Russia is finally ready to attach a long-awaited science module to the International Space Station.

The new module, a 43-foot-long cylinder called Nauka (meaning "science" in Russian), is currently orbiting Earth and making its way towards the station. It will give the Russian side of the ISS expanded science facilities, crew quarters, and a new airlock for spacewalks. Nauka also features a new docking port for Russian spacecraft.

The module was originally scheduled to launch in 2007, but technical issues and unexpected repairs led to years of delay.

To clear a port for Nauka, Russia's 20-year-old Pirs docking station detached from the ISS on Saturday. Pirs first arrived at the space station in 2001, and it has served as a receiving station for cargo-carrying Progress capsules and astronaut-ferrying Soyuz spaceships.

After Pirs undocked, a Progress spacecraft towed it into Earth's atmosphere. As gravity pulled the old module down, the bulk of it burned up in the atmosphere. The parts that survived fell into the Pacific Ocean.

Now that Pirs' old port is open, Nauka is scheduled to dock there on Thursday morning at 9:24 a.m. ET. The high-stakes maneuver must be executed perfectly: The spaceship must align exactly with the port in order to lock into place and form a seal so that cosmonauts can open the hatch and access their new facilities.

If all that is successful, the ISS cosmonauts will then need to conduct about 11 spacewalks to set up electronics on the outside of the new module, according to Spaceflight Now.

Nauka had mid-flight issues on its way to the ISS

Nauka, which is also known as the Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), hasn't had a smooth journey to the ISS.

Shortly after launching on July 21, Nauka started malfunctioning. It didn't complete the first engine burn that was supposed to push it into a higher orbit above Earth. The module needed to gain altitude so that gravity wouldn't pull it into the atmosphere, where it would burn up. So Russian mission controllers instructed the module to fire its backup thrusters to push itself higher.

Over the last few days, it's fired its thrusters several times to move into the right orbital path.

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, announced Wednesday morning that Nauka had successfully performed its "final corrective maneuver," putting it on track to reach the ISS.

Watch Nauka dock to the space station live

NASA plans to broadcast live footage of Nauka docking to the ISS on Thursday morning, starting at 8:30 a.m. ET. Watch the livestream via the embed below.

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A new Russian space-station module malfunctioned after it docked to the station on Thursday. The module, called Nauka, starting unexpectedly firing its thrusters — which moved the entire station out of position.

The long-awaited science module had already encountered several technical issues on its way to the ISS, but once it docked to the space station on Thursday morning, it seemed to be in the clear. Then about three hours after its arrival — at about 12:45 p.m. ET — Nauka began firing its thrusters, which rotated the station by 45 degrees. Space journalist Anatoly Zak was among the first to notice something had gone wrong.

"Numerous particles are also seen outside the station indicating either major propellant leak or gas vent," Zak tweeted.

In response to the glitch, NASA's flight controllers began firing thrusters on another part of the ISS, the service module, in what they called a "tug of war" to get the station back onto its normal orbital path. 

Around 1:30 p.m. ET, ISS flight controllers announced that Nauka's thrusters had finally stopped firing and the ISS had regained control of its positioning.

A helium leak could be to blame for the malfunction

A sudden loss of control over the space station's orientation is "not a common occurrence," NASA said, adding that there are procedures in place to fix such an issue when it does arise.

The ISS crew is not in danger and never was, according to flight controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Currently there are two cosmonauts, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, aboard the station, as well as and five astronauts: Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, and Mark Vande Hei of NASA.

"It's safe to say the remainder of the day is no longer going to happen as scheduled, of course," a flight controller told the ISS astronauts. Controllers asked them to check the station's starboard, or right, side to see if there was any damage to the station's exterior or floating debris. So far, the astronauts have reported nothing amiss.

NASA said "it's not yet clear what caused the erroneous engine firing," but Zak wrote that Russia's mission control discovered a helium gas leak in one or two of Nauka's tanks, which may have comprised the thrusters' operation.

Around 2:15 p.m. ET, Russian flight controllers confirmed with NASA that they disabled the errant thrusters.

Zak also reported that Nauka has also used up all the propellant available to its thrusters, so there's no chance of another "tug of war."

A dramatic docking

Nauka, which is also known as the Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), was originally scheduled to launch in 2007, but technical issues and unexpected repairs led to years of delay.

The module expands the Russian side of the ISS, adding more science facilities, crew quarters, and a new airlock for spacewalks. It also features a new docking port for Russian spacecraft.

But Nauka didn't have a smooth journey into orbit. Shortly after launching on July 21, Nauka started malfunctioning and Russian mission controllers had to instruct the 43-foot-long, 2.5-ton module to fire its backup thrusters to get back on course.

After Nauka successfully docked on Thursday, the two ISS cosmonauts started checking for leaks, preparing to open the module's hatch, and integrating the module into the station's power and computer systems.

But NASA's flight control team noticed Nauka's thrusters firing unexpectedly around 12:45 p.m. and advised the ISS crew to keep the hatch closed and to close the station's 1.5-inch-thick windows, Zak reported. 

Over the next hour, the thrusters rotated the ISS 45 degrees before NASA and Russian flight controllers could reverse the process and restore the station's original orientation.

"All other station systems are operating perfectly," NASA said Thursday afternoon. "None of the other appendages were damaged in any way."

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A major mishap on the International Space Station has forced NASA and Boeing to delay the company's planned spaceship flight.

Boeing was set to launch its spacecraft, called Starliner, toward the ISS on Friday afternoon and dock there on Saturday. This mission is meant to be Starliner's last test flight before carrying its first astronauts. Boeing attempted this demonstration flight once before, in December 2019, but failed to reach the ISS due to software issues. Now the company is trying again, hoping to prove to NASA that Starliner is ready to fly astronauts.

But Boeing will have to wait just a little longer.

That's because Russia added a new module to the ISS on Thursday, then immediately encountered major technical issues. The new module, called Nauka, starting unexpectedly firing its thrusters just hours after arriving at the ISS — which moved the entire station out of position.

NASA announced on Thursday afternoon that it had decided to delay Boeing's Starliner launch. The next opportunity to launch is on Tuesday, August 3, but the agency has not yet shared which date it will target for liftoff.

Boeing is one of two companies — SpaceX is the other — that NASA has funded to develop human-spaceflight systems. Both NASA and Boeing are determined to finish Starliner's test flights and start using the spaceship to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

Before SpaceX's Crew Dragon completed its test flights last year, NASA could only use Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fly its astronauts. Starliner's next flight is critical to giving the agency more options.

Nauka encountered technical issues on the ground and in space

Russia originally planned to add Nauka to the ISS in 2007, but technical issues delayed its development on the ground. Nauka finally launched on July 21, but it immediately encountered technical problems. It didn't complete the first engine burn that was supposed to push it into a higher orbit above Earth, so Russian flight controllers had to initiate several smaller burns to push it onto the right path.

The long-awaited science module finally docked to the ISS at 9:29 a.m. ET on Thursday. It latched onto the correct ISS port and sealed itself. Cosmonauts then opened the hatch connecting the module to the station.

But three hours later, at about 12:45 p.m. ET, Nauka suddenly began firing its engines. It took flight controllers about an hour to get the ISS back under control, after playing "tug of war" by firing engines on another part of the station.

The thrusters rotated the ISS by 45 degrees before NASA and Russian flight controllers regained control.

