US basketball star Brittney Griner said at her trial Wednesday she had no intention of smuggling drugs into Russia and that she came to the country despite U.S. warnings so as not to let down her Russian team.

Griner, a two-time Olympic basketball gold medalist and Women's NBA champion who had played in Russia, was detained in February, just days

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Russia has handed down its first-ever sentence against a surrogate mother on human trafficking charges, Russian media reported Wednesday.

A court in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk found Kazakh citizen Tamara Yandieva, 29, guilty of human trafficking and sentenced her to three years in prison, the state-run TASS news agency reported.  

Although

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A barrage of Ukrainian rocket fire on the Russian-controlled Antonovskiy Bridge in the occupied Kherson region late Tuesday appeared to signal intensifying military preparations for Ukraine’s first major counteroffensive of the war. 

Video footage Wednesday showed huge craters in the strategic bridge over the Dnipro River that is part of a major

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Russia’s prisons hope to replace Western brands like IKEA with products made by inmates as the government races to carry out its import substitution program, reports said Wednesday. 

State and municipal companies have signed 600 million rubles ($10 million) of contracts with penal colonies from the Middle Urals region so far this year, the local

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The Philippines has scrapped a deal to buy 16 Russian military-transport helicopters over fears of U.S. sanctions, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

The $227 million deal to acquire Mi-17s from Moscow was approved in November and canceled in June, before the end of then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s term in office. 

“We could face sanctions,” Fo

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The Kremlin on Wednesday vowed to hinder work of Western media in Russia after a European court upheld a broadcast ban imposed on Russian news channel RT France.

"Of course, we will take similar measures of pressure on Western media that operate in our country," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. 

"We will also not let them work in our

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