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U.S. President Donald Trump said in a television interview that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin “probably” has been involved in assassinations and reiterated the assertion that Moscow meddled in U.S. politics. Trump also said he does not know whether U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is planning to step down but that he sees the four-star general as “sort of a Democrat” who just might leave. The comments came in a prerecorded interview with CBS television’s 60 Minutes program that aired on October 14. The wide-ranging discussion also touched on North Korea, U.S. hurricane relief efforts, the missing Saudi journalist...

The Communist wunderkind Valentin Konovalov should already be Siberia’s youngest governor, but the elections he’s supposed to win are cancelled every other week. The virtually unknown 30-year-old rode a wave of protest to win a first-round ballot in Khakassia, a republic in eastern Siberia, last month. The results were an embarrassment for the ruling United Russia party and the Kremlin, which backed the incumbent. But his opponents have found an easy way to keep him from winning the run-off: don’t hold it. “It’s absurd,” said the candidate, who names Lenin as a political inspiration, over a cup of tea. So...

It's one thing to read about schisms in the Church in history-books. Watching the brisk steps being taken toward it in your own time is something else entirely. For years, stubbornness has been in control of the situation. Voices of caution are raised, but no one wants to listen. Theology is transformed into points of view or, you could say, into arguments justifying the slow crawl towards the abyss of schism. We have witnessed a solid engineering to create an Orthodox papal ideology and sabotage true conciliarity. We have experienced the disavowal and destruction of all the rules that guided...

Ukraine has secured approval from the global head of Orthodox Christianity to create its own Church independent of Russia’s patriarchate. Russian Patriarch Kirill said last month that his church would break ties with the Istanbul-based patriarchate. Such a separation would “catastrophically undermine the unity of global Orthodoxy..." The threat was echoed by Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk. “We the Russian Church will not recognise this autocephaly, of course, and we will have no other choice but to sever ties with Constantinople." The question of whether the new Ukrainian Church will take over the Moscow Patriarchate’s property in the country is another...

From controlling the media to stoking nationalism, Russian President Vladimir Putin has always known how to keep his approval ratings high. But Russians’ lives are not getting any better – and Mr. Putin’s declining approval rating shows it. His tried-and-true tactic for renewing his popularity – say, annexing territory from a neighbouring country or intervening in a civil war – is not a practical long-term strategy... After Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in March 2014 – his approval rating reached a dizzyingly high 87 per cent. When the United States, under President Barack Obama, showed itself to be unwilling...

The GRU military intelligence agency was accused yesterday of making the largest intelligence blunder in Russian history after the Dutch hacking revelations appeared to result in the outing of more than 300 spies. Aleksei Morenets, one of the four Russian operatives accused of attempting to hack into the chemical weapons watchdog in the Netherlands, was identified in a leaked Russian car ownership database. Morenets’ Lada was registered in 2011 to a Moscow address that is believed to house a GRU barracks and specifically unit 26165, its notorious cyberespionage operation accused of attempting to hack into the Office for the Prohibition...

Doping is, unfortunately, a part of sport, and it happens in every country. But there is a big difference between individual cheats like Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones, and a program that is imagined and implemented by the state. A new and improved drug cocktail. Detailed schedules to ensure optimum results. And in the height of audacity, dirty samples that disappeared through a mouse hole in the official anti-doping laboratory at the Sochi Games and were handed to state security agents, who swapped them for clean urine collected before the Olympics. This is what the Russians did. At the behest...

Thanks to the national fever over the Kavanaugh hearings, a report that the FBI is holding onto documents that are potentially damning for the Clintons has been able to slip under the radar of the establishment media. In a recent bombshell report by The Hill, investigative journalist John Solomon wrote that the FBI has identified 37 pages of documents that may offer information about what FBI agents told the Obama administration preceding the Uranium One deal about the criminal wrongdoing found in Russia's nuclear Industry. Those suspicious of the deal pointed to evidence that bribery may have been at play...

Putin is shown flaunting his action man image, shooting, horse riding and fishing. Others see the president with a raft of cuddly animals including as snow leopard cub and a dog. One particularly bizarre image shows a shirtless Vlad taking a dip in Lake Seliger, just north of Moscow, as three Russian orthodox priests look on holding religious icons. The ceremony is apparently part of the celebration of Epiphany on January 6.

In 2013, Rosatom, backed by the Russian state, acquired a Canadian uranium mining company, now called Uranium One, which has assets in the U.S. Uranium is a key material for making nuclear weapons. Through the deal, Russia is able to own about 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity. However, Colin Chilcoat, an energy affairs specialist who has written extensively about Russia's energy deals, said that the company only extracts about 11 percent of uranium in the U.S. The deal also “doesn’t allow for that uranium to be exported at all,” Chilcoat told Fox News. “It’s not like it’s leaving the...

