In the Soviet Union’s declining years, there was a half-deferential, half-derisive moniker for the feeble leaders in their 70s who preceded Gorbachev: the ‘Kremlin elders’. Thirty-something years later, the United States looks set to elect its own septuagenarian to run the White House. [...]

Authorities in Wuhan have closed the city’s first makeshift hospital after discharging the last batch of 34 recovered coronavirus patients, as the rate of infection in the city has dropped dramatically. Wuhan was the site of the original outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, and the city’s response, building a new hospital in less than two weeks to handle Covid-19 patients, was seen as a moder [...]

Vladimir Putin has confided that US President Donald Trump privately lamented the "insane" US military budget. He also says Russia protects itself by making the costs of attacking the country too high for anyone to contemplate. The US has outstripped us” in terms of annual defense expenditure, the Russian president said in a new episode of news agency TASS's ‘20 Questions to Vladimir Putin� [...]

The “Russian collusion” trope didn’t just spring to life with US President Donald Trump in 2016 – accusations of taking help from the evil Russkies have dogged candidates who buck the establishment since the 1960s. Trump may be the best-known candidate to attract allegations of being ‘Putin’s puppet,’ but he is by no means the first. [...]

Russia more than doubled crude oil supplies to the United States and Britain in 2019, data from the Federal Customs Service (FCS) has revealed. A fall in prices for the Russian Urals oil, combined with US sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, were among the reasons for such an increase in purchases. [...]

As part of a WWII document trove declassified ahead of the 75th anniversary of the Yalta summit, never before seen photographs show US and British leaders and officers arriving in Crimea and touring Sevastopol with Soviet hosts. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled to Crimea in February 1945, to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the B [...]

Donald Trump offered Julian Assange a pardon if he said Russia was not involved in a leak of Democratic Party emails, a court has heard. The WikiLeaks founder's barrister brought the subject up at Westminster Magistrates' Court ahead of an extradition hearing next week. Court hears Trump offered Wikileaks founder pardon Australian MPs lobby Britain to release Wikileaks founder Julian Assan [...]

A Syrian Air flight has landed at Aleppo International Airport for the first time in years, marking a milestone in the recovery of the city, which has been returning to normal life from the abyss of its civil war. The commercial flight, carrying Syrian officials and journalists, landed in Aleppo on Wednesday, some 40 minutes after taking off from the capital, Damascus. The arrival of the Airbus A3 [...]

Under the 2018 Sochi agreement, Turkey was supposed to disarm and disassociate itself from the terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Its failure to do so has sown the seeds of Turkey’s inevitable defeat in Syria. When Turkey threw its weight behind the anti-Assad rebellion in 2011, it did so believing that it would be able to dictate the outcome on the ground by controlling the main organ [...]

Russia will not introduce politically correct terminology such as “parent #1” and “parent #2” any time soon, Putin told a constitutional reform working group on Thursday, as they discussed family values in Russia. As for ‘parent #1’ and ‘parent #2’, I have already publicly said it and I will repeat it once more: as long as I am president, we will not have parents #1 and #2, it will [...]

One of Democratic presidential nomination frontrunners, Sen. Bernie Sanders, laughed at Donald Trump calling him a ‘communist’ and explained how the US President, who doesn’t seem to know the difference, profited from ‘socialism.’ [...]

TOKYO (Sputnik) – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday that he wanted to solve the dispute with Russia around the Southern Kuril Islands, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, boost friendly relations between Moscow and Tokyo as well as sign a peace treaty between the two nations. [...]

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is “terminating” the Visiting Forces Agreement, which provides legal immunity to US military drills, in retaliation for the US canceling the visa of a political ally and fellow drug-warrior. “The president said he is terminating the VFA,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told ABS-CBN News on Friday. “I asked for clarification and he said he is not [...]

The December 27 rocket attack on the K-1 Air Base in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, which killed a US civilian contractor and injured four US servicemen and two Iraqi security officers, led to a dangerous escalation of tensions between the US and Iran. Iraq’s military and intelligence community believe Daesh (ISIS),* not Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shia Muslim militia group Khaitab Hezbollah, was responsible [...]

The head of the Pentagon’s testing and evaluation department sharply criticized the F-35 program’s schedule for incremental software updates on the high-tech aircraft, calling it “high risk” as the program falls further and further behind schedule. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II stealth aircraft is basically a giant, flying computer, and its greatest asset, according to Air Force st [...]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hit back at threats from Washington over Moscow’s support for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, insisting Caracas and its neighbors deserve the option not to be US vassal states. “I have heard the threats from Washington about punishing all those who work with Venezuela,” Lavrov confirmed during a press conference in Mexico City on Thursday. “But [...]

Israeli strikes on Damascus suburbs put a civilian aircraft in serious danger and forced it to divert to Russia’s Khmeimim airbase as the Syrian air defense was activated to repel the attack, the Russian military said. An Airbus A320 flying from Tehran to the Syrian capital was forced to make an emergency landing following an Israeli missile attack, the Russian Defense Ministry said. It added th [...]

The Syrian town has been an outpost of the Jabhat an-Nusra* terrorist group in Idlib province. It is situated at a strategic crossroads of the M4 highway connecting Latakia and Aleppo and the M5 connecting Latakia and Damascus. The Syrian army has fully regained control of the town of Saraqib in Idlib Province, according to a military source. [...]

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo won’t be winning Ukraine’s ‘friend of the year’ award. A week after he told an NPR reporter that Americans don’t care about the country, he allegedly told a Kiev audience to forget about Crimea. That’s according to Novoye Vremya (NV), an influential Ukrainian news outlet, which quotes Pompeo as saying: “Crimea is lost [for Ukraine]. World leaders und [...]

Oliver Stone’s films have won 12 Academy Awards including two for Best Director, as well as a bunch of Golden Globes and BAFTAs. His new focus is documentaries – on Venezuela, Ukraine, and Edward Snowden – all reflecting on the dubious activities of the US government both at home and abroad. Oliver Stone, the award-winning American director and a relentless critic of US administrations, has [...]

President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that all ties between the PNA and Israel, as well as the United States, would be cut following Donald Trump’s unveiling of his long-advertised peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many saw as being strongly biased towards the Jewish state. [...]

The plan was previously rejected by the Palestinian Authority, which vowed to cut ties with Israel and the US, urging people to participate in protests against the deal. People are gathering near the US Embassy in Lebanon in Beit Aaoukar to protest against the "deal of the century" – a new peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was recently announced by US President Donald Trump. [...]