The abandonment of Japan’s long-standing non-nuclear stance would worsen the security situation in Northeast Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko has warned.

Last month, Japanese media reported that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, also president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was considering initiating discussions with her allies on revising the country’s three non-nuclear principles – long-standing pledges not to possess, produce, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons. Takaichi is said to believe that prohibiting the deployment of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil weakens US nuclear deterrence.

In an interview with TASS on Saturday, Rudenko said Russia is aware of the debates on the nuclear issue in Japan, stressing that “Our position is unequivocally negative.”

“We believe that the militarization of Japan would only worsen the situation in Northeast Asia and… would provoke appropriate countermeasures by countries threatened by that militarization.”

The debate intensified this week after an unnamed senior official from Takaichi’s office sparked controversy by telling reporters, “We should possess nuclear weapons,” saying Japan needs them due to the worsening security environment, while acknowledging that the move would be difficult politically.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara later said Japan’s nuclear policy has not changed, reiterating the government’s commitment to the non-nuclear principles.

Japan’s non-nuclear stance is closely tied to its post-war identity as the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Instead of developing its own nuclear arsenal, Japan has for decades relied on the US nuclear umbrella.

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Copenhagen has expressed outrage over US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new special envoy to Greenland, an island under Danish sovereignty that the American leader previously suggested should become part of the United States.

On Sunday, Trump stated on his Truth Social account that Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry would become his special ambassador to the island, explaining that he “understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security.” 

Landry confirmed the appointment in a post on X, stating he will work to “make Greenland a part of the US.”

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said the development came “out of nowhere” and was “completely unacceptable,” according to remarks cited by TV 2 channel. His department will summon the US ambassador in Copenhagen to demand explanations, he added.

Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said the US move “doesn’t change anything for us at home” and the island still belongs to its people.

Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland from Denmark dates back to his first term but has also featured in his international rhetoric since returning to the White House in January. He has not ruled out annexing the island.

The US has maintained a military presence on the strategically important island since World War II. Vice President J.D. Vance visited the US Space Force base on the northwest coast of Greenland in March. He noted that while the US was not likely to use military force to seize the territory, it remained open to locals exercising their right to self-determination and breaking away from Denmark.

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Andrey Yermak, who resigned as Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff following a major corruption scandal, “has not gone anywhere” and continues to advise the Ukrainian leader, ZN.ua reported on Saturday.

Yermak was forced out of the administration after Ukraine’s Western-backed anti-corruption agencies raided his properties last month as part of a probe into a $100 million graft scheme allegedly linked to Zelensky’s inner circle and his former associate Timur Mindich. Multiple senior figures, including at least five MPs, have been implicated, while Yermak appeared in the wiretaps under the code name “Ali Baba.”

According to ZN.ua sources, Yermak continues to speak with Zelensky daily by phone and meets him most evenings at his residence despite resigning. Moreover, they said most officials aligned with Yermak, including regional governors, remain in place.

Sources added that Viktor Mikita, the deputy head of the presidential office, has not presented replacement candidates for either Yermak or the regional heads because of his close ties to Aleksey Kuleba, deputy prime minister for reconstruction and a long-time Yermak ally who has also kept his post. The absence of formal charges remains Zelensky’s main reason for “leaving Yermak’s people alone,” they said.

“Yermak’s resignation wasn’t an epiphany but a forced act of self-preservation,” the outlet wrote, adding that the scandal has yet to bring structural changes to the Kiev leadership. “Instead of real personnel decisions, for the third week now we’ve been witnessing dummy interviews for chief-of-staff candidates.”

Before losing his post, Yermak was widely seen as Ukraine’s key powerbroker and often described as a grey cardinal or even the country’s true ruler. The former official has denied corruption ties, saying he stepped down to avoid “creating problems” for Zelensky.

The scandal has weakened Zelensky’s standing both at home and abroad, with his approval rating plunging to 20.3%, according to a recent Info Sapiens poll. Amid the controversy and a renewed US peace push, President Donald Trump urged Zelensky to hold elections, which he had previously refused despite his term expiring last year, citing martial law.

Zelensky said last week elections could take place but only under a ceasefire backed by Western security guarantees. Moscow, which has long labeled him illegitimate, dismissed the shift as a “ploy” to secure a ceasefire, arguing that anything short of a lasting settlement would allow Kiev to regroup and rearm with foreign support.

