in the stories that shaped the week with islamic state on the verge of total collapse in syria russia and its regional allies leave plans for establishing peace in the country. unsettling times for germany and chancellor merkel as coalition talks break down leaving question marks over her future leader. gain access to russia's most notorious prison and bring you a look at the grueling regimes on life long inmates. live from the russian capital with the main stories from the past seven days and up

to the minute developments as well welcome to the weekly on our to international i'm you know new with the islamic state all but wiped on to in syria the prospect of a lasting peace in the country is now finally on the horizon russia is attempting to help secure a political solution to the almost seven year long conflict this week l talks with other key regional players. breaks down how things currently. it looks like tsotsi is shaping out as the new platform for dialogue on syria the resort has become the venue for the first major round of talks on the syrian crisis the syrian president bashar assad was here on monday. at this stage especially after victories against terrorism we are of course interested in advancing the political process then mr putin had

a long phone conversation with donald trump. blatt of our putin gave donald trump a full update on the talks with syrian president bashar assad mr putin also told mr trump about the upcoming summit with the presidents of iran and turkey. it was these three countries that were behind the so-called astronaut talks in the first place and with the terrorists now almost gone this format could prove to be more crucial than ever. to launch scale military actions against terrorist groups in syria are coming to an end i'd like to note that thanks to the efforts of russia iran and turkey we have managed to prevent is the dissolution of syria stop it from being captured by international terrorists and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe we heard the leaders confirm their assessment the syrian

conflict has entered a new stage the era of active fighting is over and time has come for a new settlement opportunities the trilateral meeting today has not most importance is the final stage in putting an end to the bloodshed in syria we have achieved success thanks to the union of rand turkey and russia after roughly one and a half hours of talks we finally heard about the number one decision for the new stage the creation of the syrian national dialogue congress it will be an unprecedented platform for inclusive of all syria talks and all kinds of political ethnic religious groups are expected to be involved in the leaders say that it should pave the way for a new constitution in syria and new elections it's this kind of communication somehow involving different sides like washington moscow damascus and

tehran that is giving us a reason to say that things may be looking promising here. while politics professor saeed mohammad marandi totalist the talks were a positive development but difficulties still lie ahead. fast on a fox as well as the current path from sochi. push the power of the process a great deal for the force things have shifted in changed enormously on the ground and hopefully these talks will help pave the way for. the the conflict to come to an end but i think that it looks good on paper but it i'm sure it's going to be very complicated in the weeks and months ahead there's a lot to do and it's not clear if the americans and their allies are going to help this process move forward or whether they are going to improve and competed.

for over twenty years there's been a moratorium on the death penalty in russia the country's most dangerous criminals are sentenced to full life terms in prison and this week artie's murat does d.f. was given unique access to the high security facility known as the black dolphin arguably russia's toughest jail. in the provincial town at the edge of siberia is a prison but it's no ordinary prison in sight the statue is broken the moved a soulless butchers the black doll thing russia's highest security prison it is here that some of the country's worst maniacs serial killers terrorists and even cannibals i held in this cell a man who raped forty four miners and killed five children aged seven to eleven some of the people in this prison will never be allowed out so we dread for the

things that they've done and then the man in a drunken killing frenzy killed six of his friends in this cell a murderer killed eleven people. seven hundred inmates sentenced to life between them they've killed almost four thousand people everything is procedural everything intended to minimize risk from sleeping schedules to how inmates are a school that bend to the waist and blindfolded so they can't memorize the prisons layout. it may seem excessive humiliating even but don't forget what these people did to be here to that end every cell door has a description of the inmates crimes any sympathy the guards might feel disappears

immediately. you ask me if i do it again i've thought about it and it would have been better for died with them i probably wouldn't have done it but it's better to die than sacrifice others eagle was just over twenty when he and his father took on a rival gang after killing their enemies they attempted to get rid of witnesses. ordinary civilians in a restaurant seven dead eight injured both he and his father incarcerated here do see each other sometimes when he fell ill they transferred me to help him for a while the most important thing is to avoid becoming embittered it is so easy to turn into an animal here some say a life sentence is worse than the death penalty. with i've been here for seventeen years and i've never heard anyone say they don't regret it or they'd kill more i'm sorry but that's nonsense. i regret it everything is