"It's safe to say the remainder of the day is no longer going to happen as scheduled, of course," a flight controller told the ISS astronauts.

NASA says the astronauts on the ISS were never in danger.

Currently there are two cosmonauts, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, and five astronauts aboard the station: Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, and Mark Vande Hei of NASA.

Aylin Woodward contributed reporting.

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Some pretty interesting close encounters between NATO fighters supporting BAP (Baltic Air Policing) mission and Russian aircraft flying in international airspace close to the airspace of the Baltic States took place on July 29, 2021: overall, two Il-22PP "Mute" Electronic Warfare Aircraft, one Su-24 Fencer and an Il-76 Candid transport were tracked, intercepted and identified in the same area as they were on their way to Russia from Kaliningrad Oblast.

According to NATO, NATO's Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem in Germany launched the allied fighter aircraft to intercept and identify them. The Russian aircraft did not have flight plans nor transmit transponder codes, and thus posed a potential risk to civilian flights.

The intercept mission was carried out by Spanish Air Force Eurofighters and Italian Air Force F-35s, both on QRA (Quick Reaction Alert) duty in the Baltic region.

Noteworthy, it was the very first time NATO intercepted the Il-22PP Porubshchik (NATO designation "Mute") in that region. The "electronic escort" aircraft made its first appearance in 2017, during the celebrations of the 105th anniversary of the Russian air force over Kubinka.

According to Piotr Butowski, the aircraft is a SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) and stand-off jamming platform, based on a converted Il-22 "Coot-B" aircraft (a command post and radio relay aircraft based on the Il-18D airliner).

According to Mikhail Khodorenok, a retired colonel and military analyst of the Gazeta.ru online newspaper, the Il-22PP was a necessity for the military when no other options were available:

"At one time, a few more options were considered: AN-140 and AN-158 planes with turbojet engines as well as the Tu-214," he told RBTH. "However, at the time of the formation of the 'defense procurement' in 2009, none of these models were not yet fully ready to be equipped with the latest electronic warfare [EW] systems."

"Of course, this is not an ideal solution," he added, explaining why the new weapon has been placed on a "trusty old horse.""However, for lack of a better option, a choice had to be made — either to stay without the EW aircraft, or to mount the equipment on the tested wings."

While it might be a gap filler until it is replaced by a more modern aircraft in the future, the Il-22PP aircraft (also nicknamed "Fridge" by the Russians — because it's large and white...) is equipped with antennas so that it scans radio signals in the area of its activity and selectively jam those on which enemy aircraft, drones or air defense systems work.

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When Brandon Van Grack left the Justice Department in January, stepping down from a top role policing foreign influence, his government colleagues sent him off with a curious going-away present: a pink cat piñata.

Before becoming a gag gift, the piñata sat in the office as a mascot of sorts for the Justice Department unit tasked with enforcing a decades-old federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign lobbying. It was a tongue-in-cheek totem, a nod to what the unit saw as the unfair notion that it took a lax approach to enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, until the special counsel Robert Mueller's team returned the pre-World War II law to prominence with high-profile prosecutions of Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and other MAGA acolytes.

Since parting ways with its papier-mâché party prop, the FARA unit has only continued to shed its reputation as a feeble and flimsy Justice Department backwater.

More broadly, the Justice Department has in recent months escalated its enforcement efforts, mostly notably with investigations and prosecutions of prominent Trumpworld figures suspected of monetizing their access to Trump's administration by working illegally for foreign governments and other overseas powers.

"The Justice Department and FARA unit haven't skipped a beat in the last six months and, if anything, have continued the historic ramp-up of FARA enforcement," said Van Grack, who served in Mueller's special-counsel office before becoming the FARA unit chief in 2019. 

Jennifer Gellie, a federal prosecutor with experience in espionage cases, replaced Van Grack in January as the chief of the FARA unit.

Van Grack, now a partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, told Insider that the Justice Department's approach to foreign influence had featured "a little bit of everything."

"There are prominent criminal cases moving forward, significant criminal cases being charged, and unprecedented resources and personnel being dedicated to it," he said. "From all directions, FARA is being enforced like never before."

The Justice Department's scrutiny of foreign influence has bedeviled Trump associates. In the face of criminal prosecution, they've admitted to lobbying for foreign interests without disclosing their activities as federal law requires.

The criminal investigations have captivated the nation.

In April, federal agents raided the Manhattan home and office of Rudy Giuliani, escalating an investigation that is focused in part on whether the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian interests. Giuliani recently called the investigation "lawless,"telling an NBC affiliate in New York that he was "more than willing to go to jail if they want to put me in jail." 

"And if they do, they're going to suffer the consequences in heaven," he added.

In July, prosecutors accused Tom Barrack, the chairman of Trump's 2017 inaugural committee, of secretly acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates.

Barrack, who pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court, was not charged with violating FARA but a lesser-known statute that prosecutors have used with people accused of acting at the direction of foreign-government officials. Still, his indictment marked the latest step in the Justice Department's newly muscular enforcement of laws designed to stymie and shed light on foreign-influence activities.

Giuliani and Barrack are only the latest members of Trumpworld to find themselves crosswise with FARA and friends.

Read more: Where is Trump's White House staff now? We created a searchable database of more than 329 top staffers to show where they all landed.

Previously, the prominent Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent as he sought to sway the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.

And Trump's onetime national security advisor Michael Flynn admitted to making "material false statements and omissions" in foreign-agent filings related to his advocacy for Turkey. That admission came as Flynn pleaded guilty, in a deal with Mueller's special-counsel team, to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador in the lead-up to Trump's inauguration.

Trump pardoned both Broidy and Flynn shortly before leaving office.

Behind the scenes, the FARA unit — holed away in a nondescript office building abutting railroad tracks — is no longer a sleepy corner of the Justice Department. It's staffing up — and taking other steps short of criminal prosecution to force lobbyists and political consultants for overseas powers to register as foreign agents and disclose their activities to the US government.

"The office is staffed up higher than it's ever been and is more aggressive — not just in terms of numbers and budget but in perspective and focus," said Tom Spulak, a partner at King & Spalding and former general counsel for the House of Representatives, who regularly counsels clients on FARA. "You want people to comply, but it's not good enough to say, 'Oops, I won't do it again' if there's any evidence this was intentional to avoid FARA. If you can't explain yourself satisfactorily, they'll come after you."

'Take that gun off the mantelpiece'

In the decades before the Russia investigation, the Justice Department had brought only about a half-dozen FARA prosecutions, which prompted the department's inspector general to criticize the enforcement record in a 2016 report.

Then came the Mueller investigation, which found significant foreign interference in the 2016 election.

FARA — an 80-year-old statute originally enacted to combat Nazi propaganda — suddenly transformed from wet noodle to bullwhip. Manafort pleaded guilty to FARA-related charges tied to his unregistered lobbying for the Russia-backed government of Ukraine, only to be later pardoned by Trump in the waning weeks of his presidency.

The Justice Department didn't stop there. It pursued criminal prosecutions and threatening civil lawsuits that forced foreign agents operating in the US to register and disclose their activities.

In a South Florida federal court, the Justice Department successfully sued to force RM Broadcasting to register as a foreign agent in connection with its airing of the radio channel Sputnik, whose parent company is owned and operated by the Russian government. 