Trade among Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members is now settled overwhelmingly in national rather than Western currencies, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

The CIS currently includes nine member states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Uzbekistan. Ukraine and Turkmenistan hold participant status within the organization, although Kiev has moved to sever ties with it.

Speaking at an informal CIS summit in St. Petersburg on Monday, Putin said the strong volume of trade among CIS member states showed their cooperation is working, adding that Russia’s trade with the bloc totaled almost $90 billion in the first nine months of the year.

“The share of national currencies in settlements for commercial transactions between countries of the Commonwealth has already exceeded 96%,” he said.

Russia has ramped up the use of national currencies with its regional and international trade partners in recent years. The drive to ditch the US dollar has been gaining momentum among developing nations since the West unleashed its unprecedented sanctions campaign against Russia over the Ukraine conflict. The measures effectively cut the country off from the dollar- and euro-denominated Western financial system.

Putin also said that the CIS has, over more than three decades, become an authoritative regional integration group, and that its members build ties on the basis of “good-neighborliness,” “equal partnership,” and “mutual benefit,” while respecting and taking into account each another’s interests.

Established in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the organization aims to promote cooperation on economic, political, and security issues among its members.

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Election officials in the US state of Georgia have admitted to major violations of vote certification procedures during the 2020 presidential race. US President Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden, has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” and marred by widespread fraud and irregularities. 

The admission, made earlier this month, emerged from a complaint filed by election integrity activist David Cross, who accused Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous county, of illegally certifying at least 315,000 ballots in 2020.

Biden beat Trump in Georgia – which has 16 electoral votes – by fewer than 12,000 votes, before going on to win the Electoral College 306–232.

The dispute centers on tabulator tapes produced by voting machines during early voting. Under state rules, each tabulator must generate closing tapes signed by poll workers to certify the recorded vote totals.

After filing an open records request with Fulton County, Cross found at least 134 tabulator tapes with no signatures, meaning that the associated ballots could not have been legally certified.

Cross also raised allegations of missing “zero tapes” meant to confirm that machines began counting from zero at the start of polling, along with discrepancies involving scanner serial numbers and unusually late poll closing times. 

During a recent State Election Board hearing, Ann Brumbaugh, an attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, said the county “does not dispute the allegations,” acknowledging the failure as a violation of election board rules.

Members of the state board described the findings as “very troubling” and referred the case to the Georgia Attorney General, seeking potential civil penalties of $5,000 per unsigned tape and other enforcement action.

The Georgia result has remained a focal point of Trump’s broader complaints about the 2020 election, which have been rejected by Democrats and formed the basis of multiple legal cases against him.

Since returning to office, Trump has vowed to overhaul the US voting system, pledging stricter voter identification requirements, limits on mail-in voting, and a shift toward paper ballots, arguing that these changes are necessary to restore confidence in elections.

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A Russian general has been killed in a car bomb blast in Moscow, the Investigative Committee has reported.

Officials identified the victim as Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, head of operational training at the General Staff. According to the statement, an explosive device had been planted beneath the vehicle he was traveling in, and detonated on Monday morning in the southern part of the Russian capital.  

The blast also damaged several other vehicles and seriously injured Sarvarov’s driver, media reports stated.

Russian officials said one line of investigation is an assassination carried out by Ukrainian intelligence services, noting that Kiev has previously used explosive devices in targeted killings of officials and public figures.

Last December, a bomb hidden in an e-scooter killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, and his aide in what investigators alleged was a Ukrainian plot.

Sarvarov was a career officer with combat experience he received during counterterrorism action in southern Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, according to the Defense Ministry’s website. The 56-year-old was appointed in 2016 to lead the department responsible for training senior officers at staff exercises and other events. Previously he was involved in the Russian deployment in Syria.

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China bought a record amount of gold from Russia in November, with shipments rising to almost $1 billion, RIA Novosti reports, citing Chinese customs data.

Russia’s gold sales to China were valued at $961 million in November, following October’s total of $930 million, the outlet said on Saturday, as Moscow steps up efforts to reroute precious-metal exports away from Western markets due to the sweeping sanctions against Russia, and as China emerges as a key destination.

