Kremlin Spokesman Dmitriy Peskov caught coronavirus

The coronavirus test result of Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitriy Peskov in Russia was positive. Peskov was hospitalized and treated.

The Kremlin Spokesman Dimitry Peskov, who is known for his proximity to Putin in Russia, where the coronavirus epidemic increased its effect, was caught coronavirus. The spokesperson was taken to the hospital and treated. "YES, I DID." He also said that Peskov treatment was carried out in the hospital.

Russia successful in second attempt to start Progress spacecraft

Moscow: Russia`s space agency said Monday it had managed to restart the engines of the Progress spacecraft and correct the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) after a failed first attempt.

"On Sunday night, the orbit of the ISS was successfully corrected," Roscosmos told Russian news agencies after an initial attempt to switch on the spacecraft`s engines was unsuccessful.

The operation by the Progress M-26M cargo vehicle, which is moored to the Russian module Zvezda, began just after 3:30 am Moscow time (0030 GMT) and took about half an hour.

ISS is now at the right altitude for its three crew members to return to Earth in early June.

The manoeuvre was first attempted on Friday but the Russian team was unable to start the engines, sparking a crisis in the country`s space industry after a series of embarrassing failures.

A few hours later, Russia also lost a Mexican telecommunications satellite following the failed launch of Proton-M carrier rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev immediately launched an inquiry after the satellite incident, demanding answers from the head of the space agency, Igor Komarov, and suggesting heads could roll.

Russia fired the head of its space agency last year after a series of failures.

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Russia intends to restore Cuban spy base – MP

Published time: May 08, 2015 09:59 FILE PHOTO: The secret Russian listening station at Lourdes some 30 km south of Havana (Reuters/Andrew Winning)

As Russia restores its military-industrial cooperation with Cuba it may soon reopen the Lourdes signal intelligence center near Havana, claims a senior member of the State Duma Security Committee.

“I think that in the nearest future we can restore the radio intelligence base in Lourdes that had been used first by the USSR and then by the Russian Federation,” MP Dmitry Gorovtsov (Fair Russia) said in comments to RIA Novosti.

“Under conditions created on the international arena as a result of the US pressure and anti-Russian sanctions, cooperation with the Cuban Republic will develop in the direction of restoring the relations that our countries had up to mid-1980s,” he added.

However, President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the military base issues as he briefed reporters about the recent talks between Russian and Cuban leaders in Moscow.

“I cannot tell you anything about the bases’ opening. The issue was not on the agenda,” Peskov said.

The Lourdes spy base, AKA the SIGINT facility, was opened in 1967. The largest Soviet signal intelligence center abroad, it was manned with 3,000 personnel and operated throughout the Cold War. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the base was downscaled, but continued operation. In 1993, Raul Castro, then-Defense Minister of Cuba, said Russia received 75 percent of signal intelligence on America through Lourdes.

READ MORE: Russian spy ship in Havana ahead of US delegation’s historic visit

However, after 1992, when Russia was asked to pay Havana hundreds of millions dollars to keep the facility open, Moscow started pondering its closure. In addition, in 2000 the United States made the closure of Lourdes a key condition for rescheduling or forgiving any Russian debt to the US.

In 2001 the Lourdes intelligence center stopped its operations.

In July 2014, Russian business daily Kommersant reported that Russia had sealed a deal with Cuba to reopen the facility during Putin’s visit to Cuba. The newspaper referred to numerous unnamed sources in its report, but shortly after it was circulated the Russian embassy in Cuba completely refuted it, claiming the report was an attempt to blacken the improving relations between the states.

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‘WWII victory doesn’t bring Russia, Ukraine together as Kiev turned war criminals into heroes’

Published time: May 08, 2015 11:46 Ukraine as a new nation has to create a useable past, Arch Getty, Professor of Russian and Soviet history at UCLA told RT’s In the Now show. War criminals like Bandera, who killed a lot of civilians, are being praised by Kiev government now, he added.
RT: Mikhail Gorbachev said that snubbing the Victory parade is disrespect for the people who suffered enormous losses fighting Nazism. It's clearly not completely perceived this way in th, e United States. Why is that?

