MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Russian armed forces have taken control of the settlement of Novopavlovka in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

"The units of the Tsentr Battlegroup liberated the settlement of Novopavlovka in the Donetsk People's Republic," the statement said.

The Russian forces also took control of the Alexeyevka settlement in the Dnepropetrovsk) region, the ministry added.

Furthermore, the Tsentr Battlegroup has eliminated more than 460 Ukrainian military personnel in the past day.

"The Ukrainian armed forces lost more than 460 servicepeople, two Kozak armored vehicles, five vehicles, and two field artillery pieces," the ministry said.

Russia's Zapad group has eliminated up to 220 Ukrainian military personnel, while the Vostok group of forces eliminated up to 900 Ukrainian soldiers in the past day, the ministry said.

Additionally, the Russian armed forces have hit energy facilities supporting the operation of Ukrainian defense industry complex enterprises, the statement read.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20251015/russian-forces-liberate-novopavlovka-settlement-in-donetsk-region-1122963018.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Kiev regime escalates persecution of Orthodoxy

BY Lucas LEIROZ

On October 10, 2025, yet another brutal episode targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was recorded — this time in the city of Vladimir. During the seizure of the Dormition Cathedral, security forces and radical militants violently assaulted worshippers, seminary students, and clergy members. The most serious case was that of Deacon Bogdan, who was beaten, choked, and dragged by the hair. Witnesses reported that the attackers prevented filming, confiscated phones, and the police stood by, doing nothing to protect the victims or stop the violence.

This is not an isolated incident. It is part of a long and intensifying campaign of repression against the Orthodox Church linked to the Moscow Patriarchate. Under the current neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, Ukraine has ramped up religious persecution under the pretext of fighting so-called “Russian agents.” In practice, this is a systematic policy aimed at eliminating the historical presence of traditional Orthodoxy on Ukrainian soil.

Numerous independent analysts have been warning for years about this coordinated campaign. The illegitimate Ukrainian government is conducting an ideological crusade to weaken or eradicate the UOC, using a combination of legal repression, state propaganda, and direct violence. Churches are forcibly seized, monks are expelled, clergy are prosecuted for “collaborating with the enemy,” and worshippers are intimidated by paramilitary groups and local authorities.

The logic is clear: Kiev seeks to impose a new nationalist religion, aligned with the state’s ideology and detached from the canonical tradition that historically unites the Eastern Slavic peoples. The creation and promotion of the so-called “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” — recognized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople but rejected by Moscow and much of the Orthodox world — has served as an instrument in this process. This new church acts as a religious arm of the ongoing Western-aligned, Russophobic political project in the country.

The case of the Dormition Cathedral exposes the violent nature of this process. The attacks on Deacon Bogdan were not the excesses of overzealous individuals — they were a direct expression of a state policy that tolerates and often encourages violence against those who maintain religious ties with Russia. The police’s passive presence at the scene confirms the institutionalized nature of this persecution.

Beyond physical violence, a symbolic war is also underway. By forbidding filming, confiscating phones, and intimidating witnesses, the attackers show a clear intention to control the narrative, erase evidence, and silence dissent. This impunity only fuels further attacks. With every church seized, every monk expelled, and every believer silenced, Ukraine moves further away from the religious freedom it claims to uphold in front of the West.

This anti-Christian crusade unfolds with the full approval of the so-called “defenders of democracy.” The same countries that criticize Russia for its self-defense actions remain complicitly silent in the face of the destruction of churches, the repression of historic religious communities, and the censorship of believers. This hypocrisy reveals that “human rights” are, for the West, nothing more than selective tools of geopolitical manipulation.

Orthodoxy represents a millennia-old spiritual and cultural continuity among the populations of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Attacking it is an attempt to erase this memory, destroy the bridge between Slavic nations, and forcibly shape a new national identity — one based on hatred of tradition, of Russia, and of the Ukrainian people’s own spiritual roots.

