• Poland to stop importing Russian coal

    Polish state-owned companies intend to stop buying coal from Russia, said Polish Minister of State Assets Jacek Sasin in a broadcast of radio RMF FM.

    In addition to Russia, the state-owned company will stop importing coal from South America, Columbia, Mozambique and the US.

    According to information cited by the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, in 2018 Poland purchased 20 million tons of coal from abroad, of which 13.5 million was from Russia. The primary importer of Russian coal is …

  • Lukashenko: Belarus to repay Russia $1 billion per year on old loans

    Belarus will pay Russia $1 billion per year for previous loans and will not ask for “any money at all”, and proposes “honest, transparent and sincere” bilateral cooperation, said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, as cited by BelTA.

    The US pays Russia “1.5% for keeping their foreign currency there” but Belarus pays 4-6%, Lukashenko explained: “This just couldn’t make us happier – paying Russia $1 billion per year. They’ve invested their money successfully.”

    The president remarked that …

  • Russia sends out military patrols without Turkey again in Syria

    For the second time this week, Turkish soldiers have not joined their Russian colleagues in the joint patrolling of Syria, said Major General Yury Borenkov, director of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, as cited by Russia’s Defense Ministry website.

    According to Borenkov, because Turkey did not show up, Russian troops patrolled Syria’s Al-Hasakah region independently. The Russian military police has also continued to patrol the Aleppo province. Borenkov noted that the patrols took …

  • Russia accuses Israel of nearly shooting down passenger plane during air attack on Syria

    The Russian Defense Ministry accused its Israeli counterparts of creating a dangerous situation in which a passenger plane came under fire when it was about to land at Damascus airport.

    “This was an airplane on the route from Tehran to Damascus. There were 172 passengers on board at the time of the attack, “ Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

    According to the general, on the night of Thursday, February 6, four Israeli F-16 fighter jets unexpectedly struck the suburbs of …

  • Number of Belarusian supporters of union with Russia down by a third

    The number of Belarusian citizens who support the idea of a union state with Russia has declined by 20 percentage points in the last year, Kommersant reports, citing the results of a sociological study by Andrey Vardomatsky’s Belarusian Analytical Workshop.

    While at the start of 2019, more than 60% of Belarusians advocated a union with Russia, by December this figure had dropped to nearly 40%.

    At the same time, sociologists have been observing a growth in the number of supporters of Belarus …