lost all the years go by your health worsens everything passes by i think there are a few people left in here who think they did the right thing they are show you that you were wrong totally wrong you can't do that. to me treat saluted his family his father his mother and his brother he was twenty now he's forty five why didn't he watch t.v. we see people who have committed two or three murders get sentenced to seventeen or nineteen years that isn't so terrible yes we are guilty before the law yes we are guilty before the public but if they're left out after twenty years why are there fraid of letting us out who in their fifty's could be bothered to do anything all they would want is a normal life. the difference is that life sentences are mostly reserved for crimes of such brutality that they escape reason for individuals deemed a permanent danger to society one inmate released early from the black dolphin

committed the murder on the very train that was taking him home most will never see release control he's total god's check on everyone every fifteen minutes in cell cameras i'm one of the twenty four seven and there's three doors to every cell this is a cell for those sentenced to life it's locked with a full metal door a cage door and another one for complete security we essentially have a cell within a cell it's easy to see why no one has ever escaped from the black dolphin and for most you'll be sure way out is in a coffin for i guess the odyssey from seoul in let's russia. uncertainty hangs over germany's political future after talks to form a three party coalition government collapsed on monday peter all over examines what

caused the negotiations to fail and what options remain now for chancellor merkel. the day after the bundestag election in september angela merkel said that she was confident that by christmas she would have a ruling coalition government in place or fast forward through weeks of torture a sit times negotiations with the green party and the pro-business free democrats while the wheels of that coalition health fell off well and truly with christie and of the free democrats delivering the killer blow we have the other one is that we will not abandon our voters for a policy with which we are not convinced it is better not to govern than to govern badly ingrained differences between the parties on key issues such as climate change refugees and the budget saw the so-called jamaica coalition break down.

just hours after coalition talks with the free democrats and the greens collapsed under merkel was turned down by another coalition suitor this time the social democrats martin schultz saying there would be no return to a grand coalition if. on september the twenty fourth the grand coalition lost fourteen percent so it's clear we were shown the red card in view of the election results we are not available to join a grand coalition without off the table one other option available to angela merkel would be to rule over a minority government most likely with the green party. but

a minority government. would be unstable at best and would certainly require horse trading on gargantuan proportions with the other four parties in parliament if the government was to well pass anything more than just time in the chamber it's also worth noting that this would be a first in modern german history and wouldn't exactly fit the profile of the german voters who do love stabilises so where does this leave us the other option would be we go back to the polls for fresh elections. that could well prove to be a storm she doesn't whether. that's really fun for somebody has got to be responsible for that the federal chancellor created this situation she's been in power for what feels like a hundred years and now she should be asking herself maybe i have something to do with this situation. mrs merkel has failed it's time for her now to take

a step back that night at the end of the merkel era began europe's biggest economy is heading into uncharted territory with current polling suggesting that a new ballot wouldn't return any results too different from what we had in september it does seem that there is no immediate solution to the current instability germany is facing and of course the implications that has for the why do european union peter all of a r.t. berlin after it was announced the talks had failed the german president called on all parties to work towards producing a stable government this is the moment when all those involved should pause and reconsider their stance in all the parties voted in the parliament are committed to the common good they are serving our land expect from everyone a willingness to talk in order to facilitate the formation of a government in the near future at it. he indicated her readiness to renew the

so-called grand coalition with the social democrats the system that's governed germany for the past four years the chancellor sees the alliance has pretty varied effective on the social democrats with martin schulze up the helm seem to have softened their position too we had previously refused to deal with merkel again we asked some members of germany's political parties about the recent twists and turns in the. i would be surprised if we had fresh elections but apparently stated that we are going to have them both fall she has always clung to power and i thought she would have sought another negotiated solution so everybody is supporting just the f.t.p. but in the end to to make a coalition of the three the f.t.p. the c.s.u. the c.d.o. was a very very unlikely construct a very strange construct that. cannot work and we could see that the country is in

