logo
Europe 'doomed to war with Russia,' as Putin puppet demands strikes

Europe 'doomed to war with Russia,' as Putin puppet demands strikes

Daily Mirror14 hours ago
Russian state TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov has called Britain's prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz satanists
A Russian state TV presenter has made the shocking claim that his country should make pre-emptive strikes on Europe as it is inevitable the two sides will go to war. Well-known journalist Vladimir Solovyov alleged that Britain's prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz are all satanists.
On a TV broadcast to the Russian people, Mr Solovyov said: "They've discussed how they support one another... in their fight against Christianity. Satanism is the one thing that unites all of them. The Democratic Party, is a party of satanists. The European elites are satanists. You won't find a single believer among them. Starmer, Macron and Merz. All of them are enemies of religion."


"We are witnessing the divisions that are now underway, this is a fight between religious goodness and absolute evil. At this point all jokes are simply over. We see that the Nazis are getting ready for war. They can't stop. Europe is doomed to war with Russia.
"They won't stop until we carry out a destructive preventive strike." Mr Solovyov has been described as Putin's puppet. Just last month he appeared on state TV and demanded a strike on Britain with Poseidon high speed atomic underwater drones - or Sarmat, the Satan-2, giant 208-ton intercontinental silo-launched 15,880mph nuclear weapon, the size of a 14-storey tower block.
Mr Solovyov - whose propaganda themes are choreographed by the Kremlin which pays for his TV show - said he would deploy both Poseidon and Sarmat.
Just yesterday, Russia gave an ultimatum to Britain that it must halt all military training for Ukrainian troops for the war to end.
Supplies of arms must also be stopped, according to Rodion Miroshnik, a special envoy to Vladimir Putin 's foreign ministry. The Russian demand came amid signs Donald Trump is ready to impose swingeing sanctions on the Kremlin over its refusal to end the war.

The weekend saw the most intense aerial onslaught of the conflict on Ukraine with 537 strikes by Putin's forces, including the downing of an F-16 warplane with the death of pilot F-16 pilot Lt-Col Maksym Ustymenko.
The pilot was posthumously awarded the Hero of Ukraine honour by Volodymyr Zelensky for 'defending our people from yet another massive Russian attack'. He was 'one of our very best' and 'losing people like him is deeply painful'.
Moscow made clear its aim to kill off Britain's Operation Interflex training for Ukraine, which has drilled tens of thousands of fighters for battle.
'The participation or complicity of other countries is a key issue that must be stopped in all forms — including weapons deliveries and the training of Ukrainian militants,' he said.
'All of this amounts to direct complicity in the conflict. Halting these programmes would be a signal of willingness to seek a resolution.'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Is Britain ready for France's most controversial novel?
Is Britain ready for France's most controversial novel?

Spectator

time3 hours ago

  • Spectator

Is Britain ready for France's most controversial novel?

