NATO and Kiev seek weapons to destroy Russian airfields – Moscow

NATO and Kiev seek weapons to destroy Russian airfields – Moscow

RT

NATO is openly helping Ukraine acquire weapons capable of destroying strategic targets deep inside Russia, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. The latest joint arms development tender shows that the US-led bloc is actively integrating Ukraine into its structures, coming dangerously close to an open confrontation with Moscow, she warned.

Zakharova was referring to the €250,000 ($285,656) bidding contract announced in mid-June by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) – one of the bloc’s two strategic commands – in cooperation with the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC). Created in February 2025, JATEC openly describes itself as “the first joint NATO-Ukraine organization in the NATO Command Structure.”

Although the contract does not mention Russia directly, it contains a clear reference to enhancing Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities with “solutions” capable of “persistent airport denial.” The project gives priority to various unmanned systems or loitering munitions capable of flying in signal-denied, electronic-warfare-contested environments and effectively striking runways, fuel reserves, and ground support facilities.

The tender stipulates that any “solutions” must be ready for combat deployment within 12 months and should not require extensive training for operators, with submissions due by late July.

The contract proves that NATO is accelerating Ukraine’s integration into its command structures as well as its military-industrial complex, Zakharova said on Monday. The bloc “is steadily losing what remains of its rationality and drifting into an increasingly high-risk zone” in a bid to turn Ukraine into a “testing ground” for emerging military technologies, she added.

However, NATO strategists are “clearly underestimating” the risk of further escalation of the Ukraine conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow, the spokeswoman warned.

“With their recklessly aggressive actions, the Ukrainian-NATO partnership is giving the Russian military additional grounds to pay heightened attention to any enterprises involved in the development and production of weapons used against our country,” Zakharova said.

The development comes amid broader European militarization, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte consistently urging member states to adopt a “wartime mindset.” Top British and German defense officials recently urged citizens to accept “difficult choices” on military spending as NATO states move to hit targets of 5% of GDP. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius claimed last year that Russia could attack a NATO member “as early as 2028,” insisting on the need for a costly military buildup.

NATO Turning Ukraine Into Test Ground for Deep Strikes Into Russia - Foreign Ministry

NATO Turning Ukraine Into Test Ground for Deep Strikes Into Russia - Foreign Ministry

Sputnik

NATO is working on advanced weapons systems for Ukraine designed to disable Russian airfields and airbases, including those located deep inside Russian territory, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

NATO's plans to develop advanced weapons systems in the interests of Kiev are recklessly aggressive, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Monday.

"In the end, we must conclude that, with its recklessly aggressive actions, the Ukrainian-NATO alliance gives the Russian military additional grounds to demonstrate increased attention to any enterprises involved in the development and production of weapons used against our country," Zakharova said in a statement.

NATO, while planning to develop weapons for Ukrainian forces, underestimates the risk of further escalation, Zakharova said.

Kiev is stepping up its attempts to push NATO into direct armed conflict with Russia, while NATO is gradually losing its remaining rationality, using Ukraine as a "testing ground," Zakharova added.

Kiev is stepping up its attempts to push NATO into direct armed conflict with Russia, while NATO is gradually losing its remaining rationality, using Ukraine as a "testing ground," Zakharova added.

Other statements:

The systems are intended to inflict massive damage and keep Russian airbases out of operation for extended periods

The project is being promoted by NATO's Allied Command Transformation with Ukrainian involvement

Proposed weapons are expected to operate autonomously, function without GPS and use AI for targeting

NATO requirements reportedly do not mandate continuous human control over the weapons

NATO and Ukraine are increasingly integrating their military and defense industries against Russia

NATO is "losing the remnants of rationality" by trying to wring maximum benefit from Ukraine as a testing ground for arms

The Ukrainian government is trying harder to drag NATO into a direct conflict with Russia to reverse its battlefield losses

NATO and Ukraine underestimate the dangers of further escalation, including the risk of the conflict spreading beyond Ukraine

The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that such plans increase the risk of further escalation

Venezuela earthquake: death toll nears 1,500

Venezuela earthquake: father and son found alive in rubble after four days as death toll nears 1,500

Agence France-Presse

A man and his teenage son were found alive under the rubble in Venezuelaon Sunday, in a town about 40km north of the capital Caracas, AFP journalists reported, as the death toll from last week’s twin earthquakes passed 1,450.

