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Russia will have to increase its entire missile arsenal to deter the West as Moscow is now in an open confrontation with the United States and its allies, a Russian diplomat was quoted as saying on Monday. President Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine touched off the worst breakdown in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and U.S. diplomats. Russia has ramped up weapons production and is now forecast by the United States to manufacture this year more artillery than all of NATO's 32 members combined. "We are now at the...

"You can't go anywhere at all, not even to Uzbekistan or Belarus for the May holidays," said one source. -snip- Russia is making overseas travel harder for some officials due to fears that foreign powers may try to gain access to state secrets during the worst crisis in relations with the West for more than 60 years, nine sources told Reuters. The Federal Security Service (FSB) is putting pressure on employees across government ministries not to leave Russia at all, even to visit so-called 'friendly' countries that have not imposed sanctions against Moscow, the sources said. Foreign travel was highly...

MOSCOW, April 7 (Reuters) - Ukraine attacked the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on Sunday, including a strike on the dome of the plant's sixth power unit that caused no damage, the plant's Russian-installed administration said in a statement. Earlier, the administration reported a drone attack that damaged a truck parked near the station's canteen, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing the plant authorities.

SUMMARIES: • Ukraine launches mass drone attack • Fire at NORSI refinery, drone downed near Kirishi • NORSI is badly damaged - sources • Russia says it repels cross-border attack by Ukrainian proxies

President Vladimir Putin granted an interview to U.S. television host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday, the Kremlin said, his first to an American journalist since before Russia's invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago. -snip- The interview is likely to be aired on Thursday, Russia's TASS news agency said, citing reports by the Wall Street Journal

A senior ally of President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday that any Ukrainian attacks on missile launch sites inside Russia with arms supplied by the United States and its allies would risk a nuclear response from Moscow. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that some Ukrainian military commanders were considering hitting missile launch sites inside Russia with Western-supplied long-range missiles. He did not name the commanders or disclose more details of the alleged plan and there was no immediate reaction from Ukraine to his threat.

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin dismissed as complete nonsense remarks by U.S. President Joe Biden that Russia would attack a NATO country if it won the war in Ukraine, adding that Russia had no interest in fighting the NATO military alliance.The war in Ukraine has triggered the deepest crisis in Moscow's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and Biden warned last year that a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia would trigger World War Three.In a plea to Republicans not to block further military aid earlier this month, Biden warned that if Putin was victorious...

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Friday that he hoped President Vladimir Putin would run in the March election for another term as Russian president, a move that would keep Putin in power until at least 2030. -snip- Asked by the student television channel of Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO) what the next president after Putin should be like, Peskov said: "The same." "Or different but the same," Peskov told MGIMO 360 with a smile. "Putin has not yet announced his intention to run but I sincerely want to believe that he will do...

Pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said on Sunday he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be "sham" with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin's military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his...

For Darya Stepanova, a mother of two who lives in a small town on the eastern side of the Ural mountains, soaring prices for everything from baby food to nappies have forced her family to cut back on most treats and eating out. The Stepanov family is one of millions of Russian families having to cut back due to the significant changes forced on Russia's economy by the war in Ukraine and the myriad sanctions imposed by the West. Stepanova, 34, her five year old son and newborn son, try to make ends meet on the 50,000 roubles ($550) a...

HELSINKI (AP) — Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating.

Russian patriotic bloggers on Friday poured scorn on President Vladimir Putin's intimation that mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane was blown up with hand grenades while those on board were high on cocaine and alcohol. The private Embraer jet on which Prigozhin was travelling to St Petersburg crashed north of Moscow killing all 10 people on board on Aug. 23, including Dmitry Utkin, co-founder of the mercenary Wagner group, four bodyguards and a crew of three. Putin said on Thursday fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the dead and that investigators had ruled out any external impact...

A Russian general said he had been dismissed as a commander after telling the military leadership about the dire situation at the front in Ukraine, where he said Russian soldiers had been stabbed in the back by the failings of the top military brass. After the June 24 mutiny by Wagner mercenaries, the biggest domestic challenge to the Russian state in decades, President Vladimir Putin has so far kept Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in their jobs. Major General Ivan Popov, who commanded the 58th Combined Arms Army, said in a voice message...

Russia's most powerful mercenary said on Sunday that his Wagner fighters would not sign any contract with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, publicly refusing an attempt by the defence ministry to bring his fighting force under its sway. -snip- The defence ministry on Saturday said Shoigu had ordered all "volunteer detachments" to sign contracts with his ministry by the end of the month, a step it said would increase the effectiveness of the Russian army. Though the ministry did not mention Wagner in its public statement, the Russian media reported that it was an attempt by Shoigu to bring the mercenaries...

Ukraine's military said on Tuesday that Russian forces blew up a major dam in southern Ukraine, while Moscow-installed official in the city of Nova Kakhovka in the Russian-controlled parts of the Kherson region denied it. "The Kakhovka (reservoir) was blown up by the Russian occupying forces," the South command of Ukraine's Armed Forces said on Tuesday on its Facebook page. "The scale of the destruction, the speed and volumes of water, and the likely areas of inundation are being clarified." Reuters was unable to immediately verify the Ukrainian statement. Earlier, Russian state news agency quoted the Moscow-installed mayor of Nova...

Ukrainian forces continued to shell Russia's border region of Belgorod overnight into Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. "Overnight, it was quite restless," Gladkov said on the Telegram channel, adding that the Shebekino and Volokonovsky districts had suffered "lots" of damage from the latest shelling. Gladkov later wrote that fires had broken out in the town of Shebekino after Ukrainian forces shelled a market area in the centre, adding that nobody had been injured. Shebekino is about 7 km (4 miles) from the...

Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday that Kremlin factions were destroying the state by trying to sow discord between him and Chechen fighters. -snip- Putin held a Security Council meeting of Friday about what he said were “interethnic” relations inside the country. Prigozhin said Chechen remarks made about him sounded like something out of the early 1990s when conflicts gripped Russian cities after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Clearly the statements made were rather provocative, aimed at hurting me and freaking me out,” Prigozhin said. Prigozhin also said any battle between Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s Akhmat special...

The United States has supplied more than $27 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24, including over 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft rocket systems, 8,500 Javelin anti-tank missile systems and over 1 million 155mm artillery rounds.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The mystery surrounding a missing merchant ship deepened Thursday with the vessel's operator suggesting piracy and maritime experts suspecting foul play or even a secret cargo. The Kremlin ordered Russian warships to join the hunt for the 4,000-tonne, 98-meter bulk carrier Arctic Sea, whose fate has baffled maritime authorities across Europe and North Africa. The Maltese-registered vessel, carrying a $1.3-million cargo of timber, was supposed to have docked on August 4 in the Algerian port of Bejaia. It never arrived and is thought to have last made contact from the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France....

The withdrawal of Russian forces from a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine has prompted two powerful allies of President Vladimir Putin to do something rare in modern Russia: publicly ridicule the war machine's top brass. Russia's loss of the bastion of Lyman, which puts western parts of Luhansk region under threat, touched a nerve for Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. Kadyrov, who has been close to Putin since his father and former president of Chechnya, Akhmad, was killed in a 2004 bomb attack in Grozny that also killed a Reuters photographer, suggested that...