News about Dmitry Medvedev

Dmitry Medvedev's threat came as the Kremlin staged strategic missile drills with its nuclear-capable Yars rockets in Siberia marking the dictator's birthday amid high tension with the West.

The threat came as the Kremlin staged strategic missile drills with its nuclear-capable Yars rockets in Siberia marking the dictator's 72nd birthday amid high tension with the West. Giant mobile launchers were driven on remote routes in Novosibirsk regions to exercise in finding positions to launch nuclear strikes. The dictator's crony was responding on his Telegram channel to a claim by sports star Yelena Välbe that all Kremlin problems would be solved by bombing London .

The Russian leader (pictured inset) expanded his list of scenarios that could provoke Russia into using nukes on Wednesday, including Western leaders allowing Ukraine to use their long-range missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia. Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat, said the 'red line' was intended as a 'very clear message': 'Don't make a mistake - all these kind of things may mean nuclear war.'

HMS Iron Duke and HMS Tyne have tracked four Russian vessels through UK waters in recent days as RAF jets intercepted a Russian strategic bomber on Wednesday. The Navy's warships have shadowed the Russian advances to 'protect national security' as four vessels sailed through the Channel and the North Sea.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, believes that US will keep its sanctions against the Kremlin in place 'forever' or until the country collapses under civil war.

Dmitry Medvedev, (left) deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, believes that US will keep its sanctions against the Kremlin in place 'forever' or until the country collapses under civil war. Medvedev, in a Telegram message Saturday, offered his thoughts on the US presidential election, branding Democrat nominee Kamala Harris (bottom right) as 'inexperienced' and 'just plain stupid', and Republican rival Donald Trump an 'eccentric narcissist' and 'pragmatist'. He argued that although Trump (top right) 'understands that sanctions harm the dollar's dominance in the world' and has 'threatened to lift' them, he will not actually do so because it is an 'insufficient reason to stage a revolution' in an anti-Russia America. He further alleged that Harris, who Putin has endorsed, will continue to deliver 'beautiful, meaningless speeches' during which she will 'read off a teleprompter while laughing contagiously'.

It's something I've seen before. The whirling melee of khaki and camouflage, of blue and yellow flags. The bovine growl of armoured vehicles. The elephantine rumble of tanks. And above, the drones buzzing like insistent wasps. Ukrainians surging into action have become a feature of my professional life and now they have thrust into Russia. On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces charged more than 20 miles across the border into Russia's Kursk Oblast, a region in the south-west of the country. The counter-attack involved more than 1,000 troops, 11 tanks and - critically - US-made Stryker armoured combat vehicles.

Tanks, armoured personnel carriers, a UR-77 mine-clearing vehicle and other army equipment were seen surging through a rural area in footage taken by a Ukrainian mortar position and shared to Telegram this morning. Kyiv's forces stormed across the border on Tuesday morning, deploying around 1,000 troops and more than two dozen armoured vehicles and tanks in an unexpected assault on Russian soil, according to the Russian army. Thousands of Russians are evacuating the region amid complaints that Putin's armed and security forces have failed to protect them. The key gas transit town of Sudzha is under partial Ukrainian control and almost ringed by its forces as Kyiv's troops advanced up to six miles into Russian territory - the most serious border incursion of the conflict so far, the Institute for the Study of War said today.

'Illegals' Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva (bottom right) were posted in Slovenia's capital Ljubljana where they posed as Argentine citizens while spying for Russia's SVR intelligence service. Operating under the cover identities of Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer, Artem ran an IT start-up company and his wife ran an online art gallery while secretly working on behalf of the Kremlin - completely unbeknownst to their own kids. Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov today boasted that their two children - Sofia, 11, and Daniel, eight - were none the wiser. They never learned Russian and were only informed of their heritage once the whole family had boarded the plane taking them back to meet President Putin at Vnukovo airport. Anna broke down as she stepped off the plane and came face to face with the Russian president who presented her and her daughter Sofia with a bouquet of flowers

British journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and a host of other detainees were released from their prison cells yesterday in return for various Russian assets in one of the biggest East-West prisoner swaps since the Cold War. But Medvedev (bottom right with Putin), now the deputy chairman of Russia's security council, implied those freed by the Kremlin would forever need to look over their shoulder in a thinly veiled threat. 'Let the traitors now feverishly select new names and actively disguise themselves under the witness protection programme,' he posted, implying that Russia's security services may seek to assassinate them following their release. It comes as several prisoners released by the West, including hitman Vadim Krasikov (inset) who assassinated a former Chechen independence fighter in Berlin in 2019, were welcomed back on Russian soil in a grand red carpet ceremony personally presided over by Putin (main)

Ukraine has seized a Russian 'spy couple' who are accused of sending details of secret ammo stores and troop movements to Moscow's FSB intelligence agency. The husband and wife team are suspected of sending intel focused on the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to their Kremlin handlers. The wife is a nurse who worked in Kharkiv and had been asking colleagues about the location of Ukrainian bases in the region. The Ukrainian intelligence agency, the SBU, suspects she asked her husband, a former employee of a disbanded militia who lived in Sumy Oblast, to travel to the border area to find the locations of Ukrainian troops. Pictured are the Sumy and Kharkiv regions

US spies were able to foil a Russian assassination plot against the chief executive of a German weapons manufacturer that has been arming Ukraine. In a parallel shadow war effort, Russia has been carrying sabotage operations across Europe, largely by proxy, and recruiting locals for arson attacks to petty vandalism as an effort to slow the flow of arms to Ukraine.

China and Russia have both threatened NATO against 'provoking confrontation' over the bloc's claims that Xi Jingping's nation holds a key role in Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.  NATO leaders said in a declaration at their summit in Washington on Wednesday that China had 'become a decisive enabler of Russia's war against Ukraine', adding that Beijing's 'so-called 'no limits' partnership' and 'large-scale support for Russia's defence industrial base' were of 'profound concern'. In response, a spokesperson for Beijing's mission to the European Union said: 'NATO should stop hyping up the so-called China threat and provoking confrontation and rivalry, and do more to contribute to world peace and stability.'

Russia stopped carrying out capital punishment in 1996 as a prerequisite for joining the Council of Europe. But it was expelled from the rights group in 2022 after launching its offensive in Ukraine. And now a growing number of Putin's (left) allies and lawmakers have called for the death penalty to be brought back. They want the the sentence to be used against suspects in a terror attack at a concert hall (right) near Moscow in March in which more than 140 people were killed. 'We should consider lifting the moratorium on the death penalty,' the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, (inset) told a legal forum in Saint Petersburg on Friday.

Skripal, his daughter Yulia and ex-police officer Nick Bailey were poisoned by deadly nerve agent Novichok in a murder attempt in the English town in March 2018. All three survived, however Dawn Sturgess, 44, died four months later after she found a perfume bottle containing the nerve agent and sprayed it on her wrist. On Friday, a preliminary hearing for the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice heard that Mr Skripal and his daughter may give oral evidence at the poisonings inquiry which is due due to begin in October this year. Michael Mansfield KC, representing the family of Ms Sturgess, said this was because transcripts from police interviews with the Skripals had not been disclosed to him and they should therefore be provisionally on the witness list.

The Russian defence ministry stressed the launches were simulated, but everything else was performed by troops as it would be in a genuine attack. A naval crew were seen pressing the button on a nuclear hit from a warship believed to be in the Baltic Sea to hit a target some 220 miles away, while Tu-22M3 nuclear capable bombers were pictured taking off from an undisclosed airstrip. Meanwhile, a land-based mobile crew in Leningrad Military District in northwest Russia was shown loading suspected Iskander nuclear-capable mobile short-range ballistic missiles, although the warheads were blurred in the footage. The unsettling footage comes as the US announced an expansion of its sanctions regime against the Kremlin, prompting Russia's deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev (inset) to declare that Moscow should inflict 'maximum harm on the USA and their 'f***king allies'.

