Five employees of the Donetsk water filtration plant were wounded during the shelling, the acting Director of Voda Donbasa municipal enterprise, Oleksandr Yevdokimov reported. According to him, a convoy of cars with workers who were going to conduct maintenance operation at the filtration station came under fire at about 3:40 p.m.

"They were workers from the day shift of the filtration station. Their bus was fired upon. Five are wounded; one is in serious condition," Yevdokimov said. He also …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin held telephone talks on Tuesday, April 16, during which they discussed the situation in Syria, Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2.

The politicians agreed on the need to focus on the political process to resolve the "long-standing bloody conflict" in Syria, German official Steffen Seibert said.

In the conversation, Putin "pointed out once again that the actions taken by a group of Western countries that committed an act of aggression …

The Russian presidential administration and government are preparing for a further tightening of the anti-Russian sanctions as was the case with Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, with a ban on investing in state debt, the blacklisting of state banks, making it impossible to conduct transactions in dollars, and the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT interbank transfer system, RBC news agency reports with reference to two federal officials familiar with the discussion process, and a source close …

Russia has stopped serial production of the Grad and Smerch Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), as they are to be replaced by a new generation of MLRS, as announced by Vladimir Lepin, CEO of Techmash (part of Rostec), Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports.

According to him, the Grad system first appeared in 1963. It has been an extremely successful project, which has been improved several times, and today “it would completely satisfy the requirements of the time”.

“Not only the Grad, but also the …

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said that Saudi Arabia is prepared to send its own soldiers to Syria as part of the US-led coalition, if the coalition is expanded, DW reports.

“Since the start of the crisis we have been in discussion with the US about sending forces into Syria,” he said, adding that even during Obama’s administration, Riyadh had expressed its readiness to send troops into Syria. “There is discussion concerning which forces should remain in eastern Syria and where they …

The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, stated in an interview with BBC that Russia's relations with the West are worse than during the Cold War period.

"We are losing the last remnants of trust in our western partners who prefer to act on very strange logic… There were channels of communication during the Cold War period. And there was no obsession with Russo phobia, which looks like genocide through sanctions,” Lavrov said, commenting on missile attacks against Syria carried …

According to the German publication Bild, citing sources from the channel ARD, an official Russian delegation paid for call girl services for the President of the International Biathlon Union (IBU) Anders Besseberg in exchange for his support in choosing Tyumen as the host city for the 2021 World Cup.

Besseberg, a Norwegian citizen, has taken a temporary leave of absence from activity with the IBU in connection with an investigation into the concealment of doping incidents.

The Norwegian …

Ukraine will not denounce agreements within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the fields of transit, recognition of diplomas and employment, the representative of the President in the Verkhovna Rada, Iryna Lutsenko reported.

"The Commander-in-Chief urges the government to carry out an inventory of all multilateral treaties between the members of the CIS to denounce separate treaties, leaving only those that are pragmatically needed by Ukraine, such as the recognition of diplomas, …