Republicans in the US Congress are squeezing President Biden on Foreign Aid with a crackdown on immigration at their border….
Ukraine is trying to get China to help work a settlement with Putin maybe in a summit in Sweden….
Hungary has been warned that holding out on EU aid for Ukraine could risk it being sidelined by the organization…
Nobody believe’s Putin would agree right now to a settlement which includes only the territory that Russia currently has …At least not before the upcoming Russian elections in March…
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Russia and Ukraine continue to dispute the circumstances surrounding the crash of a Russian military transport plane in the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. The crash killed all 74 people onboard. Russia claims the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoW who were to be swapped, and that Ukrainian forces shot it down.
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The black boxes from the plane have been delivered to a special laboratory in Moscow for analysis, Russian state media said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called for full clarity over the crash, accusing Moscow of “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners of war”.
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The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has lost an appeal against his arrest, Russian state news agencies report. A court in Moscow extended the pretrial detention until the end of March, meaning the journalist will have spent at least a year behind bars in Russia.
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The former Nato security general George Robertson has told Sky News that the Ukrainians are “fighting for us” and “we need to do more”. He said if Russia were to defeat Ukraine, the “rest of us” would then be in danger because Putin would be “fuelled by any success that he has in Ukraine”.
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Ukraine has invited Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, to participate in peace talks, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s top adviser has said. Switzerland has agreed to hold the summit, which a number of world leaders will attend, but no venue or date has been set just yet.
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In a letter to House Republicans, the speaker, Mike Johnson, warned that an immigration deal under consideration in the Senate may be “dead on arrival” in his chamber. The Republican leader’s statement bodes ill for the bargaining in the Senate, which is seen as crucial to unlocking GOP support for aid to Ukraine, as well as for Israel and Taiwan….
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Jan 26, 2024 – ISW Press
The Kremlin and US officials rejected rumors about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to engage in meaningful negotiations amid continued indications from the Kremlin that Russia seeks nothing less than full Ukrainian and Western capitulation.