The government of Slovakia agreed to buy fourteen F-16 fighter jets to replace their aging Russian MiG-29 aircraft.   “We picked the best solution because they are modern machines that we can afford from a price point of vew, quality and capability point of view, and that have no competition, Defence Minister Peter Gajdos said. The country also plans to cancel its maintenance contract with Russia for its MiG-29 that would have lasted until autumn 2019.   The cost of contract with the US has not …

Based on a temporary broadcasting agreement, eight radio stations in the mainland of Ukraine will cover the entire south of Kherson and the administrative border with the Crimea, according to a Facebook post on July 11 by Serhiy Kostynskyi, a member of the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine.

According to Kostynskyi, “an information security border will be created in the nearest future, which will cover almost every region bordering Crimea with Ukrainian broadcasting.” …

Official representative of the Iranian Foreign Ministry Bahram Kasemi said that the U.S. is pressuring its NATO partners and imposing its views and policies on them. “Although most of NATO’s expenditures go to ensuring U.S. security, this country behaves as if others are indebted to it and, by exerting pressure, tries to impose its views and policies on other nations, especially European countries,” Kasemi said.

He also said that Tehran condemns and opposes the repeated accusations made …

Moscow views the American-Ukrainian Sea Breeze2018 exercise as another attempt to provoke an escalation of the situation in the Black Sea, stated Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. "We view the exercises as another attempt to provoke tensions not only in the southeast of Europe but in the Black Sea in general,” Zakharova stated at a briefing. She also noted that those countries that involve Ukraine in dangerous “games with fire” and constantly accuse Russia of threatening the …

The U.S. does not want to release EU companies from the sanctions that Washington intends to impose on Iran, stated the Minister of Economy and Finance of France Bruno Le Maire in an interview published on Friday in the newspaper Le Figaro.

“In the spring of this year I wrote to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin with a request to make an exception for European countries that are legally operating in Iran, and to extend the period in which they will not be under the sanctions. …

On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė described the pressure placed by US President Donald Trump on NATO allies with respect to defense financing as “positive aggression” which resulted in success, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

 “We confirm once again that President Trump’s pressure worked. Something I call ‘positive aggression’, in a good sense,” Grybauskaitė said.

This was the Lithuanian president’s take on the unplanned meeting of NATO leaders …

The Verkhovna Rada has ratified an agreement between Ukraine and the Netherlands according to which the persons found guilty of the MH-17 catastrophe by the court in the Netherlands will serve their sentences in Ukraine. 241 MPs voted in favor of the corresponding bill (No.0194) to ratify the agreement in a plenary session on Thursday.

The agreement stipulates that the central government bodies in Ukraine through which requests for legal assistance will be sent are the Prosecutor General’s …

NATO's deployment of additional resources to the Baltic region despite Russia's opposition was a "necessary step" based on Moscow's "aggressive actions," the NATO supreme commander Europe, Curtis Scaparrotti says.   Speaking to Radio Liberty on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels on July 12, Scaparrotti said that "four battalions is not a threat to Russia," referring to the additional forces stationed on the alliance's eastern flank and in Poland in recent months. According to him, it …