2022/3/15RT

Zelensky reveals Putin meeting goal
The Ukrainian president outlines his primary objective
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on Sunday night that the main goal for Kiev’s negotiators is to pave the way for a direct meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. He also hopes that the talks will lead to security guarantees.

“Our delegates have a clear task – to do all they can so the meeting between presidents takes place, the meeting I’m sure the people are waiting for,” he said in a video address published on the president’s official Telegram channel.

According to him, the goal of the negotiations is to obtain “effective” security guarantees, “not like in Budapest or like on our skies,” but guarantees about which the Ukrainian side could “say: this works, these are the guarantees.”

Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994 along with Russia, the US, and UK, in which Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and agreed to give up its own nuclear armaments, while receiving security guarantees from the other sides in return.

Ukraine claimed the treaty was breached by Russia in 2014 when the neighboring state “occupied” Crimea and the Donetsk and Lugansk republics – allegations that Moscow denied. In February, Zelensky claimed that the Budapest Memorandum no longer guarantees security to Ukraine, so the country can reverse its decision to not hold nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian officials have appealed to NATO and their allies to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the wake of the Russian offensive since the first days of the conflict, which broke out in late February. Western leaders have rejected these requests due to fears that it would lead to a direct conflict with Russia and the US-led military bloc, since NATO aircraft would be forced to engage in fights and shoot down Russian planes in Ukrainian airspace.

The new round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is set to take place on Monday via video conference. According to the Russian side, there has been “significant progress” and the sides could soon come to an agreement and develop documents to sign, while a representative from Kiev said the two parties are approaching compromise and the Russian side is “already seeing things much more adequately.”

Moscow attacked its neighbor in late February, following a seven-year standoff over Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk Agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to regularize the status of the regions within the state of Ukraine.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.



Russia sends message to foreign mercenaries in Ukraine
The military says it knows the location of all foreign fighters in Ukraine and vows to continue targeting them

West accused of engineering ‘artificial default’ in Russia
Moscow is ready to pay off its debts, but half of the nation’s forex reserves are frozen abroad
Washington and its allies want to push Russia into an “artificial default” by making it impossible to pay off the country’s foreign debts despite having the money to do so, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Monday.

“The freezing of foreign currency accounts of the Bank of Russia and of the Russian government can be regarded as the desire of a number of foreign countries to engineer an artificial default which has no real economic grounds,” the minister said.

The latest wave of Western sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine targeted Russia’s banking and financial sectors, with nearly half of the country’s foreign currency reserves, worth $300 billion, frozen by foreign central banks.

This critical food item is about to run out in Europe
The halt of exports from Ukraine could change region’s frying habits

Europe now faces a deficit in sunflower oil because exports from Ukraine have stopped, with the available stocks projected to last between 4 and 6 weeks, the EU vegetable oil industry association has warned.

“Beyond that period, it is likely that [the] lack of availability of crude sunflower seed oil and limited alternatives will lead to a shortfall of refined/bottled sunflower seed oil on the European market, and that this will be felt up to the consumer level,” reads the latest FEDIOL press release.

How to Detox Spike Protein After COVID or Vaccine
Whether you’ve had a COVID injection or the natural infection, you likely have dangerous spike protein remaining in your tissues and organs, including your brain.

Israel hit by ‘largest ever’ cyberattack – media
Websites of government agencies and the prime minister’s office were targeted

The websites of Israel’s interior, health, justice, and welfare ministries, as well as the prime minister’s office, were taken offline on Monday in what a defense source claimed was the largest ever cyberattack against Israel. Authorities believe a state actor or large organization was responsible.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the cyber strike, citing a “defense establishment source” who claimed it to be the worst ever to hit the Jewish state. The attack reportedly targeted sites using the ‘gov.il’ domain, which serves all Israeli government websites except defense-related ones.

The government database is one such site, and a potential target for cybercriminals.

Access to some of the affected sites was restored on Monday night, but Israel’s defense establishment and the National Cyber Directorate have declared a state of emergency while websites of strategic importance – such as those related to the country’s water and power infrastructure – can be checked for signs of compromise.

The official cited by Haaretz said that the government believes “a state actor or large organization carried out the attack,” but said that the culprit could not yet be identified.

However, Israeli journalists have already speculated that Iran is to blame. Israel and Iran have for years traded cyberattacks, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) hacked CCTV cameras and employee databases at the ports of Haifa and Ashdod last month.

Conflict between Tehran and Tel Aviv also went kinetic in recent days, with Israel killing two IRGC officers in an airstrike in Syria last week, and the IRGC responding with a ballistic missile strike against an alleged Israeli “strategic center” in Erbil, Iraq on Saturday.