NOVO-OGARYOVO – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has voiced support for the idea of creating a general school textbook on the Russian military history.
NOVO-OGARYOVO – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday welcomed the idea to build memorials on graves of Soviet soldiers who died during the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish war. However, he warned that the work should be aimed at strengthening Russia’s relations with Finland rather than at confrontation with the northern neighbor.
NOVO-OGARYOVO – President Vladimir Putin pledged on Thursday that the state would support the activities of military-patriotic clubs. “Humanitarian, military and any other agencies in which people wearing military uniforms and shoulder straps serve should and will certainly render assistance to you,” Putin said at a meeting with members of the Russian Military Historical Society.
NOVO-OGARYOVO – President Vladimir Putin presented the Order of Friendship to President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas. The presentation of the award took place after the two leaders’ talks.
MOSCOW – Palestine may be put on Russia’s list of tariff preferences’ recipients if a mutual free trade agreement is concluded but still the matter needs discussing, also at the level of the Eurasian Economic Commission.
NOVO OGARYOVO – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hopes that the year 2013 will be declared the year of Middle East settlement. “The efforts should be taken to resume the serious and substantive peace process based on the resolutions, which were approved by the international community and worked out on the Arab Peace Initiative,” the Palestinian president said.
NOVO-OGARYOVO - President Vladimir Putin said the tragic events in Syria were a subject of his discussion with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Thursday meeting. "We exchanged our views of the situation in the Middle East," Putin said after the talks.
NOVO-OGAREVO – Russia and Palestine intend to intensify bilateral economic relations, Russian President Vladimir Putin said after the negotiations with his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas here on Thursday.
MOSCOW – Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill on Thursday congratulated Pope Francisco I on his election as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. “The relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church received a new impetus and positive dynamics under your predecessor – Pope Benedict XVI,” Patriarch Kirill said.
MOSCOW – Director General of Russia’s Public Television /OTV/, which is in the phase of formation at the moment, on Thursday mapped out the character and of the new channel saying it will be ‘provincial’ and ‘optimistic’. Anatoly Lysenko, the Director General, addressed a news conference at Itar-Tass.
NOVO-OGAREVO – Russian Presidential Aide Elvira Nabiullina continues to work at this post, despite the intentions of President Vladimir Putin to nominate her candidacy for the post of the chairman of the Central Bank of Russia, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.
MOSCOW – External sponsors of the Syrian irreconcilable opposition consider the political settlement based on the Geneva communique unacceptable, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday. “These forces stepped up actions on all tracks by trying to spur armed confrontation,” Lukashevich said.
MOSCOW – The idea of a political solution of the Syrian crisis based on the Geneva communiqu· is not the liking of certain forces, first and foremost, the outside sponsors of the irreconcilable Opposition, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.
LONDON - Russia’s Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told Itar-Tass on Thursday that the Russian government could diversify the Russian economy if it had enough political will and desire to correct the existing shortcomings in the country’s fiscal system.
MOSCOW - Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov, expelled from A Just Russia on Wednesday, said they would set up a new political party. "If the Party Congress does not disavow the decision /on expulsion/, we'll set up our own party and invite A Just Russia members to join," Gennady Gudkov told a news conference on Thursday.
TBILISI – Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili said the Georgian government is ready to restore relations with Russia step by step. “We should move forward step by step to normalising relations with Russia. It won’t be very easy to improve relations with Russia and create conditions for the country’s peaceful unification. Patience, tact, pragmatism and cautiousness are indispensable,” Ivanishvili told journalists.
KIEV – Latvia upholds Ukraine’s integration into the European Union and pledges to provide aid to adapting Ukrainian legislation to European law, Latvian President Andris Berzins said on Thursday. Berzins is currently in Kiev on a state visit.
DONETSK – Ukraine is seeking European living standards, but it should by all means retain normal relations with Russia, Parliamentary Speaker Vladimir Rybak said during a working trip to the Zaporozhie region.
MOSCOW – Passengers on board a train running from Minsk to Vilnius will undergo border check and customs control at a railway station in Vilnius, while earlier the border check point was in Kena, which will enable to cut time en route from three to 2.5 hours, a spokesman for Lietuvos Gele·inkeliai (Lithuanian Railways) told journalists on Thursday.
MOSCOW – The chairman of the Federation Council’s defense and security committee, Viktor Ozerov, believes that the law on military police will be adopted by the end of this year. “During 2013 the law on military police will be adopted and this structure will begin its work,” he said at a meeting with foreign military attaches in Moscow. Ozerov said the bill had already received comments from the Federation Council.