turmoil here but this indeed to the unprecedented situation it's going to be new elections i'm pretty certain the f.t.p. and probably also the ifi the opposition party that will gain because this. is quite a silent significant part of the population that's once a change in the immigration policies r.t. faces more pressure from google's purr and company as the tech giant plans to make changes to its search engines that's just one of the stories right ahead. but politicians do sometimes. put themselves on the line they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to express. some want. to go on to be press it's like before you can't be good. i'm interested

in the why how. this should. and the culture is good now out of the big picture but it's it's a real business which we need to maintain we need to have it but it's no effect of the prospects at the moment go forward with the draw with the automotive g.p.s. driven tractor most of the machines will have less and less people employed so the fact that we easily get a c.e.o. business just so the rest of the world is getting rid of this b.s. . with it with ego. you're back with r t international it emerged this week that google's parent company is working on a d. ranking stories from r.t.e.

on the sputnik news agency in web searches not the move would make articles harder to find alphabet boss eric schmidt's comments came of a security forum in canada when he was asked about r.t.s. use of google's service. i had a subscription for google alerts in german language and getting them every day out of ten results between five and ten every day with sputnik news which is a russian german program no outlet and when i clicked on them they will monitor rise to that sense is it really necessary to monitor the rise russian propaganda outlets would google it's and so we're well aware of this one and we're working on detecting this kind of scenario you're describing and again the ranking the ranking those kinds of sites it's basically artie and sputnik are the two and there's a whole bunch of coverage about what we're doing there but we're well aware of it we're trying to engineer the systems to prevent it we don't want to ban the sites.

well eric schmidt question has a long time relationship with the leadership of the democratic party in the us he was reportedly a donor to barack obama's campaign later becoming an advisor to the administration he's also believed to be the tech mastermind behind hillary clinton's presidential campaign although he has never confirmed that himself now under pressure from the u.s. authorities google recently launched an investigation into alleged russian meddling . but google's own report to congress say said find no evidence that r.t. had violated its policies or manipulated in any way to get its status as the most viewed news network last month google dropped or channel from its you choose prime out list in the u.s. without notice or explanation it later side of the drop in viewership is the reason despite r.t. being the most watched t.v. network on the platform by didn't you revert artie's preferred status after the

i.c.a. came out in january two thousand and seventeen it took you to september of two thousand and seventeen to do the removal of r t from the program was actually a result of the as as i understand it is a result of some of the drop in viewership there is nothing about r t its content that. mental state interstate out. well eric schmidt's remarks chomping contradicted by a google representative who said the company doesn't change its algorithms to rank individual sites media consultant neil wallace is certain google's actions against politically motivated. i don't think it censorship you don't have to like the stories that russia today covers you don't have to want to read the material coming from sputnik but i really do not believe it in any way except to ball that

a bunch of politically correct. democratic party supporting people certainly in silicon valley should decide what i should or should not read i think it's the height of arrogance i think that i am quite capable of watching r.t. reading sputnik and deciding what i do or do not want to take from it what i do or do not believe i think it is extremely said mr as i say. living on lebanese lebanon's prime minister suspended his resignation on whedon's they're not his sudden announcement to step down and made in riyadh two weeks before had plunged his country into turmoil many saw it as evidence of a growing regional power struggle between saudi arabia and iran we are. now it's my resignation from the post of prime minister with my certainty that the

will of the lebanese is stronger that they will be able to overcome the tutelage from inside or outside the car like i discussed my resignation with the president of the republic he won't speak don't wait before submitting it to put it on hold and to allow for more consultations into the reasons behind it are complied well after resigning in saudi arabia hariri took a small detour before returning home on tuesday he visited france egypt and cyprus here's a quick recap of the events of recent days. somebody prime minister saad hariri was forced the resignation was not his desire nor

decision. and i hope i am here in the kingdom as a free man. in the.