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France's most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn't a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a 'certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced'. More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist. Yet what made The Camp of the Saints such a sensation when it was published – and increasingly today among the online right – was its narrative. Raspail explained the idea for it came to him in 1972 as he looked out at the Mediterranean from the Côte d'Azur. 'The immigration problem didn't exist yet,' he said. 'The question suddenly arose: 'What if they came?'' In The Camp of the Saints, a million migrants from India land in the south of France in an armada of small boats. The left welcomes them with open arms and cries of: 'We're all from the Ganges now!' The French government requests that the rest of Europe accepts some of the arrivals, which it does. Seeing the generosity of Europe, more migrants from other Third World countries decide to head to the Old Continent for a new life. Europe collapses. The Camp of the Saints was savaged by much of the American press when it was published across the Atlantic in 1975, and not just because of its language. 'Preposterous' was the reaction of the New York Times, which mocked Raspail's 'fancy that sometime in the near future the Third World, protesting the unequal division of the world's goods and western indifference to its misery, strikes back'. In 2019, the NYT returned to the attack in an article entitled 'A Racist Book's Malign and Lingering Influence'. According to the paper, 'what Raspail described as a 'parable' came to be seen as a canonical text in white nationalist circles'. It namechecked Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump as two politicians influenced by the book. Given its reputation, The Camp of the Saints is possibly the closest thing we have to an actual 'banned book' in the English-speaking world. It has never been published in Britain, and while it was reissued by a small American publisher in 1995, secondhand paperbacks cost upwards of £200 on Amazon. But that is about to change. The novel is soon to be released in English again, this time by an independent American publisher called Vauban Books, run by Ethan Rundell. Rundell is a Francophile who studied in Paris in the 1990s (as well as Berkeley and Trinity College, Cambridge) and worked for many years in France as a translator. He founded Vauban Books in 2023 with Louis Betty, a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Their mission is to translate into English books in French that are victims of 'ideological curation and gatekeeping… some voices are amplified, often for no other reason than they flatter the prevailing doxa on this side of the Atlantic; other voices, some of them quite prominent, are neglected or even actively suppressed when what they have to say runs counter to it'. Among the authors published so far by Vauban are Renaud Camus, the originator of the 'Great Replacement Theory' – which holds that ethnic French and white European populations are being replaced by non-white people. Camus was recently barred from entering Britain because the government said his 'presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good'. Rundell tells me it was a 'great honour' to be the translator of Camus. 'To publish Camus is to discover just how far we have gone in the direction of a post-literary society,' he says. 'His words are on all lips. Everyone has an opinion about him. And yet shockingly few people still seem capable of marshalling the basic curiosity – or perhaps I should say intellectual self-regard – needed to consult the source before rendering judgment on it.' He believes the same applies to Raspail, which is why Vauban is reissuing his best-known work in September. 'It has become an object of reflexive condemnation, even though many of those condemning it have never read a word that Raspail wrote,' says Rundell. 'On purely liberal grounds – informed debate, the free circulation of ideas, the need to make important primary texts available to the public at large – the case for publishing it is self-evident.' Even some supporters of the book take issue with many of the expressions it uses, but Rundell is braced for the criticism: 'I expect some people will be very angry that we are bringing it out, not least because it gives the lie to the imaginary, parallel world the progressive intelligentsia has constructed for itself and still seeks to impose upon the rest of us.' Bien-pensants hate the book, adds Rundell, because it 'relentlessly mocks that same intelligentsia, which in many ways has hardly changed since the book was first published in 1973'. Vauban Books hopes to have The Camp of the Saints ready for pre-order in Britain and Europe by the end of this month, although Rundell says he fears the distributor might 'refuse to carry the title'. With that in mind he intends to contact Toby Young's Free Speech Union. 'There may well be a battle ahead,' says Rundell. The Camp of the Saints isn't a great book, but it is an important one. Its concern about mass immigration can often shift into revelling in racist tropes. In that sense, it speaks to our current debates, where the line between demographic worries and outright nativism is frequently blurred. But as Rod Dreher in the American Conservative has written: 'You don't have to endorse Raspail's radical racialist vision to recognise that there is diagnostic value in his novel.'

CIA review criticizes procedures but not conclusions of intelligence report on 2016 Russia election interference
CIA review criticizes procedures but not conclusions of intelligence report on 2016 Russia election interference

NBC News

time3 hours ago

  • NBC News

CIA review criticizes procedures but not conclusions of intelligence report on 2016 Russia election interference

WASHINGTON — CIA officials failed in some cases to follow standard procedures in an intelligence analysis of Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election, according to an internal review declassified on Wednesday. Intelligence officers were given an unusually short timeline for the analysis, there was 'excessive involvement' by senior leaders and staff were given uneven access to crucial intelligence about Russia, the 'lessons-learned' review stated. But the review did not refute the findings of the 2017 intelligence assessment that Russia had waged an information warfare campaign designed to undermine Americans' confidence in the electoral process, damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump 's prospects in the 2016 election. 'While the overall assessment was deemed defensible, the identified procedural anomalies and tradecraft issues highlight critical lessons for handling controversial or politically charged topics,' the review stated. Trump and his allies have long rejected intelligence and other reporting indicating that Russia employed false information and propaganda to try to influence the 2016 election and tip the scales in Trump's favor. They have accused intelligence and law enforcement officials of plotting to tie Trump to Russia and cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump's electoral victory in 2016. A special counsel appointed under the first Trump administration looked extensively into how the CIA crafted its assessment but filed no criminal charges and reported no clear evidence that the process was tainted by political bias. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation in 2020 concurred with the 2017 intelligence assessment and found no reason to dispute its conclusions. In Trump's second presidential term, his deputies have vowed to bring more transparency to the intelligence community and prevent any attempt to politicize its work. CIA Director John Ratcliffe ordered the internal review this year and declassified it on Wednesday, according to the spy agency. The intelligence assessment of the 2016 vote, which was requested by then President Barack Obama after the November election, found that Russia sought to undermine public faith in the democratic process, denigrate Clinton and that Moscow 'aspired' to help Trump win the election. Two senior leaders of a CIA mission center focusing on Russia objected to including the conclusion that Russia aimed to help secure Trump's victory, according to the internal review. They argued that the view was mainly supported by a single intelligence report while other judgments were backed up by more information. The review stated that the assessment was conducted in an unusually short timeline. Instead of having months to prepare a complex and politically sensitive analysis, the authors had 'less than a week to draft the assessment' and 'less than two days to formally coordinate it' with other intelligence officers. Multiple intelligence officers 'said they felt 'jammed' by the compressed timeline,' according to the review. The review said top CIA officials were heavily involved in the assessment effort, which 'was highly unusual in both scope and intensity.' As a result, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research were 'entirely shut out' of the analysis, which was a 'significant deviation' from standard practice in the intelligence community, according to the review. Authors of the 2016 assessment and other CIA officers also 'strongly opposed' including a reference in the analysis to the so-called 'Trump dossier' compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The dossier had unverified allegations about Trump colluding with Russia. In the end, a summary of the dossier was included in an annex, with a disclaimer that it was not used 'to reach the analytic conclusions' in the assessment. The review of the 2016 assessment also found reasons to praise the effort, saying much of the team's work showed 'robust' tradecraft with extensive sourcing and there was no sign of systemic problems. ​​John Brennan, who was CIA director at the time of the assessment, told NBC News on Wednesday he was aware of the review but had not had a chance to read it yet.

