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“Russia said it destroyed two HIMARS. This has not been confirmed and is likely wishful thinking, as the HIMARS are capable of operating beyond the range of Russian artillery, and Russia has no air superiority,” Ville Cantell, director of the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s Sustainable Development and Trade Communications unit, tweeted Monday. Russia said Monday that its forces had destroyed two U.S.-made HIMARS in Ukraine, adding to the four systems it previously said it took out....

The Russian supporters grabbed flags and threw projectiles, forcing panicked England fans to clamber over barriers as stewards looked on. (Reporting by Mitch Phillips; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by John Irish) 0 votes

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a press briefing Tuesday that the Kremlin has yet to respond to the “serious” proposal made by the Biden administration in July to free Griner. Jean-Pierre reiterated the White House’s stance that Griner has been wrongfully imprisoned and called her coming appeal “another sham judicial proceeding.” A Russian court in August sentenced Griner, an Olympic gold medalist and top player with the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA’s) Phoenix Mercury, to nine years in prison and a fine of about $16,000 after being found guilty of drug smuggling with criminal intent....

The contest, named Makeup Under Camouflage, was done in celebration of International Women’s day, according to a Euronews report. The event saw women soldiers compete in military tests and exercises as well as show off their creative, culinary and intellectual gifts. The event takes place annually, and this year it was held in the Yaroslavl region, three hours northeast of Moscow. It went ahead despite Russia being involved in a developing conflict with its neighbor Ukraine....

Dmitry Lisov’s third-period goal was enough for the Russians to collect their second victory of the event in Goyang after a 2-1 victory on Saturday over hosts South Korea. Russia, making its debut in the A-Pool competition, was also defeated 3-4 by Canada on Sunday. The top five finishers will qualify directly for the Sochi Paralympic Games next year, with the bottom three entering playoffs. Russia is an automatic qualifier as Olympic host....

Known Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov has attacked NATO and its member countries in recent days, most recently making comments in a video posted to Twitter on Thursday by BBC journalist Francis Scarr, alleging that Russia has “liberated over 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory” and “around 10 million Ukrainian citizens from Nazi authorities.” “It’s a war against NATO, a war for our country’s survival,” Solovyov said, adding that Russia “decided finally to finish the eight-year war,” referencing Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Donbas....

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its July 19 war assessment that should the Kremlin annex the regions that are currently occupied by Russian forces, Putin may state, directly or obliquely, that Russian doctrine permitting the use of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory applies to newly annexed territories. Russia’s military doctrine allows battlefield use of nuclear weapons in response to any non-nuclear assault on Russian territory....

Ukraine estimates there have been 94,140 Russian deaths since the war began nearly 10 months ago. This includes 380 in the last day. The mark was at 91,150 just seven days earlier. At 3,000 soldiers killed each week, the death toll would reach 97,000 by Dec. 18 and perhaps 100,000 by Christmas Day. Recent fighting in the Bakhmut region has the Russians losing more than 50 soldiers a day alone, Ukraine stated....

According to Russian News Agency TASS, dialogues between NATO and Russia are not going to happen due to current developments. The state-run news agency cited an unnamed source in Moscow with this update. The source told TASS, Russia “should not be expected” to make “a conceptual return” to previous security guarantees that it sent to the United States and NATO a year ago. “We won’t be the ones to do it,” the source told TASS....

Business dealings in Russia involving these countries will now require special government authorization, Russia said, in a response to crippling sanctions imposed by Western nations over the invasion. The countries and territories considered “unfriendly” by the Russian government incude “Australia, Albania, Andorra, United Kingdom, including Jersey, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, the member states of the European Union, Iceland, Canada, Liechtenstein, Micronesia, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, San Marino, North Macedonia, Singapore, the United States, Taiwan, Ukraine, Montenegro, Switzerland, Japan,” according to a decree published on the government’s website....