Meanwhile, new FARA registrations have poured in. Between the fiscal years that ended in September 2016 and September 2019, new registrations more than doubled, jumping from almost 70 to 150, a Justice Department official said.

Read more: 5 things to know about the US law designed to fight Nazi propaganda that now has Rudy Giuliani sweating

The Justice Department has also kept a closer eye on whether registered foreign agents are adequately detailing their activities in regular disclosures. (In those filings, registered foreign agents are required to disclose their expenses and contacts with government officials, among other details of their advocacy.)

As part of that effort, the Justice Department has stepped up inspections, in which officials scrutinize registered foreign agents' records to ensure they're fully disclosing their activities. During the 2019 fiscal year, the Justice Department conducted 20 such inspections, sometimes with the FBI present, a Justice Department official said.

After having to pause inspections because of pandemic restrictions, the Justice Department began to conduct them virtually last year. The FARA unit is now on track this year to match the 20 inspections that were conducted in 2019, the Justice Department official said.

Last year, for the first time since 1995, the Justice Department sent letters demanding that foreign agents more fully detail their influence activities — or cease working for their foreign clients. These so-called deficiency notices amount to cease-and-desist letters, giving registered agents 10 days to address the Justice Department's concerns or risk a civil lawsuit or criminal prosecution.

This year, the Justice Department's FARA unit brought in added resources to bolster its civil-enforcement authority.

Of note: The unit added to its ranks Margaret Harker, a longtime assistant US attorney who specialized in civil litigation during stints in the federal prosecutors' offices in eastern Virginia and eastern Tennessee.

The FARA unit is housed within the Justice Department's national security division, which has broadly been adding trial attorneys. But Harker is assigned specifically to the FARA unit, which signals the Justice Department's increased willingness to bring civil lawsuits to force new foreign-agent registrations.

With the addition of Harker, the FARA unit now includes five full-time lawyers — an increase from the three it had in 2018, a Justice Department official said. The 12-person unit also includes a detailee, analysts and support staff.

"They have augmented the attorney bench in the FARA unit with an experienced prosecutor," said David Laufman, a partner at Wiggin and Dana who previously oversaw FARA enforcement as a top official in the Justice Department's national security division.

Referring to the FARA unit's civil authority, Laufman added, "It wouldn't surprise me to see the Justice Department, in the right case, take that gun off the mantelpiece again."

The Justice Department may soon have such a case. 

In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was preparing for litigation against the casino mogul Steve Wynn — a major Republican Party donor— to compel him to register as a foreign agent in connection with his 2017 effort to persuade US officials to send Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman living in New York, back to China.

Wengui has been accused of several criminal offenses, including sexual assault and bribery. Chinese authorities consider him a fugitive. Wynn himself has facedaccusations of sexual misconduct, which he denies.

Wynn's defense lawyer Reid Weingarten did not respond to a request for comment. Weingarten told The Journal in May: "Steve Wynn never served as an agent or lobbyist for China or anyone else. He was merely a loyal messenger of information he received from our government."

The Venezuelan oil company

The FARA unit hasn't shied away from big targets lately.

In April, after months of tangling with the Justice Department, the US subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company Citgo registered for the first time as a foreign agent.

The registration ended a months-long standoff in which Citgo said it should not be subject to FARA. The company instead requested that the government allow it to continue disclosing its political activities under the less onerous Lobbying Disclosure Act.

In its bid to avoid registering, Citgo turned to William Burck, a top partner at the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. A high-powered defense lawyer, Burck represented several Trump associates — including former White House counsel Don McGahn and Steve Bannon — in the Russia investigation. 

Burck is intimately familiar with FARA, having registered as a foreign agent himself in 2019 as he advised a Kuwaiti defense contractor. In Burck, Citgo had a man with both experience and political connections, and he raised the oil company's objections to Trump-appointed leadership at the Justice Department.

But the Justice Department's FARA unit wouldn't budge, dismissing Citgo's argument for avoiding registration, in which the company said that the foreign parent in Venezuela had no meaningful control over the operations of the US subsidiary.

In disclosures with the Justice Department, Citgo detailed meetings with lawmakers and Trump administration officials as it responded to Venezuela's leadership crisis in 2019. Citgo's relenting to the Justice Department's registration demand came just months after Trump left office.

A 'clerical error' and $50,000 for 'talent appearances'

The Justice Department's zeal for pursuing FARA violations has given rise to a growing unease among lobbying and public-affairs firms, particularly those that crossed paths with Giuliani and other Trumpworld figures with foreign entanglements.

Whether in response to inquiries or to head off scrutiny, firms have been returning to past disclosures with an eye toward filling in gaps.

"There's a sense of anxiety surrounding FARA compliance that really began post-Manafort but has not waned," said Josh Rosenstein, a partner at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock and FARA expert.

"In my experience, a lot of firms are trying to get ahead of the DOJ a little bit," Rosenstein said. "They don't want to wait for an inquiry letter and have to incur the cost of that process when there's an argument to be made that they should have done something in the past. 

"They'll do it on their own."

A public-affairs firm with ties to Giuliani appeared to make one such filing in March.

Read more: Rudy Giuliani investigation is bringing heat on lobbyists with foreign clients

The firm, Sonoran Policy Group, reported expenditures related to a cocktail party thrown three years earlier, in 2018, as part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to improve relations between the Trump administration and then-Congolese President Joseph Kabila.

On that July evening in 2018, Giuliani posed for photographs on the top floor of the Hay Adams Hotel overlooking the White House. The reception featured remarks by the Democratic Republic of Congo's special envoy to the US.

Giuliani's presence conferred a sense of closeness to the White House. It also fueled questions about Giuliani's foreign entanglements at a time when he was serving as a personal lawyer for Trump in the Mueller probe.

When asked about his appearance at the event, Giuliani gave a variety of explanations.

For example, he told The New York Times in a story published in December 2018 that he wanted to "say hello to people" and impress a woman that evening by taking her "to the top of the Hay-Adams to see a Washington party" with a "great view."

Giuliani may have been laying on the charm that night. But his appearance had been arranged in advance by the firm of Robert Stryk, a big-spending lobbyist who bonded with the former New York City mayor over a shared taste for Scotch whisky and Cuban cigars, according to people familiar with the event.

In March, Sonoran Policy Group disclosed it had spent a combined $50,000 on "Event Consulting/Talent Appearances" in connection with the 2018 reception that Giuliani attended in Washington. Sonoran made the $50,000 payment in two installments to Frontline Strategies & Media, a public-affairs firm run by Eric Beach, a California political consultant and close associate of Giuliani's. 

Beach worked on Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign and helped oversee the pro-Trump Great America political action committee in 2016. Giuliani appeared in some of the PAC's commercials and later signed on as an advisor to a nonprofit linked to Beach and the longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins.

Sonoran made the March disclosure to amend a previous filing that did not include the $50,000 in payments, among other costs for the 2018 reception. In the March filing, Sonoran said it had "previously overlooked these funds due to an unintentional clerical error."

Beach did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and Giuliani could not be reached for comment. Stryk declined to comment.

A month after Sonoran submitted its amended filing, the FBI raided Giuliani's home and office.

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Russia plans to build a bitcoin monitoring tool to track cryptocurrency wallets possibly linked to criminal activities as well as terrorism financing, CoinDesk first reported Wednesday. 

The nation's financial monitoring service, Rosfinmonitoring, has tapped a firm called RCO for a contract to develop the proprietary tool for roughly $200,000, reduced from the initial price of around $270,000.

