Russia

With a Russian ship sailing in very close proximity to the primary east coast submarine base, and tensions between the US - and perhaps the Trump administration - and Russia, once again rising it seems like an odd moment to organize a meeting between the top US military general and his Russian counterpart on Thursday in Azerbaijan, the first such meeting between the two since military cooperation between the two nations was suspended in 2014 following the hostilities in Ukraine.

Russia will not be giving Crimea back to Ukraine a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said in response to White House comments saying that Donald Trump expected Moscow to “return” the peninsular. Maria Zakharova told a weekly news briefing “We don’t return our territories. Crimea is a territory of the Russian Federation” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday that the US president expects Moscow to “return” Crimea to Ukraine. RT reports: Trump later reiterated his position on Crimea on Twitter. Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer says President Trump expects Russia to give back Crimea to Ukraine. During a press briefing Tuesday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear that he expects Moscow to “return” the Crimea peninsula to Ukraine.

The latest Trump foreign policy keeps getting stranger by the minute. Overnight, as the three liberal-leaning US newspaper launched another attack on Trump, alleging that officials linked to the president, most notably Tim Manafort, engaged Russian intel officials in the not too distant past, the Russian government dismissed allegations that the country’s intelligence officials were in repeated contact with Donald Trump’s team ahead of the US election.

With the news cycle once again squarely focused on Mike Flynn in particular, and the Trump Administration's ties to Russia in general following a volley of news last night from NYT, WaPo and CNN that Trump advisors allegedly communicated with members of Russian intellgience in the year preceding the election, it was expected that Trump's first comment of the day would be focused on the story du jour, and sure enough in his first tweet on Wednesday, President Trump blasted the “fake news media,” saying it is “going crazy with conspiracy theories and blind hatred.”