In October and November last year, Russia did not ship any gold to China, and its previous peak annual tally was just $223 million. Over the first 11 months of 2025, Chinese imports of Russian gold reached $1.9 billion – almost nine times the value recorded in the same period last year, according to the customs data cited. Russia’s overall exports of precious metals to China doubled from a year earlier, data shows.

The true scale of China’s purchases could be far higher than official data indicates, analysts say. Bloomberg estimates Russia’s exports of precious metals to China at around $1 billion in the first half of 2025, without specifying how much of the total was gold.

The Financial Times reported in November that China’s unreported gold buying could be more than ten times its official figures, as the country quietly diversifies away from the US dollar. Data compiled by the World Gold Council shows China bought 23.95 tons of gold from January to September this year, but analysts argue that actual purchases are much larger as China reduces its reliance on dollar-denominated reserves.

Russia and China have intensified cooperation since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. The two nations describe relations as a strategic partnership “without limits,” with trade turnover exceeding $200 billion for a third consecutive year. Moscow and Beijing have essentially eliminated the use of Western currencies in trade, with almost all payments now conducted in rubles and yuan. 

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Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever mocked Politico on Thursday after the outlet branded him “Russia’s most valuable asset,” joking that he was heading back to his “dacha in St. Petersburg” to join “neighbours” Gérard Depardieu and Bashar al-Assad.

Axel Springer-owned Politico, which has a staff of some 350 in its European bureau alone, took a personal swipe at the “bespectacled 54-year-old” “eccentric figure at the EU summit table, with his penchant for round-collared shirts, Roman history and witty one-liners.” The piece was authored by four of its reporters in early December, just as de Wever’s opposition to the asset-theft plan was becoming a significant thorn in the side of Merz and von der Leyen.

Following the collapse of the German-backed plan at a disastrous EU Summit for Merz and von der Leyen, De Wever addressed one of the authors of the article head on.

“Politico, you published some very nice articles with some very nice titles, claiming that I was Russia’s most valuable asset? I like that one a lot. I will remember that one. But go ahead with your question anyway, because as I said, a real politician lets go of his emotions, even if these emotions are pure anger, vengeance, and maybe even violence.”

Winding up his tirade and leaning fully into the sarcasm, De Wever delivered his closing flourish.

“But now I have to go to my dacha in St. Petersburg,” he said, “where my neighbor is Gerard Depardieu, and across the street there is Bashar al-Assad. And I think I can become mayor of that little village. Maybe that could be your title.”

Depardieu, a French actor, was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin in 2013, though he does not live in Russia full time. Assad was given asylum by Russia after being overthrown last December by forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. He and his family now live in Moscow.

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The European Commission has barred the Brussels-based outlet Euractiv from its background briefings over critical reporting on the “EU bubble,” according to  editor-in-chief Matthew Karnitschnig.

Practically every media outlet with a sizeable EU bureau depends on the largesse of powerbrokers, bloc mandarins, foreign governments, and lobbyists for information, in what is known as the ‘access journalism’ business.

However independent journalism in Brussels is now “on the enemies list,” Karnitschnig wrote on Friday. “In fact, it has become an endangered species,” he wrote. 

“At the beginning of this year, we set about infusing the ‘EU bubble’ with a heavy dose of critical journalism,” Karnitschnig said. “Not all recipients reacted well, least of all the Commission, which recently banned us from its background briefings – the off-the-record sessions during which President Ursula von der Leyen’s advisers seek to steer the message they’re trying to send on any given issue to the press.”

The editor cited coverage he believes contributed to EU’s ban of his outlet.

“Maybe it was our debunking of the legend pushed by the Commission that von der Leyen’s pilots were forced to resort to “paper maps” to land her plane in Bulgaria amid a purported Russian attack… Or was it that we lambasted her absurd plan for a European intelligence service?”

Founded in 1999 by French media publisher Christophe Leclercq, the reputable Brussels-based outlet focuses on EU policy and says it aims to “unpack the complexities of EU politics, policies, and legislation.”

Brussels has long faced criticism over restrictions on free speech and the marginalization of independent voices, including from US Vice President J.D. Vance, who has warned that free expression across Europe is “in retreat.”

During his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance accused EU governments of “running in fear” from their own people, arguing that the main threat to democracy does not come from Russia and China, but from abandoning fundamental democratic values.