Romania drone incident, response to NATO threats: Key takeaways from Putin’s chat with journalists

Romania drone incident, response to NATO threats: Key takeaways from Putin’s chat with journalists

RT

Russian President Vladimir Putin took questions from reporters during his trip to Kazakhstan on Friday, providing an update on the Ukraine conflict and tensions with NATO in Europe.

The president also commented on the drone intrusion in Romania, which NATO blamed on Russia, and touched on foreign policy debates in Armenia, a former Soviet state and Russia’s longtime ally.

Russia has the upper hand on the battlefield

The Ukraine conflict is nearing its end as the Russian military continues its offensive on all fronts, Putin said. He said it would be “unwise” to name a specific timeline, however.

“The situation on the battlefield gives reason to believe that (the conflict) is drawing to a close,” Putin said.

Putin said that although Moscow maintains “certain contacts,” no peace talks are being held at the moment.

While the US has been preoccupied with the war in Iran, some EU officials have begun floating the idea of resuming talks with Russia, which were suspended in 2022.

The president reiterated that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO or EU members, dismissing claims to the contrary as “brazen lies.” He reiterated Russia’s position that it was forced to intervene in Ukraine after Kiev failed to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk accords with the breakaway Donbass republics, which later voted to become part of Russia.

Western leaders are using the conflict to justify “unreasonable” military spending hikes, Putin argued. “They should not mislead their own people,” he added.

At the same time, Putin said Russia has the capability to “raze to the ground”any country that attempts to attack it.

He was responding to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys, who said this month that, in the event of a conflict, NATO must demonstrate that it “can break into” Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, an exclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Putin warned that Russia would treat all Ukrainian drone launch sites as legitimate targets, even if they operated from the Baltic states.

Putin called for an “objective investigation” into a drone strike on a residential building in the Romanian city of Galati near the Ukrainian border on Friday, which injured two people. Romania, together with its NATO allies, blamed Russia for the intrusion.

The president said Romania should provide “objective data” about the incident, just as Russia handed over decoded flight data from a Ukrainian drone shot down last year en route to one of Putin’s residences. Putin also recalled how suspected Ukrainian drones had veered into the Baltic states and Finland in recent months.

Putin denounced the Western media for what he called making fools of their audience in order to channel more money to Ukraine. He also blasted foreign outlets for what he said was their failure to cover Ukrainian drone strikes on a college in Starobelsk last week, which killed 21 students and injured more than 40 others.

“Not a single word was said about the tragedy in Starobelsk, where our children were deliberately killed. Not a single word, as though it never happened,” Putin said.

Moscow previously criticized outlets including CNN and the BBC for declining an invitation to travel to Starobelsk.

Karen Hao: “I Saw Up Close The Dark Reality Of OpenAI’s Race To Create God”

Karen Hao: “I Saw Up Close The Dark Reality Of OpenAI’s Race To Create God”

Madeleine Spence via The Sunday Times

For the last three weeks the world has watched as two of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, engaged in a public mudslinging battle through a California court about an organisation they co-founded: OpenAI. The evidence provided, including memos, emails and text messages, all gave a tantalisingly rare window into the origins of the company.

Karen Hao, however, already knew the story well. In fact, watching the trial she felt vindicated. “It was good to see lots of what I had discovered being laid out,” she tells me when we meet in London a few days after the trial ends.

Hao was given unprecedented access to OpenAI’s offices in 2019, and has since spoken to hundreds of former employees and people within Altman’s inner circle to piece together the story of how OpenAI went from an ideological non-profit, with the purpose of “saving humanity”, to an engine of record financial investment and controversy (last week The Wall Street Journal reported it was preparing to file for a public listing, expecting a valuation in excess of $1 trillion). It is the central theme of her book, Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination, published last month, in which she argues that the maker of ChatGPT sparked a race for technological progress which is rapacious, extractive and bad for humanity.

When Hao first arrived at OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco in 2019, the company’s chief technology officer greeted her with a tentative smile. “We’ve never given someone so much access before,” Greg Brockman told Hao, inviting her to embed herself in their company for a profile piece she was writing.

