Breaking News, 19th of July, 2018

The terrorists of ISIS attacked civilian objects in the city of Kirkuk, in Iraq. The city hospital was also under fire — five people were injured. In total, 11 people died and several dozen people were injured as a result of the attacks.

Albania, Georgia, Norway, Ukraine and Montenegro joined the EU sanctions against Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, the European Council announced. The EU once again extended sanctions against Crimea and the city of Sevastopol on 18th June. Restrictive measures in the matters of import, export, investment and tourism were extended until 23rd of June, 2019.

The prosecution party of Russian woman Maria Butina, who was arrested in the US on suspicion of «conspiratorial activity» in favor of Russia, believes that she may have connections with Russian intelligence services, Interfax reports. As an evidence, a photo of Butina was presented during the court session — on the photo Maria Butina was at a dinner in a restaurant with a Russian representative that is being suspected in co-working with the intelligence service. That person left the US as a part of other 60 Russian diplomatic mission staff who were deported after the accusations against Russia related to the poisoning in British town of Salisbury.

Leader of the Ukrainian political party «Fatherland» Yulia Tymoshenko is in the lead in the rating among the Ukrainian politicians. The current president, Pyotr Poroshenko, is not only absent in the top three, but he is inferior in popularity among voters even to the comedian Vladimir Zelensky. In hopes of taking presidential seat, Yulia Tymoshenko is looking for the support of those oligarchs that are personally interested in the removal of Poroshenko, experts say. Earlier the press secretary of Tymoshenko announced her meeting with Igor Kolomoisky in May.

The situation with weapons in the Ukrainian army is lamentable, a parliamentarian of Ukrainian Parliament Andrei Biletsky said in an interview to news channel ‘ZIK’. According to him, the condition of weapons left in Ukraine since the Soviet times already is close to critical, and the necessary equipment is not being produced because of corruption. At the same time, the Kiev elites prefer not to steal money from the state orders, but rather launder money on the military industry by transferring production orders to their own private companies. «What is being produced there is not what is needed in the army, but what a private company can produce» — concluded Andrei Biletsky.

On Thursday, the Russian Parliament adopted, during the first reading, the governmental bill of raising of the retirement age, Interfax reports. The explanatory note to the draft law sets out the arguments of the government in support of raising of the retirement age from the current 55 years old to 63 for women, and from 60 years old to 65 for men. The Russian government believes that the implementation of the proposed measures in the bill will create conditions for raising the level of pension provision for senior citizens, and it will keep the annual indexations of pensions above the level of inflation