Europe

BRUSSELS, Feb 7 (Reuters) - NATO is considering a longer-term military posture in eastern Europe to strengthen its defences, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday, as tensions remained high over Russia's military build-up near Ukraine.

"We are considering more longer-term adjustments to our posture, our presence in the eastern part of the alliance. No final decision has been made on that but there is a process now going on within NATO", he told reporters in Brussels.

DONETSK, Ukraine, Feb 7 (Reuters) - An influential separatist commander in eastern Ukraine has urged Russia to send 30,000 soldiers to reinforce rebel forces fighting in the breakaway Donetsk region and to operate new weapons systems he hopes Russia will supply.

The Kremlin did not immediately respond when asked to comment on the request by Alexander Khodakovsky, a former political leader in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic who now oversees a military unit.

MOSCOW, Feb. 7 (Xinhua) -- Russia registered 171,905 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, fewer than a day earlier for the first time since Jan. 10, taking the national tally to 12,982,023, the official monitoring and response center said Monday.

The nationwide death toll grew by 609, the lowest increase since June 27, to 336,023, and the number of recoveries increased by 55,683 to 10,624,954.

Moscow, Russia's worst-hit region, reported 15,442 new cases, taking its total to 2,511,333.

MOSCOW (AP) — International efforts to defuse the standoff over Ukraine intensified Monday, with French President Emmanuel Macron holding talks in Moscow and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington to coordinate policies as fears of a Russian invasion mounted.

The buildup of an estimated 100,000 Russian troops near Ukraine has fueled Western worries of a possible offensive. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Sunday that Russia could invade Ukraine “any day,” triggering a conflict that would come at an “enormous human cost.”

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz set off Sunday for Washington seeking to reassure Americans that his country stands alongside the United States and other NATO partners in opposing any Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Scholz has said that Moscow would pay a “high price” in the event of an attack, but his government’s refusal to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, bolster Germany’s troop presence in Eastern Europe or spell out which sanctions it would support against Russia has drawn criticism abroad and at home.

MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/: Washington is trying to limit all the international security issues to Ukraine, which is absolutely wrong, Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said on the YouTube channel Soloviov Live on Saturday.

"You know, the US is trying to narrow down all the present-day problems to Ukraine. I believe it is absolutely wrong, it is an attempt to blur the true state of affairs," he said. Antonov said that Russian documents on security guarantees raise a question of the further development of the international security system.

MOSCOW, February 6. /TASS/: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova drew attention to the silence of the US State Department regarding fake publications by the US news agency Bloomberg.

MOSCOW, February 6. /TASS/: Moscow took retaliatory measures towards German broadcaster Deutsche Welle following Berlin’s decision to ban RT DE in Germany to demonstrate that further steps in this direction will come at a cost, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday in an interview with the Soloviev Live YouTube channel.

"We respond, we’ve been taught, we are doing this to demonstrate that further steps in this direction will come at a cost," the diplomat stressed.

MOSCOW, February 6./TASS/: The number of confirmed coronavirus cases across Russia grew by 180,071 in the past 24 hours, amounting to 12,810,118 overall, the anti-coronavirus crisis center said on Sunday.

The relative growth rate is 1.4%. As many as 12,749 coronavirus patients were hospitalized across Russia in the past 24 hours, which is 29.3 % less than the day before, the anti-coronavirus crisis center reported.

ZURICH, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Swiss President Ignazio Cassis wants to thaw frosty ties with the European Union by seeking a new package of bilateral agreements and believes his country must move closer to the bloc, he told the SonntagsZeitung newspaper.

Years of talks to bind Switzerland more closely to the EU's single market collapsed in May last year when the Swiss government ditched a draft 2018 treaty cementing ties with its biggest trading partner.