres into the air.

Kommersant newspaper said a second person was also killed.

Moskalik, who held the rank of major general, had participated in several high-level Russian delegations, according to defence ministry bulletins and media reports.

He joined the Russian contingent in a meeting in October 2015 of the Normandy Format, a group made up of teams from Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France who oversaw the Minsk agreements designed to end the war between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatist forces that broke out in 2014.

Moskalik represented the army's General Staff at the negotiations alongside Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, according to the Kremlin website.

Russia's RBC newspaper listed Moskalik as a participant in the security subgroup in the Minsk talks.

In December, Ukraine's SBU intelligence service used a bomb hidden in an electric scooter to kill Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, whom Kyiv accused of being responsible for the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops.

The SBU did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported death of Moskalik.​

 

[Saif]

Russian inflation drops sharply in 2025

Russian annual inflation fell sharply in 2025, data from the state statistics agency showed on Friday, as central bank efforts to tame price growth appeared to bear fruit...

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Russian inflation drops sharply in 2025
Agence France-Presse . Moscow 17 January, 2026, 22:39

Russian annual inflation fell sharply in 2025, data from the state statistics agency showed on Friday, as central bank efforts to tame price growth appeared to bear fruit.

The Central Bank of Russia kept interest rates close to 20 per cent for almost two years as high military spending, which initially gave a boost to the Russian economy, and also spurred red-hot inflation.

But price growth slowed to about 5.6 per cent last year, the Rosstat agency said.

This represents a sharp drop from the 9.5 per cent recorded in 2024, and was also below what the central bank and analysts had expected.

In 2025, the bank started to gradually ease interest rates as price growth sagged and businesses railed against high borrowing costs which have weighed on economic growth.

Last month, Rosstat said economic growth was close to zero in the third quarter.

In November, inflation fell to about six per cent from seven per cent a month prior, the steepest 12-month drop in 2025, according to Rosstat.

The bank is targeting an inflation rate of four per cent by 2027. Slowing growth has put pressure on Russia’s stretched public finances, prompting the Kremlin to raise taxes to tap the pockets of citizens and businesses in the hope of plugging last year’s budget gap of around $50 billion.

Analysts forecast inflation to pick up again in early 2026 as a rise in value added tax (VAT) kicks in, contributing to upward price pressures.

In the four years of war in Ukraine, Russian defence spending has skyrocketed, while its oil and gas revenues have been weighed down by sanctions.

In 2025, Russian military spending rose by three per cent over 2024, representing around seven per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated.

Last year, the US unveiled some of the harshest measures yet targeting Russia’s energy sector, sanctioning its two biggest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, to curb Moscow’s revenues and force it to end the war in Ukraine.​