A cache of Soviet jokes that was compiled by CIA agents during the Cold War has been released among a cache of declassified documents. All the jokes were told between Soviets but picked up by CIA operatives before being relayed back to Washington. The list was addressed to the Deputy Director of the CIA but it is believed to have been circulated among senior White House officials.

Canadian athletes are not mincing their words when it comes to the World Anti-Doping Agency's decision to reinstate Russia's drug-testing program after a nearly three-year suspension over its widespread, state-sponsored doping scheme.

Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned. A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador’s London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country. One ultimate destination, multiple sources have said, was Russia, where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US. The plan was abandoned after it was deemed too risky.

Anders. Borman. Lovell. The names of the first three humans to journey around the moon will echo throughout eternity. But these brave Apollo 8 astronauts were actually not the first earthlings to complete the voyage. Two tortoises beat NASA to the moon by a matter of months. Fifty years ago today, on September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft circled the moon, ferrying the first living creatures known to have orbited another world. On board were two Russian steppe tortoises along with some worms, flies and seeds.

Plans are underway for a new Jurassic Park-style attraction in Russia after an official claimed woolly mammoths will return to life in the wild within a decade. The regional government in Yakutia, Siberia, is supporting scientists seeking to clone the extinct species and bring it back to life using elephants as surrogate mothers. Experts hope to use similar techniques to make cave lions and extinct horses part of a new 'Ice Age' park.

President Donald Trump has delayed the release of Russia probe documents after U.S. allies raised concerns. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has been asked to review documents from the FBI’s Russia investigation amid allies’ concerns about their public release. Earlier this week Trump had ordered the documents declassified. Trump said then the declassification would expose “really bad things” at the FBI. But his order raised concerns that sensitive sources and methods could be exposed.

Pyotr Verzilov, an activist with Russian protest group Pussy Riot, has been flown to Berlin for specialist medical treatment following a suspected poisoning in Moscow. He reportedly fell ill after a court hearing on Tuesday and was taken to hospital in a serious condition. His symptoms allegedly included losing his sight and ability to speak. Mr Verzilov is best known for taking part in a protest at the World Cup Final earlier this year.

Accepting Putin's offer would go against long-standing Japanese position on the territorial dispute.

UK news organisations have cited tweets from Russian trolls more than 100 times, a Guardian investigation has found, in stories about topics including Donald Trump, Donald Glover and Lena Dunham. In June the US Congress released details of 1,000 accounts that Twitter believes were run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a state-backed misinformation operation based in St Petersburg, adding to more than 2,000 accounts the company had already identified.

When the UK authorities announced on Wednesday that they suspected two alleged Russian agents in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, they released CCTV images of the suspects arriving at Gatwick airport. Two of the images, framed side by side, began to spread on social media, driven by pro-Russia conspiracy theorists and suspected troll accounts. They showed the alleged agents - Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - passing through a non-return gate at the airport.

This week, Russia kicked off its Vostok-18 military exercises, drills that defense officials claim involve some 300,000 troops, 36,000 tanks, 1,000 aircraft, and scores of warships and have touted as "unprecedented in scale." That's roughly a third of the entire Russia military, much of which would have to be moved to the far east to participate in these large-scale maneuvers.

The June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has become one of the most famous gatherings in American political history: a flashpoint for allegations of collusion, the subject of shifting explanations by the president and his son, countless hair-on-fire tweets, and boundless speculation by the press. But secret documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal a previously undisclosed aspect of the meeting: a complex web of financial transactions among some of the planners and participants who moved money from Russia and Switzerland to the British Virgin Islands, Bangkok, and a small office park in New Jersey.

A Russian maritime patrol aircraft with multiple personnel on board was inadvertently shot down by Syrian regime anti-aircraft artillery on Monday after the Syrians came under attack by Israeli missiles, according to a US official with knowledge of the incident. The US official said the regime was actually trying to stop a barrage of Israeli missiles. A second official confirmed that Israel was responsible for the missile strikes on the Syrian regime.

Russia has said Syria shot down one of its military planes - but laid the blame for the deaths of the 15 personnel on board with Israel. The defence ministry said Israeli jets put the Il-20 plane into the path of Syrian air defence systems on Monday after failing to give Moscow enough warning of a strike on Syrian targets.

Most Russians have sided with the thousands of protesters in Moscow, saying they too are ready to rallly against a policy backed by President Vladimir Putin to postpone their retirement by half a decade. The controversial plan, which dented Putin's popularity to an extent that even the hosting of the soccer World Cup couldn't mend, seeks to up women’s retirement age from 55 to 60 and men’s from 60 to 65.

