Russia

MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. Russia will fight against attempts of other countries to inhibit its activity on the international arena, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote in the article for the Voprosi Ekonomiki (Economic Questions) magazine published on Tuesday.

"Every time when our country becomes active on the international arena, it always faces hard attempts to hinder us. We cannot ignore these tendencies, and we will actively fight for a good place in world economy and world politics," Medvedev said.

MOSCOW, October 7. /TASS/. The idea of weaning the Russian economy off the dollar does not envisage any restrictions on using the greenback by Russians and the government has never had any plans to convert dollar deposits into rubles, Finance Minister and First Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with the program "Moscow. Kremlin. Putin" of the Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday.

MOSCOW, October 7. /TASS/. De-dollarization does not imply refusal of the dollar, CEO of Russia’s VTB bank Anderi Kostin said on Sunday.

"Several words have been said about the refusal of the dollar. I would like to say that, first, no one is speaking about the refusal of the dollar. Moreover, the so-called de-dollarization program does not envisage any restrictive, the more so, prohibitive measures in respect of the dollar neither for people nor for corporations," he told the Tolstoy. Sunday program on the Rossiye-1 television channel.

RHODES, October 6. /TASS/. Russia has allocated more than $60 million to fight Ebola in Western Africa, Russian Presidential Special Representative for the Middle East and Africa Mikhail Bogdanov said in his address to a session of the World Public Forum - Dialogue of Civilizations.

Currently, Moscow is actively assisting Africans in healthcare and medicine, he said.

"Russia has donated a total of $100 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria," said Bogdanov, who is also a deputy foreign minister.

MOSCOW, October 6. /TASS/. The US has embarked on a deliberate course of ending the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in order to remove all obstacles for containing Russia on the international arena, experts told TASS on Friday.

MOSCOW, October 6. /TASS/. Deputy foreign ministers of Russia and North Korea will hold bilateral consultations in Moscow on October 8, a representative of Russia’s diplomatic mission in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea told TASS on Saturday, adding that on the next day, October 9, diplomats from Russia, North Korea and China will have a trilateral meeting.

MOSCOW, October 4./TASS/. Russia dismisses accusations of the US that says Russia’s supplying Syria with S-300 air defense systems will have a destabilizing effect, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Thursday, adding that on the contrary - this will normalize the situation in the region.

"Just the contrary - it plays a very stabilizing, normalizing role. We see eye to eye with Damascus in this assessment, and that’s how we will be analyzing the approaches of those who think otherwise" Ryabkov said.

OTTAWA, October 5. /TASS/. Canada’s claims of Russian cyberattacks are nothing more but a new round of anti-Russian witch hunt, the Russian embassy in the country told TASS in a statement on Thursday.

"The new round of anti-Russian witch hunt around the far-fetched accusations of some cyberattacks, which is currently being fuelled by the United States, the United Kingdom and their obedient allies, including Canada, is nothing more than cheap spy hysteria and empty guesses," the embassy said.

NEW DELHI, October 5. /TASS/. Head of Russia’s State Space Corporation (Roscosmos) Dmitry Rogozin will meet with NASA Administrator James Bridenstine at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 10 to discuss the future of the International Space Station (ISS).

"We will hold talks with Bridenstine at Baikonur on October 10. We will discuss the future of the ISS," he told reporters.

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian space capsule with three men onboard has safely landed in a barren steppe in Kazakhstan after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station.

The Soyuz MS-08 carrying Russia’s Oleg Artemyev and NASA’s Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold touched down at 5.44 p.m. Kazakh time (1144 GMT).

The two Americans performed three space walks to carry out maintenance during their 197-day stay at the orbiting lab. Artemyev conducted one spacewalk together with a fellow Russian.