Eight years after its informant uncovered criminal wrongdoing inside Russia’s nuclear industry, the FBI has identified 37 pages of documents that might reveal what agents told the Obama administration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others about the controversial Uranium One deal. There’s just one problem: The FBI claims it must keep the memos secret from the public. Their excuses for the veil of nondisclosure range from protecting national security and law enforcement techniques to guarding the privacy of individual Americans and the ability of agencies to communicate with each other. Sound familiar? It’s a lot like the initial reasons...

It’s not every society whose ideals are embodied by a corpse. But in the Soviet Union, the never-decaying body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was meant to freeze his ideals in time: a promise to citizens that they were on the collective path to the bright communist future. Opened to visitors on August 1, 1924, his mausoleum became a key symbol of Soviet power, from the saint-like aura around Lenin’s remains to the Politburo’s tradition of standing atop the structure on holidays. Today, the unburied body remains a lingering element of the Soviet legacy, representing Russia’s inability or unwillingness to bury...

Putin and Orban are increasingly conscious that their regular contacts have failed to bring the two countries closer together. In fact, despite its reputation as the EU’s most pro-Russian member-state, Hungary actually expelled a Russian diplomat in response to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, unlike fellow EU member-states Slovenia, Bulgaria, Austria, Slovakia, Greece. In the spring, Orban readily deployed anti-Russian rhetoric during Hungary’s parliamentary election campaign. Bela Kovacs, a member of the European Parliament from the Jobbik opposition party, was indicted for alleged spying on the eve of the vote, having faced accusations of being a Russian agent...

An online investigations group has published what it says is the real identity of one of the prime suspects in the Salisbury nerve agent attack. Bellingcat has reported that the man who was named as Ruslan Boshirov is actually Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, who they say is a highly decorated officer in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. The Home Office said it could neither confirm nor deny the reporting about the suspect’s real identity. Scotland Yard, which has already said it believed the two suspects were using aliases, declined to comment.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States almost doubled its aid for displaced Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh and Myanmar, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced on Monday as she pushed for U.N. investigators to brief the U.N. Security Council on the crisis. “The military are at fault, the fact finding mission came out and gave clear examples of what’s happened,” Haley told reporters on Monday as she left a ministerial meeting in New York on the sidelines of the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders. “These weren’t terrorists. This was the military that did this to them....

The Russian Communist Party has announced it will form a coalition government with the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) in three regions where Kremlin-backed candidates suffered rare gubernatorial election defeats over the past week. Incumbents from the ruling party in the Far East Khabarovsk region and central Russia’s Vladimir region lost gubernatorial runoffs to LDPR on Sunday. Candidates from the Communist Party and A Just Russia will compete for the governor’s seat in the Siberian republic of Khakasia on Oct. 7 after its governor’s withdrawal from the race. “We will now form a coalition government in Khabarovsk, Vladimir and Khakasia,”...

With support for the Kremlin waning, repression is all it has left. General elections this month have revealed that the Russian public is frustrated, uncertain about the future and electrified by protest sentiment. Kremlin candidates struggled to win their gubernatorial bids, while high school and college students—people who haven’t even started working yet — took to the streets to protest plans to raise the pension age. Political analysts chalk this situation up to Kremlin errors. They believe that domestic policy chief Sergei Kiriyenko has loosened the political rules too much and has invested too heavily in the spectacle of the...

Next month, Europe’s leading budget airline will begin regular flights from Ukraine to a host of EU destinations. This is the latest milestone in a Ukrainian aviation boom that is seeing additional routes announced on a weekly basis and record passenger numbers at airports across the country. Each new flight serves to broaden Ukrainian horizons and anchor the country more firmly within the wider international community. Meanwhile, there has not been a single direct flight between Ukraine and Russia since October 2015. The changes in Ukraine’s air travel industry are just one of the many ways in which the country...

An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans. The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday criticized Russia for its failure to cooperate with the U.S. on the world stage despite overtures by President Donald Trump to “develop a relationship” with the Kremlin. “They have not proven helpful in the Ukraine, in Syria,” Pompeo said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview set to air Sunday. The State Department last week imposed sanctions on China’s Equipment Development Department for its purchase of Russian combat aircraft and surface-to-air missile equipment. On Saturday, Pompeo pointed to those economic penalties as evidence of the Trump administration’s efforts to “push back...