The discovery of survivors in Caraballeda was made by French and American rescue teams nearly four days after back-to-back quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck, completely destroying nearly 200 buildings in the area.

Interim president Delcy Rodríguez on Sunday praised rescuers for still pulling survivors from the ruins. “Today we have rescued people who are still alive, and therefore these efforts will not be suspended,” she said. “We always hold on to hope.”

The rescue offered a glimmer of hope in an ongoing tragedy that has shaken a country already mired in an economic crisis, but tens of thousands of people were still reported missing and the critical 72-hour window for rescuing trapped victims following a natural disaster has now passed.

Millions more people were reported to lack sanitation and other basic needs after one of Latin America’s most devastating earthquake disasters.

Rescue teams from the US, Mexico and elsewhere scrambled to save people as desperate residents dug by hand for relatives trapped in the pancaked layers and rubble of collapsed apartments.

About 774 buildings were badly damaged by the twin quakes that struck on Wednesday evening, National Assembly president Jorge Rodriguez said on Sunday. On Sunday, Rodriguez reported 1,450 dead – a toll expected to rise – with 3,150 people injured.

Even as rescue efforts continued apace, outbreaks of looting hit La Guaira, a port city near the country’s main international airport. Much of the city now lies in rubble after Wednesday’s disaster. Pharmacies, supermarkets and other businesses were ransacked, said residents, some of whom complained of the slow and meagre post-quake aid coming from authorities.

US helicopters ferried in aid, and 230 more US military personnel were arriving to help expand airport capacity and reopen a key seaport to boost relief efforts, the US Southern Command said on Sunday.

The US – which seized Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro in a military raid on Caracas in January – had already sent a 250-strong disaster response team.

But the prospect for rescuing more survivors has dwindled.

A Salvadoran rescue worker who declined to give his name, said: “At this point, they are probably dead bodies. Thanks to God maybe we can find people still alive.”

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‘Mystery’ Valdai Meeting Between Putin and Lukashenko Stirs Speculation Amidst Zelensky’s Latest Threats

‘Mystery’ Valdai Meeting Between Putin and Lukashenko Stirs Speculation Amidst Zelensky’s Latest Threats

Simplicius

One of the most interesting updates surrounding the current Ukraine war escalations has been the ‘mysteriously’ abrupt visit of Belarusian president Lukashenko to Valdai yesterday for a meeting with Putin that has now spanned two days. The length and secrecy shrouding the meeting has caused various speculations, particularly given Belarus’s central focus recently amidst Zelensky’s major ongoing psyops meant to broaden the conflict and push Russia into a ceasefire Ukraine is in dire need of.

The meeting was reportedly unannounced and Kremlin spokesperson Peskov revealed that no official transcript or statements would be provided—which is certainly odd. “Officially” the agenda was said to include Union State matters, economic and trade agreements, etc. But the implication given the nature of the meeting is clearly that, instead, matters of grave military importance were discussed, which required Putin and Lukashenko’s direct face-to-face contact at Putin’s own private retreat.

We can therefore only logically infer that this was a kind of emergency meeting where the two leaders ironed out a coordinated plan as to how their respective countries should proceed militarily should Zelensky continue his upward spiral of provocations.

A matter that required such an immediate and private face-to-face meeting is certainly one justified in its urgency, a fact which further implies that Zelensky’s threats are serious enough, and have a high enough likelihood of materializing, as to require such a serious joint brainstorming session.

As previously seen, Zelensky has announced a new “campaign of terrors” lasting 40 days that is meant to be a kind of grandiose final arc to top the war. The ploy’s chief mechanic is obviously set to be a series of major escalations combined with an unprecedented information campaign to paint Russia as collapsing, and more importantly, Putin as being in the throes of an uprising. This is the age-old playbook used by Western intelligence agencies in Iran and elsewhere.

Few could have missed the massive propaganda push the past few days, wherein all the regime stooges and ‘useful idiots’ have been mobilized to pump 24/7 agitprop about Putin’s “imminent downfall”.

This campaign came coordinated with a series of laughably fake psyops from all the usual agents attempting desperately to stoke discontent, fear, and panic in Russia. Unfortunately for them, most of the attempts were immediately debunked and gained no traction whatsoever:

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Things To Come?

