Articles from ‘Independent News Roundup’

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova joins RT on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok to discuss the Ukraine conflict and the current political situation in the world.

Ukraine's Security Service headquarters is hit by a drone, a day after a street shoot-out between rival intelligence agencies in Kiev. Moscow denies Berlin's claim of an attempted explosive drone attack at a German airport, while Germany's opposition questions the account. Estonia's Defense Minister quits amid a €70m scandal over undelivered shells for Ukraine. In the DRC, health workers face attacks from locals claiming the Ebola outbreak is a…

Australia's world-first social-media restrictions for children under 16 appear to be facing a fundamental enforcement problem. New usage data indicates the initial decline following the December 2025 ban lasted only weeks, with young Australians steadily returning to major platforms and some younger children now using them at rates exceeding those recorded before the restrictions. INR Report: Based on reporting by David Lindfield for Slay News…

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is calling for tighter controls over AI-powered automatic licence plate readers, warning that surveillance of ordinary citizens' movements has become “out of control”. His intervention highlights a growing international debate over where legitimate law-enforcement technology ends and mass surveillance begins. INR Report: Based on reporting by Frank Bergman for Slay News HERE · Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has…

America’s falling birth rate has acquired a political dimension. Research cited by Slay News finds a persistent fertility gap between conservatives and liberals, but the evidence points to a more complicated mix of attitudes, geography, economics and lifestyle than the headline claim of political “doomism” alone might suggest. INR Report: Based on reporting by Frank Bergman for Slay News HERE · The United States has been experiencing declining…

More than four years into the Russia-Ukraine war, the central question is increasingly not who can gain another town or stretch of territory, but whether either side can achieve its underlying political objectives. Political scientist Dr Nicolai Petro argues that Russia, Ukraine and Europe's leaders remain locked into fundamentally incompatible visions of European security leaving military escalation easier to imagine than a durable settlement.

Vladimir Putin says that the ultimate resolution of the conflict with Ukraine must be handled by Moscow and Kiev only while noting that Ukraine's current Western sponsors are complicit in international terrorism. Moscow says Vladimir Zelensky's threats to civilian infrastructure and his terrorist tactics are an attempt to draw attention away from Kiev's frontline losses. On the eve of a shooting in Kiev between Ukraine's spy agencies, one…

Previously classified Soviet records have provided new details of a mass execution carried out by Japanese occupation authorities in Hailar, Manchuria, on August 9, 1945 — the same day the Soviet Union launched its offensive against Japan in the Far East. According to the documents released by Russia’s Federal Security Service, 43 prisoners were killed, many by beheading, before the Japanese occupation regime collapsed. INR Report: Based on…

BRICS has grown into one of the most significant non-Western groupings in international affairs, but expansion alone will not determine whether it succeeds. Russian foreign-policy analyst Timofey Bordachev argues its real challenge is more fundamental: developing a coherent idea of international order capable of binding very different countries together — and persuading others that there is a credible alternative to institutions historically…

Russia’s increasingly deliberate use of “Britain” rather than “Great Britain” may sound like diplomatic trolling, but Russian academic Alexander Bobrov argues it reflects something deeper: Moscow’s deteriorating view of London as relations between the two nuclear powers approach what he describes as a dangerous low. His RT opinion also extends the argument beyond Ukraine, portraying Britain as a country that retains considerable international…