Europe

MOSCOW, June 18. /TASS/: Negotiation process with the UK on restoration of air service is not underway at the moment, Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin told TASS Thursday.

"There is no negotiation process on resumption of air service at this moment," he said.

According to the envoy, some 760 people were brought to Russia from London via repatriation flights.

MINSK, June 18. /TASS/: The Russian Energy Ministry agreed the schedule of oil supplies to Belarusian refineries over main oil pipelines in the amount of 5.75 mln tonnes in the third quarter of 2020, Belneftekhim Holding said on Thursday.

"The schedule of oil supplies over main oil pipelines to Belarusian refineries was determined together with the Russian Energy Ministry with the volume of 5.75 mln tonnes in the third quarter of 2020 (2.875 mln tonnes to each refinery)," the company said.

MOSCOW, June 18. /TASS/: Rosatom State Corporation will continue to participate in a tender for the construction of Belene Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Bulgaria in partnership with Framatome SAS (France) and GE Steam Power (USA), Rosatom Central Europe reported on Thursday.

Rosatom, Framatome SAS, and GE Steam Power signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) on the Belene NPP construction project to join forces to participate in the procedure for selecting a strategic investor for the plant’s construction.

MOSCOW, June 18. /TASS/: Russian-Serbian partnership does not depend on Belgrade’s dialogue with Brussels, Foreign Ministers of Russia and Serbia, Sergey Lavrov and Ivica Dacic, said in a joint article published by Russia’s Rossiisakaya Gazeta and Serbia’s Kurir dailies on Thursday.

BERLIN, June 18. /TASS/: The German Public Prosecutor’s Office has pressed charges against a Russian citizen suspected of murdering a Georgian man in Berlin in August 2019, the office informed on Thursday.

The suspect, Vadim S. or Vadim K., said to be a Russian national, is accused of murder and weapon trafficking. The prosecution believes that "at an unknown time, state bodies of the Russian central government gave the order to the accused to murder the Georgian national."

MOSCOW, June 18. /TASS/: One child and three adults died in the shooting in an apartment on Priorova Street in northern Moscow, Russian Investigative Committee’s Main Investigative Directorate spokeswoman Yulia Ivanova told TASS.

"Two women, one man and one child died in the shooting," she said. According to preliminary investigation, the man committed suicide.

According to Ivanova, the neighbors heard loud claps and called the police.

"They told the police that a roommate came to the woman’s apartment," the spokeswoman said.

PARIS (Reuters) - Failure to work towards an international deal on taxing big digital companies could trigger a dangerous trade war, the OECD said on Thursday, urging countries to remain engaged in talks after Washington announced it was pulling out of them for now.

“Absent a multilateral solution, more countries will take unilateral measures and those that have them already may no longer continue to hold them back,” OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said in a statement.

WARSAW/BERLIN (Reuters) - European Union leaders are expected on Friday to back extending the bloc’s main economic sanctions against Russia over the turmoil in Ukraine until the end of January 2021, diplomatic sources and officials said.

The EU hit Russia’s energy, financial and arms sectors after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and went on to back rebels fighting Kyiv government troops in the east of the ex-Soviet republic.

It has rolled them over ever since as Moscow has vowed to never give back the Black Sea peninsula.

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Denmark said on Thursday it would allow entry to citizens from most European nations with a low number of COVID-19 infections from June 27 - two months earlier than originally planned, including some two million people from hard-hit nearby Sweden.

European Union member states, non-EU countries in the open-border Schengen area such as Norway and also Britain, which is in neither grouping, will be individually assessed based on objective criteria, the Danish Foreign Ministry said.

BERLIN, June 18 (Xinhua) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday presented a basic outline and goals of Germany's presidency of the EU Council starting in July, setting tackling COVID-19 as the "leitmotif" for its term.

"Europe needs us as much as we need Europe," said Merkel in a speech to the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament. "Europe is something that we can and must create. It is a dynamic order of peace and freedom."

She said that Germany would assume this responsibility at a time when Europe was facing "its greatest challenge" in history.