Medvedev tells Trump ‘Russia isn't Israel or Iran'
The US president on Monday issued a more extreme ultimatum to Russia, demanding that Moscow reach a ceasefire with Kiev within '10 or 12 days.' Earlier this month, Trump threatened sweeping secondary sanctions against Russia's trade partners unless a deal was reached by autumn.
Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said that Trump was 'playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10…'
In a post on X on Monday, he suggested Trump should remember two things: first, that 'Russia isn't Israel or even Iran,' and, second, that every new ultimatum constitutes a threat and a step toward hostilities between Russia and the US.
'Don't go down the Sleepy Joe [Biden] road!' he wrote.
Trump's playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10… He should remember 2 things:1. Russia isn't Israel or even Iran.2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country. Don't go down the Sleepy Joe road!
During his election campaign last year, Trump repeatedly criticized his predecessor Joe Biden's handling of the Ukraine conflict, warning that US policy under the former administration had brought the world to the brink of 'World War III.'
While Trump has re-engaged Russia diplomatically and pushed for Kiev to enter direct peace talks with Moscow, he has increasingly expressed impatience with the pace of negotiations. Earlier this month, after issuing his initial ultimatum, the president resumed US military aid to Ukraine through NATO.
Russia has long condemned the US-led military bloc's arms supplies to Ukraine, arguing they make Kiev's Western sponsors party to the conflict, which Moscow sees as a proxy war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said that although Russia is essentially fighting a war against the entire West on its own, it will not back down from its key security demand in the conflict.
'No dragging Ukraine into NATO, no NATO expansion at all,' the top diplomat said on Monday. 'It has already expanded right up to our borders.'
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Facial data gathered in Nigerian policing trials end up fine-tuning surveillance software in San Francisco, where western models have had protracted problems in identifying and tracking darker-skinned individuals. Agricultural data scraped from Filipino farmers help power predictive analytics for agribusiness conglomerates that will hardly benefit the Philippines. This is not a partnership. This is colonial pillage dressed in TED Talk lingo. AI is marketed as a miracle equalizer that will help developing nations leapfrog into the future. We were told AI would bring precision agriculture, predictive healthcare, and smart urbanism, among numerous other utopian transformations, to even the most under-resourced regions. These Davos fantasies were regurgitated for nearly two decades. But where is the proof, the showcase project or evidence that even a fraction of those promises was delivered? The only real revolution happening is the outflow of data that were supposed to power these breakthroughs. Big Tech servers abroad now function like the colonial warehouses and banks of yore. Nor are intellectual properties of individuals and SMEs in the Developing World safe from this new brand of predation. Models, patents, ideas, and profits quietly migrate north while the Global South is left with nothing but pilot programs and PowerPoint decks. Worse still, these tools are increasingly used against the very populations providing the raw material, or should I say, raw data. In Kenya, facial recognition technology was introduced as a policing tool under the guise of modernization. In practice, it has disproportionately targeted political activists who, in turn, are also resorting to AI to level the political battlefield. Who ultimately benefits from this internecine clash? Isn't this the latest incarnation of the old imperial 'divide and conquer' dictum? In India, AI-driven fraud detection systems have misclassified thousands of rural poor, unjustly cutting them off from vital government benefits. Imported algorithmic governance – often designed without regard for local context or cultural nuance – compounds the problem. Ironically, while these systems penalize the most vulnerable, India has emerged as a global hub for sophisticated online scams. It is a digital paradox where the poor are relentlessly surveilled, while the real fraudsters flourish with impunity. Nothing exemplifies AI colonialism better than the biometric boom. Tech firms, often in partnership with NGOs or global financial institutions, are racing to digitize identities across the Global South. Fingerprint scans, iris recognition, voiceprint registration have all been justified as ways to 'include the unbanked' or 'streamline public services.' But these efforts rarely include meaningful consent or data protection frameworks. In many cases, biometric systems have been imposed without community consultation or independent oversight. One of the most egregious examples is Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project that offered small payments in exchange for biometric iris scans. Its largest user base? Young people in low-income African nations like Kenya who served as a convenient population to experiment on, far from the regulatory spotlights of Brussels or Washington. (Note; Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, who is also the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT). Once collected, this data becomes part of opaque and often proprietary AI systems whose inner workings are unknowable to the very people they affect. Local regulators are usually outgunned, underfunded or more likely, politically compromised. As a result, entire populations are subjected to surveillance and scoring regimes that they neither understand nor control. The worst culprits in this saga are not Big Tech but local politicians and 'technocrats' who sell out their nations at bargain basement prices, couched under the double-speak of 'best practices' and UN institutional recommendations. Silicon Valley is the global epicenter of thenew East India Companies. These entities are vested with quasi-sovereign power and backed by vast capital reserves, lobbying muscle, and a veneer of corporate benevolence. Where the original East India Company extracted tea and textiles, today's digital extractors siphon up location metadata, online behavior, biometric identifiers, and social graph mappings. Consider Meta's 'Free Basics' initiative, which offered zero-rated internet access in dozens of developing countries. What seemed like a humanitarian gesture was, in reality, an attempt to create a captive ecosystem – one where Facebook was the internet. It was banned in India in 2016 but continues in other countries, quietly conditioning the digital habits of hundreds of millions of users. An expanded Meta Connectivity is now used by an estimated 300 million people across many countries, including Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Critics warn that these platforms could be exploited for surveillance, IP harvesting, and geopolitical intelligence – often without the knowledge or consent of local populations. No one really knows what is happening. Besides, these services are not entirely free either. Pakistani users of Meta's tech philanthropy were allegedly charged $1.9 million per month. India, once hailed as a rising digital superpower, now serves as a showpiece for AI neo-colonialism. Its vast IT industry, once brimming with promise, is today little more than an outsourced arm of Western conglomerates. Here is a reality check: how many individuals outside India have even one Indian-made app on their phones? 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It echoes the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, where loans came with strings that hollowed out national control. Only now, the strings are coded in algorithms. The Global South needs a coordinated pushback against Silicon Valley's digital hegemony. This would involve not just resisting predatory data practices but investment in alternative infrastructures such as sovereign cloud storage, ethical AI standards, community-owned data cooperatives, and open-source platforms. This is how a new digital non-alignment paradigm can be achieved. The Global South has been colonized before. But data, unlike oil or sugar, is invisible, infinitely replicable, and easily stolen. That makes the fight harder but also more urgent. In this new age of algorithmic empires, control over information isn't just about profit, it is about power, freedom, and the right to define your own future.