RCO is owned by one of Russia's major information technology companies.

Apart from tracking, the tool must maintain a database of cryptocurrency wallets and monitor the behavior of market participants, CoinDesk reported, citing the auction page.

As early as 2018, Russia had been looking into cryptocurrency tracking, according to CoinDesk.

Meanwhile, the UK, is considering banning anonymous cryptocurrency transactions for the same reasons — to tighten its crackdown on money laundering and terrorism financing.

Cryptocurrencies have been at the center of recent high-profile cyberattacks, demanded as ransom by criminals because transactions are either anonymous or very difficult to trace.

In the US, the Biden administration is said to be ramping up efforts to trace cryptocurrencies used in cyberattacks and is planning to offer bounties of up to $10 million for information that will help catch criminals.

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Recent statements by a Russian admiral and an anonymous Russian source have prompted speculation about whether Russia is changing its approach regarding Israeli strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria.

If such a shift is coming, it could pose problems for the United States, as the situation between Israel and Russia, while not unfriendly, is fragile and complicated.

On July 19, Israel launched an attack on Hezbollah and Iranian-affiliated targets in Syria.

Rear Adm. Vadim Kulit, deputy chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Parties in Syria, claimed that Russian missile-defense systems brought down seven of eight Israeli missiles launched at sites near Aleppo. A few days later, Kulit claimed Israel launched another four missiles near Homs, all of which he said were intercepted.

Israel did not comment on the attack, but made sure that images of significant damage to a Syrian site were widely circulated on social media.

Observers questioned the specifics of Kulit's claims, casting a good deal of doubt on their veracity. Around the same time, the London-based Arabic news outlet, Asharq Al-Aswat, reported that an anonymous Russian source said that, in the wake of US President Joe Biden's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Moscow had gotten the message that Washington was not pleased with Israel's escalated activity in Syria.

But there has been no indication that the United States is concerned about Israel's military activities in Syria, nor that such a spectacular success against Israeli missiles was accomplished.

Either of these would be game-changers, and it's difficult to believe that there would be no chatter about them in the United States and Israel if either were true. But if the claims are exaggerated, what is the purpose of such statements by Russia?

Clearly, Kulit was not speaking out of turn, as there have been no reports of his being disciplined or reprimanded for his statements. Russian leaders have not publicly rebuked or supported Kulit's statements, which reinforces the idea that these claims are being put out there for strategic purposes.

They take place at a time of major change. Joe Biden has replaced Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu has been supplanted by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

In both cases, this means a shift for Putin from interlocutors who relied heavily on their personal relationship with him and operated with a very self-centered style of diplomacy, to newcomers he is less familiar with and represent national interests beyond their own.

Putin likely wants to test the resolve of the relatively inexperienced Israeli leaders and wants to get a clear picture of how Biden, with his less conciliatory approach to Moscow compared to Trump, will handle the delicate balance that has been struck in Syria.

That balance is based in an agreement that the Trump administration reached with Russia in 2017, and which Israel was greatly displeased by.

It allowed Iranian-backed militias, including Hezbollah, to continue to operate in a safe zone created in southern Syria. The accompanying ceasefire in that zone was meant to facilitate both US and Russian efforts to combat ISIS in the region, but Israel was much more concerned about the militias.

Israeli complaints fell on deaf ears, but the Trump administration made it clear that Israel was free to pursue its objectives. A line of communication was opened between Israel and Russia, which Israel used to notify Moscow of impending attacks, in the hope of avoiding Russian casualties and upsetting the delicate balance.

Although there have been several incidents over the years that threatened to alter the status quo, diplomacy between Israel and Russia managed to defuse tensions when they arose. But now, there have been reports that the communication between Israel and Russia has stopped.

Netanyahu, ever on the lookout for ways to discredit and undermine the new Israeli government, seemed to support this idea when his Likud party stated that, "We maintained freedom of action in Syria thanks to Netanyahu's close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. If these reports are accurate, this failed government has lost another vital strategic asset that Israel enjoyed under the Netanyahu government."

Russia has never been happy about Israel's frequent attacks in Syria, as its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, affirmed in January. "If Israel is really forced to respond to threats to Israeli security coming from the Syrian territory," he said, "we have told our Israeli colleagues many times: if you see such threats, please give us the information."

Israel has made it clear over the years that this is unacceptable to them.

There may also be more than just feeling out the new Israeli and US governments at work here.

With Lebanon mired in economic collapse and political chaos, Hezbollah's position there has become more volatile and controversial, even while its military capabilities have grown and have remained a source of agitation for Israel.

As the situation in Lebanon worsens, the possibility of clashes with Israel increase, particularly as Hezbollah has faced increased scrutiny and negative attention domestically.

The possibility of the United States finding a way to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, and defusing some of the tensions in the Gulf, also represents a potential shift for Russia to manage.

In early July, Russia, Iran, and Turkey reaffirmed their stated desire to see a unified and independent Syria reformed.

This is where Russia is hoping to flex its diplomatic muscles on the international stage, but aside from declarations like this one, and some cooperation between Russia and Turkey in maintaining each country's sphere of influence in Syria, the process these countries undertook four years ago has shown little potential to resolve the Syrian conflict.

With these shifting circumstances, Russia may be looking for a way forward.

Arab states, most prominently the UAE, are carefully exploring ways to start bringing Syria back into the fold. Russia very much wants to see that happen, as it would then have a more direct influence in the region, through Damascus.

But it's a difficult process; Arab states do not want to shoulder the burden of rebuilding Syria, something Russia as well cannot afford, and the country remains conflicted and divided.

By rebuking Israel, Moscow has reaffirmed its support for and value to the tattered Assad regime. But the regional concerns are what make the question of whether Russia is really intending to take a stronger stance against Israeli actions in Syria so important.

The Biden administration will have to think carefully about how to move forward if Russia decides to defend Syrian airspace more forcefully. It would need to find a way to convince Israel to respect Syrian airspace while ensuring that Israel remains secure from attack, something the United States would need to cooperate with Moscow to achieve.

Washington has so far remained quiet. If the recent statements were mere posturing by Russia, it can comfortably continue to do so. If not, it will have to get involved in brokering a deal, lest Israeli tensions with Russia escalate and create a new powder keg in a region that already has too many.

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In June, the Turkish navy successfully test-fired the Atmaca, Turkey's first domestically produced long-range anti-ship cruise missile.

The missile was fired from the TCG Kınalıada, one of the newest Ada-class corvettes, which are also domestically designed and built. In its final test, the missile sank an old research vessel, and it is now set to replace the US-made Harpoon as the Turkish Navy's standard anti-ship missile.

It is the most recent in an impressive string of achievements for Turkey's defense industry, which has historically relied on US and European companies to outfit its military.

In recent years, though, Turkish firms have increased their efforts to manufacture high-quality defense equipment — including guns, missiles, tanks, and warships.

That increased investment has made Turkey's military more self-reliant and is turning Turkey into a top arms exporter.

Threats and sanctions

Turkey has long had a large and relatively capable defense industrial base. For decades it has built a variety of infantry weapons under license from foreign manufacturers, and it is one of only five countries licensed to build F-16s.

The recent focus on domestic design and production stems from an increase in potential threats from Russia and various militant groups and from sanctions placed on Turkey's defense industry by its NATO allies, which have prevented the sale of critical technology or entire systems to Ankara.