Western silence on the repression of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is not mere omission — it is strategic complicity. By tolerating the religious persecution promoted by Kiev, the West reveals that its professed principles of freedom are subordinated to selfish interests and liberal political agendas. What is happening is not an isolated excess, but part of a deliberate policy of cultural rupture. Recognizing this reality is both an ethical and strategic duty for all those concerned with stability and justice in Eastern Europe.

Unfortunately, given the failure of peaceful means to stop Ukrainian barbarism, Russia has no alternative left but to use force to protect its people.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/10/13/kiev-regime-escalates-persecution-of-orthodoxy/

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/47119

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Why western sanctions have failed and become self-defeating

BY Ian PROUD

I recently participated in a debate in London about the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. I argued that they have proven ineffective as a tool of foreign policy, and kept my remarks focussed on Russia, which is the most sanctioned country on the planet, with over 20,000 sanctions imposed so far.

For good or ill, I argued that sanctions were ineffective from a position of having authorised around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after war broke out in 2022. I take no great pride in that, but that was my job at the time and I eventually left my career as a British diplomat in 2023, largely out of a sense that UK foreign policy was failing in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, it worries me that so few people appear focused on what we in the UK want the sanctions to achieve, to the point where they have become an end in themselves. Yet, look at the legislation, specifically the Russia Sanctions Regulations of 2019, and the purpose is [quite] clear:

Encourage Russia to cease actions destablising Ukraine or undermining or threatening the sovereignty or independence of Ukraine.

More than eleven years since the onset of the Ukraine crisis and not far from four years since war broke out, the UK and its allies have manifestly failed to deliver upon that goal.

We have been through eleven years of gradually ramping up sanctions against Russia only to see Russia increase its resistance, and then to launch its so-called Special Military Operation in 2022.

Sanctions did not prevent that. One might argue that they helped to precipitate it.

Ukraine is bankrupt, its cities broken, its energy infrastructure once again subject to nightly bombardment as the winter approaches and people wonder whether they’ll be able to heat their homes.

Sanctions are not preventing this.

Yet at the debate, my opponents somehow advanced the argument that sanctions remain an effective tool of foreign policy, from the comfort of a grand hall, two thousand miles away from the frontline, even further from responsibility, and completely detached from reality.

In my mind, there are two clear reasons why sanctions policy has failed.

Firstly, because even if people in the west consider them to be justified, the Russian State considers them to be unjust.

Ever since the Minsk II peace deal was subordinated to sanctions in March 2015, President Putin has become increasingly convinced that western nations would sanction Russia come what [may].

And that has proved to be the case.

Every time an inevitable new package of sanctions is imposed by the UK, Europe or others, it also convinces ordinary Russian people that this is true.

People in the west might hate Putin, but he is far more popular in Russia than Keir Starmer is in Britain, or than Friedrich Merz is in Berlin, or than Emmanuel Macron is in France.

So the idea that sanctions undermine support in Russia for President Putin is deeply misguided.

Likewise, sanctioning British-based Russian billionaires who took their assets out of Russia might play well in the Financial Times but is a meaningless gesture; these figures have no real power in Russia.

The idea that if we sanction Roman Abramovich he might some how rise up and try to unseat Putin together with other oligarchs is a fantasy.

The Russian oligarch Oleg Tinkoff who took to Instagram after the war started to criticise the Russian army, was forced to sell his eponymous bank and yet the UK still sanctioned him.

Why would any wealthy Russian on that basis stand up rise up against President Putin on the west’s behalf only to get sanctioned by us anyway?

Yet, we have sanctioned 2000 individuals and entities, banning them from travel to the UK, even though 92% of them never had before the war started. These, I’m afraid, are empty gestures.

Sanctions will not stop the war.

And the longer they go on, more Ukrainians will die.

Despite Russia having done everything to adjust to sanctions since 2014, commentators in the west nevertheless try to tell you that, well, maybe we should have imposed more sanctions at the start for a bigger effect.

But on my second point, that denies the political reality of how sanctions are imposed.

While the combined economies of NATO are 27 times bigger than Russia, 32 states cannot coordinate policy quickly enough to take decisive action.

This results in waging war by committee.