Russia has reportedly told the U.S. government at least twice in recent days that it is ready to support a Syrian government offensive into an area near the Iraqi and Jordanian borders where American-backed opposition forces are presently in control. The threats come as the United States, among others, has warned the Kremlin and Syria’s dictator Bashar Al Assad against kicking off a major offensive into the rebel-held Idlib region further to the northwest. CNN was first to report on the growing tensions over the border garrison, situated near the city of At Tanf.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry said it has dismissed hundreds of Soviet-era staffers and graduates of a top-flight diplomatic school in Moscow over the past two years. Moscow and Warsaw are at odds over the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. While Russia has slammed Poland’s removal of Soviet-era war monuments as illegal and immoral, many Poles today say they view the Soviet presence in the country as an occupation.

The hedge-fund manager has offered a fable for why the West should confront Putin.

A leader of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, Alexander Zakharchenko, has been killed in an explosion at a cafe in Donetsk city. "The head of the DNR [Donetsk People's Republic]... has died as the result of a terrorist attack," Zakharchenko's spokeswoman told AFP news agency. Russia's foreign ministry said it suspected Ukraine of organising the latest killing. The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement.

Russia's military said on Sunday that two US F-15 fighter jets had dropped phosphorus bombs over Syria's Deir al-Zor province on Saturday, the TASS and RIA news agencies reported. The air strikes targeted the village of Hadjin and resulted in fires, but there was no information about casualties, the Russian military said.

Events of 1968 still influence debate about whether Russia should be seen as friend or foe

Former NSA contractor Reality Winner sentenced to 5+ years in prison for leaking secret report on Russian election hacking to The Intercept.

Offshore reactors could be cheaper, safer and more flexible, proponents say, making them a useful weapon against climate change. Critics are incredulous.

Britain is one of the most heavily surveilled nations on Earth. And then there are the 'super recognisers'. This is how they found their men.

A Russian woman is facing years in jail on extremism charges after she reposted memes on social media that authorities deemed offensive.

Microsoft said Tuesday that it executed a court order to shut down six websites created by a group tied to Russian intelligence that sought to spoof conservative U.S. institutions, the U.S. Senate and Microsoft itself. The fake sites were intended to trick users into thinking they were clicking on sites run by the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, and the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit pro-democracy group whose board includes numerous prominent Republican figures, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf.

Study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, tweeting about vaccines

The Russian public was quiet about Manafort and Cohen, but in the halls of power, debate about Trump’s usefulness rages. By Alexander Gabuev.

The attorney for Maria Butina—the Russian woman who’s accused of ensnaring conservative political operative Paul Erickson as part of an alleged Kremlin influence campaign in the U.S.—says the couple are still together, and claims a newly released video of them singing “Beauty and the Beast” together proves they’re in love. Butina is awaiting trial on charges of acting as a foreign agent and has been accused of maintaining a “duplicitous relationship” with Erickson as part of a plan to set up backchannels to powerful Republican Party figures.

Deep in the forests of Slovakia, former Russian Spetsnaz commandos trained young men from a right-wing paramilitary group called the Slovak Conscripts. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, some of these freshly-minted paramilitaries went to fight with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine while others stayed at home to agitate against nato as a “terrorist organization.”

Russia will stop shipping U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2019, Russian station Kommersant FM 93.6 has reported. Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov reportedly said the return flight of a Soyuz-MS next year "will finalize the fulfillment of our obligation under a contract with NASA." With new crew-carrying vehicles still under development, the move may leave the U.S. unable to send astronauts to the ISS.

Italian police say they have arrested three men accused of recruiting mercenary fighters to take part in the Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Three more people are being sought. In a statement Wednesday, carabinieri police said they searched the homes of another seven people as part of the investigation into the Italian-Ukrainian recruitment network. Some of the suspects had ties with a commander of a neo-Nazi paramilitary unit called "Rusich," which operates in the Ukrainian Donbass region.

The time has arrived for some moderation and clarity in thinking about contemporary Russia and its relationship to the Western world. Ronald Reagan was not wrong in the 1980s to call the Soviet...

How a hit on a retired spy named Sergei Skripal became the latest—and most terrifying—front in Vladimir Putin’s war with the West.

Maxim Neverov reportedly fined by authorities over images posted on social network VKontakte. By Tom Barnes. (Aug. 11, 2018)