Inside Russia-Outside Russia is a news insight by the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bangladesh on 5.2.2025
Dhaka 5 February 2025 :
INSIDE RUSSIA
Palestinian president to attend Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9 — ambassador
Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov said earlier that invitations were sent to “many countries”
MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will be among guests of the Victory Day parade held on Moscow’s Red Square to celebrate the 80th anniversary of victory over the Nazi Germany, Palestinian Ambassador to Russia Abdel Hafiz Nofal has told TASS.
When asked whether the Palestinian leader will travel to Moscow on May 9, the ambassador replied: “Certainly. He has an invitation, and he accepted it. He will come.”
Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov said earlier that invitations were sent to “many countries.” The Kremlin official said he expected “broad [international] representation” during the festivities.
Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, in turn, said military units from 19 friendly nations were invited to parade in the heart of Moscow.
OUTSIDE RUSSIA
Russia’s newest T-90 Proryv tank to be showcased abroad for first time
The tank will be displayed at the IDEX 2025 exhibition in Abu Dhabi
DUBAI, February 4. /TASS/. Russia will demonstrate the export version of its T-90 Proryv tank for the first time abroad at the IDEX International Defense Exhibition in Abu Dhabi that is kicking off on February 17, the Al Arabiya television channel said.
It posted a photo of the T-90 Proryv tank in desert camouflage prior to its being loaded onto a transport plane. “An exclusive photo of Russia’s newest T-90M Proryv tank, which [Russian President Vladimir] Putin believes to be the most powerful in the world. It will be displayed at the IDEX 2025 exhibition in Abu Dhabi,” the television channel said.
The T-90M main battle tank, the most advanced vehicle in the T-90 family, is designed to fight in any weather and terrain. It is armed with a 125mm 2A46M turret and can shoot antitank guided missiles. The tank carries 7.62mm PKTM machineguns and is equipped with modern fire controls which identify tanks at a distance of 5,000 meters. The tank has an upgraded two-plane arms stabilizer and automatic target tracking system with a hunter-shooter regime. The tank carries modular reactive armor and slat armor on the sides and in the back. Its maximum road speed is 60 km/h. It can overcome five-meter deep water obstacles with underwater driving equipment. It needs a crew of three men to operate it.
The IDEX 2025 International Defense Exhibition will be held in Abu Dhabi from February 17 through 21. The previous exhibition in 2023 was visited by more than 132,000 people from 65 countries. According to its organizers, contracts worth 23.34 billion dirhams ($6.35 billion) were signed on the sidelines of the exhibition. Russia exhibited more than 200 pieces of weaponry, combat vehicles, munitions, and gear.
Russia plans to set up diplomatic missions in Gambia, Liberia, Comoros, Togo — Lavrov
In the Russian foreign minister’s assessment, all this “requires both great attention and significant resources”
MOSCOW, February 4. /TASS/. Russia plans to establish diplomatic missions in The Gambia, Liberia, the Comoros, and Togo, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the presentation of the Department of Partnership with Africa.
“In the near future, embassies in Niger and Sierra Leone will resume their activities. For the first time, our embassy will open in South Sudan. In the near future, we plan to open diplomatic missions in The Gambia, Liberia, the Union of the Comoros, and Togo,” Russia’s top diplomat announced.
In the minister’s assessment, all this “requires both great attention and significant resources.” “In this regard, we feel and receive the full support of the Russian president and government,” Lavrov concluded.
Ukraine seen as mercenary state serving Western interests
According to Georgy Muradov, it is a “new phenomenon of our history”
YALTA, February 4. /TASS/. Ukraine is a mercenary state whose regime acts in the interests of the West, said Georgy Muradov, a representative of Crimea to the Russian president.
The official, who is also deputy chairman of the board of the Russian Association for International Cooperation, made the statement at an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference at Livadia Palace.
“Here’s what I will say: this is the West’s war – an open and blatant one. It’s a hired regime, a hired commander-in-chief, the entire army is hired, fully funded, supplied right down to satellite reconnaissance, aiming at all targets in Russia and everything else,” Muradov said.
According to the official, it is a “new phenomenon of our history.”
“This is the first case so far. It could multiply in different parts of the world, in the struggle between these centers of influence, as the world will now be going through a very active, fluid regime. Including the establishment of state borders, the definition of interests, groups of states and the formation of centers,” he said.
