Heading towards World War III?

Though relations between Russia and the West are at their worst since the Cold War, the unipolar world dominated by the US and its allies is now over, former Russian president and current head of the National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev told RT and RIA Novosti in an interview on Thursday. He added that Russians are uniting in the face of Western sanctions and threats, and will forever remember the current campaign of hate against everything Russian.

www.rt.com/russia/552745-medvedev-west-relations-rt-interview

Western nations should prepare their peoples for a long-term drop in living standards if their standoff with Russia continues, the Britain’s former Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, Jonathan Shaw, has said.

“We in the West have the wrong mentality” about the conflict in Ukraine, he said. Once one of the British Army’s most senior officers, Shaw was speaking on talk radio station LBC on Saturday.

“We are obsessed with humanitarian concerns and individual suffering, and that makes good TV, but the reality is this is far more serious than that,” the Major-General, whose 30-year career spanned the Falklands and Kosovo to commanding the UK forces in Iraq in 2006, warned.

The West has imposed draconian sanctions on Russia after it attacked Ukraine a month ago. This includes the US and Canada giving up their need for supplies of Russian hydrocarbon fuels, and the EU and UK announcing plans to join them in the near future.

The restrictions and retaliatory steps by Moscow have already seen energy and food prices spiking in many Western nations. There were reports of British food-bank users refusing free potatoes because they couldn’t afford to boil them. But Shaw predicted that this is only the beginning.

www.rt.com/news/552752-ukraine-uk-west-sanctions

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky quietly and successfully lobbied Joe Biden to keep billionaire Russian-Israeli oligarch Roman Abramovich off Washington's sanctions list, according to a bombshell new report from the Wall Street Journal.

www.informationliberation.com/?id=62977

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Tuesday that Kiev would not consider a request by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) to pull back the Ukrainian troops from its controlled Donbass districts.

"We are not communicating with them. We do not understand who they are," Zelensky said at a joint press conference with Estonian President Alar Karis, responding to a question about whether Kiev would consider the request by the Donbass republics.

Lawmaker of the LPR People’s Council Dmitry Khoroshilov stated earlier on Tuesday that measures could be taken to restore the integrity of the entire territory of the republic, if Kiev did not pull back its troops outside the Lugansk Region. He pointed out that under the republic’s law the LPR territory included the entire former Lugansk Region. The lawmaker said that it was necessary to call on Ukraine to pull back its troops voluntarily because otherwise "measures will be taken that will allow establishing peace and territorial integrity on the entire LPR territory."

Official Kiev has repeatedly stated that it refuses to hold direct negotiations with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as it considers them senseless. Zelensky, in particular, has claimed that the leaders of the republics "decide nothing" and, therefore, it is not worth "wasting time" on negotiations with them.

On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced recognizing the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Russia signed agreements on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance with their leaders. Putin instructed the Foreign Ministry to establish diplomatic relations with the DPR and the LPR and the Defense Ministry to ensure peace on their territories.

tass.com/world/1408279

In a co-ordinated move, four EU countries are expelling more than 40 Russian diplomats suspected of spying.

Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic issued expulsion orders to a total of 43 embassy staffers on Tuesday afternoon.

The move follows similar actions taken by other EU members, including Poland, in the past week.

www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60920588

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has been briefing the media on the talks held with Ukraine in Turkey yesterday, and played down any hopes of a breakthrough.

Yesterday, Russia said it intended to scale back its military activity in Kyiv and Chernihiv, and Ukraine said it would consider becoming a "neutral" state.

"What is positive is that the Ukrainian side has at least started to specifically formulating and putting on paper what it is proposing. Until now we had not managed to achieve that," Peskov said.

"As regards the rest, we cannot, put it this way, at present state there have been any breakthroughs, anything very promising," he said, in remarks reported by the Interfax news agency.

www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60923158