library was led by crowds of supporters on his return to beirut some of them who like many of their country's politicians believe he was held against his will and forced to resign by the saudis we asked people in the lebanese capital for their thoughts on the situation. i hope that all the other countries in the region will leave lebanon alone so the lebanese people can decide their future for themselves it's on president that saudi arabia held the lebanese prime minister by force and pushed him to resign while he was outside his country and that is. i have to tell ourselves we want our country to stay out of regional conflicts when it comes to the saudis meddling should continue and it's not only riyadh's interference in celebrities affairs many other countries are doing it too i'm sure saad hariri wants to help his country number nine i think that the way saudi arabia treated him is very wrong international relations professor jamal wakim told us he believes the

saudis are using hariri to advance their own regional agenda i believe that his figure got damaged a lot here received as severe blow specially the lebanese public think prime minister probably was humiliated in saudi arabia we need to admit that. his father actually ideally. a long time but it was a. soul the influence in lebanon and that is a widespread belief in lebanon and how did he was forced to designate by the man at the time where the crown prince also the idea. is trying to increase the tension in iran especially in lebanon they lost their influence in iraq. and syria you know answer a few of some of the stories that made the headlines this past week much more on

right to the minute updates can be found on r.t. dot com to check out our stories there. they call me a useful idiot i mean you called me a useful idiot a useful idiot useful idiots go expressing my opinions on t.v. there's two things of us doing it behind his record is the same strategy we attack persons instead of talking about what's next. you'll ban me from getting this close to the white house i'm with the group code pink why not ban the color pink one hour stretch beyond the right i should be sent to the town because i want to try to

break me on the wheel but when i long time that this sort of nonsense you don't scare me and i'll continue to voice my opinion i'll continue to speak out in good company i'm in good company you're going to lose me you want to do this because we'll freezing cold. years ago i traveled across the united states exploring america's deadly love affair with a gun if a bad guy tried to get to one of my family members he would have better a lot better and i think it's fair and hurting whenever my my babies says my book was published in the year two thousand more than hoffa million americans have been killed by far olds in the us and we had a thought to me as i did this this is a middle school we go through drills and we put ourselves some real scenarios it was interesting to see who actually got hit by the gun i just saw i did to

return to the subject to track down each gun owner who i'd met and photographed those years ago i don't know this but we are not. was it to americans by the. unfortunate the financial support of some. of contraries in the. for making unsafe.

hello and welcome to all the part that's diseases it's very common condition and long based source research countries but it's the facts on the body of the economy as well as the potential cure up always country specific what would it take for russia both economically and politically to win itself all of the hydrocarbon the windfall all to discuss that i'm now joined by anthony marsh chant director of the economic policy program at the carnegie moscow center midsomer of china great to talk to you big fan of yours for a long time thank you now it's generally believed that the position of an addiction is the first step toward coming clean and then that sounds russia's excessive reliance on hydrocarbons has long been recognized but i wonder if it has been recognized as something unequivocal about something that needs to be broken where. well i wouldn't completely of the alcoholism and the had been some initial resources in the service of course is

a disease which is imposed by the be here or the second one is a structural problem russia cannot get rid of the hydrocarbons and until european union stops to buy a cup. and because of the enormous overwhelming amounts of cash coming from the hydrocarbons so hard to fight for the diversification of the participants are they to nomics the route me curious decisions of abandoning the the better a source of margins good into the water but from what i understand does does is not just excessive reliance on oil and gas it's more about. high appreciation of the currency that makes other sectors either less competitive or less attractive for foreign investors and in that sense i wonder if you believe in the euro from the very skeptical and critical of the russian government if you believe that the russian authorities. had enough instruments prior to two thousand

and fourteen to encourage other sectors and to. off sad at the fact of that very sharp robel appreciation well i would leave the two to the course appreciation and even would not talk about course a professional talks can also can be controlled by other factors and russia is the real example of the pure duchesses of the trouble is the amount of all the oil prices exclusively but if we vote. because of the policies or other factors of the world can buy but but pursuing doesn't affect the economy that much and as we saw in the in the ruble depreciation after the prices fall russia coots us the foreign currency and could find the ground of this free fall and that was partially of this from what i understand because russia actually did try to. counterbalance as dependency on.