Russia

German federal prosecutors accused Russia on Thursday of ordering the killing of a former Chechen rebel in Berlin last summer and indicted a Russian man for the murder, which has severely strained diplomatic ties.

European Union leaders agreed on Friday to extend until the end of January next year their economic sanctions against Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea and the turmoil in eastern Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday the scale of the clear-up operation after a huge fuel spill in the Arctic was unprecedented for Russia, with Greenpeace estimating the environmental damage to waters in the region at $1.4 billion.

Russia's central bank slashed interest rates on Friday to the lowest level since the collapse of the Soviet Union, pledging to consider the need for even lower rates amid waning inflationary risks and a shrinking economy.

Russian e-commerce company Sbermarket is expecting at least 11-fold growth in its 2020 sales versus last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic triggers a surge in online retail it predicts is the start of permanent change.

President Vladimir Putin has called on the leaders of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to make good on an agreement to hold a face-to-face summit to try to tackle the world's problems as soon as possible.

The Kremlin denied on Friday an assertion by a former senior U.S. White House official that Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he could play U.S. President Donald Trump "like a fiddle" and found it easy to manipulate him.

The head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund Kirill Dmitriev sees no point in extending strict global oil output cuts as world economies and oil demand recovers from the depths of the coronavirus crisis, he told the RBC Daily newspaper.

Russia on Friday reported 7,972 new cases of the novel coronavirus, pushing its nationwide case tally to 569,063 since the crisis began.