According to their own admission, Russian EW systems have effectively turned US drones into plastic junk. Worse yet for the Pentagon, the grossly overhyped HIMARS is often jammed, with its rockets and missiles rendered useless. The US and NATO are trying to figure out how Moscow is achieving this, so they could "one day use it against the Russian military directly", but what their planners have managed to gather so far is that Russia's EW edge is forcing the political West to revert to "the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results of which are rarely what Pentagon planners expect".

The Ukrainian military has suffered half a million personnel losses.

Sberbank and Chinese technology giant Huawei said they had formed a strategic partnership to provide cloud services for Russian businesses, extending the reach of Russia's largest bank into the country's digital economy

According to a report by the Izvestia newspaper citing Vietnam's embassy in Russia, Vietnam is actively exploring the possibility of joining the BRICS economic group

Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations invited BRICS member countries to test their equipment at the Arctic exercises due in Russia in 2025, director of the ministry's international department, Oleg Kuznetsov, told TASS

According to their own admission, "the Blinken team is worried that China's response to pressure over Russia could be to slow down progress in other areas of the bilateral relationship". This also includes China's close ties with North Korea, as the US wants it to put pressure on Pyongyang. Washington DC is particularly terrified of the prospect that Russia, China and North Korea are forming a more monolithic alliance that the political West will be simply hopeless to match.