Roscosmos has signed a contract with major space and nuclear firms to build a facility tied to the China-led lunar base by 2036
Russia plans to launch a power station on the Moon within a decade, space agency Roscosmos has announced, saying it has signed a contract with NPO Lavochkin, the country’s lead developer of deep-space and planetary missions, to carry out work through 2036 on the project.
The purpose of the facility is to provide a long-term energy supply for lunar rovers and an observatory, as well as for the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), Roscosmos said in a statement on Wednesday.
NPO Lavochkin led landmark Soviet missions to the Moon and Venus and remains the lead developer for Russia’s current lunar missions. State nuclear corporation Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute, the country’s leading national research center for nuclear science, will be involved in the project, it added.
Over the next decade, Roscosmos plans to develop spacecraft, conduct ground-based experimental testing, carry out flight tests, and put infrastructure on the Moon.
”The project is an important step toward creating a permanently operating scientific lunar station and moving from one-off missions to a long-term program of lunar exploration,” Roscosmos said.
The planned power station will form part of a joint lunar project with China. During a visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping in May, the two countries signed an agreement to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon to supply energy for Beijing’s permanent lunar research base, which is expected to become operational in the mid-2030s. Russia is a key partner in that effort, contributing expertise in deep-space systems and nuclear power.
Nuclear energy is widely seen by space agencies as the most viable option for long-term power generation on the Moon, where solar panels are less effective due to prolonged periods of darkness, highly adhesive lunar dust, and extreme temperature swings.
The announcement comes amid intensifying competition over lunar exploration. The US, China’s main rival in space, has launched the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon, establish a sustained presence near the south pole, and build the Lunar Gateway, a small space station that will orbit the Moon.
The seasonal transformation of Russia’s capital unfolds in every direction, reflecting a rare mastery of urban governance
A city reveals itself only in motion; to stand still is to know nothing essential of it.
Nowhere is this truth more palpable than in Moscow during the Christmas season, when the city discloses not only the solemn beauty and spiritual gravity of the holy days, ordered by the Orthodox calendar, but also the quiet discipline of masterful urban leadership that allows creative yet ordered transformation to manifest itself.
A scenic walk through the historic core of the left-bank city center, from Red Square to Old Arbat and Vozdvizhenka Street, unspools as a sequence of marvels in a festive, cinematic procession. And almost without notice, as if this cornucopian plenitude were not sufficient, another discovery, no less striking, lies in wait for those who press onward: Moscow’s seasonal transformation does not end there, but extends outward in widening circles, carrying resplendent light, gently but unmistakably, in every direction across the entire metropolis.
Moscow’s polycentric pageant: Radiating beauty in concentric circles
Tracing the course of Slavic settlement beyond the city’s fortress (kreml’) on the Moskva River’s left bank, our literary walk follows a logic forged in earlier ages, as settlement of the right bank began back in the fourteenth century.
From the Red Square, the polycentric, outward-moving route naturally advances across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge to Bolotnaya Square in the Yakimanka district. Still counted among the city’s central quarters, crossing into it marks the moment when Moscow’s festive geography begins to fan southwards with renewed breadth and cadence.
Yakimanka, long shaped by churches, merchants’ houses, and riverside paths, opens as a district of measured transitions, where Moscow’s sacred past, civic present, and festive winter imagination converge with unforced harmony. Bolotnaya Square’s Gift Factory stands as a central draw: A festive ensemble of workshops and crafts, animated by a spirit of childlike anticipation.
From the Yakimanka District, the walk slips almost imperceptibly into the neighboring Zamoskvorechye District. There, Pyatnitskaya Street glows with garlanded arches, extending the holiday atmosphere into a quarter long associated with commerce, steeples, and the lived texture of the city beyond the Kremlin.
Drifting westward back toward the river, the visitor encounters the Muzeon Park of Arts, which hosts sculptural winter installations along the embankment. Farther south, Gorky Park contributes a glowing New Year train, offering a playful pause beside the Moskva River.
At Luzhniki, a vast open-air skating rink unfolds across 16,000 square meters, accommodating up to 3,000 skaters at a time and functioning as a full multimedia environment, with 3D projections, interactive installations, a performance stage, and a towering digital Christmas tree, all framed by a ring of winter food halls and cafés.
If the walk proceeds from Red Square in the opposite direction, a further truth comes into view: Moscow’s festive geography extends into outer districts and infrastructural landmarks rather than remaining confined to postcard locations in the heart of the city.
