Russia

MOSCOW, Nov 14 (Reuters) - The European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei discussed a migrant crisis on the Polish border and European sanctions against Minsk by phone on Sunday.

Borrell wrote on Twitter that he had raised "the precarious humanitarian situation at the border with the EU".

"Peoples lives must be protected and humanitarian agencies allowed access," he wrote. "The current situation is unacceptable and must stop. People should not be used as weapons."

MOSCOW (AP) — For most of his 27 years as Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko’s repressions and truculent statements frequently offended the West. This year, that belligerence is directly affecting Europe.

His government forcefully diverted an airliner flying between Greece and Lithuania that was carrying a political opponent. As the European Union imposed sanctions for that action, Belarus responded by easing its border controls for migrants from the Middle East and Africa, allowing them to head for the EU frontier.

MOSCOW, November 13. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin finds it inappropriate for Russia to carry out its maneuvers in the Black Sea in response to NATO exercises there, there is no need to escalate the situation. He said it in an interview with Pavel Zarubin, the host of the Moscow. Kremlin. Putin program.

MOSCOW, November 13. /TASS/: Russia is not a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the journalist of the Rossiya-1 TV channel Pavel Zarubin.

"The Minsk agreements do not say that Russia is a party to the conflict, we have never agreed with this and will not agree, we are not," the Russian leader stressed.

As the President noted, the Western partners "are trying to push Russia to implementation of the Minsk agreements."

MOSCOW, November 13. /TASS/: Russia’s coronavirus cases have exceeded 9 million since the beginning of the pandemic. Another 39,256 cases were confirmed in the past 24 hours, the total number of infected people has reached 9,031,851, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told reporters on Saturday. According to the crisis center, the growth rate was 0.44%.

MOSCOW, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Belarus wants Russian nuclear-capable Iskander missile systems to deploy them in the south and west of the country, President Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview with a Russian defence magazine published on Saturday.

Russia is a close ally of Belarus, which the European Union has accused of engineering a crisis on its border by flying in thousands of migrants and pushing them to try to cross illegally into Poland. Brussels is gearing up to sanction Minsk.

MOSCOW, Nov 13 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that Belarus had not consulted him before raising the possibility of cutting Russian natural gas flows to Europe, adding that such a move would risk harming ties between Minsk and its key ally Moscow.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko threatened on Thursday to retaliate against any new European Union sanctions against Minsk over a migrant standoff on the Belarus-EU border, suggesting he could halt the transit of gas and other goods via Belarus. 

MOSCOW, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- It is the Western countries themselves who caused current migrant crisis on the borders between Belarus and the European Union (EU), Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday.

The Western countries fought many years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and economically, high social benefits are attracting migrants to the EU countries, Putin said in an interview with a Russian TV program.

He stressed that Russia has nothing to do with the crisis and Russian airlines did not fly the migrants there.

MOSCOW, November 12. /TASS/: A Norwegian naval ship’s visit to the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen indicates a growing trend towards Norway’s latent militarization of the archipelago, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a commentary on Friday.

"We have taken note of a report the Norwegian Navy’s frigate The Thor Heyerdahl visited Spitsbergen’s port of Longyearbyen lately. The Norwegian naval ship’s visit to the archipelago was another in a series of Oslo’s steps to include this territory in the sphere of its military efforts," the commentary runs.

MOSCOW, November 12. /TASS/: The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation could raise its efficiency by developing cooperation with other regional organizations, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, speaking by video link at the group’s summit.

"Greater coordination with other regional forums and organizations that have similar agendas - the Eurasian Economic Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Shanghai Cooperation Organization - would help to raise the efficiency of the APEC,’’ Putin said.