Eighty years ago, February 4, 1945 was the opening day of the Yalta Conference, which brought together, amid the Second World War, the leaders of the main countries of the anti-Hitler coalition: the USSR, the UK and the US. The decisions taken at this meeting laid the foundations of the post-war world order and divided spheres of influence between Western states and the Soviet Union. The conference ended on February 11, 1945.
The celebrations of the anniversary will be attended by the leadership and lawmakers of the Republic of Crimea, the State Duma and the city of Yalta, along with political scientists and scholars. The guests will be presented with a historical reconstruction of how the Soviet Interior Ministry, known at the time as the NKVD, prepared and guarded Livadia Palace, an exhibition from the collection of the palace, a display called “the Crimean Conference in 1945.” At the White Hall, a presentation will be held for a book authored by lawmaker and legal scholar Pavel Krasheninnikov and called “On the Way to Being a Superpower. State and Law in Times of War and Peace (1939-1953).”
Moscow, Tehran in talks on construction of new NPPs in Iran — Ambassador to Russia
Kazem Jalali stressed that nuclear energy cooperation between Russia and Iran was exclusively peaceful in nature
MOSCOW, February 4. /TASS/. Russia and Iran are negotiating the development of projects and contracts for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the Islamic Republic, Iran’s Ambassador to Moscow Kazem Jalali told reporters.
“You know that the Russian Federation has built nuclear power plants in our country that generate electricity in the amount of a thousand megawatts. Two other units are being built under the supervision of Russian colleagues. I can also confirm that negotiations on defining new projects and contracts for the construction of new nuclear power plants are continuing,” he said.
The ambassador stressed that nuclear energy cooperation between Russia and Iran is exclusively peaceful in nature.
“As for our cooperation in the field of nuclear energy, it is developing well. Nuclear cooperation, which is purely peaceful in nature, continues effectively between our countries,” Jalali added. The diplomat also recalled that Iran adopted a resolution on achieving electricity generation in the amount of 20,000 megawatts based on nuclear power plants.
Woman who called Macron’s wife a man seeks asylum in Russia
Journalist Natacha Rey has been prosecuted in France for alleging that Brigitte Macron underwent a sex change
The journalist who claimed that the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron was actually born a man is reportedly seeking political asylum in Russia. In an interview with Izvestia, Natacha Rey and her lawyer, Francois Danglehant, have cited “persecution” in France as the reason for her decision.
Rey alleged in 2021 that Brigitte Macron is actually the transgender identity of her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux. Rey spent three years researching Macron’s supposed secret and later published a video on her findings on social media. Since then, she has been the subject of judicial action in France.
Explaining her decision to seek asylum in Russia, Rey described the country as a great democracy compared to France, which, in her view, persecutes the political opposition and restricts freedom of speech.
“Why did I choose Russia? Because it is a great nation, a great civilization which I admire, defending traditional and Christian values that are inherent to me,” she told Izvestia. According to Rey, Russia has been a “victim of a disinformation campaign and unjustified attacks by European and American media for decades.”
Danglehant insists the charges against his client have been “fabricated.” According to him, false testimony was given by Brigitte Macron’s former family, including her ex-husband, Jean-Louis Auziere.
Mrs. Macron sued Rey in 2022 over defamation and for violating her privacy. Last year, a Paris court fined Rey and ordered her to pay €8,000 ($8,200) in damages to the wife of the French president.
Rey’s lawyer said that the journalist believes she will be respected in Russia and will not face persecution. He previously claimed that his client had submitted an asylum request to Russian State Duma Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolsty, but the lawmaker denied this to RT on Monday saying “matters of citizenship are decided by the head of state.”
Danglehant told Izvestia on Monday that his client “has not yet submitted an application but will soon send it to the Russian Embassy in Paris… She believes that in Russia, she may be seen as a normal person, someone with at least some value, somewhat like former US National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden.”
Emmanuel Macron was 17 years old when he declared his intention to marry Brigitte Marie-Claude Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior and was his literature teacher. Brigitte divorced banker Andre-Louis Auziere, with whom she had three children in 2006, and married Macron in 2007.
SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION IN UKRAINE
Russian human rights commissioner urges UN to react to Kiev’s attack on school bus
Moskalkova said that the fact that the collective West remained tight-lipped on the matter of Kiev’s war crimes raises eyebrows
MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova believes that the United Nations needs to come up with a tough response to recent Ukrainian drone strike that targeted a school bus in the Zaporozhye Region.