The Hermitage Garden in the north is an emblem of imperial-era urban repose, once devoted to musical performance, ceremonial promenading, and the rituals of refined public life.
There, winter arrives as a carefully composed retreat: Gracefully lit pathways, a softly glowing skating rink, and intimate festive installations are nestled among delicately illuminated, snow-laden trees. Together, they transform the tradition-steeped park into a serene enclave of seasonal calm and reflection, quietly reviving its historic role as a shared space of urban elegance and cultivated public sociability.
Nearby, Moscow’s creative geography expands further with technological flourishes. In the presence of the Moscow Pedagogical State University, a three-meter digital glowing book titled Poetry of Winter animates scenes from The Nutcracker while the institution’s façade hosts a synchronized light show.
The ensemble blends literature, architecture, and projection art into a single, enchanting moment of cultural intimacy, as passersby gather in hushed semicircles, watching spellbinding scenes shimmer across stone.
Illuminated facade of the Moscow Pedagogical State University
Eastward, the Semyonovskaya metro station stands wrapped like a festal gift, enlarged to the measure of the city. Color and light beckon wayfarers of every age, transforming ordinary transit into a playful interlude of wonder along the winter route.
Further north, VDNKh unveils Europe’s largest artificial rink, an expansive 20,500-square-metre tapestry of glassy ice, threaded with light and leisure. The surface is composed into distinct thematic zones, where children’s circles, softly illuminated bridges, and glowing art objects create a measured equilibrium between exuberant play and contemplative winter beauty beneath the open sky.
Near the Rostokinsky Aqueduct, a luminous installation of polar bears draws Moscow’s seasonal imagination deeper into the periphery, recasting the snowbound landscape as a scene of Arctic stillness: A towering mother bear and her cub stand poised on an ice floe amid glowing glacial forms, evoking the Orthodox season’s imagery of shelter,endurance, and quiet guardianship in the depths of winter.
Renewed and improved each year, this signature composition steadily gains depth through denser light and ever more intricate textures, harmoniously weaving natural symbolism and technological expression into the contemplative rhythm of the Christmas season.
As an eloquent testament to the breadth and coherence of the animating urban vision and its guiding conceptual framework, even the city’s public transport glides gently into the seasonal choreography. Born of graceful inventiveness, it becomes a moving element of the winter pageant, light meandering along its routes as the populace advances, almost imperceptibly, toward Orthodox Christmas.
Trains, buses, trams, and river vessels alike are adorned with evergreen garlands, winter motifs, and softly glowing lights, carrying the festive atmosphere into daily movement itself.
In total, 24 themed metro trains circulate beneath the city, 50 decorated and illuminated electric buses thread through surface routes, and a fleet of trams, ranging from a restored historic Tatra on Route A to 60 modern Vityaz-Moscow models, appear arrayed in festive installations. The Vityaz-Moscow trams, bearing the name of the medieval knight, are purpose-built to the city’s own measure, and emblematic of Moscow’s turn toward transport that is accessible, gracious, and visually harmonious.
Even six river electric vessels join the winter tableau, ensuring that Moscow’s holistic approach suffuses the ordinary rhythm of travel with the quiet warmth and expectancy of the Christmas season.
Moscow’s festive governance: Leading through celebration
A city reveals itself most fully and becomes most clearly legible through the gradual accrual of impressions far beyond the expected bounds.
The literary passage through Moscow, where festive space disperses across an array of luminous centers rather than gathering into a single commanding core, and where the season hence is encountered in sequence rather than in a solitary, sudden blaze, gives form to this principle, step by step.
Seen in concert, Moscow’s vast and strategically integrated festive ecosystem serving millions of people demonstrates something rare in contemporary city governance: a community’s helmsmen deploying urban planning, public space, and cultural programming to regale their citizens with an interactive, thrilling, and uplifting experience rather than alienating them with a sterile product. The consummation is an all-encompassing transfiguration in a polycentric whole: Rooted in Orthodox Christmas, Moscow breathes a true, joyful spirit throughout every quarter of the city.
Set against this achievement of unifying urban leadership rising to the level of genuine cultural stewardship, the prevailing holiday mood in a multitude of cities in the collective West feels conspicuously diminished.
