It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business.

An official inquiry into a notorious 2018 Novichok poisoning case has found the victim briefly emerged from a coma, revealing information which wholly undermined the British government’s narrative. While the medical professional she told was muzzled, mainstream media has ignored the new finding.

The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.

The “Deep State” continues to pressure the new U.S. Administration to “not give in to any of Moscow’s proposals and create from day one of direct negotiations, a position of strength that will eventually force Moscow to compromise and send a clear message to China, Iran and North Korea that the United States is back in strength and glory.”

US President-elect Donald Trump’s statements about acquiring Greenland not exempting economic or military means received critical reactions from Russian officials. They called the development “dramatic” and predict “uncertainty and tension in the region.” Some Russian political commentators celebrated Trump’s statements while others expressed skepticism and noted the potential implications for Russia.

The feds are still lying and obfuscating about the Russiagate conspiracy against Donald Trump: Witness the recent release, years late and heavily redacted, of a document about the origin of the FBI probe.

America’s proxy war with Russia isn’t anything new. It’s been decades in the making. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick explain what nuclear war would actually look like.

The US stands as the primary economic beneficiary of the pipeline bombings

Ukraine loses billions in transit fees, Europe faces soaring energy prices, with Russia largely insulated from the fallout

The present severed from the past is easily misunderstood. In discussions of the Russia-Ukraine war, not enough is made of the historical facts that, at the end of the Cold War, the newly independent Ukraine promised not to join NATO, and NATO promised not to expand to Ukraine.