Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has refused to negotiate a peace settlement as long as Vladimir Putin remains president of Russia, issuing a regime change demand via his official Telegram channel on Friday. 

Claiming he had “always offered Russia coexistence on equal, honest, dignified and fair terms,” Zelensky blamed Russia for the failure of negotiations, insisting that it was “obvious this is impossible with this Russian president.” 

“We are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but already with another president of Russia,” he wrote. Unlike the majority of his Telegram posts, this one was written only in Ukrainian, without an accompanying English translation.

Russia has accused the US of baiting it into using its UN veto power in a bid to limit Moscow’s influence on the Security Council. Russia blocked a US-sponsored resolution on Friday that would have condemned its acceptance into the Russian Federation of four former Ukrainian territories.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed accession treaties on Friday, starting the process of bringing the two Donbass republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions into the Russian Federation following successful referendums. Within hours of the treaties being signed, the US introduced a resolution to the United Nations Security Council condemning the “illegal so-called referenda in Ukraine” and demanding Moscow immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine.

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President Vladimir Putin has signed documents paving the way for the formal acceptance by Moscow of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions. The treaties await ratification by the Russian parliament.

According to the Kremlin, Friday’s decision followed a democratic vote, in which people living in the former regions of Ukraine exercised their right to self-determination and requested to be protected from Kiev.

The historic move was condemned and rejected by Kiev and its foreign backers, which regard it as an annexation of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

RT takes a look back at how an armed coup in Kiev eight years ago led to a change of European borders and a major armed conflict.

Maidan

“Too much blood has been spilled” — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies highlight a few of the many under-reported appeals made at the General Assembly for peaceful negotiations.

We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the U.N.’s founding and defining principle.

Climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. Armstrong McKay et al. present an updated assessment of the most important climate tipping elements and their potential tipping points, including their temperature thresholds, time scales, and impacts. Their analysis indicates that even global warming of 1°C, a threshold that we already have passed, puts us at risk by triggering some tipping points. This finding provides a compelling reason to limit additional warming as much as possible. —HJS

Structured Abstract

At the behest of Washington, Western countries are intensifying the crisis in relations with Ankara by imposing more and more anti-Turkish sanctions. Be it for the drilling operations in the eastern Mediterranean, the purchase of Russian surface-to-air missile systems, or simply because of rapprochement with Russia – anything goes. All of this is done with the obvious expectation that such an ostentatious anti-Turkish policy will “clamp down” not only on Turkish leader Erdoğan, but will also point out to other European countries the “perniciousness of going against the American current.”

BY Vladimir Odintsov

One day after Hurricane Ian unleashed its fury across Florida, its destruction and the devastation left behind started to become clear just as it regained strength off Orlando’s east coast and threatened South Carolina as its next target.

As officials warned that Ian would be a problem for much of South Carolina after it regained hurricane-level strength, US President Joe Biden issued a formal disaster declaration and warned of “substantial loss of life”.

And in Deltona, Florida, came the first confirmed fatality: a 72-year-old man who died while attempting to drain his pool into a nine-metre-wide canal, when he slipped down the hill, fell into the water and drowned.

The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilisation is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.

Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.

BY Caitlin Johnstone

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has joined the advisory board of the International Democrat Union. It is an organisation that is much more radical than its self-declared defence of the “centre right” spin suggests.

The alliance that marked the transition to the hard right is the IDU’s embrace of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader now standing for “illiberal democracy” around the west.

This echoes Tony Abbott’s post-leadership embrace of the Orban right. In 2015, he was appointed director of the Ramsay Institute for Western Civilisation, a body that created years of controversy.

The leaders and most of the news media in the U.S. seem to believe that Washington’s foreign policy over the past several decades has been a success and benefitted both the United States and the world. That assumption wasn’t really true even during the Cold War, although that confrontation eventually resulted in the peaceful demise of America’s nasty totalitarian adversary. There was plenty of collateral damage along the way, with the suffering caused by Washington’s conduct in Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most glaring examples.

US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called out for a congresswoman who had died in a car crash in early August – apparently forgetting his own statement of condolence to her family, or the tribute video that reportedly aired before the event. 

“Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie,”he said, looking at the people attending the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. “She was going to be here,” he added, according to NPR. Others quoted Biden as saying “She must not be here,” based on video footage from the event.

Biden was looking for Jackie Walorski, a Republican congresswoman from Indiana who had co-sponsored the bill to fund the conference.

Washington may not be able to support Ukraine in the conflict against Russia “for as long as it takes” due to a shortage of the industrial capacity needed to replenish munitions and weapons it sends to Kiev, CNBC reported on Wednesday, citing military analysts.

“There is a point where… the Ukrainians will need to be cautious about their rate of expenditure and where they prioritize those munitions, because there isn’t an infinite supply,”Jack Watling, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, was quoted by the news network as saying.

The problem reportedly stems from the structure of military production in Western nations, particularly the United States, which was tailored for peacetime and cannot sustain a protracted draw on stockpiles during a major armed conflict, such as the one in Ukraine.

Ignorance is the opiate of the poor, a cordial, administered by the gracious hand of providence.

                                 Soame Jenyns

Our familiar system of global political and economic alliances is shifting, and nothing has made this change clearer than the varied reactions to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87 percent of the world's population has declined to follow us. Economic sanctions have united our adversaries in shared resistance. Less predictably, the outbreak of Cold War II, has also led countries that were once partners or non-aligned to become increasingly multi-aligned.

BY MICHAEL GFOELLER AND DAVID H. RUNDELL

Nowhere is the shift more apparent than in energy markets where, unlike with currencies, governments cannot simply print what they need. Here the web of sanctions becomes a sieve.