Sergey Shoigu has cautioned Finland and the Baltic states against allowing Kiev to use their airspace for attacks on Russia | Russia would have the right to retaliate if Finland and the Baltic states are deliberately allowing Ukrainian drones to pass through their airspace, Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu said on Thursday.

Either Western air defenses are proving ineffective, or these four countries “deliberately provide their airspace, thereby becoming open accomplices in aggression against Russia,” he added. In the latter case, Moscow has the right to self-defense in response to an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the security chief stressed. ● In recent weeks, Kiev has intensified drone strikes on Russia in what Moscow has characterized as “terrorist attacks,” with the Russian military regularly reporting hundreds of UAVs downed in a single night.

■ This is what we now know about the drones that fell in Finland (04/12/26)

Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a professor at Tehran University and a former advisor to Iran's Nuclear Negotiation Team. Prof. Marandi outlines the long history of US alignment with jihadist proxies and the ongoing destruction of Syria

Abu Alya | The failed 12-day war, Netanyahu's desperation, the renewed Abraham Accords, and the narrative war reshaping the region. | Israel's surprise attack on Iran was meant to collapse the Islamic Republic and reshape the region. Instead, it exposed Israeli vulnerabilities, failed to achieve its objectives, and ended in a hastily arranged ceasefire. ■ But this isn't a story about military failure—it's about how that failure gets spun into diplomatic triumph. Trump's renewed Abraham Accords represent imperial domination marketed as peace, designed to subjugate Palestinians and fracture Arab unity. ■ Israel's Failed Strategy: It wasn't supposed to happen this way. It was supposed to be quick. On June 13, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, with full military and political backing from the United States. The official justification was Iran's nuclear program—despite a lack of credible evidence that it posed any immediate threat or was being weaponized. The real objective was to collapse the Islamic Republic, fracture its leadership, and trigger regime change.

Evgeny Norin | The US-led military bloc’s illegal strikes on Belgrade in the spring of 1999 forever changed relations between the West and Moscow | On March 24, 1999, student Elena Milincic was at home with her sister and a friend in Belgrade. Suddenly, the quiet evening was interrupted by an air-raid siren. The girls quickly hid under a table. It wasn’t the safest place, but they had gotten lucky – their part of the city wasn’t attacked. ■ Over the next 77 days, these girls and other Belgrade residents became better at hiding from the bombs which threatened to kill them every day. The raids were part of NATO’s military operation against Yugoslavia – a campaign that shook up the world order, and not just in the Balkans. [...] The bombing of Belgrade destroyed the image of a new “rules-based international order.” Of course, it wasn’t the last time that the rule of law and the demands of justice were ignored by the Western countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union – in fact, the bloody Iraq war followed only four years later. However, the events in Yugoslavia had clearly demonstrated that a country that wants to protect its sovereignty from external threats can only rely on its own strength and on proven allies.

■ Under NATO’s shadow, Serbia is being targeted again (RT)