In a tweet, it explained that a Russian convoy, 30km (18.6 miles) outside of Kyiv has made little movement in the last three days. They also said the Ukrainian resistance has played a role in preventing the convoy from moving forward. “The main body of the large Russian column advancing on Kyiv remains over 30km from the center of the city having been delayed by staunch Ukrainian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion,” it said in a tweet....

The report from the U.S.-based think tank noted Russia’s growing “siloviki faction,” which it described as people with meaningful power bases within Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who are fielding combat forces in Ukraine. Notably, this group is “led” by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian billionaire and the financier of the Wagner Group, an elite paramilitary force linked to Putin, and sent mercenaries to fight in Ukraine. The report noted recent criticism leveled by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov against Russian military commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin in a “likely” response to a Ukrainian “strike on Chechen units in northeastern Kherson Oblast....

Putin made a surprise visit to Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday after lawmaker Valentina Tereshkova, a member of Putin’s ruling United Russia party and a former cosmonaut who was the first woman in space, proposed either lifting presidential term limits or allowing the current head of state to run again. Putin said he did not want to return to the authoritarianism of the country’s Soviet past, but deferred on the second initiative to the country’s Constitutional Court....

Asked by Newsweek on Moscow’s position on the thousands of refugees who have attempted to enter the European Union via Poland by way of Russian ally Belarus, the Russian Foreign Ministry referred to comments a day earlier by President Vladimir Putin at the ministry’s collegium. He warned that Western nations were using the events to stir unrest near Russia’s own borders while neglecting their own responsibilities. “It is also impossible to ignore that Western countries are using the migration crisis on the Belarus-Poland border as a new reason for tension in a region close to us, for putting pressure on Minsk, while at the same time forgetting their own humanitarian commitments,” Putin said....

A cryptic marketing campaign is promoting the project that was developed by the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), which is part of Rostec, Russia’s state-owned defense and technology development group. The plane will be revealed on Tuesday, July 20 on the first day of MAKC-2021, a biennial airshow held at Zhukovsky airport around 25 miles southeast of Moscow, Russia. In teasing its release, a press statement by Rostec gave props to Russia as one of the few countries in the world which had “full-cycle technologies for the production of advanced aircraft systems....

Russia’s Foreign Ministry released a statement “on the prevention of nuclear war” on Wednesday, calling on other nuclear powers to “abandon dangerous attempts to infringe on each other’s vital interests, balancing on the brink of direct armed conflict and encouraging provocations” with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Such provocations, the ministry said, “can lead to catastrophic consequences.” In referencing nuclear powers, Russia was specifically referring to five countries—China, Russia, the U....

“During the current day, the Defense Forces aviation has hit 4 areas of the focus of the enemy’s life force and military equipment and 1 support point. The losses of the enemy are being specified,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in an unverified situational update on Facebook. “In addition, our air defense units in different directions destroyed a Su-24 aircraft, two winged missiles and one Gulf of the invaders....

The comments by Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, follows a New York Times report saying that the Biden administration was considering giving Kyiv the ability to strike Crimea. When asked about the report, White House spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday that “Crimea is Ukraine,” and that the U.S. was “not making targeting decisions” for Kyiv, but rather “these decisions are up to them.” Antonov took exception to the U....

“Putin definitely thinks that ethnic minorities are expendable,” Vladimir Budaev of the Free Buryatia Foundation, a pro-democracy group based in the United States, told Newsweek. “We are now seeing the second step of mobilization. The first step was to start from ethnic minority republics,” said Budaev, chief operating officer of the advocacy group, which was formed after Putin launched his full-scale invasion against neighboring Ukraine in February. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on September 21 that Russia would be targeting 300,000 reservists and ex-military personnel with “certain military specialties and relevant experience....

Denis Protsenko, the chief physician for coronavirus patients in the hospital in Moscow’s Kommunarka district, said he had tested positive in a Facebook post on Tuesday, Russian news agency Tass reported. “My dear friends, I very much appreciate your concern. Indeed, I have tested positive for the CoV virus but I feel quite well. I have self-isolated in my office where I have everything I need to telecommute,” he wrote, according to an English translation of the post by Tass....