MOSCOW – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond met in London to discuss the situation in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO-led troops slated for 2014, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov told journalists on Thursday. On Wednesday, March 13, the Russian defence minister and the Russian foreign minister and their British colleague took part in the 2+2 meeting.
MOSCOW – The Russian Investigation Committee reported about the detention of the first suspect in the criminal case over the riots at a penitentiary in the town of Kopeisk in the Chelyabinsk Region overnight to November 25, 2012. Dmitry Kolomiitsev with previous convictions was detained on Tuesday, the Russian Investigation Committee reported. He is suspected of active involvement in massive riots and the use of violence against the law enforcers.
VIENNA – The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should be involved in cancelling visa formalities between Russia and Europe, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov said.
MOSCOW – Head of the Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) Vladimir Popovkin and Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) Jean-Jacques Dordain signed an agreement on cooperation in the exploration of Mars and other celestial bodies of the Solar System with robotic rovers in Paris on Thursday.
MOSCOW – RF Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said the international conference on European security will be held in the Russian capital on May 23–24.
MOSCOW – Russia is worried about certain Western countries’ intention to supply arms to the Syrian opposition, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said on Thursday. “All would talk about the need to start the political settlement in Syria,” Gatilov wrote in his Twitter blog.
MOSCOW – Russian and Chinese diplomats on Thursday discussed the situation in the Korean Peninsula in the wake of the North Korean nuclear test, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported after consultations between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov and Wu Dawei, special representative of the Chinese government for the Affairs of the Korean Peninsula.
MOSCOW – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu urged his British counterpart Philip Hammond to work out concrete projects in the military and military-technical fields, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov said.
MOSCOW – Russia urges Sweden to prevent the resumption of the work of the extremist website Kavkaz-Centre in its territory, speaker of the Federation Council upper house of Russia’s parliament Valentina Matviyenko said in Moscow on Thursday at meeting with speaker of the Swedish Riksdag (parliament) Per Westerberg.
MOSCOW – Hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church find the prospects for relationship with the Roman Catholic Church to be quite promising, as they recall the friendly treatment that the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, gave to the Eastern Orthodox Christians in Latin America, a high-rank Russian metropolitan told a news conference Thursday.
KIEV – Heads of state border agencies of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine Alexander Boyechko, Dominik Tracz, and Nikolai Litvin met in the Western Ukrainian city of Lutsk Thursday to sign an intergovernmental agreement on the point of convergence of the three countries state borders.
BISHKEK – Kyrgyzstan is interested in joining the customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and it will do its utmost to become its member, President Almazbek Atambayev said after talks with his Austrian counterpart, Heinz Fischer.
KIEV – The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office denied the statements that new criminal cases were opened against former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko. "The Prosecutor General's Office has not opened new criminal cases," its press service underlined.
BISHKEK – Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev and Austrian President Heinz Fischer held negotiations in Bishkek on Thursday. The two presidents discussed the development of bilateral cooperation in hydropower engineering, agriculture and tourism.
KIEV – Latvia contributes to developing a constructive dialogue between Ukraine and the EU, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich said. Speaking at a joint conference with Latvian President Andris Berzins on Thursday, Yanukovich said Ukraine thanked Latvia for consistent support to Ukraine’s drive to integrating into the European Union.
YEREVAN – Armenia’s Constitution Court has turned down a lawsuit filed by two candidates in the February 18 presidential election, Raffi Hovannisian, and Andreas Gukassian, who demanded that the results of voting be annulled.
KIEV – Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich said on Thursday that the main purpose of the Kiev-Moscow gas negotiations was to establish a realistic and fair market gas prices for Ukraine. Yanukovich told a joint news conference with Latvian President Andris Berzins that Kiev had been trying to review gas prices for Ukraine for the past three years, so far to no avail.
MOSCOW – The Russian Interior Ministry has called on all parties linked to an acid attack on Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi ballet’s artistic director, to refrain from comments and interpretations in the interests of investigation.
MOSCOW – The fragments of Poland’s presidential Tu-154 liner, which crashed near Smolensk in April 2010 will remain in Russia until a final procedural decision in the criminal case, a source familiar with progress in bilateral negotiations said on Thursday.
MOSCOW – Police in Astrakhan have detained a suspected accomplice of the man who took four hostages in a city college earlier in the day. "The suspect is a female student from the same college where the incident occurred," the Russian Interior Ministry told Itar-Tass. The bomb and the pistol used by the hostage taker were dummies. None of the hostages was hurt in the operation conducted by special task force police.