Putin's stranglehold on the Russian press
Putin's stranglehold on the Russian press

Spectator

time4 hours ago

  • Spectator

Putin's stranglehold on the Russian press

Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian press has been slowly, methodically strangled, which has forced existential choices on newspaper and TV journalists. Twenty-one have been killed – beaten, poisoned or gunned down. Others, such as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, highly regarded investigative reporters, have been forced into exile. Yet others, like the 'dear friends' of this book's title, have chosen a different path – to cleave ever closer to the regime. The authors tell the fascinating story of those choices and allow us a glimpse of why they were taken. In 2000, Soldatov and Borogan were employed by the political department of the newspaper Izvestiya, where they made new friends – slightly older and more experienced journalists, whom they envied for their access to people in power and admired for their intelligence and bohemian glamour. This group's ideas about Russia seemed a bit 'retro': Petya Akopov envisaged the country as a spiritual power, in contrast to the West's moral decadence; Zhenya Baranov had pan-Slav leanings; while their patron, Evgeny Krutikov, was obsessed with the secret services. But at the time these views appeared eccentric, provocative and certainly harmless. At first, Izvestiya was free enough to allow some criticism of government policy; but after barely six months, Soldatov and Borogan were squeezed out by increasing demands to toe the Putinist line. As they arrived at the office to clear their desks, they noticed a new employee – a nondescript, secretive man with no media experience. Just ten years after the 1991 putsch, the security services were back on the editorial floor. Moving from publication to publication, the pair found ways to get into print for most of the next decade. In the unlikely pages of Versia, the offshoot of an unscrupulous tabloid called Sovershchenno Sekretno (Completely Secret), they published an exposé of the official account of the Nord-Ost crisis, in which hundreds of hostages trapped in a theatre by Chechen suicide bombers were gassed by the security services. The FSB responded by harassing them and the paper for months, and this set a pattern. Subsequent employers crumpled under pressure from above. Each time the pair published a too-truthful report they'd be out on the street again. For some years, interestingly, the principle that the press should act as a check on state power still held true among their 'dear friends' from Izvestiya days, who helped them get articles printed. And for a while both Akopov and Krutikov were even happy to cooperate with Soldatov and Borogan on the website they'd set up, providing analysis and comment on Russia's security and intelligence services. In 2008, the authors' efforts to investigate the murder of their colleague Anna Politkovskaya got them sacked from their final paper. Bravely, they clung on in Moscow, writing books for PublicAffairs, their New York publisher, that were later translated into Russian. 'It felt as if we and our friends had discovered some sort of arrangement whereby we could coexist with the country's political regime.' One day, the liberals hoped, Putin would be gone and things would return to 'normal'. Their Izvestiya friends, meanwhile, had gone a different route, straight to the heart of the regime. By 2014, Baranov was a presenter for Channel 1, the Kremlin propaganda channel, pushing a narrative of Nazis in Ukraine and Nato aggression, while his wife crossed the barely discernible line between state and press to become deputy minister of culture the following year. Akopov is now known as the author of a triumphalist essay, published in February 2022: 'Putin has resolved the Ukrainian question.' It was swiftly removed from the internet when the Ukrainians stopped the Russian army outside Kyiv. All three are subject to sanctions. Why did these intelligent, well-travelled people agree to be the mouthpieces for state misinformation? Basically it was their only option if they wanted to stay in Russia and work as journalists. Financial need and family and health pressures weighed on them, as on anyone, and general lawlessness and corruption in Russia encourage conformity in all but the bravest. The emotional hangover of the Soviet Union is also considerable – nostalgia for the USSR's former status, the certainties of their childhood and family trauma working themselves out in complicated ways. Perhaps even more significant is another Soviet legacy – a profound cynicism that reasserted itself, as powerfully as ever, once Putin's direction was clear. Many of the propagandists are connected to Soviet dynasties such as the Mikhalkovs, who seem quite comfortable with telling lies in return for success and comfort. Trying to gauge the views of ordinary Muscovites, Soldatov and Borodan noted a collective determination to enjoy this rare moment of Russian prosperity without rocking the boat. Their interviewees often clammed up, snapping: 'We just want to trust our security services!' Yet almost before people had noticed, the Russia they knew had been transformed 'from a highly globalised and aspirational society to a dismal walled-in fortress'. In a flash, the moment when they could have chosen another future had passed.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store