Two weeks earlier, on July 22, 2019, OpenAI had received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. For Hao, a young technology reporter who had studied engineering and worked for a Silicon Valley start-up before joining the magazine MIT Technology Review, it was a career-defining opportunity. It was also the moment that the scales fell from her eyes. “Right off the bat, I started realising that something was not right,” says Hao, 32.

Hao had become a bit of a cynic after spending too much time around Silicon Valley start-ups masquerading as noble endeavours. But OpenAI, which had been founded in 2015, was supposed to be different. It was a non-profit that had dedicated itself to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the most powerful form of AI yet conceived. The idea was that this superintelligence could replicate, and then surpass, human intelligence. In OpenAI’s telling, it could become powerful enough to destroy the world, or to create global utopia, solving problems humanity wasn’t smart enough to.

They wanted it to become the latter, and OpenAI would be a transparent and collaborative tool to enable the world to get there.

Hao was surprised to find, then, what she considered a distinct lack of transparency. She was chaperoned everywhere. She wasn’t allowed to visit certain floors or attend certain meetings. “As I was talking to researchers, I noticed that they kept being very nervous about saying things they weren’t supposed to, which was bizarre, because the entire premise of OpenAI was they were going to share everything,” says Hao.

A security guard was given a picture of her face and told to be on the lookout if she appeared unapproved on the premises. Employees were warned on Slack not to speak to Hao beyond “sanctioned conversations”. The atmosphere was “competitive, secretive and insular”.

Speaking to insiders later on, she would hear how what had begun as an organisation throwing ideas at the wall “to see what stuck” had been transformed under Altman’s singular obsession: to achieve AGI before everyone else. This included competitors, such as Google, but also states, such as China.

Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But, Hao says, their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. She calls it “the ideological pursuit of the machine god”.

What most disillusioned Hao, however, was how this relentless pursuit of superintelligence was moulding the company and the industry.

OpenAI decided that the best way to achieve AGI was to take its large language models (LLMs) and dramatically scale them up. This meant “pouring ever more data into them and training them on supercomputers larger than anyone has ever built in human history”, says Hao. All this new processing power cost money, and OpenAI began a for-profit arm in order to find it.

“It’s hard to overstate how much this idea of scale was considered a scientific extreme at the time,” says Hao, who describes it as a “brute force” approach.

Until this point, AI research had been much more targeted. Scientists used small and limited data sets to test hypotheses about what artificially intelligent machine learning could do, such as detecting signs of Alzheimer’s by feeding it datasets of brain scans.

Now, it was about feeding as much data to the AI as possible in the hope of it developing “intelligence” in any field. The results were increasingly fluent models which seemed impressive, although some were sceptical whether this represented novel problem-solving and true intelligence. Nonetheless, OpenAI’s competitors raced to upgrade or create their own LLMs.

The vast, water-consumptive data centres popping up all over the world, driving up local energy prices, are a result of AI companies feeding LLMs more and more data in an effort to expand their knowledge base. Meanwhile, companies trawling the internet for morsels of information on which to train them has eroded our privacy and intellectual property, Hao argues.

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NY Fed: 14% of US Households Experience Food Insecurity

NY Fed: 14% of US Households Experience Food Insecurity

Martin Armstrong 

The government keeps telling people the economy is strong because the stock market keeps making new highs. That is the great deception behind every bubble throughout history. Wall Street is not Main Street. You can have record highs in financial assets while society underneath is quietly rotting in real time.

The New York Federal Reserve now reports that 14% of American households are struggling with food insecurity. For families with children, the number rises to 17.5%. That means millions of Americans are literally worried about whether they can afford enough food while politicians stand in Washington congratulating themselves over manipulated statistics.

This is the direct result of monetary policy and the destruction of purchasing power. They printed trillions after 2020 and inflated everything. Housing exploded. Rent exploded. Insurance exploded. Food exploded. The people who owned assets got richer while the working class got trapped trying to survive inflation.

Meanwhile, household debt has surged above $18 trillion. Credit card balances are above $1.2 trillion. Americans are borrowing money just to maintain basic living standards. That is never sustainable historically. Rome did the same thing by debasing the currency until the middle class collapsed under rising costs. Weimar Germany also saw financial assets rise while ordinary citizens watched purchasing power evaporate.

