Heading towards World War III?

Finland and Sweden joining NATO is “very dangerous charlatanry” and amounts to provoking Russia, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said on Tuesday. Zagreb will refuse to ratify their membership until the US and EU pressure the neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina into guaranteeing ethnic Croats their basic voting rights, Milanovic added.

“As far as I’m concerned, they can get into NATO, they can poke the rabid bear in the eye with a pen,” Milanovic told reporters in Zagreb on Tuesday.

“However, until the electoral law issue in Bosnia-Herzegovina is resolved, until the Americans, the English, the Germans – if they can and want to – compel Sarajevo and Bakir Izetbegovic to update the electoral law in the next six months and grant Croats their elementary rights, the Sabor must not ratify anyone’s admission to NATO,” he added, referring to the Croatian parliament.

NATO cannot admit new members without the approval of the current ones, Milanovic pointed out, adding that he sees Croatia’s role at this moment as “a historic silver bullet.”

www.rt.com/news/554563-croatia-sweden-finland-nato-bosnia

The war in Ukraine is set to cause the "largest commodity shock" since the 1970s, the World Bank has warned.

In a new forecast, it said disruption caused by the conflict would contribute to huge price rises for goods ranging from natural gas to wheat and cotton.

The increase in prices "is starting to have very large economic and humanitarian effects", Peter Nagle, a co-author of the report, told the BBC.

He said "households across the world are feeling the cost of living crisis".

"We're particularly worried about the poorest households since they spend a larger share of income on food and energy, so they're particularly vulnerable to this price spike," the senior economist at the World Bank added.

www.bbc.com/news/business-61235528

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday noted Russia’s success in resisting Western sanctions, expressing his regrets about the fact.

“So far, we see that Russia, unfortunately, is coping well with the sanctions,” he told reporters, adding that in order to “correct” the situation, Warsaw would work on developing new penalties.

Moscow has confirmed the failure of the plans by ‘unfriendly’ nations to “strangle Russia economically.”

“Step by step, using all sorts of pretexts, sometimes just without any pretexts, they introduced new restrictions,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, adding that Moscow successfully warded off the sanctions strike, withstood it, and did not crumble.

www.rt.com/business/554625-eu-russia-sanctions-dont-work

Poland’s Deputy Minister of the Interior and Administration Paweł Szefernaker said on Thursday that several dozen municipalities, were left without liquefied gas because of sanctions imposed by Warsaw on Russian energy giant Novatek.

“At the moment, we are trying to find ways to solve this problem and resume gas supplies to areas where blue fuel was supplied by a Russian company that fell under sanctions,” Szefernaker said as quoted by media.

He explained that after the introduction of sanctions, Novatek’s subsidiary Novatek Green Energy suspended gas supplies to several dozen Polish municipalities.

www.rt.com/business/554665-polish-households-without-gas

Gazprombank, Russia’s key bank that handles European gas payments, has reportedly declined several payment attempts for April and May gas deliveries to Germany and Austria even though they were made through a ruble account. The bank rejected the transaction because the attempted payments came from a former Russian trading firm that was nationalized in Germany, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

The Gazprom Marketing & Trading Limited (GM&T) had been controlled by Russia’s Gazprom Germania Group before April 4, when Berlin’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck announced that the subsidiary would come under the trusteeship of the German energy regulator until September 30.

www.rt.com/business/554655-russia-gas-payment-rejected-germany

Poland continues to buy Russian natural gas from Germany via reverse flows, after its direct supplies were suspended due to non-payment in rubles, Russia’s energy giant Gazprom said on Thursday.

“This week Poland refused to pay for the Russian gas with the new terms, in rubles. It was grandly announced that they no longer needed Russian gas and would not buy it any more. But in fact Poland keeps buying Russian gas after the direct supply was halted. It now buys the gas from Germany, and it comes back to Poland with the reverse flow via the Yamal-Europe pipeline,” Gazprom's official representative Sergey Kupriyanov said.

www.rt.com/business/554682-poland-buys-russian-gas-germany

While multiple European leaders have publicly proclaimed they won’t buy Russian gas in rubles as Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded, 10 EU countries are technically going along with Putin’s plan, Hungarian official Gergely Gulyas told public radio on Sunday. According to Gulyas, these countries’ leaders aren’t admitting this in order to be seen as “being a good European.”

Gulyas said that Hungary has opened a euro account with Russia’s Gazprombank, which then converts payments into rubles before transferring them to suppliers in Russia. This system allows European buyers to comply with Putin’s demand, made in late March, that “unfriendly” countries switch to Russia’s national currency to buy its natural gas.

“There are nine other countries using the same payment scheme, but because today the idea of being a good European also means that the leaders of those countries are not honest when speaking either in the international arena or to their own people, the other nine countries won’t say that they are doing the same thing,” said Gulyas, who serves as Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff.

“There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that countries importing raw materials from Russia use exactly the same method to pay for Russian gas,” he added.

It is unclear which EU countries Guylas was referring to. Russian energy giant Gazprom has already shut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria after both refused to pay in rubles, but a Bloomberg report last week stated, as Gulyas did, that 10 of the bloc’s member states have already set up accounts with Gazprombank, and four have actually paid for Russian gas using this mechanism.

Hungary depends on Russia for all of its gas imports, and has therefore opposed EU sanctions on this critical commodity. Gulyas reiterated this commitment to Russian energy and opposition to Brussels’ sanctions regime on Sunday.

www.rt.com/business/554827-hungary-eu-gas-rubles

Former US President Donald Trump says the world is going to be "blown to pieces" if America doesn't get some "smart leadership".

Mr Trump issued the chilling warning during an interview with Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan.

"We have stupid people now running our country," Mr Trump said.

"Our country's in trouble – something has to happen.

"If it doesn't happen, and if we don't have smart leadership, you're going to end up with no world – the world is going to be blown to pieces."

Russia has still not received a response from Ukraine regarding its latest proposals for a possible peace agreement, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova says.

"As of this morning, at the time of preparing for the briefing, the Russian side has not received an answer," Reuters reported her saying.

Both sides met for peace talks in Istanbul a month ago, but there has been no significant breakthrough since then.

www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-61252785

The US House of Representatives passed a non-binding bill on Wednesday, calling on President Joe Biden to impound the assets of wealthy Russian individuals believed to have ties to the Kremlin. Under the plan, confiscated capital would go toward supporting Ukraine.

Named the Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act, the bill was backed by 417 lawmakers, with eight voting against it.

The document urges the US president to “confiscate any property or accounts subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, valued over $2,000,000, and belonging to Russian energy companies or to foreign persons whose wealth is derived in part through corruption linked to or political support for the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), one of the lawmakers behind the bill, explained that under the legislation US authorities could seize luxury villas, yachts and airplanes belonging to wealthy Russian individuals and companies that have been sanctioned by the U.S.

www.rt.com/news/554654-us-house-representatives-bill-russian-assets