Turkey has had a long-standing conflict with Kurdish PKK militants in its southwest, which regularly bleeds into northern Iraq and was a major factor in Turkey's military intervention in Syria's civil war.

Turkey is also dealing with a stronger Russia, its longtime state rival. Turkey enjoyed a sense of security in the Black Sea in the decades after the Cold War, when Russia was considerably weaker, but Moscow's recent actions pose a new challenge.

"The military balance in the Black Sea has shifted rather significantly in Russia's favor after the seizure of Crimea and the further militarization of the peninsula," Stephen Flanagan, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, told Insider.

"The Russians have increased the level of military forces in their Southern Military District, and they are also engaged in a fairly substantial modernization of the Black Sea Fleet," Flanagan said.

Turkey sees Russia's involvement in and influence over Syria as a threat, as it does Iranian influence in Syria and Iraq.

Despite the increase in threats, Turkey can no longer rely on the US and Europe to sell it the equipment it needs.

US and European concerns about Turkey's human-rights abuses, its actions against the Kurds in northern Syria, and its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system have led to sanctions on Turkey's Presidency of Defense Industries, the government institution that oversees its defense industry.

The US has kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program, in which Ankara was an original contributor and manufacturer, and Germany has been reluctant to modernize Turkey's inventory of Leopard 2 tanks.

"All of that has only reinforced Turkey's need to become more independent in the development of its defense industry and its own defense capabilities," Flanagan said.

Increased domestic output

Turkey had a similar experience with Western sanctions in the 1970s, when tensions with Greece over Cyprus almost led to war. Those sanctions were lifted, but Turkey prepared for their potential reimposition.

Now that preparation is showing returns.

Turkey is replacing the G3 with the MPT-76, a domestic design, as its standard-issue rifle. It is replacing its AH-1 attack helicopters with Turkish Aerospace Industries' T129 ATAK, and it plans to field its first domestically made Altay tanks by the beginning of 2023. It is also upgrading its Leopard 2s without German assistance.

In addition to four Ada-class corvettes, Turkey's navy has launched the first of four planned Istanbul-class frigates and one amphibious assault ship, TCG Anadolu, with a second planned.

Based on Spain's Juan Carlos I class, Anadolu and its future sister ship, TCG Trakya, are expected to function as light aircraft carriers, with the capability to launch new Turkish-made aircraft.

Turkey's efforts to become a leader in unmanned systems is perhaps its most impressive initiative.

Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicles were key to Azerbaijan's victory in that country's recent war with Armenia. Other countries looking for an aerial advantage are now seeking TB2s.

Turkey has a number of other unmanned systems in development.

It has begun mass production of the Akıncı, a larger unmanned combat aircraft with a payload of 1.5 tons, and has started sea trials for the ULAQ, an unmanned surface vessel armed with six guided missiles. Four kinds of armed unmanned ground vehicles are competing for a Turkish government contract.

Turkey also has plans for a "mobile naval mine" that can be used for surveillance and to attack ships, as well as for unmanned fighter jets and strike aircraft to be used on its amphibious assault ships, which officials say will be able to carry 30 to 50 drones.

Exports, new partnerships, and self-reliance

Increased domestic defense output has also allowed Turkey to become a growing weapons exporter. It now sells its weapons to 28 countries.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks the global arms trade, recently listed Turkey as one of the three fastest-growing arms exporters, with the volume of its exports increasing 86% in the latter half of the 2010s. Over the same period, it rose six spots to become the world's 13th-largest arms exporter and went from being the sixth-largest arms importer to the 20th.

Turkey is constructing two modified Ada-class corvettes for Pakistan's navy (with Pakistan building two more itself under license) and at least one Ada-class corvette for Ukraine. Turkey also recently received a US export license to send attack helicopters to the Philippines.

"There's been a heavy emphasis on the idea that Turkey was going to develop its indigenous capabilities so as to be able to both become more effective as a military producer and less dependent on foreign sources but also as a potential for export-driven growth," Flanagan said.

Turkey's increasingly nationalistic leaders are determined to grow its domestic arms industry. Feeling spurned by its traditional partners, they are now looking to countries like South Korea and Ukraine to fill the country's remaining technological gaps.

There is still some Western technology that Turkey needs and can't replicate.

It uses US-made engines in the T129 ATAK, German guns for the Altay tank, and German air-independent propulsion systems for its new Reis-class submarines.

While Turkey hopes to build its own fifth-generation fighter to replace the F-35, its F-16 life-extension program suggests it might not be able to do so.

Disputes with neighbors and NATO allies have fueled a sense that Turkey "can find Turkish solutions to some of these problems and then not be so dependent on outsiders," Flanagan said. "They have a strong indigenous capability and also can compete for exports among allies for international customers, along with the major international arms suppliers of the world."

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Scientists have found two nearly perfectly preserved cave lion cubs from the Ice Age, nicknamed Boris and Sparta, in east Russia.

Only four ancient cave lion cubs have ever been found, and scientists say these two are the best-preserved ones.

"Sparta is probably the best-preserved Ice Age animal ever found, and is more or less undamaged apart from the fur being a bit ruffled," Love Dalen, a professor in Evolutionary Genetics and author of a new study on the cubs, told CNN. 

"She even had the whiskers preserved. Boris is a bit more damaged, but still pretty good."

Cave lions, known as panthera spelaea, roamed Eurasia during the Ice Age before going extinct over 10,000 years ago.

Boris and Sparta were found in 2017 and 2018 within 15 meters (49 feet) of each other on the banks of the Semyuelyakh river by mammoth tusk hunters.

Although they were initially thought to be related, new research has revealed that the cubs were around 15,000 years apart in age.

Using radiocarbon dating scientists determined that the male cub Boris is around 43,448 years old, while the female cub Sparta is 27,962 years old, according to the study published in Quaternary.

Both animals were around one or two months old when they died, according to the study. While their cause of death is unclear, researchers said there was no evidence to suggest a predator had killed them.

"Given their preservation, they must have been buried very quickly. So maybe they died in a mudslide, or fell into a crack in the permafrost," Dalen told CNN. "Permafrost forms large cracks due to seasonal thawing and freezing."

The cubs' coats were similar but not identical to that of an African lion cub, and Sparta had a more dull, greyish coat compared to Boris, according to the team.

"The general tone of the color of the fur coat of Sparta is greyish to light brown, whereas, in Boris, the fur is generally lighter, greyish yellowish," they said.

"It is, therefore, possible that light coloration prevailed with age in cave lions and was adaptive for northern snow-covered landscapes."

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The container ship Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal in March was a billion-dollar demonstration of an overlooked security threat, a top Democrat in Congress says.

"I would have liked to have more focus and more people's hair on the back of their neck standing up, because I think a lot of people don't think about maritime chokepoints," Rep. Elaine Luria, vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a Navy League event in July.

The Ever Given was dislodged after six days, and experts were quick to note the military significance— in 2014, Russia sunk obsolete ships to block Ukrainian ships in a Crimean port. Disruptions like that are a threat in more places than most people think, Luria says.

"If you ask people if they even know what a chokepoint is they would probably come up with the Suez Canal [and] the Panama Canal, but not a lot of other ones," Luria said at the Hudson Institute this month.

