Russia

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The United States is halting work at two consulates in Russia, the State Department said, citing safety and security issues at the facilities where operations had been curtailed over COVID-19.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in consultation with Ambassador John Sullivan decided to shut the consulate in Vladivostok in the far east and suspend operations at the consulate in Yekaterinburg, a State Department representative said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Saturday.

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: State trials of Russia’s latest armored vehicle, Atlet, will begin in the spring of 2021 and continue until late summer, Military Industrial Company CEO Alexander Krasovitsky told TASS on Friday.

"By now, Altet has fully completed preliminary trials and is about to enter state trials. They will begin in the spring of 2021 and will continue until late summer of the same year," he said.

Russian Army Commander-in-Chief Army General Oleg Salyukov told the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper on December 9 that Atlet state trials will be completed next year.

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin would be unable to work from a secret bunker, considering his potency, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station Friday, adding that there is no bunker under the president’s countryside residence.

"There are no bunkers," the spokesman said. "No head of state, especially as vigorous as Putin, would be able to hunker down in any bunker."

Commenting on rumors that the president works from this kind of isolation, Peskov called it fiction and a "complete nonsense."

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: A "light" vaccine against the coronavirus, that is, inoculation with only one of the two vaccine components, will protect against the infection for three or four months, Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Healthcare Ministry Alexander Gintsburg told TASS.

"The immunity is expected to be formed in three weeks," he said. "It won’t last long, I think it will regretfully last three or, at best, four months."

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: Global gas demand will not decline in coming 25-30 years, it will only rise due to a small carbon footprint, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Pavel Sorokin told a forum on Friday.

"Due to the fact that gas has the smallest carbon footprint we do not expect a decline in gas consumption in coming 25-30 years. We project it only to rise," he said.

The demand is largely expected to be satisfied by liquified natural gas (LNG).

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in Russia over the past 24 hours has increased by 28,552, bringing the total to 2,791,220, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told journalists on Friday.

A day earlier, 28,214 infections were detected.

According to the crisis center, since the beginning of the pandemic 1.9% of Russia’s population have been infected.

17 Dec 2020; MEMO: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described American policy in the Middle East on Tuesday as "unconstructive", RT Arabic has reported. He made his comment during a meeting with his Croatian counterpart, Gordan Grlic Radman, in response to America's claim that Moscow's policies in the region are destabilising.

MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/: Russian combat engineers have defused over 6,000 explosive objects and cleared about 200 hectares of territory in Nagorno-Karabakh, Dmitry Perepelkin, a deputy chief of the Russian peacekeeping contingent’s reconciliation center, told reporters on Thursday.

"Russian combat engineers of the Center for Humanitarian Demining have cleared 195 hectares of territory and 60 kilometers of roads from unexploded mines and shells. More than 6,000 explosive objects have been detected and destroyed," Perepelkin said.

MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin told his annual news conference on Thursday he hopes that at least some problems in Russian-US relations will be solved under Joe Biden’s administration.

"We presume that the newly elected US president will understand what is going on - he is a person, who has experience in both domestic and foreign policy. We expect that all problems, which emerged, or at least some of them will be ironed out under the new administration," Putin said.

MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/: There is no evidence to prove allegations that any country deliberately spread the coronavirus, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his annual news conference on Thursday.

"As for the origin [of the virus], there are many rumors but I would like to refrain from making statements about for all the nation and the world to hear, particularly because we don’t see evidence proving allegations against anyone," Putin pointed out.