Europe

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not rule out that cooperation between Moscow and Minsk would be based on equal terms in the future. However, at the current stage of integration between the two countries, the issue at hand is the commercial aspect, he said.

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Russia is developing air defense systems based on new physical principles, Air Defense Force Chief Lieutenant-General Alexander Leonov said on Wednesday.

"Eventually, there are plans to arm air defense troops with systems based on new physical principles, which are currently being developed," the general said in an interview with the Defense Ministry’s Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.

TBILISI, December 25. /TASS/: Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Garibashvili signed an agreement with his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar for Turkey to allocate 100 million lira (around $17 million) to Georgia to carry out a reform in the military logistics sphere during Garibashvili’s official visit to Turkey, the Georgian Defense Ministry’s press service reported on Wednesday.

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Do you know that seals may be quick and curious, sharks — on the contrary — lazy and indifferent, and algae in northern seas — of any colors and forms you could imagine? What is the world of the Barents and White Seas like? Why tourists may prefer it to tropical waters? Leader of the Sea Hunter (Morskoi Okhotnik) Diving Club in Murmansk Andrei Bukreyev gave answers to TASS.

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Belarus is free to use any options for oil supplies if they are more profitable than Russia’s offer, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

He was commenting on the words of the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who said that Minsk had to look for alternative sources of oil supplies, due to tax maneuver in the oil sector in Russia.

Peskov stressed that the Kremlin does not consider such statements to be unfriendly.

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Russian president Vladimir Putin at a meeting with the government called increasing personal incomes of citizens the number one goal.

"In the last quarter of this year, even starting from the third, we see certain growth rates of personal incomes and real wages. This trend needs to be maintained and strengthened," he said.

"This is the number one goal," Putin noted.

MOSCOW, December 25. /TASS/: Allegations by the Japanese news agency Kyodo to the effect "former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the need to resolve a dispute with Japan over the sovereignty of a group of islands lying off Hokkaido in a 1988 meeting" (the Soviet Union denied the very existence of this problem as such), are a fake, Gorbachev’s interpreter, chief of the international and media relations office at the Gorbachev Foundation, Pavel Palazhchenko, told TASS on Wednesday.

25 December 2019; AFP: The climate summit in Madrid earlier this month did not collapse -- but by almost any measure it certainly failed.

Five years after the fragile UN process yielded the world's first universal climate treaty, COP25 was billed as a mopping-up session to finish guidelines for carbon markets, thus completing the Paris Agreement rulebook.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said on Wednesday that the forcible military conscription of one of his allies to a remote air base in the Arctic amounted to kidnapping and illegal imprisonment.

Ruslan Shaveddinov, a project manager at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, was detained at his Moscow flat on Monday after the door was broken down, the electricity cut, and the SIM card on his mobile phone remotely disabled.

MOSCOW, Dec. 25 (Xinhua) -- Two people died and six more were injured in a fire on early Wednesday in a hostel in eastern Siberia's Irkutsk region, Russia's emergency ministry said.

The fire broke out in a two-storey wooden hostel for logging workers in the village of Zalari, and triggered an automatic fire alarm, the ministry's Irkutsk regional office said in a statement.

When fire brigades arrived, the wooden building measuring over 300 square meters was all covered in fire, the statement said, adding that 13 people evacuated independently.