Russia and Saudi Arabia will ask OPEC to hike production by 1.5 million barrels a day in the third quarter of 2018, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Saturday.

Bloomberg quotes a person familiar with the Russian thinking, as saying that Russia is mulling proposing that the OPEC and non-OPEC producers return oil output to October 2016 levels.

A jury in Paris handed a 20-year jail term to a Chechen man convicted of murdering a Russian businessman during his trip to France, a lawyer for the victim’s family told Sputnik.

The U.S. and Russian top military commanders met in Helsinki on Friday, and press releases from the two sides mentioned that the crisis in Syria and ways of preventing clashes in Syria between Russia and the U.S.-led alliance were discussed.

Ukraine, seeking to reassure its Western allies after faking the murder of a Russian dissident to thwart what it said was a plot on his life, told them on Friday its ruse led to the discovery of a hit-list of 47 people whom Russia planned to kill abroad.

xThe threat of U.S. sanctions has prompted Russian oil giant Lukoil to put its plans to develop projects in Iran on hold while the Indian company that owns the world’s largest oil refining complex plans to stop buying oil from Iran, Reuters is reporting.

North Korea’s state-run news agency said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in the North on Thursday at the invitation of North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho.

Prominent Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, a critic of Russian actions in Ukraine and Syria, has been shot and killed in Kiev, Ukraine officials said late Tuesday.

The doctors who treated a Russian former spy and his daughter after they were poisoned with a nerve agent in Britain say they don’t know what the pair’s long term health outlook is – and initially feared the incident could have been much worse.

New Russian electronic warfare systems will be developed in three years on the basis of data obtained during the study of US Tomahawk cruise missiles that had been brought to Russia from Syria, Vladimir Mikheev, an adviser to the first deputy general director of Russia’s KRET, said in an interview with Sputnik.

Crude oil prices plunged on Friday as Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih endorsed prior comments from his Russian counterparts calling for self-imposed output curbs to be relaxed, perhaps as soon as June. Gold prices edged lower as oil’s plunge pulled down energy-linked stocks, contributing to broader risk aversion that fed haven demand for the US Dollar.

The SNP’s defence spokesman Stewart McDonald has called for greater engagement in Europe’s “forgotten war” in Ukraine – and warned his own party to be wary of the “dangerous instrument” of Russian propaganda.

The issue of Iran-Russia interactions in Syria has once again come to the headlines as the Russian officials have reportedly called for Iran’s exit from the Arab country. Reacting to these positions, Iranian foreign ministry stresses Iran’s legal presence in Syria, based on the Syrian government’s consent.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi left for Russia on Monday for an informal summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the city of Sochi.

Moscow hopes that US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran is not connected with US plans to attack Tehran or change the regime there, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, Sputnik reported.

Since 2016 Russian firms have revealed the existence of several armed UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) but only one of them appears to have entered service; the five ton Uran-6. This one has seen action in Syria in an unarmed version for use by combat engineers to deal with landmines, roadside bombs and, most importantly, ensuring that a route is clear of mines and bombs.