The younger generation has been absolutely destroyed financially. In many cities rent now consumes nearly half of take-home pay. Home ownership has become almost unattainable for millions. Food prices remain dramatically above pre-2020 levels. Families are paying 30%, 40%, even 50% more for necessities than just a few years ago while wages never remotely kept pace.

This is why I have warned that the real crisis would not simply be inflation itself but the collapse in living standards. Governments always manipulate statistics to hide reality. They change CPI formulas, adjust baskets, and claim inflation is “cooling,” but people know the truth every time they walk into a grocery store.

This is also why civil unrest rises during the later stages of debt crises historically. The average person eventually realizes the system no longer works for them, while the financial elite continue accumulating wealth through asset inflation. The K-shaped economy becomes politically dangerous because one side of society feels abandoned entirely.

The French Revolution was not caused because people suddenly hated the aristocracy overnight. It was bread prices, hunger. It was watching elites continue living comfortably while ordinary families could no longer survive rising costs. History always repeats because human nature never changes.

The frightening part is that this is happening before the real sovereign debt crisis even begins. Governments worldwide are drowning in debt and they cannot raise rates forever without detonating the system. So they are trapped. Either they continue inflating the currency slowly to manage the debt, or they trigger a deflationary collapse. Politicians will always choose inflation because it delays the pain politically.

That means the middle class continues getting squeezed while the divide between financial wealth and real economic survival grows wider.

People do not eat stock portfolios. They eat food. They pay rent. They pay utilities. They buy gasoline. That is where the real economy is collapsing.

Putin: Russia Has Means to Destroy Anyone Targeting Its Air Defense Bases

Russia Has Means to Destroy Anyone Targeting Its Air Defense Bases - Putin

Sputnik

Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia has all the means to destroy anyone who attempts to destroy its air defense bases.

“Russia has all the means to flatten anyone who tries to do this,” Putin told journalists during a press briefing following his visit to Kazakhstan, commenting on the Lithuanian statement.

Earlier, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys said that the NATO Baltic states have the capability, if necessary, to level Russian air defense bases in the Kaliningrad region.

Ukraine Conflict Nearing Its End, Media Must Face the Truth

Putin said that the Ukraine conflict is nearing its end based on battlefield realities. He sharply criticized European media for failing to report the Starobelsk incident in LPR, calling it “not journalism, but mass deception.”

Russia's attack on the Kiev region was a response to the Ukrainian forces' attack on Starobelsk, Vladimir Putin said.

"In response to their [Ukrainian forces'] crimes against children in Starobelsk, we launched a strike on the Kiev region," Putin said.

Putin called the coverage of the Ukrainian airstrike on Starobelsk in European media disgraceful and a nightmare, adding that journalists should be ashamed of themselves for silencing the attack on the Lugansk People's Republic.

Putin called western media "means of mass deception."

Russian troops are advancing in all directions in the special military operation zone, Putin said.

"Our troops are advancing in all directions, well, you see it. Every single day," Putin told reporters.

Russia needs to strengthen its air defense system, and this is being done, the president added.

"The situation on the battlefield is developing in such a way that it gives us the right to say that the situation is nearing its conclusion," Putin said, adding that he is saying this based on the analysis of the situation on the battlefield.

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BREAKING: U.S. Navy Central Command has warned mariners that CENTCOM will conduct military operations in the Strait of Hormuz, north of Oman's Musandam Peninsula

BREAKING: U.S. Navy Central Command has warned mariners that CENTCOM will conduct military operations in the Strait of Hormuz, north of Oman's Musandam Peninsula

The notice carries two pointed messages. USNAVCENT advised vessels to coordinate with the United States when transiting the strait. And it warned that any vessel caught laying mines or supporting mine laying will be targeted. The U.S. is telling ships to clear their passage with Washington rather than Iran's permit authority. This directly challenges the PGSA system Tehran built to control Hormuz. It is Trump's "we're going to watch over it" turned operational. As he weighs his final determination on the deal, the Navy is standing up an American transit regime in the strait, on American terms.