The downing of a Russian Sukhoi bomber by the Turkish Air Force was sufficient reason to start a war, but Moscow chose not to respond symmetrically, says Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “What did 20th-century countries used to do in a similar situation? A war began,” Medvedev said on the ‘Talk to the Prime Minister’ TV program. [...]

The West should not ignore Vladimir Putin’s warnings about retaliation for long-range strikes by Ukraine, the Hungarian PM has said. The West should not ignore Russian President Vladimir Putin's warnings regarding Moscow’s response to long-range Ukrainian strikes, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. On Thursday, Putin announced that Russia had used its new Oreshnik intermediate-ran [...]

Despite Washington's threats to impose sanctions on states buying military equipment from Moscow, many of them, such as Turkey, India and Indonesia, still stick with Russian weaponry, citing its outstanding quality. Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin explained in an interview with Sputnik why many states around the world prefer to buy Russian S-300 and S-400 air defense systems over U [...]

A Russian missile cruiser and a coast guard powerboat had to intervene after a merchant vessel flying the Turkish flag blocked a convoy transporting two drill platforms to a new location in Moscow's territorial waters. The decision to relocate them closer to Crimea was caused by the complicated international situation, according to a press release from the Russian Chernomorneftegaz state compan [...]

David Vaughan Icke is an English writer and public speaker. A former footballer and sports broadcaster, Icke has been known since the 1990s as a professional conspiracy theorist. He is the author of over 20 books and numerous DVDs, and has lectured in over 25 countries, speaking for up to 10 hours to audiences. Tyranny Is Here With Its Targets Cheering Every Step Promoting Instabilit [...]

More than 30 Iraqi soldiers have been killed and 20 more injured in an airstrike carried out by the US military, an Iraqi said in a statement cited by Sputnik. “30 Iraqi servicemen from the 55th brigade of the Iraqi Army have been killed and 20 injured after an airstrike carried out by US aviation in the town of Al-Naimiya, Fallujah province ,” Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Parliamentar [...]

Much has been made of the possible geopolitical motivations behind the decision to price the $5 billion Russian-Indian S-400 deal in roubles, and Moscow and Beijing are eyeing another rouble/yuan-based trade compact. However, Sputnik has discovered that there's also a purely economic reason for the three countries to move away from the dollar. [...]

Since 2003, Moscow has watched with infinite patience as US-led forces have steadily steamrolled a path of chaos and carnage across a large swath of Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. This year Vladimir Putin drew a line at Syria. In an age when diplomats regularly correspond with each other behind the cold cover of firewalls and Twitter accounts, Moscow’s method of informing its [...]

In pushing the SWIFT financial messaging system to exclude Iran, the US has “gone rogue,” economist Steve Keen told RT. SWIFT cut a raft of Iranian banks - including the country’s central bank - off from its system on Monday, having come under pressure from the US to do so. [...]

Terrorist leader, Zahran Alloush who headed Jaish al Islam, was a leading advocate of wiping out the minority community in Syria. And now he has been killed in an airstrike against the terrorists. Jaish al Islam was one of the groups that Saudi Arabia invited to allegedly reach a solution for Syria. /* */ Again we see terrorists being asked to provide a solut [...]

Residents of the Syrian province of Suwayda, grateful for their liberation from the captivity of Daesh* terrorists, lifted Syrian President Bashar Assad onto their shoulders during an official reception. [...]

Social movements calling for raising the minimum wage to $15/ hour with yearly adjustments for increases in the cost of living deserve support. However, earning $15/ hour will not guarantee a decent standard of living. An individual working forty hours a week at $15/ hour for an entire year earns $31,200, an income that is more than two and a half times the 2014 official poverty threshold of $1 [...]

The US Air Force Chief of Staff has said that both China and Russia are ready to step in to fill a power vacuum in Latin America left by Washington. The United States should pay more attention to Latin America, lest China and Russia take root in the region, US Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein said in the wake of a trip to Colombia. [...]

Russia has started supplying the southern Ukrainian city of Henichesk with natural gas at the request of local authorities amid severe frosts in the region, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said Monday. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Henichesk Mayor Alexander Tulupov, in view of cold weather conditions in the region, has addressed the Russian side with a request to supp [...]

Russia has warned Ukraine against efforts to revise the status of the Sea of Azov in violation of international law, urging Kiev to refrain from attempts to unilaterally establish new state borders. Tensions climaxed on Sunday after Ukrainian ships entered Russian territorial waters. Here’s a timeline of the provocation by Kiev. [...]

Lawyers and lobbyists for giant multinational corporations have been working up the TPP and promoting it for nearly a decade. The measure would join the United States along with 11 other nations along the Pacific Rim (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) in a “free-trade zone” [...]

Direct talks with the Taliban are crucial for the Kabul government to survive amid crushing defeats by the militants, Afghanistan experts told RT amid expectations that end of the 17-year war is looming. [...]

The grip that neocons and liberal interventionists have on Official Washington’s opinion circles is now so strong that “realists” who once provided an important counterbalance have been almost banished from foreign policy debates, a dangerous dilemma that James W Carden explores. In a widely remarked upon article for the online version of Foreign Policy last week, Harvard’s Stephen Walt [...]

Journalist John Pilger has recapped major events and crises that unfolded across the globe this year in an interview to RT. The recent emerging scandal around the shadowy UK government-funded Integrity Initiative (II) leaked by Anonymous hacktivists has been hitting the headlines over the past month. [...]

While the dangers of a power system based on the burning of fossil fuels are increasingly apparent, a new report on Monday argues that a rapid, affordable energy transformation is, in fact, within our grasp. Within 15 years, the United States could slash greenhouse gas emissions from power production by nearly 80 percent below 1990 levels without increasing cost and, at the same time, meeting i [...]

The past year was full of events that inevitably split the global geopolitical space into two camps: those who still support using US currency as a universal financial tool, and those who are turning their back on the greenback. Global tensions caused by economic sanctions and trade conflicts triggered by Washington have forced targeted countries to take a fresh look at alternative payment systems [...]

I never thought I’d see the day, I don’t think anybody imagined it would happen, but, by late December, Bernie Sanders’ campaign had caught on to such an extent that corporate media and National Public Radio, corporate media’s fellow traveler, could no longer pretend that it wasn’t happening. [...]