Report Russia

Anyone casting their mind back to the Western media’s reporting of the battle to liberate eastern Aleppo from the Al-Qaeda led Jihadis in the second half of last year will remember the vivid reporting of supposed Russian and Syrian government atrocities the Western media and Western governments engaged in during the battle.
Thus the Russians and the Syrians were accused of terror bombings of civilians, of deliberately bombing hospitals, with the Syrians specifically accused of ‘barrel-bombing’ ie. of dropping inaccurate improvised home made bombs to kill civilians.

During his press conference following his meeting with President Macron, US President Trump spoke with hope and some pride about the ceasefire in southern Syria he agreed with Russian President Putin during their meeting on the margins of the G20 summit
Here is what President Trump said

In the latest Crosstalk in which I appeared with Peter Lavelle I made the point at the very end that much of the US’s anger towards Russia comes from a US belief that the US won the Cold War and that Russia refuses to behave like a defeated country by submitting to this ‘fact’.
I said that if there is to be any future to the US-Russia relationship the US has to move beyond this.
I also said that much of the anger in the US towards Donald Trump is precisely because he has had the realism to move beyond it.

A consistent pattern of the Russiagate affair is that the New York Times or the Washington Post “expose” what is presented as some dark and terrible twist to the story of Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.
The rest of the news media and the Democrats in Congress following up by greeting the “revelation” with a mixture of enthusiasm and feigned horror.
The days and weeks pass, it turns out that nothing of importance has been “exposed” and that the “revelation” is not so dark or terrible after all.
At that point it quietly drops out of the news.

In my recent discussion of the Trump-Putin summit on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg I spoke of the intense resistance the US has put up in the past to proposals from Russia for a general treaty regulating the use of cyber weapons.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray, who is a friend of Julian Assange and who has claimed to have direct personal knowledge of the DNC and Podesta emails found their way to Wikileaks, has written another long statement on the Russiagate scandal.

The single most important fact about the Trump-Putin meeting is that it went on for 2 hours, four times longer than planned.  What was supposed to be a brief encounter on the sidelines of the G20 summit became a deep and animated conversation the two men didn’t want to end.

US President Trump kicked off his trip to Europe to attend the G20 summit with a stopover yesterday in Poland.
That was neither wrong nor inappropriate.  Since he became US President Donald Trump has been short of friends in Europe, with the public of all the big European states – Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain – all to a greater or lesser degree hostile to him, and with his personal relations with the G20 summit’s host – Chancellor Merkel of Germany – already extremely difficult.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has now published the complete text of the Russian-Chinese joint statement on the Korean conflict.
Since this document is not easy to find, I set out the full text with the key points highlighted

One of the most interesting revelations from President Assad’s visit last week to Russia’s Khmeimim air base in Syria is that the Russians have deployed one of their most unusual weapons systems there: the BMPT-72 Terminator.
Here is a picture of President Assad looking at this remarkable machine