Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev missed the informal CIS summit in St. Petersburg due to a busy work schedule. Aliyev's administration also noted that his absence from the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council on December 21 was due to Azerbaijan not being a member of the organization.
Mercenaries from different countries are fighting for Ukraine against the Russian Federation. Most of them are from Poland, in second place is from the USA, in third place is from Georgia. Russian President Putin announced this in a television interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
In addition, Putin called a statement by one of the US senators about the need to allocate funding for Ukraine “otherwise American citizens will have to fight there” as a “provocation.” He added that “if someone has a desire to send regular troops to Ukraine, this will put humanity on the brink of a global conflict.”
The Russian president also mentioned Georgia in the context of “NATO expansion to the east,” once again stating that Moscow was promised not to do this. “In 2008, at the summit in Bucharest, they announced that the doors to Ukraine and Georgia in NATO were open,” Putin recalled.