Voters in the 27 EU states have delivered a stinging rebuke to the bloc's centrist and Left-wing politicians.  Elections to the 720-member European Parliament have seen hard-Right parties triumph, with voters expressing frustration with mass migration. So where have Right-wing parties fared well? Victory for the Right-wing, populist Freedom Party in Austria - which won 25.7 per cent of the vote - sums up the nightmare facing the EU elite. While the party doesn't want Austria to leave the bloc, it wants the EU's budget slashed by half and powers returned to member states. It also opposes EU intervention in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.

The US military launched a nuclear weapon early Tuesday morning as part of a test to show the 'readiness of nuclear US forces' and provide 'confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrence.' The unarmed weapon traveled more than 4,000 miles at speeds over 15,000 miles per hour to a test range on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean.

Russia would be able to disable Britain and France's nuclear deterrents 'within one day' if World War Three breaks out, a Moscow military expert has claimed. Dr Yuri Baranchik, Deputy Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute, declared that within 24 hours of the conflict in Ukraine hypothetically descending into nuclear war Russia would 'eliminate the nuclear potentials of Britain and France'. Writing on Telegram, he said targeting British and French nuclear arsenals would '[deprive] Europe of its military-geopolitical status' and reduce the number of nuclear powers from nine to seven.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov (inset) warned in an interview with the TASS news agency that security guarantees which Russia had sought and discussed with the West in 2021 were no longer relevant and that Moscow had no trust in the NATO military alliance. '(NATO) continues the manic advance of the alliance towards new frontiers... they are literally ready to balance on the brink of a direct armed conflict with us,' he said. 'We warn that they are playing with fire. (The US) have long been in a state of proxy war with the Russian Federation. They somehow cannot understand that they are approaching a phase when it will be very difficult to manage what is happening and a landslide crisis.'

His comments come as Russian troops continue to seize territory in eastern Ukraine, forcing thousands in Kharkiv to flee their homes after Moscow launched another ground invasion in the region. 'The Kyiv regime is dragging the United States and European countries into a big war,' said Vyacheslav Volodin (inset), the speaker of the State Duma, who is a close ally of Putin's and a member of Russia's Security Council. He said that Ukrainian lawmakers were trying to convince the United States to allow Kyiv to use US-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory. 'This path leads to a tragedy that can affect all of humanity,' Volodin said. 'Western politicians need to realise their responsibility and do everything to avoid bringing the situation to a global catastrophe.'

According to the Missile Defense Project at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the Bulava has a range of 5,160 miles and a payload of up to 10 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), capable of delivering nuclear warheads to different targets. The 40ft-long rocket that weighs in at some 37 tonnes will form the cornerstone of Russia's land-sea-air nuclear triad alongside the Topol, Yars and Sarmat systems.

The best spies are the ones who can earn their targets' trust and glean information from them - with flirtation and pillow talk methods that are not just used in movies. Honey trapping - designed to sexually undermine a target to elicit information - is a technique which has been used by intelligence agencies around the world for centuries. The Chinese government warned its citizens this year not to fall for the allure of 'exotic beauties' who may be spies - while Beijing itself allegedly targeted British intelligence officials with honeytrap operatives. For many spies, sex and seduction are some of the most valuable tools in their arsenal, and sometimes the only way to get valuable information which could save lives or even win a war. Here, MailOnline takes a look at some of the most notorious femme fatales in history - who used their skillsets to seduce, ensnare and exploit their male targets.

Lukashenko's rant came as Russian and Belarusian forces carried out tactical nuclear weapons drills, claiming the West is threatening them. 'We are closer than ever to a nuclear catastrophe,' said Lukashenko, 69, who maintained his grip on power after rigging a presidential election and brutally quashing protests in 2020. 'We are not planning to attack anyone. But everyone should understand that we will hit back. And all their chatter ''Ah…Putin is pushing Lukashenko''. And then about me ''He's bonkers, he has no [red] lines''. They are absolutely right in saying so. I am far from stupid but I have no [red] lines.'