For Americans it was something that they read about in the newspapers or something they heard about on the radio. For the Soviet people it was in their neighborhood, it was in their face- their houses were burnt, their houses were bombed, their neighbors were slaughtered, their family was killed. It had immediacy in their lives. But I don’t think Americans can really understand very well, because for us, in the US, it was something that happened somewhere else, but not for the Soviet people.
RT: If Obama came to Moscow, would this be perceived as weakness amid the current global geopolitical climate in the world?
AG: I don’t think it would be by anybody who fought in the war, or anyone who remembered the war, because it was a joint allied effort. I don’t think it would be perceived as a weakness by anybody who knew anything about the war. In fact, you could even see it the opposite. Having had his sanctions fail to resort to this kind of blockade it seems patty; it seems juvenile, especially given the depth of the loss that the Soviet people felt. You can almost argue that he looks even weaker by not going.

RT: What's the attitude towards this victory in the West now? Is it some kind of inconvenient fact when a lot of what we’re seeing now is to paint Russia as an aggressor, to sort of commemorate what should be a joint victory?
AG: I think it is an inconvenient fact. But for a lot of Americans it is even not a fact at all because they were taught in their schools frequently, that we, Americans, won the war. The Soviet effort has always been minimized here, and that’s happened even more lately. By the time we came ashore on D-Day in June, 1944, the tide had turned on the Eastern Front against the Germans for a year and a half. The Soviets faced 10 times as many German divisions, as we did in the West. That is not a fact for a lot of Americans because they are still living in ignorance of who did what, who turned the tide and what the scale of the thing was. And the more governments on all sides try to rewrite history for their own current purposes the worse that gets.
RT: Shouldn't this victory be bringing Ukraine and Russia together?
AG: It certainly should, but it is not, and it won’t because Ukraine as a new nation, a new state more than anybody else has to create a useable past, a useable history. And they have done so in the most glaring kinds of ways that the Ukrainian Prime Minister, [Arseny] Yatsenyuk has said that WWII was about the Soviet Union invading Germany. War criminals in Ukraine, Bandera, people who killed Jews and many others are being touted as national heroes there for current political needs of the Ukrainian leadership. I’m afraid these celebrations are not going to do that simply because of the attitudes that are being taken.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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Parade Relay: RT to air live Victory Day commemorations from across Russia

The Parade Relay is the latest in RT’s series of special projects dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as its theater of WWII is known.

RT will air a live broadcast of Victory Day parades from all around Russia as part of an extensive project to mark the occasion. Dubbed the Parade Relay, the event will stream on RT channels and online platforms around the world in Russian, English, Spanish and Arabic on May 9.

RT will broadcast military parades live on Victory Day from Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Tyumen, Samara, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladivostok, St. Petersburg, Severomorsk and other Russian cities. In Sevastopol, RT will cover the land, sea and air force show. The Relay starts at 7:00 am Moscow time (4:00 am GMT) with a march in Novosibirsk.

The Parade Relay will run live on RT International, RT Arabic, RT Spanish TV channels, online on RT Russian and on RT’s YouTube channels in English, Russian, Arabic and Spanish as well.

This is the latest in RT’s special on-air and online projects dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War and the Soviet victory over the Nazi Germany in World War 2.

“Living photos"

retells the most significant episodes of the war through animated sketches on the basis of war-era photos and eye-witness testimonies. 3D-reconstructions of major places and events of the Great Patriotic War appears in RT studios throughout broadcasts, taking the viewer back in time to witness the War’s iconic battles – including the Battle of Stalingrad, the defense of the Brest Fortress and the Battle of Moscow. The broadcast of the RT International flagship channel will be airing in Moscow’s international press center on May 8th and 9th.

Online, RT has launched http://9may.rt.com/— a special multimedia portalavailable in English, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, French and German. The website offers historical information, unique photos, interactive battle map, and chronology of the main events of the War. It also features the complete War Witness: Heritage documentary series, with 70 veterans and survivors of the Great Patriotic War – and their descendants – offering unique testimony and reflection on the war that shaped their lives and the fate of the world.

Ahead of the Victory Day celebrations, RT together with Russia’s oldest record label Melodiya have put together a special collection of the most iconic songs from the era entitled ‘Songs of Victory’. The music inspired and carried the Soviet people through the horrors of war, and became an emotional, spiritual outlet for the people who played an important part in achieving victory.

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