Russia

MOSCOW, August 5. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Washington’s endeavors to dismantle the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF)

Treaty can result in an unrestrained arms race.

"In our opinion, the United States’ actions, which led to the termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, will inevitably entail the weakening and

undermining of the entire global security architecture, including the strategic offensive arms treaty and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," the

05 August 2019; DW: Moscow authorities arrested more than 800 people for participating in an unauthorized rally. But some residents said they "had no option left but to protest" in the face of a growing crackdown on independent candidates.

The German Foreign Ministry on Sunday urged Russia to immediately release protesters detained during a Moscow rally against the exclusion of independent candidates from city elections.

MOSCOW, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The aviation force of the Russian Defense Ministry has managed to extinguish forest fires on an area of 753,000 hectares in the Krasnoyark and Irkutsk regions in Russia's Siberia in the last four days, the ministry said Sunday.

The aviation group of the Russian Defense Ministry has dumped about 6,000 tons of water onto the forested areas covered by fire since the beginning of the operation, and wildfires on about 303,000 hectares of forests were extinguished on Sunday alone, a ministry statement said.

MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/: A criminal case has been opened against a detained participant of Saturday’s unauthorized rally in Moscow, who has been charged with using violence against a riot police officer, a source in the law enforcement agencies told TASS.

"An investigator of the Investigative Committee has opened a case against citizen Ustinov under Part 1 of Article 318 of the Russian Criminal Code," the source said.

MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/: Organizers of unauthorized rallies in the Russian capital sought to involve their participants in riots, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in his interview with TVC, shown by Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday.

"Obviously, not all who attended the rally had expected this scenario. But the organizers, apparently, sought to drag them into riots," Sobyanin said. According to the mayor, many of those who participated in the rally had no relation to the upcoming elections to the Moscow City Duma (parliament).

MOSCOW (AP) — Police in Moscow cracked down hard on an unsanctioned election protest for the second weekend in a row Saturday, detaining more than 800 people at a rally against the exclusion from city council contests of some independent and opposition candidates, an arrest monitoring group said.

MOSCOW, August 2. /TASS/: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will visit Turkmenistan on August 11-12, where he take part in the first Caspian Economic Forum and meet with Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, the press service of the Russian government said on Friday.

MOSCOW, August 2. /TASS/: Russia hopes that Turkey will fully implement within the next 24 hours the agreements on the withdrawal of militants and weapons from the Idlib de-escalation zone in response to the Syrian government’s initiative to cease hostilities in the area, Major General Alexey Bakin, the chief of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the conflicting sides in Syria, told reporters on Friday.

MOSCOW, August 2. /TASS/: The second round of US sanctions imposed on Moscow over the Skripal case is a blatant provocation designed to create a propagandist effect, Russian Foreign Ministry's official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a commentary published on Friday.

MOSCOW, August 3. /TASS/: At least one person died and four others were injured in an earthquake of 6.9 magnitude that rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Friday, Detik news portal reported citing local law enforcement agencies.

According to Detik, the person died from a heart attack caused by shock sustained as a result of the earthquake.

Local police said that 139 houses and two mosques were damaged in the earthquake, and over 1,000 people were evacuated from the affected area.