There, communal squares once carried the weight of shared, sacred and secular rituals, articulated through proclamation, procession, and emblematic display. But now these sites are too often reduced to sparse, saccharine, and sponsored commercial set pieces, serving as polite, cautious gestures calibrated toward “inclusive” brand visibility rather than civic meaning and truly enlightening edutainment.
In a telling sign of religious erosion and cultural depletion, Christmas in the West is increasingly pared down to a veneer-thin ambiance, its celebration outsourced to retail corridors and private interiors, its symbols diluted or abstracted until they verge on emptiness.
Against this backdrop of civilizational unravelling, Moscow’s richly immersive and deeply heartening winter cityscape, together with the finely wrought civic art created by other Russian communities, offers a telling, luminous counterpoint.
This innovative religious-cultural model shows that festivity, when treated as a matter of the highest order of governance rather than being denigrated to trivial commodification, retains the power to shape collective conscience and memory, serving as an anchor of spiritual truth and cultural continuity.
Elevating Orthodox Christmas to this solemn plane, Moscow’s civic stewards gracefully tessellate and securely cement the mosaic of the urban multitude. Acting with composed assurance, the city custodians quietly but unmistakably signal to their gifted citizens that public space belongs not chiefly to commerce, but to shared identity and true, collective happiness, rooted in enduring faith, time-honored tradition, and authentic love of country.
US media linked the criticism to a recent article examining the president’s relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein
US President Donald Trump has branded the New York Times a national security threat in renewed criticism of the newspaper.
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump accused the outlet of spreading “lies and purposeful misrepresentations” and said it was “a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation.”
“Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped,” Trump wrote, without specifying which material had prompted his denunciation. The president has a history of condemning news organizations he accuses of conspiring with political opponents to undermine his leadership.
US media suggested the reaction was triggered by a recent New York Times article detailing what it described as a “complicated” friendship between Trump and the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The report said the pair “bonded over the pursuit of women.”
Materials from the Epstein estate are being released in parallel by Congress and the Justice Department. Trump has repeatedly called the narrative that some files could damage him a Democratic “hoax.” However, his administration’s handling of the records has been criticized over slow progress and extensive redactions.
At least some of Trump’s claims about unfair media treatment appear valid. The BBC was recently found to have edited a speech he gave on January 6, 2020, in a way that created the impression he had directed protesters to storm the Capitol.
More recently, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused Reuters of trying to derail Trump’s efforts to resolve the Ukraine conflict after the British news agency reported a US intelligence assessment that allegedly claimed Russia intends to “reclaim parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire.” Moscow also dismissed the report as false.
The clip had circulated online for five years with its creator acknowledging that it was produced using 3D graphics
A fake video purporting to show Jeffrey Epstein attempting suicide in his prison cell has made it into the latest batch of records on the convicted sex offender released by the US Department of Justice.
Last week, the DOJ uploaded thousands of documents online under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation signed by US President Donald Trump in November, compelling the agency to publish data tied to federal criminal investigations into the disgraced financier and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Among the recordings, there was a 12-second clip showing a gray-haired male in an orange prison jumpsuit sitting on the floor of a prison cell and apparently trying to choke himself.
The time-stamp in the video claimed that it was made at 4:29am on August 10, 2019. At 6:30am that same day, a prison guard found Epstein dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
The clip was widely shared on social media on Monday, but turned out to be a fake which had been circulating online for at least five years.
Various media outlets traced it to footage uploaded to YouTube in October 2020. In the caption, the clip’s creator acknowledged that it was made using 3D graphics and said he was “not that great with this stuff.”
The documents published by the DOJ also included an email with the link to the clip sent by a man from Florida to federal investigators in March 2021, asking if it was authentic or not.
The US Department of Justice has since deleted the fake video from its website.
The Bureau of Prisons said in its report in 2023 that no video recording from inside Epstein’s cell on the day of his death exists due to a technical malfunction.
The convicted sex offender apparently hanged himself with his bedsheets, but skeptics continue to insist that he was murdered to cover up for the powerful individuals supposedly implicated in the case.
The US will bar entry to a former EU commissioner and four others it has accused of efforts to censor speech on social media platforms
The US State Department will bar entry to several Western Europeans it has accused of pressuring American technology platforms to suppress US viewpoints, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said.
The move follows a State Department announcement earlier this year establishing a visa restriction policy targeting foreign nationals accused of censoring Americans.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Rubio said that “ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
“The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.