“I call upon the UN Humn Rights Commissner and the UN Child Rights Committee to come up with a tough response to heinous crimes against civilians,” Moskalkova wrote on Telegram. “The brutal attack on civilians shows that those behind this act of atrocity have no moral compass whatsoever.”
In her words, the fact that the collective West remained tight-lipped on the matter of Kiev’s war crimes raises eyebrows.
Five children and a driver were wounded when a Ukrainian drone attacked a school bus in the Zaporozhye Region. A criminal case was launched into the attack.
INSIGHTS
Rape and torture: Will the West cover for Kiev’s war crimes?
Atrocities that happen on the inconvenient side of the barricades must not be swept under the rug
Russia’s Investigative Committee has announced the initiation of a criminal investigation into the killing of civilians in a small village in Kursk Region.
The region on the border with Ukraine is, of course, the site of the worse than pyrrhic incursion which Kiev launched into Russian territory last August. Since initially being overrun, the territory under the control of Ukrainian forces has unsurprisingly been shrinking under a Russian counterattack, while Kiev has been wasting its soldiers’ lives on yet another strategically absurd and tactically mulish to-the-last-man stand in classic Zelensky style.
Against this grim backdrop, the village in question, Russkoye Porechnoye, was under temporary Ukrainian occupation before being liberated by Russian forces. Entering the settlement, those forces reported finding evidence of the crimes that are now under investigation.
Specifically, Russian prosecutors charge Ukrainian forces with severely abusing and killing 22 civilians (11 men and 11 women) in Russkoye Porechnoye. They have also identified five individual Ukrainian servicemen as perpetrators: they go by the field pseudonyms of “Kum” (godfather), a platoon commander, “Motyl” (moth), “Provodnik” (conductor), and “Khudozhnik” (artist) and belong to Ukraine’s 92nd assault brigade. A fifth man, Evgenii Fabrisenko, is of special importance as he is the only one – at least until now – who has been apprehended by Russian forces.
His confessions, partly shown on Russian primetime news and on widely watched talk shows, seem to be a key source for information on the other perpetrators. Apart from providing details about the cruel abuses – including rape – and killings in Russkoye Porechnoye, Fabrisenko also claims that the perpetrators received an order from their battalion commander to “cleanse” the settlement. That is an important detail since it implicates the commander in the crimes even if he was not personally present.
At this point, the Russian authorities have launched an investigation, named suspects, and made specific accusations. It is true that, at the same time, Russian media and politicians treat the crimes already as fact: Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, for instance, has underlined that the atrocities of Russkoye Porechnoye must be acknowledged and widely publicized, even if the West and Ukraine pretend to be deaf to this kind of news. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, has denounced the crimes as typical of the “terrorist and Neo-Nazi” Kiev regime, which, she stressed, is supported by the West.
But the investigations have not been completed, and trials have not yet taken place. At least until then, conclusive assessments of what exactly happened in Russkoye Porechnoye and who precisely took part in it are out of reach. It should be noted, however, that things can get even worse: Russian prosecutors speak of five identified perpetrators at least. Others might still become targets of investigation. The battalion commander, in any case, seems liable to be charged under the command responsibility principle.
Even without speculating, we do know a few things already: very serious, detailed allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity have been made. Russian prosecutors and media are showing us pieces of evidence and of the confessions of one of the accused. Leading Russian politicians have invested their credibility into supporting these allegations.
Even if some of the rhetoric around the case in the Russian media is, unsurprisingly, intense (it would be everywhere), there is no good reason to simply dismiss all of the above as “fake.” Yet that is what Ukraine and the West have done. Intriguingly, with few exceptions that seem to almost fulfill an “alibi” function, this wholesale dismissal has mostly taken the form of keeping quiet about the case: try googling for “News” about “Russkoye Porechnoye” in Russian and in, for instance, English, and the pattern is clear. That may still change in the future, but it is already a fact that the initial Western and Kiev response has been what the Germans call “totschweigen,” that is, hushing something up until it is – or at least seems – dead.
