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It is now becoming boringly predictable, but Obama’s CIA’s chief John Brennan is just the latest in a seemingly unending series of US officials who is unable to cite any evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee Brennan said “I don’t know that such collusion existed”.
This admission is important since by general agreement Brennan and the CIA were the branch of the US intelligence community who were most aggressive in arguing the case for Russian meddling in the US election.

Over the last few hours the Western media has filled with stories of how during their recent meeting in the Oval Office US President Donald Trump supposedly told Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that former FBI Director James Comey was a “nut job”, which was why he dismissed him.
The story, which first appeared in the New York Times, is very specific

Rod Rosenstein, the newly appointed Deputy Attorney General whose memorandum on former FBI Director Comey’s failings precipitated President Trump’s decision to dismiss former FBI Director Comey, has appointed Comey’s predecessor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, to supervise the FBI’s Russiagate investigation.
Rosenstein’s announcement reads as follows

Russian President Putin has weighed in to the furore surrounding the allegation that President Trump disclosed ‘highly classified information’ to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov during their meeting in the Oval Office.
Describing the allegation as nonsense, Putin has offered to make available to Congress the complete transcript of the conversation so that they can see for themselves that no ‘highly classified information’ and no secrets were discussed.

Russian officials have given a withering response over the course of the day to the Washington Post’s story that US President Donald Trump leaked “highly classified information” to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during their recent meeting in the Oval Office.
I have discussed this story and explained why it is a cynical attempt to spin a standard diplomatic exchange into something sinister here.

Russian President Putin in answer to journalists’ questions in Beijing has squarely laid the blame on US foreign policy for causing North Korea to launch a programme to acquire nuclear weapons.
This is how President Putin spoke about North Korea’s programme during a press conference he gave in Beijing today

Russia and Saudi Arabia – the two biggest oil producers alongside the US – announced today Monday that they had agreed to extend oil production cuts for a further 9 months to March 2018.
The decision was announced in the form of a statement issued by the Russian and Saudi Energy Ministers, Alexander Novak and Khalid al-Falih.  In their statement they said they would do “whatever it takes” to rebalance the oil market to eliminate the current supply overhang.

Amid the shifting sands of the Trump administrations foreign policy positions, Reuters has reported that President Trump and Russian President Putin are scheduled to hold their second publicized phone conversation in a few hours time.
The talk is supposed to take place at around 12:30 p.m. Washington time, according Putin’s spokesman Dimitri Peskov.

Despite President Trump’s recent policy reversals, talk from within the administration claims he still personally wants better relations with Russia, though most of the officials within his administration supposedly disagree with him 

A few weeks ago protests in Russia called by the Western-backed ‘liberal’ opposition activist and blogger Alexey Navalny attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the Western media.  This was despite the fact that the turnout in those protests – probably in the region of 15-20,000 people across the whole country (not the 60,000 people the ‘liberal opposition’ itself claims) – was hardly impressive.
Since then there have been two other attempts to stage more such protests.