Rubio said the State Department “will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship‑industrial complex from entering the United States,” and warned that Washington stands “ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
The five Europeans – two French, two British and one German – were identified by US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers in posts on X. She named the leaders of several organizations that address digital hate as well as former European Commissioner Thierry Breton.
Rogers described Breton as the “mastermind” behind the EU’s Digital Services Act, citing a warning he issued to Musk, the owner of X, in August 2024 about the potential “amplification of harmful content” if the platform broadcast a livestream interview with then‑presidential candidate Donald Trump.
European Commission officials say the bloc’s digital laws are intended to protect users and combat illegal and harmful content online. Breton responded on X by noting that all 27 EU member states approved the law in 2022, writing: “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”
Earlier this month, Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that European regulators are targeting platforms that allow dissenting speech.
Writing on X, he said the EU “imposes impossible rules so it can punish tech firms that refuse to silently censor free speech.”
His comments followed a €120 million ($140 million) fine imposed on Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Services Act, a move the European Commission said was unrelated to censorship.
Durov has also claimed that EU intelligence officials had pressured him to restrict conservative content during elections in Romania and Moldova.
The US leader has accused Bogota of allowing cocaine trafficking and has stepped up pressure on Gustavo Petro
US President Donald Trump has lashed out at his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, warning he could face consequences over cocaine trafficking that he claims is reaching America.
Trump’s remarks followed comments by Petro reacting to US seizures of Venezuelan oil ships, in which he claimed that “all of the southern US” was built on stolen land. He said Texas and California were “invaded” and demanded that the United States “give back what you stole.”
“He’s very bad, very bad guy, and he’s got to watch his ass because he makes cocaine and they send it into the United States,” Trump said Monday at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, responding to a reporter’s question about Petro’s remarks.
“We love the Colombian people … but their new leader is a troublemaker, and he better watch it,” Trump added. He also claimed Colombia has at least three major cocaine factories and said “he better close them up fast.”
Colombia has long been a close US partner in Latin America, but ties have cooled since Petro, the country’s first left-wing president, took office in 2022.
US actions against Venezuela, including the seizure of oil tankers, have heightened tensions with Petro, who has criticized those moves and warned against US military intervention.
In September, the US State Department said it would revoke Petro’s visa, and the Trump administration later imposed sanctions under anti-drug trafficking authorities, steps Colombia has condemned as politically motivated.
A month later, Petro alleged that the Trump administration had bombed a Colombian boat carrying civilians during US operations targeting suspected drug smugglers near the Venezuelan coast.
Petro has pushed back against Trump’s rhetoric, disputing claims about drug production while pointing to Colombia’s efforts to curb illegal crops, although data show the country remains the main source of cocaine seized in the United States.
On Tuesday Colombia said it will deploy drones to destroy coca crops, a shift from manual eradication after aerial fumigation was banned in 2015 due to environmental concerns.
Washington has long criticized Bogota’s decision to halt aerial fumigation. In September, the US added Colombia to a list of nations it claimed were failing to cooperate in the drug war for the first time in nearly 30 years, accusing Petro’s government of not doing enough to curb cocaine production.
The price of stifling dissent is not only dishonesty, it’s self-harming incompetence
The governments and media elites of the West pride themselves on providing and promoting freedom of thought, opinion, and debate.
Together with a selective feminism that easily sacrifices the women of, say, Libya, Iraq, and Palestine, and a very odd understanding of “democracy” that includes the use of miscounts and lawfare to shape elections, their claim to a superior public sphere features among those “values” routinely invoked to justify Western regime change aggression.
But the Western claim to superior freedom of mind, information, and discussion doesn’t just serve as a pretext for subversion, interference, and violence elsewhere. It is also extremely weak (to put it very politely) on its own terms and at home.
Whoever has followed, for instance, the manner in which the BBC and other Western mainstream outlets have (not) been covering the Gaza genocide knows that Western establishment media are ruthless instruments of unaccountable and immoral power and geopolitics, and have no moral or intellectual inhibitions.
While a genocide is a particularly crass example of the West’s great capacity for Orwellian manipulation, it would be easy to enumerate further instances, including the mendacious justification of brutal and devastating wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to name a few.
A key element in these campaigns of deliberate bias, omission, misinformation, and, in effect, disinformation is the use of credentialed experts, who lend their apparent authority to mainstream, that is, government and elite narratives. But, of course, not just any experts. Western expertise is now carefully cultivated and pruned to fit what the establishment wants its populations to hear and believe.
