Day: January 23, 2019

Recep Tayyip Erdogan / Kremlin.ru Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan will get another chance to lobby Vladimir Putin to protect Turkish interests as the U.S. prepares to withdraw from Syria, leaving Russia as the key power broker in that war-ravaged nation. The two leaders meet again in Moscow on Wednesday to discuss coordination in Syria, where…

Above all, ending the decades-long territorial dispute will be good for business, some say. Shinzo Abe and Vladimir Putin / Kremlin.ru As Shinzo Abe and Vladimir Putin met this week in Moscow, Japanese expats in Moscow were watching closely. “My Russian colleagues and I hope a peace treaty will be reached,” said Hiroshi Makino, the…

Customers across Russia owe a regional subsidiary of the Gazprom gas giant 30.1 billion rubles ($455 million) in accumulated debt, the subsidiary told Russian media on Wednesday. Last week, a court in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya ruled to erase 9 billion rubles of its residents’ gas debts after local prosecutors warned of rising…

Russia said on Wednesday that Israel should stop carrying out what it called arbitrary air strikes on Syria days after the Israeli air force targeted Iranian forces there. Israel, which regards Iran as its biggest threat, has repeatedly attacked Iranian targets in Syria and those of allied militia, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. “The practice of arbitrary…

The Cold War can wait over a hot slice. Taking a page out of their Canadian colleagues book, air traffic controllers based in Far East Russia have reportedly ordered pizza for their American neighbors across the Bering Strait. Some 800,000 U.S. federal government workers – including an estimated 10,000 air traffic controllers – have been furloughed or…

Russia should not unleash an oil price war against the United States but rather stick with output cuts even at the cost of losing market share in the medium term, one of the main Russian architects of a production pact with OPEC said. Since 2017, Russia and OPEC have cut oil production jointly for the first time in an…

The situation in Syria’s Idlib province where Russia and Turkey have tried to create a de-escalation zone is rapidly deteriorating, Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said on Wednesday. The territory is now almost under full control of Nusra militants, she said. “Continuing provocations pose a threat to civilians, Syrian military personnel and the Russian Khmeymim air base,”…

Bulgaria has revoked the Bulgarian citizenship of Russian telecoms millionaire Sergei Adoniev over a 20-year-old fraud conviction in the United States, the justice ministry said on Wednesday. Eager to join EU’s border-check-free Schengen zone, Bulgaria said on Tuesday that it plans to stop letting wealthy foreigners buy citizenship, which allows free movement within the entire European…

Russia showed foreign military attaches and journalists a cruise missile system on Wednesday that the United States says breaches a Cold War-era arms control pact, its latest attempt to disprove an allegation it denies and stop Washington quitting the treaty. Washington has threatened to pull out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), alleging…

Russia was named the second-most powerful and influential country on the global arena as it returned to the top 25 list of countries ranked for the Davos economic forum. The U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Countries” annual rating ranks 80 countries across a range of metrics, including quality of life, openness to business, culture…

The head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency Sergei Naryshkin on Monday met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the head of the kingdom’s intelligence services, the Interfax news agency said on Wednesday. Naryshkin discussed cooperation in the fight against international terrorism with his Saudi counterpart, Interfax cited Russia’s Foreign Intelligence…

Russian oligarchs Arkady and Boris Rotenberg have been forced by their Swiss bank to sell their private jets on the back of U.S. sanctions, Forbes Russia reports. The Rotenberg brothers, childhood friends of President Vladimir Putin, were first hit by U.S. sanctions in March 2014 over the annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The…

Any deal to end a territorial row with Japan needs public backing, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday after meeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, giving a nod to widespread Russian opposition to ceding territory to Japan. Shortly before Putin met Abe in the Kremlin for the latest round of talks on the dispute…

Mikhail Dzhaparidze / TASS The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Tuesday it had decided not to re-impose a suspension on Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA despite Moscow missing a deadline to hand over laboratory data. RUSADA had asked WADA last week not to suspend it after missing the Dec. 31 deadline, which was a condition…