Russia

Former KGB spy Yuri Shvets has told The Guardian that Russia has cultivated former president Donald Trump as a Russian asset for over 40 years. Shvets serves as a source for journalist Craig Unger who's currently working on his new book 'American Kompromat' which explores Trump's relationship to Russia and Jeffrey Epstein. Trump allegedly appeared on Russian's radar after his marriage to his first wife Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and was later identified as a potential asset by so-called spotter agent Joy-Lud who sold television sets to Trump for his Grand Hyatt New York hotel.

When Trump visited Russia with Ivana in 1987, he was allegedly approached by KGB operatives who suggested he'd go into politics.

"For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery," Shvets recalls. "This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time."

The state-owned Direct Investment Fund, which co-finances the vaccine and markets it abroad, announced in Moscow on Friday that Russia wants to help out the European Union with its vaccine. In the second quarter, 100 million doses of the vaccine Sputnik V could be delivered, which would allow 50 million people to be vaccinated. The prerequisite is that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approves the active ingredient.

Independent studies testing the efficiency of the vaccine are outstanding.

Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, has voted to ratify an extension of the New Start nuclear arms control treaty by five years, one of the last major pacts between Russia and the US.

Hundreds of people were detained across Russia on Saturday as police used force to break up rallies in cities across the country where protesters demanded Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's release. Among the arrested was Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny's wife.

Russian authorities had warned people to stay away from the protests, claiming they risked catching the coronavirus and prosecution and possible jail time for attending an unauthorized event.

Russian authorities are warning social networks, especially the video platform TikTok, popular with young people, to stop advertising for jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

"We request that you immediately take comprehensive measures to prevent the dissemination of such unlawful information on the TikTok platform," reads a statement from telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor.

Specifically, the authority refers to calls disseminated via TikTok to participate in a demonstration for Kremlin critic Navalny that had been announced for Saturday but had not been approved.

Alexei Navalny's team on Tuesday released a two-hour video featuring details of a luxurious property on Russia's southern Black Sea coast purportedly belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The video, and a blog post, claim Putin's property cost €1.1 billion and was paid for "with the largest bribe in history."

The film was produced while Navalny was still in Germany, where he was recovering from an attack with the nerve agent Novichok in August.

Multiple European leaders, including German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and European Council President Charles Michel, have demanded Alexei Navalny's immediate release on Monday.

“Russia is bound by its own constitution and by international obligations to the principle of the rule of law and to the protection of civil rights,” Maas said in a statement. “These principles must, of course, be applied to Alexei Navalny as well. He should be released immediately.”

Russian opposition leader and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been arrested upon his arrival in his homeland Russia. A plane of the Russian company Pobeda with the number DP 936 had previously landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport in the northwest of the capital.

The Russian prison service has ordered Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to report in person to the authority's office. Should he return to Russia after the deadline, he said, he would face imprisonment. The FSIN prison authority announced this on Monday.

Navalny was released from the hospital on Sept. 20 and has been symptom-free since Oct. 12, the statement said, citing a report in The Lancet journal. Therefore, Navalny had to report to the scene, according to the parole conditions of a prison sentence to which Navalny was sentenced in 2014.

According to a Russian top emergency official the fuel spill at an Artic power station earlier in 2020 has been the largest oil spill in world history.

Near the city of Norilsk around 21,000 tonnes of oil have spilled and contaminated surrounding ground and waterways following the collapse of a diesel oil tank on May 29.

The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases has surpassed 80 million infections worldwide on Saturday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. At least 1,753,313 people have died from the novel coronavirus globally. The highest infections have been recorded in the United States, India, Brazil and Russia.

More than 40 countries have imposed a ban on UK arrivals, include Belgium, Canada, India, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Russia, and Switzerland. On Monday, European Union member states meet to discuss a co-ordinated response and France is planning to establish a protocol "to ensure movement from the UK can resume.

The body of assistant Professor Alexander Kagansky, who had been researching a Covid-19 vaccine, was found under the windows of a multi-story building in the Kalininsky district of St Petersburg. An informed source told the Russian newspaper Interfax on Sunday that the body of Alexander Kagansky has been found in the yard of a 16-story building on Zamshina Street. He had worked in laboratories in St. Petersburg, Washington, Edinburgh, and headed the Centre for Genomic and Regenerative Medicine at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.

According to preliminary reports, shortly before the tragedy, a conflict arose between Kagansky and a friend he was visiting, which the landlord denies and says that Kagansky committed suicide.

The administration of outgoing US President Donald Trump wants to close the two remaining US consulates in Russia. As the U.S. State Department confirmed to the AFP news agency, the U.S. representation in Vladivostok is to be closed and the consulate in Yekaterinburg will cease operations for the time being. After that, the embassy in Moscow would be the last U.S. diplomatic representation in Russia.

The first Covid-19 shots have been given to more than 1.1 million people in four countries. Other countries have gotten a head start on vaccinations. China and Russia authorized their own shots in July and August, before they’d been fully tested. Since then, they’ve vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people.

Putin's stated that if Russian special services had wanted to kill opposition politician Alexey Navalny, they would have "finished it" in response to a question at his annual press conference following an investigation by the investigative group Bellingcat and CNN, published Monday, which uncovered evidence that Russia's Federal Security Service (the FSB) formed an elite team specializing in nerve agents that trailed Navalny for years.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has congratulated future U.S. President Joe Biden on his election victory after the decision of the Electoral College. Moscow is "ready for cooperation," a Kremlin statement said. "For my part, I am ready for cooperation and contacts with you," Putin wrote in a telegram to Biden, according to the Kremlin.

The U.S. is imposing sanctions on NATO ally Turkey over its deployment of Russia's S-400 missile defense system. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday in Washington that punitive measures would be imposed against the Defense Security Directorate (SSB). The directorate reports to the office of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The sanctions included a ban on all U.S. export licenses and permits for SSB, Pompeo announced.

Any assets of SSB chief Ismail Demir and other U.S. executives would be frozen. They would also be subject to entry restrictions. At the same time, Pompeo stressed that Turkey is a "valued ally" of the U.S. and an important security partner in the region, and that they would like to see continued cooperation in the defense sector.

Hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday.

Pilots of the Russian state-controlled airline Pobeda have chosen a route that traces the contours of a male sexual organ during an unauthorized maneuver with an aircraft with 100 passengers on board.

The airline's supervisory board has now drawn the consequences in this case: The head of the company was warned and his deputy fired, as the Moscow newspaper "RBK" reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, the pilots wanted the maneuver to be understood as a solidarity action for the Russian soccer player Artjom Dsjuba. As the captain of the national team, Dsjuba had been excluded from the games in November after an intimate video of him was widely viewed on the Internet.

The departure from the route, which was dangerous for passengers, was said to have occurred on a flight from Moscow to Ekaterinburg on November 11. Pobeda is a subsidiary of the Russian airline Aeroflot.