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The Russian Ministry of Defense announced Monday that its large anti-submarine ship, Udaloy-class destroyer Vice-Admiral Kulakov, received a distress signal from the Panama-flagged container ship MSC Lucia as it sailed in the Gulf of Guinea between Togo and Cameroon in West Africa. Armed hijackers had reportedly approached the ship via a small speedboat and boarded as the crew hid in the engine room. The warship then “immediately” dispatched a Kumov Ka-27PS helicopter with a marines unit....

Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at New York’s The New School, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Friday that anxiety among Russians waiting for Putin’s next steps is “palpable,” according to Metro. She is currently in Russia and said that recent conversations about the potential deployment of a nuclear weapon are pushing residents to ready themselves for the fallout of such a possibility. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, demand for potassium iodide pills has spiked....

At least a dozen regions throughout Ukraine reported strikes on Tuesday, some of which experienced emergency blackouts because of the damage, the Associated Press said. The Ukrainian capital of Kyiv was among the areas reportedly hit. Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko wrote on Telegram Tuesday that two residential buildings in the city’s Pechersk District were hit but said several incoming missiles were shot down by air defense over Kyiv. In a later Telegram post, Klitschko wrote that another multistory building in the same district was struck....

Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova cautioned citizens this week that “the illness and chronic conditions [of coronavirus] don’t always have a positive ending,” as health officials warned citizens of an expected spike in mortality for the month of May. Russia has recorded 344,481 positive cases of coronavirus to date as it has slowly become among the world’s top three most infected countries, briefly trading off the second-place spot with behind the United States with Brazil this week....

Russian state media were rooting for significant Republican gains in the hope that the party could shift the dial on U.S. policy towards the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Solovyov started his radio show Full Contact (Polny Contakt) on Tuesday by saying, “Happy interference in the U.S. elections day.” Given the GOP’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, supporters of Ukraine feared that U.S. aid to Kyiv could be affected if the Republicans took the House and Senate by a big majority, thus helping Russian President Vladimir Putin in his invasion....

Footage obtained from the MoD shows fighter jets sporting the now infamous “Z,” daubed in white. The Z is one of the symbols, as well as the letters V and O, that can be seen painted on Russian military vehicles taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian MoD claimed in a statement obtained Friday that the country’s Air Force had conducted successful operations in Ukraine. They claimed (in English): “High-precision attacks launched by Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed two command posts, five munitions depots near Ivano-Daryevka, Seversk (Donetsk People’s Republic), Belogorovka (Lugansk People’s Republic), Nikolayev, Lepetikha (Nikolayev region), as well as AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine] manpower and military equipment in 26 areas....

Roskomnadzor said on Thursday it is fining the non-profit organisation up to 4 million rubles (some $49,000), for refusing to delete information about the Ukraine war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24. In a press release, the agency said it was issuing the fine due to Wikipedia’s “failure to delete illegal information.” The Russian-language Wikipedia contains “false information on the subject of a special military operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine aimed at misinforming Russian users,” it said....

The first exercise is called Zapad-Interaction, or West-Interaction, 2021 and was scheduled to begin Monday at the Qingtongxia Joint Tactical Training Base in northwestern China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The combined maneuvers were announced jointly last week by the Russian and Chinese militaries, and were set to feature up to 10,000 personnel and various weaponry and equipment from both sides. The official Chinese Military Online published a report Thursday detailing the preliminary training of troops from Russia’s Eastern Military District who have already arrived in China to meet counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army Western Theater Command....

A 5-1 hammering by the Netherlands earlier Sunday put Nikolai Pisarev’s side on the brink of a group stage exit, with only a German victory over Spain able to save the Russians. But a 1-0 victory for Spain leaves Russia six points adrift at the bottom of Group B with one game to play. The now-meaningless fixture is against the Germans Wednesday. Russia are playing in the final stage of the tournament for the first time since 1998, when they lost to Spain in the quarterfinals....

The video is broken up into multiple skits where a man, his wife and child are on a plane leaving Russia to permanently live in America. The video creates ludicrous situations where it suggested Russians must now be concerned about same-sex couples, black people and vegetarians. The video was posted by Twitter user Kermlin Russia on Wednesday and so far has been viewed more than 450,000 times. “The Russian Federation launched videos against the avalanche of migration,” read the video’s caption, according to a Google translation....

