Shafaq News/ Russian President Vladimir Putin says that he and U.S. President Joe Biden have agreed that their two nations will start consultations on cybersecurity.
After a meeting with Biden in Geneva, Putin said: “We believe that cybersecurity is important for the world in general, for the U.S. in particular, and for Russia as well.”
The Russian president said that the two countries “just need to abandon various insinuations, sit down at the expert level and start working in the interests of the U.S. and Russia.”
Putin charged that “most of the cyberattacks in the world are carried out from the cyber realm of the United States,” with Canada and Britain coming second and third.
However, the most damaging cyberattacks on record have been attributed by the United States and the European Union to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, including the NotPetya virus that did more than $10 billion in economic damage in 2017, hitting companies including shipping giant Maersk, the pharmaceutical company Merck and food company Mondolez.
While the U.S., Canada and Britain all engage in cyberespionage, the most damaging cyberattacks on record have come either from state-backed Russian hackers or Russian-speaking ransomware criminals who operate with impunity in Russia and allied nations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says opposition leader Alexei Navalny got what he deserved when he was handed a prison sentence.
Navalny, Putin’s most ardent political foe, was arrested in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin — an accusation that Russian officials reject. In February, Navalny was given a 2 1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he dismissed as politically motivated.
Speaking Wednesday after a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva, Putin said Navalny received his due punishment for violating the terms of his probation, adding that he was aware that he was facing a prison sentence when he returned to Russia.
“He deliberately moved to be arrested,” Putin said, sticking to his habit of not mentioning Navalny by name.
Last week, a Moscow court outlawed the organizations founded by Navalny by labeling them extremist, the latest move in a campaign to silence dissent and bar Kremlin critics from running for parliament in September.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says an agreement has been reached to conduct U.S.-Russian negotiations on limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Speaking after a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva, Putin said they agreed that the U.S. State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry would work out details for the talks.
Russia has long called for the start of strategic stability talks to potentially replace the New START treaty limiting nuclear weapons after it expires in 2026.
Washington broke off talks with Moscow in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its military intervention in support of separatists in eastern Ukraine. Talks resumed in 2017 but gained little traction and failed to produce an agreement on extending the New START treaty during the Trump administration.
Shortly after Biden took office in January, the two sides agreed to a five-year extension of the pact just days before it was due to expire.
Moscow has said it’s ready to include its prospective doomsday weapons — such as the Poseidon atomic-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drone and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile — in the talks on condition the U.S. brings its missile defense and possible space-based weapons into the equation.
