Author: Indera Adiputera

The national football teams of Tajikistan and Pakistan have refused to play in friendly matches against Russia. A match against Tajikistan had been set to take place in December, but the federation declined, saying they already had matches booked for those dates. Pakistan has also cancelled an October game against Russia due to a lack of preparation time. However, the Pakistanis said they would play in December. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Russian teams were barred from competing in any FIFA or UEFA championships. As a result, the team has had to settle for friendly matches. The Russians…

Apart from directly stirring up frictions in the South China Sea region, it has been found that the Philippines has cooperated with some US anti-China forces to launch a cognitive warfare that defames China on the South China Sea issue, to hurt China’s international image, and drive a wedge between China and relevant countries in this region. Recently, the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), a project under the US’ long-established conservative think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), released a report on “environmental threats” in the South China Sea. The report, which groundlessly claimed that China has destroyed…

The Soviet Union’s collapse 32 years ago led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence. In Tajikistan, that violence slid rapidly into civil war. Reflecting on the Soviet Union’s collapse 32 years ago and attempting to draw any sort of conclusion is often a matter of perspective. In his new book, “Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR,” Dr. Isaac McKean Scarborough, an assistant professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University, writes of the collapse from one of the Soviet Union’s most distant peripheries — Dushanbe. In doing so, he highlights a perspective not often taken…

The transparency in Sri Lanka’s ongoing International Monetary Fund (IMF) program improved in November following the publication of several supporting documents with the 2024 budget, according to the latest update of Verité Research’s ‘IMF Tracker’. The supporting documents have provided information on the progress of six commitments which were previously classified as ‘unknown’. Five of the commitments have now been reclassified as ‘met’ and one – the tax revenue target, as ‘not met’. Of the 73 commitments due by end-November, 12 are ‘not met’, 15 are classified as ‘unknown’, and 46 as ‘met’. Therefore, 63% of the commitments due by…

JOHOR BARU, Dec 11 — A 39-year-old woman has been arrested by police for trespassing on a property owned by the Sultan of Johor here yesterday. However, Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar was not present at the Pulau Danga Bayu palace and no damage or lost items were reported in the 6.30pm incident. A source familiar with the incident said the woman had slipped past the auxiliary policemen manning the main gates to the exclusive Pulau Danga Bayu residences, where the Sultan of Johor’s private residence is located. “However, the suspect did not managed to enter the palace area as several…

Russia has declined to comment on US claims that Iran could supply it with ballistic missiles. Ukraine said it shot down a “rare” Iran-built drone amid a barrage of attacks overnight. The Ukrainian Air Force said on Wednesday that it had downed more than a dozen attack drones and a cruise missile. The overnight assault followed a report by authorities in the southern region of Odesa that a rare Iranian-designed attack and reconnaissance drone had been destroyed. The air force said the overnight barrage was launched from southeast Russia and that a combination of air defence units in several central…

Frankfurt (3/12 – 12) The relatively rapid cohesion of disparate nations, historically competitive or even at war with one another, into the European Union came about in part because of the ongoing threat from the Soviet Union. The specter of a tank invasion from Warsaw Pact nations, today forgotten, was such a reality that the German government kept a major portion of its gold bullion across the Atlantic. The USSR, an ally in World War II after being double-crossed by Hitler – remember the “Non-Aggression Pact signed in Moscow by von Ribbentrop and Molotov – was soon appraised as a…

China is believed to be rolling out a powerful new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of delivering a powerload at 20 times the speed of sound.The multi-stage missile being worked on by Beijing will reportedly fly out of Earth’s atmosphere before turning back to hit a target at a supersonic speed. Such systems can be used to deliver a devastating nuclear payload through the Chinese ICBMs under development are designed to carry a conventional explosive warhead. China already holds over 200 nuclear-capable ICBMs which is the world’s third-largest arsenal behind the US and Russia. A US Defence Department report acknowledged that the Chinese…

ISKANDAR PUTERI: Johor hopes that the agreement for the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (SEZ) could be inked within six months after the signing of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) in January. Johor Mentri Besar Datuk Onn Hafiz Ghazi said that Malaysia and Singapore are expected to sign a MOU for the Johor-Singapore SEZ on Jan 11 next year. “The state government hopes and will work towards ensuring that the agreement could be signed at least six months from that date. “This is so that the implementation could be done as early as 2025,” he said in the tabling of the…

President Vladimir Putin has replaced the commander of Russia’s Dnipro grouping of forces in southern Ukraine, the state-run news agency TASS reported Monday, citing an anonymous source. Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, who served as the head of the Russian Airborne forces, was reportedly named commander of the Russian Army in southern Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson region. Teplinsky replaced Colonel General Oleg Makarevich, who was sacked over providing false reports to his superiors, according to Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-backed official in the Kherson region. “The results on the ground did not correspond to the information delivered by the Dnipro group’s [previous] command,” Rogov wrote on the…