Imagine, if you will, a chessboard with President Putin staring across at a team of thirty-two people on the other side, squabbling loudly among themselves for months on end before deciding not to make the best move.

If you believe that Europe is about to become a rapid decision-making body now at a time when its member states are increasingly turning to nationalist political parties who resent the war policy in Brussels, then my message to you is, good luck waiting for that.

Europe has now been debating for over a year whether to expropriate 200 billion in Russian assets housed in Belgium.

Yet that has not been agreed precisely because the Belgian government has blocked it consistently out of a not illegitimate fear that it will shred that’s country’s reputation among international investors at a time when new financial architecture is being constructed in the developing world.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves have continued to grow and now stand at over $700 billion for the first time. So even at this late stage if Europe chose to expropriate the assets, Russia could live without them.

Rather than being forced to the negotiating table – the complete fantasy that proponents of this hair-brained idea would tell you – Russia would be so enraged by what it sees as theft that it would keep on fighting.

And more Ukrainians would die.

President Putin is not hemmed in by the need to consult, and western indecision gives him time to adapt.

Since 2014, Russia’s economy has reoriented away from its dependence on the west, precisely to limit the impact of sanctions.

When war broke out in 2022, Russia had been adapting to sanctions for 8 years already.

Even though the scale was unprecedented, Russia had already prepared itself for the onslaught when it happened and has adapted better.

In 2022, with everyone crowing about the crashing rouble, Russia pulled in its biggest ever current account surplus of over $230 billion which, by the way, is bigger than Ukraine’s whole economy.

Despite cutting off gas supplies and bearing down on shadow tankers, Russia to this day continues to pull in hefty trade surpluses each year. It has not been in deficit since 1998.

Lots of people argued that if we had gone all in 2014, then that might have made a difference. But believe we, that was debated in Europe, and no one could agree to it.

And I wonder whether, had it been agreed, Europe would simply have faced the political and economic turmoil it is currently going now, ten years earlier.

So let’s stop talking about what ifs.

The ugly truth is that sanctions have become an end in themselves. They are not a strategy, but a fig leaf covering the embarrassing fact that the west does not have a strategy.

They are a weak alternative to war or peace that serve no purpose other than to prolong the war in Ukraine.

Western nations have shown themselves unwilling to contemplate diplomacy. Taking to Putin is dismissed as a prize that will take him out of international isolation; even though he only appears isolated by western nations. Yet diplomacy isn’t about talking to your friends, despite the never ending round of backslapping summits our leaders attend. Diplomacy is about talking to the people with whom you most disagree. We have refused to talk to Russia and continue to avoid diplomacy at all costs to this day.

Neither do we want war, Britain’s army today has 73,000 soldiers, 2,000 fewer than 2 years ago. Russia has 600,000 troops in Ukraine, apparently. We couldn’t even agree to send 10,000 troops as part of a so-called reassurance force although, to be honest, that idea didn’t reassure me at all.

Russia is outstripping us in the production of munitions, tanks and naval warships. And it has 6000 nuclear warheads.

So I’m glad we don’t want war either.

But as we continue to pursue ever diminishing packages of sanctions, Ukraine will remain stuck in the middle, devastated and depopulated, as Europe deindustrialises and falls into the embrace of nationalism at an accelerating rate.

Meanwhile, despite obvious headwinds, Russia’s economy appears in better shape that ours. It would be impossible to claim that there had been no economic impacts on the Russian economy from sanctions. Yet with economic link to the western now all but destroyed, sanctions relief is less important to Russia than it is to Europe.

In Budapest recently I got talking to a member of the House of Lords and former Diplomatic Service colleague who is a close friend of Boris Johnson. During his speech he remarked that sanctions on Russia have had no impact at all.

Later over drinks we discussed this and he agreed with the arguments that I have put forward today. But then he paused, and said ‘ah, but you just can’t say that in Britain though’.

It’s time to wake up and realise the terrible mess we have got ourselves into through sanctions. Sanctions have failed to the great detriment of Ukraine. It’s time, finally, to get back [to] diplomacy.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/10/15/why-western-sanctions-have-failed-and-become-self-defeating/

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.