NIKOLAI PATRUSHEV

Serbian media are reporting that the government has named a staunchly pro-Russian politician as the Balkan state’s new spy chief.

Russia’s military says it will withdraw from the only Ukrainian regional capital it’s captured but Ukrainian officials and analysts warn it could be a trap.

A top Russian security official says the Kremlin considers beefing up ties with Beijing as a top policy goal.

Serbia’s interior minister has met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow in a rare visit by a state official from Europe.

A fire at a munitions depot inside Russia forced the evacuation of two villages near the border with Ukraine, while two civilians were reported wounded by Russian shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as both sides traded accusations about fighting near the facility in southern Ukraine.

New tensions between Moscow and the West are rising after Lithuania decided to halt the transport of some goods through its territory to the Russian region of Kaliningrad as part of European Union sanctions on the Kremlin.

Russia cut off natural gas to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria and threatened to do the same to other countries, using its most essential export as an attempt to punish and divide the West for its united support of Ukraine.

With all eyes on a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending his top security envoy to the Balkans where Moscow has been trying to maintain influence mainly through its ally Serbia.

Russia accused the West of “whipping up tensions” over Ukraine and said the U.S. had brought “pure Nazis” to power in Kyiv as the U.N. Security Council held a stormy debate Monday on Moscow’s troop buildup near its southern neighbor.

The U.S. is working to ramp up diplomatic and financial pressure on Russia over Ukraine.

A top Kremlin official says that a revised version of Russia’s national security strategy says that it may use forceful methods to respond to unfriendly actions by foreign countries.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday Dec. 21, 2020, released a recording of a phone call he said he made to an alleged state security operative who revealed details of how the politician was poisoned. Bellingcat and other media outlets identified the man Navalny said he spoke with as Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a trained chemical-weapons specialist. Navalny said he phoned the alleged FSB operative hours before the Bellingcat report was released. While posing as a Security Council aide, the politician asked “what went wrong" and why Navalny survived the poisoning. The FSB told the Russian state news agency Tass that the recording Navalny released was fake.