Many chokepoints are already closely monitored. The Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil is shipped, and the Bab-el-Mandeb, through which Suez Canal traffic passes, both have a heavy multinational military presence to counter threats from state and non-state actors.

Other chokepoints are seeing increasing military activity amid changes to the security and natural environment.

The Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, which Russian warships must transit to reach the Atlantic Ocean, is an area of renewed focus for NATO. The Strait of Malacca is a vital channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and China's increasing presence there has worried neighboring countries, particularly India.

A more accessible Arctic may also make the Bering Strait busier. In March 2020, the US Navy's top officer said he expected that strait will "at some point" be "strategically as important" as the straits of Malacca or Hormuz.

US policymakers and military officials have warned repeatedly about China's presence in those waterways and at ports around the world.

China's construction of bases in the South China Sea is an effort to "create their own chokepoints" in one of the world's busiest shipping corridors, Luria said this month, adding that China's sole overseas military base, in Djibouti near the Bab-el-Mandeb, is also in "an incredibly strategic point."

Beijing has added "a significant pier" at that base that can accommodate an aircraft carrier, the head of US Africa Command said this spring, warning that China also sought a naval facility on Africa's Atlantic coast "where they can rearm and repair warships."

China has also invested heavily in Latin American countries, which experts say it could leverage for military benefit, including around the Strait of Magellan, through which Chinese ships first sailed nearly a decade ago.

Adm. Craig Faller, head of US Southern Command, has warned about Chinese investment in dozens of ports in the region, including on both sides of the Panama Canal.

Army Gen. Laura Richardson, who will replace Faller, told lawmakers this month that "two ports on either end of the [Panama] Canal are owned by Chinese state-owned enterprises, and so that's very concerning."

In the Arctic, Russia wants to do "the same thing" that China is doing in the South China Sea by exercising control over traffic along the Northern Sea Route, Luria said this month. Even before Ever Given was freed, Russian officials were using the incident to promote that route.

"So we literally have the Chinese and the Russians who want to essentially create new chokepoints, and not only that but the Chinese have positioned themselves in a variety of ways at every major chokepoint in the world," Luria added.

US officials have warned that Chinese investments in infrastructure, particularly in ports, are being made with the goal of developing "dual use" capabilities that would support future military operations.

Whether China has the political influence and logistical ability to establish such facilities is still uncertain, but the Djibouti base and other facilities that Chinese firms own or have stakes in aren't suited for power projection, according to John Culver, who retired from the CIA in 2020 after more than 30 years as a Chinese military analyst.

"I think that the [intelligence] community can maybe take a breath here about the dire threat of Chinese bases as locuses of power projection," Culver said in May. "I think they're really more the accoutrements of a great power, especially a country with global trading."

But China's growing presence around the world's most important waterways still presents an outsize risk, Luria said this month.

"The interruption to the flow of trade and these geographic maritime chokepoints are ways that [China] can disrupt that are not just one-on-one, like naval vessel vs. naval vessel," Luria said.

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Before any shots are fired in a major conflict, a war of words and ideas is already underway.

The modern era's unprecedented level of interconnectivity and the proliferation of communication methods, such as social media, has made that information battle fiercer than ever, and it will be crucial for the US as it competes with near-peer rivals China and Russia.

However, the US military has fallen behind in the information realm.

At a recent congressional hearing, Pentagon and Intelligence Community officials said the US has let its Information Operations (IO) atrophy compared to those of its competitors. Russia now poses the more serious IO threat, but China follows close behind.

Information operations

Disinformation, misinformation, and psychological operations are the main features of the propaganda and information realm.

Disinformation is the deliberate distribution of false information, such as social-media posts, to deceive the target audience.

During the 2016 presidential election, Russia's Internet Research Agency, which works very closely with the Russian intelligence services, disseminated thousands of pieces of fake information aimed at American voters.

Misinformation is the unintentional distribution of false information — for example, ordinary Americans spreading conspiracy theories on social media, believing them to be true.

Misinformation is very closely related to disinformation, and sometimes the former is fueled by the latter. Russian intelligence, for example, can plant fake stories in state-owned or controlled outlets, which unaware Americans may then distribute.

Misinformation and disinformation campaigns manipulate facts or omit contextual details to shape public perceptions. Misleading stories with a kernel of truth are often harder to debunk.

Propaganda is the distribution of arguments or narratives to influence a target audience.

Propaganda can be both true and false, and while it has a negative connotation, it can come through official channels, such as White House or Kremlin statements, or from seemingly ordinary sources, such as a tourist guide.

A battle for your mind

Russia has a long history information operations. Throughout the Cold War, the primary goal of Russian intelligence services, mainly the KGB, wasn't intelligence-gathering but to subvert the US and the West.

They did so with "active measures," which are similar to covert action. The goal was to drive wedges within and between Western countries, especially NATO members. Equally important was the effort to discredit the West in the eyes of the rest of the world, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Russia fell into disarray after the Cold War, but Moscow has in recent years grown more focused and aggressive in its information operations directed at the US and the West.

Russia views information operations as a key warfare domain — it already sees itself as in conflict with the West in this regard — and its approach is now more holistic as it targets both the methods of communication, such as computers and networks, and the information itself.

China uses information operations to achieve more traditional goals, such as bolstering perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies and undermining foreign governments and their policies.

Like Russia, China wants to undercut social cohesion within the US and sow discord between Western countries. US Special Operations Command has already set up a task force to counter Chinese information operations in the Indo-Pacific region.

Information commandos

When it comes to US military information operations, it's SOCOM that does much of the work, mainly through two units: The Army's Psychological Operations Groups (4th and 8th) and the Civil Affairs Brigade (95th).

These aren't your door-kicking commandos but rather special operators with language and cultural training who identify local needs and perceptions and then work to influence them.

"PSYOP in the Army goes a long way back. We first established the capability right after World War I and have refined it ever since. PSYOP guys have deployed in all the conflicts and did some great 'peacetime' work in Europe during the Cold War," a retired special-operations PSYOP soldier told Insider.

Psychological operations are part of information operations and can occur in peacetime and during war. The US military divides them into three categories — White, Gray, and Black — depending on the target and operational and political considerations.

Such operations are also divided into phases of competition: 0 for shaping perceptions, 1 for deterring foes, 2 for seizing the initiative, 3 for dominating the enemy, 4 for stabilizing environments and populations, and 5 for enabling local civil authorities.

"What's great about PSYOP is their ability to satiate all appetites. We can target audiences in the tactical, operational, and strategic levels depending on the need. This gives PSYOP a great advantage as it's always relevant, and ever more so in phases 0, 1, 4, and 5 of competition — that is, before and after a war," said the retired PSYOP soldier, who requested anonymity to discuss operations.

What makes it hard to do effective IO is the time and effort required to train troops, special operators or not, to excel in the domain. To conduct or counter information operations, practitioners need native or near-native understanding of a culture and language, in addition to knowledge of psychology and behavioral science.

PSYOP used their skills very effectively against ISIS, even deploying a special leaflet that could play and listen for audio.

"To counter Chinese and Russian IO, we need to be aware of the threat and educate the public," the retired special-operations PSYOP soldier said. "Americans need to understand that this is a real, ongoing threat. Sometimes war doesn't mean gunfire and explosions."

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.

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Russian state security agents detained the head of a research facility who has been working on hypersonic aircraft on suspicions of treason, Russian state media reported Thursday.

