The US announced a successful test of the banned missile

The Pentagon chief Mark Esper announced the successful test of a medium-range ground-based ballistic missile. The tests were held at the US Air Force Base ‘Vandenberg’, in California. The missile flew for over 500 km. The US military are still studying the test results, said Lt. Col. Robert Carver. Mark Esper clarified that the creation of the prototype took less than 9 months instead of 2 years. Medium and short range missiles were banned by the INF Treaty. Washington left the treaty on 2nd of August.

The Norman Four summit ended in Paris. The 4-way meeting of the leaders was preceded by the bilateral talks between the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French President Emmanuel Macron. During a joint press conference, the French President Emmanuel Macron said that the negotiations of the leaders of the «Norman format» were efficient. The first meeting of the Russian President Vladimir Putin with the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky took place as well. After the summit, a communiqué was adopted in which the lack of alternatives for the strict implementation of the Minsk agreements was underlined. The next meeting of the «Norman Four» should take place 4 months later, in Berlin.

»The UK Conservative Party won the extraordinary parliamentary elections on Thursday and secured an absolute majority» — the British mass media reports. According to the incomplete official data — by the Friday morning, the conservatives received 354 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons. According to the exit polls, in total they can get up to 368 seats in the lower house of parliament. Labor, so far, receive 202 seats. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was reelected as a member of parliament.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced during a briefing on Thursday that the Kurdish forces were pulled back. “We continue to work with Ankara on the implementation of the Memorandum of 22nd of October on the areas beyond the Euphrates River. The work is being carried out in order to fix two problems — to prevent the repetition of the hostilities, and to fix the humanitarian situation” — Maria Zakharova explained. She underlined that the withdrawal of the Kurdish forces from the border with Turkey and the regular joint patrols were made to solve the first problem.

The head of the Russian military department, an Army General Sergei Shoigu, during a conference call of the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that in September of 2020, the Russian armed forces will conduct strategic command-and-staff exercises «Caucasus 2020». Sergei Shoigu noted that the main goals are to implement the experience of the modern armed conflicts, and to make the commanders use out-of-box thinking to solve their tasks.

The final statement on the international meeting on Syria in the city of Nur Sultan states the following: The guarantor countries of the Astana process — Russia, Turkey and Iran — rejected the initiative to create self-government in Syria under the guise of combating the terrorism. They also confirmed their «continued commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Syria,» as well as the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. They underlined that the principles should be universally taken into account and duly respected.