✅ In a historically unprecedented measure, the Russian military has sent well over a dozen strategic lift aircraft packed with medics and medical equipment to help the Mediterranean nation battle COVID-19. Russian military medics sent to Italy to assist that country in its fight against coronavirus have been spotted on route to Bergamo, the Lombardy region city which has become on [...]

Austria will massively expand coronavirus testing in the coming days to locate and isolate infected people and avoid an Italian-like overload of its health system, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has said. The Alpine republic with a population of 8.8 million has tested around 28,400 people so far with nearly 4,900 cases and 28 deaths confirmed, Reuters reported. It was one of the first European countrie [...]

Brussels has all but abandoned them to their fates, so is it any wonder that Italy, Spain and other European countries have turned to Moscow and Beijing for meaningful support in terms of expert advice and medical supplies? When this coronavirus pandemic has passed and the nations of the European Union are counting the cost of decimated populations, shattered public health infrastructures and [...]

Russia's approach to the spread of Covid-19 has been quite effective, partially because it began taking preventive measures long before the World Health Organization labeled it a pandemic, the WHO’s chief in Moscow has told RT. “Russia started with the measures very early, before the famous ‘pandemic’ word was spelled out by [WHO] Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus on March 11," said Dr [...]

Earlier in the day, Russian military planes transported equipment and around 100 experts to Italy to provide the country with help amid the COVID-19 pandemic. A tenth Il-76 military plane has departed from Russia to Italy to assist in the fight against COVID-19, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement. [...]

Italy has become the new hotbed of the novel coronavirus, as its number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has surpassed 53,500 and 4,825 people have died from the disease so far. Russia will send medical virologists, doctors and equipment to Italy to help combat the new coronavirus outbreak, the Russian Ministry of Defence said on Saturday. [...]

The spread of Covid-19 may send the global economy into a lengthy recession, but lifting sanctions that aren’t backed by the United Nations may help avoid a total catastrophe. That's according to a senior Russian senator. The drop in energy demand, unstable currency exchange rates, and the threat to people’s safety have put humanity at risk of a major economic crisis which “won’t spare any [...]

China is shipping one million surgical masks and gloves to France as it struggles to contain the coronavirus, with Europe becoming the new focal point of the global pandemic. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed the shipments on Wednesday in an interview with France's BFM TV. The first of two planes has already arrived via Belgium and a second will arrive on Thursday, he said. [...]

Iran’s New Year celebration of Nowruz finds it weathering a perfect storm of US sanctions, low oil prices and Covid-19. The resulting humanitarian crisis may make it even more resilient, as Iranians rally around their government. Iran is facing an existential crisis, brought on by a combination of economic, political and social emergencies which, when combined, threaten to bring the nation to it [...]

The testing tools for coronavirus were delivered to 13 countries, including Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) member states Iran and North Korea, Russia’s public health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said on Saturday. The equipment manufactured in Russia can conduct over 100,000 tests for Covid-19, and has already been used to track down the first cases of the disease in Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan [...]

Created by the Moscow-based Military Industrial Company (Russian acronym VPK), the 4x4 protected utility vehicle, based on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) chassis, was first unveiled at a defense exhibition last July. The VPK-Ural has already been purchased by a foreign customer, company general director Alexander Krasovitsky has said. “The vehicle is undergoing preliminary testing. Moreover, [...]

Large-scale NATO military exercises are among the few major events not to be canceled due to the global Pandemic of COVID-19. Critics say this is a waste of both money and resources. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is being called-upon to reallocate the kingdom's military budget towards health and welfare in light of the global coronavirus illness (COVID-19) pandemic, by the Peace Pledge Union (PP [...]

Russia signed $17 billion worth of arms contracts with foreign customers in 2019, expanding its portfolio with military deals with African countries totaling $1 billion, the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation revealed on Monday. Turkey has been named one of the five biggest importers of Russian arms for 2019, according to Dmitry Shugaev, director of the Federal Service for Military [...]

While the world is combatting COVID-19, a real pandemic, it seems the European Union is worried about a fake virus – the omnipotent, omnipresent, all-encompassing “Russian disinformation.” News of a brand-new EU report, still-secret yet seamlessly leaked to the likes of Reuters and the Daily Mail, made over a hundred headlines throughout Europe in the last few days. The report is said to b [...]

One of the curious things about Western media coverage of Crimea since 2014 has been the consistent narrative that Russia's reabsorption of the peninsula was carried out against the will of locals. Look, you can make legitimate arguments about international law and the way the process was carried out. But attempts to give the impression Moscow somehow dragged residents kicking and screaming into t [...]

Russia’s research center of virology and biotechnology, known as the Vector Institute, is testing multiple different vaccine prototypes against Covid-19 in a race to find a cure for the virus behind a global pandemic. This week, it “began immunogenicity studies in sensitive laboratory animals... of all developed vaccine prototypes,” said consumer watchdog agency Rospotrebnadzor in a state [...]

Scientists in countries around the world have rushed to learn everything they can about COVID-19 in recent months in a bid to create an effective vaccine. Russian scientists have sequenced the whole genome of the new coronavirus, the Ministry of Health has announced. In a statement on Thursday, the Ministry explained that the genome, sourced from a patient infected with the virus, will help in the [...]

Plummeting oil prices have sparked another round of predictions about the economic collapse of Russia – this time from US President Donald Trump, who sounded a lot like his predecessor Barack Obama on the subject. The price of crude oil has crashed to $20 this week, due to a one-two punch of Saudi Arabia flooding the market with record output and a sharp drop in global demand owing to the corona [...]

The incompetence and hypocrisy of the European Union in dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak seems to have sobered up Serbia, a country that has previously slavishly committed itself to following orders from Brussels. For the past 20 years, every flavor of politician that ruled Serbia has signed on to the dogma that “the EU has no alternative” and that membership in that trans-national bloc was [...]

A senior German disease control expert has warned that the coronavirus pandemic could continue for two years, depending on how long it takes for an effective vaccine to be developed and if people develop immunity after illness. Speaking on Tuesday, the Robert Kock Institut's (RKI) president, Prof. Lothar Wieler, said pandemics tend to run their course in waves, and factors influencing how it unfol [...]

ATHENS - Ex-Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has published recordings from 2015 closed-door talks with the Eurogroup on his country’s bailout program to expose the "awful" decision-making of the troika creditors. A trove of audio files recorded between February and July 2015 is available on the website of Varoufakis’ self-styled pan-European DiEM25 party. In a video message, he said he [...]

According to Sweden’s Data Protection Authority (the Datainspektionen), the fine is punishment for the search engine giant’s failure to remove search results ordered to be blocked three years ago. Sweden’s Datainspektionen has fined google 75 million Swedish kronor (equivalent to about €7 million or $7.74 million) for failure to comply with the data protection watchdog’s instructions, th [...]