Federal Security Service agents detained 73-year-old Alexander Kuranov in Moscow, The Moscow Times reported.

Kuranov is the general director and chief designer at St. Peterburg's State Hypersonic System Research Institute, where he worked on the development of a hypersonic aircraft as part of the long-running Ayaks program.

The Ayaks program is one that was started in the 1970s by the Soviet Union and has been continued, on and off, over the years. It is focused on designing and developing of a new hypersonic waverider aircraft for various military missions.

Militaries around the world have shown great interest in the development of hypersonic systems, especially the US, Russia, and China. Russia has repeatedly touted its hypersonic systems research.

Though much of the hypersonic systems research is focused on hypersonic missile technology, which can evade traditional air- and missile-defense systems with high-speed flight along unpredictable flight paths, there is also significant interest in the development of aircraft that can fly at speeds in excess of five times the speed of sound.

An unnamed source told Russian media outlet Interfax that preliminary data indicates that "Kuranov, who has been engaged in hypersonic technologies for many years, gave a foreign citizen information of a sealed nature about these scientific developments."

Another source told Interfax that Kuranov regularly had work-related meetings with foreign nationals. "In particular, representatives of the United States and China showed interest," the source said.

The Federal Security Service has asked that Kuranov be placed in pre-trial detention for two months. He will stand before a court for the first time later Thursday.

As Reuters reported, treason is an offense that is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Charges of treason have been leveled against a number of Russian scientists, scholars, officials, and military personnel.

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Facebook banned hundreds of social media accounts linked to a Russian vaccine misinformation network, the company said in its July Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior report (CIB) released Tuesday.

The removed Facebook and Instagram accounts largely operated out of Russia and baselessly claimed that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine turned recipients into chimpanzees. Several memes circulated by the accounts used images from the 1968 movie "Planet of the Apes."

"AstraZeneca created a vaccine based on chimpanzee genes, when tests showed side effects, this vaccine should be banned, otherwise we will all become chimpanzees," one post by the misinformation network falsely claimed.  

Facebook's July CIB report separates the network's activities into two phases with a five-month break of inactivity in between. Russia is still the world's largest producer of online disinformation, the company reported in May. 

While the first wave of posts spread misinformation about the AstraZeneca vaccine, the second operation primarily targeted US audiences, posting false claims that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine had a much higher "casualty rate" than other vaccines.

Facebook said the campaign "functioned as a disinformation laundromat" and enlisted influencers with existing audiences on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. It also posted articles and petitions on Medium, Reddit, and Change.org. 

Fazze, a UK-registered marketing firm, sent emails to influencers in order to recruit them for the campaign, according to the report. Fazze is now banned from the platform — however, it is still unknown who hired the company.

Ben Nimmo, Facebook's Global IO Threat Intelligence Lead, wrote that the cross-platform nature of the campaign makes it "challenging for any one platform to see the full picture" and demonstrates "why a whole-of-society response to such disinformation campaigns is critical."

He highlighted that Facebook's removal of the operation was possible due to German and French influencers who reported Fazze's outreach, as well as the work of international journalists. 

Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory told Insider that Facebook took action on these accounts not because of the substance of the content, but because of "inauthentic activity." 

"This did not come down solely for being anti-vaccine content. This came down because it was a manipulation campaign," she told Insider. 

DiResta said that the accounts also used "astroturfing," which involves fake accounts posting comments to create an impression of a widespread opinion on a topic.

She added that the network's first disinformation campaign came at a time when state media accounts in Russia to China were promoting their country's vaccine while amplifying negative stories about other vaccines.

"In the case of the monkey vaccine narrative what they were doing was contrasting that with their own vaccines that did not use this particular development to try to present their vaccine as being safer or less gross than a vaccine derived with use of monkeys," DiResta told Insider. 

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The long-time Moscow correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation is being kicked out of Russia in apparent retaliation for UK sanctions on officials in the country.

The news was announced on Russian state television, The New York Times reported, with a reporter on the government-run Rossiya-24 linking the decision to the UK having "crossed all red lines in media terms."

The BBC reporter, Sarah Rainsford, confirmed the move in a post on Twitter.

"Being expelled from Russia, a country I've lived in for almost 1/3 of my life – and reported for years — is devastating," she said."

In a statement, BBC Director-General Tim Davie condemned the decision not to extend Rainsford's visa as "a direct assault on media freedom." He urged Russian officials to reconsider.

Reporters Without Borders lists Russia as one of the worst countries in terms of press freedom, ranking it 150th out of 180 nations.

A spokesperson for Russia's foreign ministry told Reuters that the decision had been explained to BBC officials in recent days, casting it as a response to Britain denying visas to employees of Moscow's state-run media organizations, such as RT and Sputnik.

The British government has accused both outlets of playing an "active role in spreading disinformation."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

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A prototype of Russia's new Ilyushin Il-112V military transport aircraft caught fire during a test flight and crashed near Moscow on Tuesday, Russian media reported, citing the United Aircraft Corporation.

There were three crew members onboard at the time of the crash. A statement posted on Twitter by UAC, part of the larger state-owned Rostec corporation, said there were no survivors.

The three crew members were test flight engineer Nikolai Khludeyev, test pilot Dmitry Komarov, and test pilot Nikolai Kuimov, Russian state-run media outlet TASS reported. The latter is a recognized hero of the Russian federation for his achievements as a test pilot.

UAC has said that it will take the necessary steps to help the families of the deceased.

UAC told reporters Tuesday that the one of the aircraft's engines caught fire, TASS reported.

"According to the preliminary version of events, the Il-112V catastrophe was preceded by a right engine fire," the company said. The aircraft crashed as it was coming in for a landing near the Kubinka airfield. It then exploded after hitting the ground.

The Il-112V is a light military transport aircraft being developed by the Ilyushin Aviation Complex, which is part of the United Aircraft Corporation. The plane can carry up to five metric tons of either personnel, weapons, or other cargo.

The new aircraft is intended to replace the older Antonov An-26 light transport planes. The new Russian aircraft, which Russia has been working on since 2014, took its maiden flight in March 2019, according to Russian media. The aircraft is developmental and still being tested.

In the wake of Tuesday's accident, a criminal investigation looking into possible safety violations is underway, The Moscow Times reported, citing Russian investigators.

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In the autumn of 1996, I received an assignment from The New York Times to go to Afghanistan to cover how a little-known (in the West, anyway) fundamentalist group called the Taliban had taken Kabul, the Afghan capital. 

This week — 25 years later — I watched from afar as the Taliban again claimed victory. I've been reflecting on the fact that this isn't the first time the Taliban has seized Kabul, nor the first time the United States has left behind its allies in Afghanistan. Then, like now, the Taliban conquered most of the country with almost no resistance, as most of the armies arrayed against it slowly defected, retreated, surrendered, or simply disappeared.

Back then, Afghanistan had been consumed by a vicious civil war since 1989, when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces and the United States cut off aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. Out of that vacuum, the Taliban formed, and it promised to end the corruption that was endemic to the warlords fracturing the country. 

I knew little of that at the time. I was a young photographer cutting my teeth in postwar Bosnia. Over 48 hours, I flew from Zagreb, Croatia, to London to Peshawar, Pakistan, where I was told to expect a call from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was still making flights in and out of Kabul. I didn't want to miss my chance at a seat on one of those planes. So in that pre-cellphone era, I stayed in my hotel room binge-watching Bollywood videos on satellite TV until the phone rang.

