Get ready for a high-energy intel rundown — The Restricted Handling Podcast brings you today’s breaking developments out of Russia, Ukraine, and Europe in a way that’s sharp, fast, and impossible to tune out. 

In this episode, “RH 10.23.25 | Russia: Trump’s Sanctions, Putin’s Nukes, Europe’s Money, and Ukraine’s Strikes,” we dive into a 24-hour stretch that flipped the geopolitical chessboard upside down. President Donald Trump has officially pulled the plug on the long-anticipated Putin summit in Budapest and instead dropped the biggest sanctions package of his second term. Rosneft and Lukoil — the twin engines of Moscow’s oil empire — just found themselves locked out of U.S. markets and facing the threat of secondary sanctions that could ripple across India, China, and the global energy trade. Oil prices spiked, banks panicked, and the Kremlin fumed. 

Meanwhile, Europe decided to pile on. The EU approved its 19th sanctions package targeting Russia, banning Russian LNG imports, blacklisting hundreds of shadow-fleet tankers, and cutting off new crypto channels. At the same time, Brussels is preparing to flip the script on Moscow by using frozen Russian assets — yes, Putin’s own money — to back a €140 billion loan to Ukraine. It’s a bold, risky move that could redefine wartime economics and turn Europe into Ukraine’s financial backbone. 

And Zelensky? He’s not just thanking allies — he’s rearming fast. From Stockholm, he inked a deal with Sweden to explore buying up to 150 Gripen fighter jets — the kind that can take off from a highway and outmaneuver Russia’s aging fleet. That’s on top of Ukraine’s latest long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory, hitting oil refineries, munitions plants, and the critical Pskov–St. Petersburg rail corridor. 

Putin, feeling cornered, went for the usual theater — overseeing a full nuclear triad drill complete with ballistic missile launches from land, air, and sea. And just when you thought Russia’s military drama couldn’t get more Cold War, new revelations show the Kremlin secretly built an Arctic submarine surveillance system using Western tech smuggled through Cyprus. Yeah, “Made in the USA” gear guarding Russian nukes — you can’t make it up. 

We wrap it all up with the ground truth from the front lines — the drone wars, the infrastructure blackouts, and Moscow’s growing paranoia. It’s geopolitics with attitude: no fluff, no filler, just the critical moves shaping tomorrow’s world. 

Tune in now for RH 10.23.25 | Russia: Trump’s Sanctions, Putin’s Nukes, Europe’s Money, and Ukraine’s Strikes — the intel briefing that sounds like a conversation, not a classified memo.