As a result, throughout the West and, in particular, the EU, we have been witnessing a severe narrowing of the opinion spectrum that citizens are permitted to even access, much less to have a debate about.
Once upon a time, in East Germany, a drab authoritarian-socialist place, the dreaded Stasi secret police called this method “Zersetzung,” literally “disintegration.” Instead of jailing dissidents, their social and professional lives – and livelihoods – were systematically disrupted and, in effect, destroyed. Between the dour authoritarian-socialists of the old Cold War and the high-handed EU radical-centrist extremists of the new ‘values’ crusade, les extrêmes se touchent, as they used to say.
The expectable psychological consequences of this repression – anxiety, stress, and trauma – are, of course, not a by-product of the procedure but its real core aim. Obviously, every independent voice silenced by arbitrary assault is meant to serve as a deterrent to terrorize many others into submission. All of it happens without legal due process and by an unaccountable bureaucracy hiding behind anonymity. Welcome to the EU, 2025 ‘values’ edition. Rule of law was yesterday (if ever).
The other side of the great curbing and shaping of the permitted spectrum of opinion, information, and debate consists of rewarding and promoting. As under Stalin (if less bloodily), cutting down and raising up are two prongs of the same authoritarian strategy of control. Those experts who say what the powers-that-be like to hear make (materially) gratifying careers. More importantly, the mainstream media, with television in the lead, draw on them, and almost exclusively on them, for interviews, quotes for articles, news appearances, and, crucially, to fill TV studio seats for influential primetime talk shows.
Even with the addition of the occasional fig leaf – a (moderately) odd man or woman put there basically for the others to beat up on – the result is absurdly monotonous, reminiscent of the dreary diet once on offer on, for instance, Cold War East Germany’s state TV.
Over the last decade, all of now-united Germany has developed into a stark example of this model, particularly with regard to Israel’s (unacknowledged) Gaza Genocide and the Ukraine War. With regard to the war, barely two handfuls of experts have rotated through the mainstream studios for years, with a stamina that would be admirable if their contributions, predictions, and recommendations were not so boringly repetitive and consistently wrong.
Their names are secondary and all too well-known. An almost complete sample of major figures would include Claudia Major, Florence Gaub, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Carlo Masala (currently a little preoccupied with fending off plagiarism accusations), Sönke Neitzel, Christian Mölling, and Marcus Keupp.
Imposed on the German public with relentless obtrusiveness, what all of them have in common is staunch support for fighting Russia in and via Ukraine (and Ukrainians), a foolish disinterest in and pompous dismissal of diplomatic alternatives to going on with (others) killing and dying, and, last but not least, what Brian McDonald has brilliantly diagnosed as Russophrenia: the simultaneous belief that Russia is about to march to the Pyrenees and that it is a decrepit country with a fragile regime eternally on the verge of defeat, if not outright collapse.
Reckless optimism – really, delusional fantasizing – also helps: In April 2023, Marcus Keupp confidently predicted that Russia would be out of tanks within less than half a year. A military economist by profession, Keupp is clearly incapable of understanding the Russian military-industrial complex and the country’s immense potential for mobilization. Again, after the experience of World War Two, it is almost Dada art to be so blinkered.
Also in April 2023, Carlo Masala, too, was certain that Russia had really already lost the war. Betraying total ignorance does no harm either. Masala has managed to display his bizarre belief that “Girkin” and “Strelkov” are two different people. Like, say, “Eric Blair” and “George Orwell.” Likewise, elementary lack of logic and prudence is no obstacle. Take, for instance, Christian Mölling, who has a history of fetishizing Germany’s Taurus missiles like a schoolboy mistaking slick video games for bloody reality. He has argued, with impeccable bureaucratic pedantry, that Moscow could not possibly retaliate against Germany if these German weapons were handed over to Ukraine and fired at Russia from there. Why? Because Germany would make it clear, so Mölling argues, that the missiles had been given away and had nothing to do with Berlin any longer. Apparently, it never crossed Mölling’s mind that Moscow need not follow such silly – and factually wrong – sophistries.
