Free Republic

A Ukrainian missile attack triggered a fire on Monday in the Russian-held northeastern city of Luhansk, the latest in a series of strikes near the city, the regional Russia-installed governor said. Leonid Pasechnik, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the strike was made with cluster munitions. "A fire has broken out as a result of the attack," Pasechnik said. Pasechnik said information on casualties was being clarified. Russia's Tass news agency, quoting emergency services, said there had been injuries. There was no official Ukrainian comment. Ukrainian media and war bloggers posted a picture of what they described as a...

Russia and Niger, under military rule since a coup last year, have agreed to develop military cooperation, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. According to Russian news agencies, Russian Deputy Defense Ministers Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Alexander Fomin met Niger's junta-appointed Defense Minister Salifu Modi on Tuesday. "The parties noted the importance of developing Russian-Niger relations in the defense sector and agreed to intensify joint actions to stabilize the situation in the region," - the ministry said, adding that it aims to continue dialogue on "increasing the combat readiness" of Niger's military.

Russian investigators said on Tuesday they had arrested three people over heating outages south of Moscow that have sent regional officials scrambling to restore services and drawn scrutiny from the Kremlin. Authorities blamed the breakdown on failures at a boiler plant owned by a private ammunition factory. The heads of the heating plant and the factory were arrested on suspicion of providing unsafe services, investigators said in a statement. The deputy head of the local administration was also detained on suspicion of certifying the heating plant as adequate for winter despite allegedly knowing about defects that needed to be fixed....