In its daily intelligence update on Monday, the ministry highlighted a report that surfaced in late June claiming that Russian wives were begging for “exhausted” soldiers to be returned home from Ukraine. “In late June, a Russian-language media agency based in Russia’s far eastern Lake Baikal region uploaded a video in which the wives of soldiers from the Eastern Military District’s (EMD’s) 36th Combined Arms Army directly appealed to a local politician for their husbands to be returned home from service in Ukraine,” the ministry said....

Kelly, who commanded the International Space Station (ISS) multiple times during his NASA career, has been an outspoken critic of the Russian government and its widely-condemned invasion of Ukraine in February this year. The former astronaut regularly takes to Twitter to blast Russian officials and spread information about Russia’s actions in Ukraine to his 5.3 million followers—some of whom are Russian. No stranger to Russian culture, Kelly has worked with cosmonauts for years and traveled to and from the ISS in Russian Soyuz spacecraft....

Alexei Gorinov, 60, was arrested in April after speaking against the war during a work meeting in March that was captured on video, according to Agence France-Presse. The Guardian reported Friday that during the meeting, Gorinov criticized a proposal to hold a children’s drawing contest and a dancing festival in his constituency while “children were dying” in Ukraine. “I believe all efforts of [Russian] civil society should be aimed only at stopping the war and withdrawing Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine,” the councilor said at the time, according to the newspaper....

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the rebel leaders asked for more military to fend off Ukrainian “aggression.” Peskov added that the rebel chiefs wrote to President Vladimir Putin, informing him that shelling by the Ukrainian army has caused people to flee and resulted in civilian deaths, the Associated Press reported. However, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the request for Russian military help was an example of a “false flag” operation that the West previously warned Moscow would try to use to create an excuse for war, the AP reported....

And with chaos on the ground in Ukraine, these sources said it would be possible to obscure who was flying the unmanned aerial combat systems and at the same time avoid belying Biden’s public promises not to send U.S. troops to take on Russian soldiers. “Biden’s statement about no U.S. service members in Ukraine opens the door wide to covert drones as well as CIA paramilitary in the country,” one former senior U....

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), set to take place from June 15 to June 18 this year, is a business event that has been held since 1997. According to Russia’s state-run media agency Tass, Roscongress Foundation, the forum’s organizer, said it expects representatives from more than 90 countries to participate this year. According to a report from Bloomberg, this year, many Russian oligarchs and business leaders intend to keep a low profile, in the hopes that they will avoid being hit by Western sanctions that were first rolled out in response to Russian President Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine....

RELATED: Video Games From The 2000s That Still Have An Active Community RuneScape 3’s developer Jagex strikes again with the addition of the game’s newest boss, Raksha. With the incorporation of this behemoth, the most challenging bosses in the game see a new contender in their ranks. Keep in mind that all of these bosses are for members only. If players want to try them, they will either have to purchase the subscription or buy a bond via the Grand Exchange....

The course included obstacles designed to accentuate flexibility of the runners through the lens of the Nike Free- Nike’s popular running footwear franchise. In the 11thyearof the popular Nike Free franchise, Nike introduces three evolved running styles: the Nike Free 3.0 Flyknit, the Nike Free 4.0 Flyknit and the Nike Free 5.0. The session was followed by the Nike+ Runners’ Meet which is the first official runners meet of the TCS World 10K....

If only my co-worker had known about i-drive, a free Web service that lets you “clip” Web pages and save them, permanently, to a personal storage bin in cyberspace. This is just one of many cool features that come with a slew of remote storage options for consumers. Companies like i-drive, X:drive, Driveway, FreeDrive, Netdrive and at least 20 others are each offering upwards of 300 megabytes of space on their massive servers, free and par-titioned for your personal use–whether for dumb things like capturing Web spoofs or important applications like backing up critical work documents, especially data-rich image files....

Canberra, Jan 30 (IANS/CMC) Opener Kieran Powell narrowly missed out on a century while Ramnaresh Sarwan made a timely return to form with a half-century, but the West Indies still made a losing start to their tour of Australia with a 23-run defeat to the Prime Minister’s XI here. In a high scoring contest at Manuka Oval, the PM’s XI piled up 333 for six off 50 overs and then restricted the West Indies to 310 all out off 49 overs, with the left-handed Powell hammering 92 and Sarwan stroking 63, reports CMC....