Free Republic

At the tail end of the fiery Oval Office exchange pitting Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky against President Trump and Vice President Vance, Trump spent two heated minutes on a theme the media will likely bury. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” said Trump. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia.” What Trump did not say, but he might have, is that the constant scapegoating of Russia and Putin made America’s proxy war against Russia an easy sell. What Trump might also have said is that before he...

Russia's nuclear chief says Japan exaggerating nuclear crisis Wed Apr 13, 2011 11:29am GMT SANYA, April 13 (Reuters) - Japanese authorities are exaggerating the scope of the country's nuclear disaster to give insurance companies an out, Russia's nuclear chief said on Wednesday. "It is hard for me to assess why the Japanese colleagues have taken this decision. I suspect, this is more of a financial issue, than a nuclear one," Sergei Kiriyenko said on the sidelines of a bilateral meeting between the Russian president and Indian prime minister ahead of a meeting of major developing economies in southern China.

Iran's first nuclear power plant will be operating by mid-2011, Iranian and Russian officials say. The Bushehr plant was begun in 1974 and abandoned five years later. Russia took over building work in the 1990s, but it has been beset with delays. Iran's semi-official Fars news agency quoted the head of Iran's atomic agency as saying that the plant had passed most tests successfully.

MOSCOW, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Russia will start up the reactor at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant this year, the chief of Russia's state nuclear corporation told reporters on Thursday. "2010 is the year of Bushehr," Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko told reporters after a cabinet meeting in Moscow. "There is absolutely no doubt that it will be built this year. Everything is going according to schedule," he said

RUSSIA has reportedly destroyed about 50 tonnes of chemical weapons in the first month of operations at a new facility built to help eliminate the country's huge arsenal. The facility in Gorny, about 700km south-east of Moscow, expected to dispose of 400 tonnes by April, former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko told the ITAR-Tass news agency. Kiriyenko, who now serves as chairman of the State Commission on Chemical Disarmament, said that the facility has been working non-stop since opening. Russia has budgeted $US174 million ($297 million) for destroying chemical weapons in 2003, about the same as 2002 and far less than...