In that regard, as a minimum, both Peskov and Zakharova have an important point: even if Western and Ukrainian observers and politicians want to contradict Russia’s version of events, their silence is entirely inadequate, in three regards:
First, despite endless Western mainstream media brainwashing there is no a priori reason to simply dismiss the Russian accusations because they also carry an inevitable political charge: In general, facts can do so and still be facts. In the case of Russia, specifically, its record of telling or not telling the truth is, actually, no worse than that of the West or Ukraine (witness the ludicrous Western and Ukrainian lying about the Nord Stream sabotage or Western denialism about Israeli genocide), to say the very least.
It is true that Amnesty International has criticized prior Russian judicial procedures against Ukrainian POWs as unfair. In 2023, a UN commission of enquiry found that “Russian authorities have used torture in a widespread and systematic way in various types of detention facilities.” Yet even if you believe all of the above, it is reasonable – and not “whataboutism,” that last refuge of the special pleader – to apply the same standards to every state: The US, for instance, has an extensive and well-documented record of horrendous and pervasive illegality, including kidnapping, assassinations, “renditions,” and torture. And yet no one in the Western mainstream media would simply dismiss without further ado allegations that its officials make about others’ crimes.
Thus, if you take allegations out of Kiev, Washington, or, say, London seriously enough to give them at least a hearing, you’ll have to do the same for Moscow. You won’t have to – and should not – believe anyone without evidence, but you cannot quickly decide to disbelieve anyone just because you feel you are “on the other team” either.
Second, there is no reason to consider Ukrainian soldiers immune to committing crimes. The West may have turned a blind eye to plenty of very questionable behavior – to put it mildly – by its proxy’s forces, from shelling civilians in Donbass to mistreating Russian POWs. And the Kiev regime has invested heavily in a deliberate attempt to “sell” its war effort as unrealistically kind and innocent.
Yet we still have some evidence independent of any Russian claims: Early in the war, Western media and Amnesty International, for instance, still dared to report Ukrainian crimes. In addition – and again despite the West’s massive efforts at obfuscating and “normalizing” this fact – Ukrainian troops do include substantial numbers of men with extremely violent, far-right ideologies.
In addition, the Ukrainian public sphere has been subjected to a systematic dehumanization campaign, in which all Russians have been depicted not merely as enemies but as monstrous and inferior (often using slurs, such as “vatnik,” a demeaning term implying backwardness; “rashist,” a contraction of “Russian” and “fascist”; or “Orc,” borrowed from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). The systematic adoption of this language by the political elite and the mass media has had real effects. As Al Jazeera reported as early as May 2022, even a humble sales clerk in Kiev knew and shared its message: “They’re orcs because we don’t consider them human.”
Indeed, many Western “friends” of Ukraine had nothing better to do than to excuse, encourage, and even adopt this foul rhetoric. Those who may wish to justify such talk as a virtually inevitable consequence of war will still have to admit that it can have severe consequences beyond words: soldiers – that is men with arms who can end up in positions where they have the upper hand over civilians without arms – taking this dehumanizing language seriously will feel free, even encouraged to commit atrocities.
And, finally, the third reason why we cannot simply dismiss the Russian accusations is that crimes have victims. If the Russian accusations are borne out, then it will be principally unjust to pretend that the crimes against these victims do not exist or do not matter simply because they are “on the other side.” Because that would imply that these victims do not matter. Yes, there is a fundamental ethical issue here.
It bears repeating that, if we think in large numbers – and this has become a war of very large numbers indeed – then it is still likely that the preponderant majority of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are not criminals. They are now at war, and they live and die violently. I know Russian and Ukrainian and I have met many Russians as well as Ukrainians. Call me naïve if you wish, but I will hope until the opposite is proven that, on both sides, most of those fighting are not rapists or murderers. And when this war will be over, everyone will need to remember this, if they want a better future. Yet everyone will also have to be honest about not only the crimes they accuse others of but also those that some on their own side will have committed.
And as far as the West is concerned, those honest enough to face reality will find that no one has remained innocent. The West – its politicians, intellectuals, and media representative – in particular, will have to admit its abysmal, essential contribution to making this war happen and keeping it going. The psychological shock delivered by this predictable, late (as always), and inevitable (in the long run) discovery will produce ongoing denial, but also, hopefully, at least some soul-searching. Because a West that always claims the moral high ground must finally understand itself: it is no better than others, and, given its extremely aggressive conduct since the end of the Cold War – not to adopt a longer, also plausible perspective – it may well be worse.
