• Kremlin: Russian military presence in the Central African Republic is legitimate

    Russian their military units and specialists in the Central African Republic are there “on a perfectly legal basis at the request of the country’s president”, said the official representative for the Russian Foreign, Ministry Maria Zakharova, as quoted by Interfax news agency.

    “The Russians’ main task is to train local military personnel in handling weapons and equipment that was supplied to the Central African Republic by the Russian Ministry of Defense on a no-cost basis in late January- …

  • Russia denies Amnesty International access to imprisoned filmmaker Sentsov

    The international human rights organization Amnesty International did not receive permission to meet with Ukrainian political prisoner Oleg Sentsov, who is currently in a Russian prison colony, as reported by the organization’s press office.

    On July 30 the Amnesty International office in Moscow received a letter from Deputy Director of the Federal Penitentiary Service Valery Balan which denied the human rights organization’s request to visit Sentsov in the penal colony in Labytnangi, but there …

  • Sweden accuses Russian Defense Minister of lying

    Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist accused his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu of spreading false information about Sweden's cooperation with NATO.

    The Swedish Defense Minister commented on the words of Sergey Shoygu, who, while speaking at the board meeting of the Russia Defense Ministry on July 24, expressed Moscow’s concerns about integration of Finland and Sweden into NATO structures.

    “What the Russian defense minister describes is a lie. NATO does not have unlimited access to …

  • Russian scientist accused of high treason and passing classified information to Belgium

    Viktor Kudryavtsev, a leading researcher with TsNIIMash (Russian rocket and spacecraft scientific center), was arrested on a charge of high treason. He is suspected of passing secret data to a foreign scientific organization, the Belgian von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, as reported by RBC news agency with reference to Kudryavtsev’s lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov.

     “The case is not about a country but about an organization TsNIIMash collaborated with – the von Karman Institute for Fluid …

  • Russian tycoon Deripaska disagrees with the USA’s conditions for removing his company RUSAL from the sanctions list

    Oleg Deripaska, Russian oligarch and President of United Company RUSAL disagreed with the conditions set by the US Treasury Department for removing the aluminum company from its sanctions list, RBC news agency reports citing its source who is familiar with the process. “The conditions set by OFAC (the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control) are unacceptable and make no economic sense. It is not possible to accept them,” the source said.

    RBC reports that a source in the …