It’s All They’ve Got Now

Jim Kunstler

A punishing heat-dome creeps over the eastern half of the country just in time for the gala Fourth of July week. The days are brutal, but anything and everything crawls out of the woodwork when that blazing sun goes down and the moon comes out. Everyone’s on edge, but the edge of what? I will tell you.

First, could there be a richer (or more obvious) target for bloody mischief than this year’s national holiday, the 250th birthday of a nation that millions lucky enough to live here have been trained-up to hate on? Even the sons and daughters (including pretend “daughters”) of millionaires have gone mad-dog on America, the poster-boy being Marxist-jihadi New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Left’s new avatar-general.

Since no one is more hated than the, ahem, Celebrator-in-Chief, you might want to steer clear of conspicuous public celebrations this week. Antifa and even worse gangs are out there right now, making plans and laying traps. Maybe not so much in places like Texas, where eight Antifas were just sentenced collectively to 450 years in the slammer for shooting up the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. . . but here in the Empire State and other Blue-ish jurisdictions, all bets are off. Be careful ‘out there’ among the smokin’ ribs, the fireworks shows, and big music venues.

You can see how this summer, and the nauseating slide down to the midterm elections, are shaping up. The party of “Our Democracy” is desperate to an extreme now, all disfigured by a communist leprosy eating away at its public face (and a cancer of fraud metastasizing through its innards). It has become such an obvious monster, raging with its hair lit-up, that anyone with half a functioning brain is shying away, stealing off into the gloaming. The party has nothing left but chaos and, in the weeks ahead, anything that might be disrupted probably will be.

The objective is to create so much havoc and distress throughout the country — especially the big cities — that Mr. Trump will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, and by doing so, the Lefty-left hope to create conditions so adverse that an orderly Election Day cannot happen. 

The Insurrection Act would be the Left’s cue to declare Mr. Trump the very “king” whose coronation they have busily rehearsed all year, and then, voila, you get a new French-style American Revolution 2.0, complete with guillotine and transgender Jacobins turning the country upside-down.

You might consider the theory that the nation actually needs to suffer a genuine nightmare to wake up from. The Revolution 1.0 we celebrate this week was, after all, a nightmarish struggle rife with hardship and loss. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence died from war-related tribulations. Five were imprisoned and tortured. Twelve had homes ransacked and burned. And then, of course, the military action itself, including travails such as the winter at Valley Forge, the disastrous New York Campaign, and the never-ending logistics crisis, no food, no clothing, no munitions.

In the present summer of travail we face, you can expect at least some major wake-up calls issued by the bloc in the country that has not gone insane — which happens to include many in Mr. Trump’s executive branch. I’m serenely confident that real evidence of 2020 election fraud will finally emerge, coincidental with indictments. Do you think that the Fulton County, GA, election records were seized last winter for no reason? Say goodbye to that old “baseless” talking point.

There are, of course, a whole lot of other seditious and treasonous Beltway villains nervously awaiting administration of the law. You know their names. It appears that the new supervising US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Joseph DiGenova, is reorganizing the so-called “grand conspiracy” case against this large cadre of coupsters into a folio of discrete cases — RussiaGate, Fake Impeachment #1, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. — to make them more manageable and move them more speedily forward. Don’t be surprised if one or more of these cases happens to drop before the midterms. (Democratic Party true-blue loyalists could be surprised, even shocked to their socks, since these indictments will refute everything that has become essential to their identities as the good and righteous people of this land.)

Just one more item for now in the wake-up folder, coming a little out of left-field: things are looking eerie in the region of the San Andreas fault that runs through California, and perhaps the Seattle fault as well. The earth’s geology even seems to be manifesting a degree of chaos. It’s been shaky along the Pacific Rim “Ring of Fire” for many months. Significant earthquakes have struck Japan (7.4 offshore Honshu/Miyako area), Indonesia (7.4 near Bitung), the Philippines, Tonga, Vanuatu, Chile, Papua New Guinea. The Venezuela “doublet” (June 24, Mag 7.2) occurred in a separate tectonic zone, but all zones are essentially connected by the movements of magma deep in the earth, solar activity (flares, etc), gravitational tidal forces, and so on.

On June 24, a Mag 5.6 shook Redwood Valley, in Mendocino California, a Mag 5.8 near Pistol River, Oregon, and a Mag 5.1 struck 40 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County, CA. The east side of the Pacific rim (America’s West Coast) has been unusually quiet for some years now. Be alert.