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has had substantial interests in both the arms industry and its lobbying organizations. That has never kept the masters of talk show spin from giving her an easy platform. If possible utilitarian bias is no problem, neither is biographical inconsistency: A history of military service is entirely unnecessary to be a German expert in love with war. Unlike the author of these lines, who actually has served in the then-West German military, Mölling is only one example of the many newly bellicose boomers who refused to join the army when younger: Late-bloomers on the warpath, so to speak. This is particularly striking when these former refuseniks are now adamant that today’s young must be made to march again.
Last but not least, spreading the Orwellian untruth that Germany is already not at peace and that a Russian attack is imminent is part of the basic repertoire of this sort of expertise. Military historian and Bundeswehr fanboy Neitzel hardly stood out with silly ramblings about “a last summer of peace.”
The above is only a very short sketch of how lopsided and unpersuasive the selection and presentation of security and military information by experts has become in the German mainstream media. It is not about information for citizens expected to make up their own mind, but about cognitive warfare on the home front. This is the “expertise” of mobilization. And that, in the final analysis, is no genuine expertise at all.
There are some scant signs of hope. Conservative mainstream newspaper Welt has now admitted that Ukraine will lose the war (wakey, wakey, but better late than never). NIUS, a right-of-center German news site with great reach, has finally at least broached the issue of selective, misleading expertise. NIUS has rightly called for a “reckoning” (“Aufarbeitung”) of the scandalous, lazy, and often incompetent one-sidedness that has taken root and for more access for alternative voices.
We will see if things will change. I would not bet on it. One thing, however, is sure: A country that systematically rewards conformism over professionalism and independence of mind does not only insult its citizens’ intelligence. It is also likely to pay a real price in bad decisions and political fiascos caused by them. Germany has started doing so already. Alas, Berlin’s elites seem determined to stay this pernicious course.
The clip pokes fun at the Western tradition of blaming Russia’s president for everything from energy bills to migration
RT has released a new holiday video, with a touch of AI, spoofing Europe’s tendency to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for virtually every problem, from power bills to migration.
The clip was released on Tuesday and shared on X by RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who wrote: “Tis the season… to blame Putin for all of Europe’s woes. Sing with me.”
Set in a cozy, Christmas-decorated living room, the video opens with the caption ‘Christmas Eve 2025 / Somewhere in Europe’ and follows a European family as a series of gloomy moments intrude on the festivities – all accompanied by a children’s choir singing the chorus: “It’s all because of Putin.”
The choir runs through a list of holiday-season woes, singing: “Power bills too high to pay? / It’s all because of Putin, hey!”
The clip becomes more absurd as the choir sings: “Migrants settled by your Christmas tree?” we see armed militants from war-torn countries by the family fireplace singing along: “It’s all because of Putin, see!”
Tis the season… to blame Putin for all of Europe's woes.
Sing with me.
Migrants settled by your Christmas tree? It's all because of Putin, see! Power bills too high to pay? It's all because of Putin – hey! pic.twitter.com/bjHleq9LG2
“Your taxes fund the war instead? It’s all because what Putin said!” one line goes, as the scene shows a Ukrainian soldier amid the Christmas setting, taking away the family’s valuables.
One segment shows an AI-generated version of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. As the choir sings “Bureaucrats are on your back?” the von der Leyen lookalike delivers the punchline: “It’s all because of Putin – whack!”
Another scene shows Santa taking children’s presents, as the choir sings: “Santa robbed your kids this year?” We see Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky wearing a Santa outfit, with a Ukrainian seal on the hat, who sings in a Zelensky-like raspy voice: “It’s all because of Putin, dear!”
Toward the end, the video shifts into a montage of TV-style segments featuring British journalist Piers Morgan and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, alongside footage framed as Euronews, repeating the chorus – before cutting back to the family’s ruined Christmas scene.
The video closes with an address to viewers: ‘Dear Europeans, save your blind faith for Santa!’
Brussels and Moscow have reached a point of clarity, and it is bleak
Over the past year, relations between Russia and the European Union have acquired an unusual quality: clarity. Not warmth, not dialogue, not even managed hostility, but clarity.
In November 2024, Russia quietly renamed the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Pan-European Cooperation as the Department for European Issues. The explanation was blunt. Cooperation no longer existed, problems did. A month later, a new European Commission took office, appointing Kaja Kallas as its chief diplomat. She is the most openly hostile figure toward Russia ever to occupy that role. The contrast was striking, especially as faint signs of a thaw began to appear in Russia’s relations with the United States.
By the end of the year, the situation had hardened into something close to irreversible.
