Russia

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.

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.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian officials say 15 people are injured after a passenger helicopter made a rough emergency landing in Siberia on Wednesday morning.

The Mi-8 helicopter with 21 passengers and three crew members got caught in a snowstorm soon after taking off in the village of Baykit, officials from the local branch of Russia’s Emergency Ministry said.

The helicopter toppled over upon landing. The injured have received medical help and two remain in a hospital, health care officials said.

Police are investigating the accident.

MOSCOW, Dec 25 (NNN-TASS) – Russian officials say, a top-of-the-line fighter jet crashed, on a training mission, but that its pilot bailed out safely.

Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation, said that, the Su-57 fighter came down, during a training flight near Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in the country’s far east. It said, the plane’s pilot ejected safely and there was no damage on the ground.

The cause of the crash wasn’t immediately known.

MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia has got a strong edge in designing new weapons and that it has become the only country in the world to deploy hypersonic weapons.

Speaking at a meeting with top military brass, Putin said that for the first time in history Russia is now leading the world in developing an entire new class of weapons unlike in the past when it was catching up with the United States.

MOSCOW, December 24. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin has described as a "scum and anti-Semitic pig" Poland’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, who said Hitler deserved a monument for his idea of the expulsion of Jews to Africa.

"He is a scum and anti-Semitic pig, there is no other way of describing him," Putin said while commenting on a diary note left by Poland’s ambassador to Germany in the 1930s. "He shared Hitler’s anti-Semitic sentiment and moreover, he promised to erect a monument in Warsaw for the persecution of the Jewish people."