Russia

MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/: Russia can respond in a mirror-like fashion to the expulsion of two Russian diplomats from Bulgaria, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova said in a statement Tuesday.

"In accordance with the diplomatic practice, Russia reserves the right to respond in a mirror-like fashion," she noted.

MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/: Three crewmembers died after a Tu-22 bomber’s ejection system suddenly went off at an airfield near Kaluga in central Russia, the Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday.

"Today, during planned preparations of a Tu-22M3 aircraft on the ground for a flight at an airfield in the Kaluga Region, the ejection system was suddenly activated," the ministry said.

"Due to the insufficient altitude for parachute opening, three crewmembers received fatal injuries upon landing," it said.

MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/: Twitter has removed only a third of content prohibited in Russia, Russia’s mass media watchdog said on Tuesday.

MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to get vaccinated by the end of the day, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

According to him, Putin is currently holding "working meetings." "We expect that he will get a vaccine shot by the end of the day," Peskov said.

The Kremlin will not disclose which COVID-19 vaccine will be administered to Russian President Vladimir Putin because all three Russian jabs are reliable and effective, the spokesman said.

MOSCOW, March 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday carrying 38 foreign satellites after takeoff was twice postponed due to technical issues, Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Video published by Roscosmos showed the Soyuz blaster launching against grey and cloudy skies at 0607 GMT.

“The Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with the Fregat upper stage and 38 spacecraft from 18 countries took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome,” Roscosmos said on its Twitter account.

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/: South Korea’s CAS500-1 Earth’s remote sensing satellite launched atop a Russian Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome has been successfully delivered into the designated orbit with the help of the rocket’s Fregat booster, Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos announced on Monday.

"After the thruster of the Fregat booster was ignited twice, the South Korean CAS500-1 Earth’s remote sensing satellite detached in the final orbit in the normal mode," Roscosmos said on its Twitter.

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/: Russia’s Technodinamika Group (part of the state tech corporation Rostec) has launched the production of the country’s first domestic aircraft simulators with a motion system that gives the feelings of a real flight, Technodinamika CEO Igor Nasenkov told TASS on Monday.

"They make it possible to get actually a full set of acceleration feelings inherent in a real flight, that is, to feel all the changes of the speed and motion experienced by the vestibular system," the chief executive said.

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/: Russia has documented 9,284 cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the overall case count to 4,466,153, the anti-coronavirus crisis center informed reporters on Monday.

The relative daily increase rate has reached 0.21%.

In the past 24 hours, 1,586 cases of COVID-19 were documented in Moscow, 865 in St. Petersburg, 646 in the Moscow Region, 339 in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, 240 in the Rostov Region, 204 in the Voronezh Region.

Currently, there are 293,577 active cases of COVID-19 in Russia.

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin always has the necessary communication tools, including the strategic ones, wherever he is, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov began a visit to China on Monday with a call for Moscow and Beijing to reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar and Western payment systems to push back against what he called the West’s ideological agenda.

Lavrov, on a two-day visit to China, is expected to hold talks with his Chinese counterpart at a time when both countries’ ties with the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden are badly strained.