The most obvious red line is the question of frozen Russian assets. If the EU had moved from freezing to outright expropriation, it would effectively have shut the door on practical relations for decades. Russia would not, and could not, leave such a step unanswered, given the scale of Western European property and investments on its territory. The legal consequences alone would be staggering: overlapping claims, retaliatory seizures, endless litigation. Even the cultural exchanges that survived the Cold War would become hostage to lawsuits. Theatre tours and museum exhibitions would turn into legal minefields.
Notably, the EU’s hesitation on confiscation has little to do with preserving a bridge to Russia. It is driven by fear. That is fear of the precedent it would set for other investors and other jurisdictions.
It would be wrong, however, to say that relations between Russia and the EU are worse than ever. History offers darker chapters. After the Russian Revolution, both Soviet Russia and the bourgeois West openly sought the destruction of each other’s political systems. That confrontation was existential. Yet even then, ties began to form in the 1920s.
The difference lies elsewhere. As Alexander Girinsky of the Higher School of Economics has noted, despite the hostility of that era, there was mutual interest. The Soviet state absorbed Western technologies and ideas. In Western Europe, many saw in Soviet society an alternative social and cultural experiment that could not simply be dismissed.
Today, that curiosity has vanished.
Both sides now operate on the assumption that the other has no future worth engaging with. There is nothing to learn, nothing to borrow, nothing to adapt. At most, there is a need to contain, to fence off, to manage buffer zones. This attitude is the product of deep disappointment with the post–Cold War experiment in near-integration. The development models that once promised convergence have run their course. For the EU in particular, Russia has once again become a convenient ‘other,’ a historically familiar antipode against which identity can be defined. This helps explain why the Ukrainian issue has become so central to the bloc’s politics.
The divide now runs deeper than open conflict. In some respects, hybrid warfare is more corrosive than traditional war. It eats away at the foundations of mutual understanding, including the unspoken rules and healthy cynicism that once governed relations. Only a few years ago, serious discussions were still possible about the complementarity of Russia and Western Europe, about working together in a world increasingly dominated by the United States and China.
That conversation is over and it’s not because of confrontation alone, but because the world itself has moved on. The era of grand, continent-spanning communities is fading. Power is fragmenting, not consolidating.
Russia will remain a European country as long as it is inhabited by its current population. Culture, history, and geography do not disappear. But shared roots do not automatically produce political closeness. They never have. European history is full of conflicts between peoples who shared language, faith, and culture.
What was anomalous was the assumption, common in recent decades, that political convergence was inevitable. That illusion has now collapsed. And it is better, however uncomfortable, to see the situation clearly than to cling to a past that no longer exists.
This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.
Defense Minister Israel Katz is mulling the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza in defiance of the US-brokered peace plan
Israel “will never leave Gaza,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said, mulling the idea of reestablishing illegal settlements in the Palestinian enclave. The remarks triggered widespread backlash, prompting Katz to backtrack on his assertion somewhat.
The minister made the statement on Tuesday while participating in a ceremony to mark the opening of 1,200 new homes in the occupied West Bank’s Beit El settlement. In his speech, Katz pledged to rebuild the settlements in northern Gaza that Israel abandoned back in 2005.
“We are deep inside Gaza, and we will never leave Gaza, there will be no such thing,” he stated.
“When the time comes, God willing, we will establish in northern Gaza Nahal outposts in place of the communities that were uprooted,” Katz added.
The minister was referring to a type of military-agricultural outpost established by the country’s troops in both Israel and Israeli-occupied territories throughout the second half of the 20th century. The bulk of those outposts were ultimately converted into permanent civilian settlements.
The defense minister’s remarks are at odds with the policy voiced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly said West Jerusalem has no plans to resettle Gaza. His statements also collide with President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which has induced the warring sides to enter a fragile truce. Upcoming phases of the US plan envision Israel withdrawing from the Palestinian enclave and explicitly state that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.”
The minister’s remarks have drawn criticism from various parties, who accuse Katz of making inflammatory statements at a “critical” moment for the country’s national security and spurning international partners. “While the government votes with one hand in favor of the Trump plan, with the other hand it sells fables about isolated settlement nuclei in the Strip,” former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot wrote on X.
The backlash has prompted Katz to walk back his remarks somewhat, with his office stating that “the government has no intention of establishing settlements in the Gaza Strip,” asserting the comments were made “solely in a security context.”