When the time came, we set off in a small twin-engine propeller plane, with perhaps 12 passengers. The South African pilots warned us that they hadn't been able to establish reliable communications with Kabul, so we would fly high until we were directly above the airport, and then rapidly descend in a corkscrew pattern to land. This approach, they said, would reduce the danger from anybody shooting at the airplane. 

The Kabul airport was a grim testament to decades of war. Wrecked helicopters, airplanes, military radar units, and anti-aircraft guns were on their sides, all riddled with bullet holes. An Ariana Airlines jetliner was parked on the tarmac, but when I looked closely, I saw that pieces of it had been blown off by a rocket attack. The terminal building was without electricity, and it was almost surprising to have my passport stamped in the near darkness.

A tank with a white flag sticking out from its radio antenna was parked in the airport's entrance. That's where the abyss of miscomprehension started for me. I assumed that the flag symbolized the tank crew's surrender to the Taliban. But the white flag was, and still is, a Taliban banner. It symbolizes the group's claim to purity of purpose.

Kabul in 1996 was a city with entire square blocks of shattered buildings, reminiscent of photographs of bombed cities from World War II, of Grozny in Chechnya — much worse than Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where I was coming from. The destruction had occurred not from battle involving the Taliban or the Soviets, but between rival mujahideen factions that had shelled the city ruthlessly upon falling out with one another. 

Some stores and markets were open, but there wasn't much to buy. There were few women on the streets, and those few were covered head to toe in burqas.

When I went to the Foreign Ministry to register as a journalist, Taliban soldiers wandered through the halls and offices, seemingly in awe of their own spectacular achievement. Many were bedecked with flowers, a discordant sight next to their automatic weapons. 

As part of its strict interpretation of Islam and Sharia, the Taliban destroyed televisions, musical recordings, and depictions of women it considered immodest — all "graven images." At roadside checkpoints, I saw unspooled cassette tapes waving in the breeze like confetti. At the movie theater, armed Taliban soldiers threw hundreds of reels of film into a pile and started a bonfire. At a police station they had occupied, a small mountain of smashed TV sets filled the backyard.

I found a Taliban officer who spoke English, as many of them did because they grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan.

"I understand that your beliefs are against television and such influences," I said. (I'm transcribing this from memory.) "But have you ever watched TV yourself?" 

"Of course," he replied. "I've watched a lot of TV in Pakistan."

"Oh, really? What did you think of it? Did you like it?"

"Yes. I especially enjoyed seeing the big fish in the big oceans." (Nature documentaries were perhaps an unsurprising choice for someone coming from a landlocked country. Later, bootleg copies of the movie Titanic were so popular that paintings of the ship adorned the walls of teahouses and the sides of trucks.)

"But you're destroying TVs here?" I asked.

"We are destroying TVs because they aren't good for Afghans and Afghanistan," he said. "It's fine for you, but not for us."

He spoke with the patient tone of an adult trying to explain a basic fact to a child. He didn't seem to have any anger or sense that I was, as gently as I could, possibly provoking him. 

Over the next few weeks, I traveled around the country with John Burns, a New York Times reporter who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his work in those months. We shared a car and the assistance of an Afghan journalist with two other Western reporters.  

Ruined armored vehicles littered the sides of the pitted roads — some rusted and overgrown with vegetation; others more recently abandoned or destroyed. The towns mostly had electricity only from generators. 

As civilians, we could cross the front lines, so long as we didn't make a show of it. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik commander famous for his efforts against the Soviets, had retreated to his home area of the Panjshir Valley, which he defended effectively against the still-advancing Taliban. The entrance to the valley is only several score miles north of Kabul, and on several nights, the flashes of artillery fire could be faintly seen in the distance.

At a position of Taliban soldiers firing rockets at their opponents, I found a Taliban officer methodically cleaning his pistol, the parts of which were laid out on a piece of clean fabric on the dusty ground. He had a cheerful greeting for me once I introduced myself as a Chinese American photojournalist. (Again, this exchange is based on my memory of it.)

"It's too bad you're going to hell. Because that is the fate of all non-Muslims," he said.

"I understand that," I answered. "But what if I do a lot of really good deeds? Like help grandmothers and elders?"

"By all means, you should do that. You should do your best to be of service to your community," he replied. 

"So that will win me some points?" Once again, without quite intending it, I found myself straying into a potentially fraught conversation. 

"No. You will still go to hell because you aren't Muslim," he said.

As we spoke, the crew finished loading the heavy rockets onto the tubes on the back of the truck-borne launcher. Some walkie-talkie conversation ensued out of my earshot, and the officer fired a salvo of rockets by pressing buttons on his controller, which was connected to the weapon by a cable. They roared off to targets miles away.

Once again, that gap in worldview seemed impossible to bridge. What to me were logical fallacies were, at least to these particular Taliban officers, uncontroversial and core truths.

In the village of Sar Chesma a few miles north of Kabul, a father displayed the bloody burqa and shoes of his daughter, who had been killed in a Taliban rocket attack.

We were driving near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif when we saw a Cadillac — it was rumored to be the only one in Afghanistan — hurtling south at high speed, flanked by dozens of pickups and larger trucks. It was Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former pro-Soviet general turned warlord, who maintained a fiefdom in this largely ethnically Uzbek area. 

We spun around and gave chase, but there was no way the old Toyota Corolla I was riding in could keep up. Hours later, we caught up with them when they stopped at an old Soviet engineers' compound in the fishing town of Khinjan, just north of the Salang Pass in the Hindu Kush mountains.

There, Dostum met Massoud, who arrived by helicopter, and the ethnic Hazara leader Karim Khalili was also present. Their soldiers, formerly sometimes at war with each other, were now mingling while the commanders sequestered themselves. It was getting dark, and there was no electricity. I had to wait outside. 

Finally, they were ready, and by the light of a hissing kerosene lantern, I took a few photographs as they signed the agreement that formed the Northern Alliance, or United Front, against the Taliban. 

For five years, with minimal assistance from Iran, Russia, and Tajikistan, they fought on. Massoud traveled to France to try to drum up Western support for his cause. The Taliban meanwhile cemented a terrible reputation with its oppression of women and incidents such as its destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. More quietly, Massoud's representatives were lobbying the US government for aid, with claims — accurate, as it turned out — that their Taliban foes were supporting Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, and an international network of terrorist extremists.

Two days before September 11, 2001, Massoud was assassinated by Taliban agents masquerading as journalists. The bomb that killed him was disguised inside a video camera. Dostum remained a warlord with a brutal record. A few days ago, he departed Afghanistan for Uzbekistan.  

Traveling to Kandahar, the Taliban's heartland, took two days from Kabul — not the six hours described in the 1970s guidebook we were using to get around. Every bridge along the 300-mile route had been destroyed, forcing all traffic up and down dry riverbeds — made barely passable by local residents, who piled up mud and debris. At one such crossing, an overturned truck lay on its side, its cargo of dozens of enormous aerial bombs scattered across the erstwhile roadway. They were guarded by a 12-year old boy, as the driver had gone to get help.   

Once in Kandahar, we wanted to investigate the report of a couple stoned to death for adultery. Witnesses and participants were proud of the death penalty as administered by Islamic clerics — at least, that's what they told foreign journalists. Mohammed Karim, a 24-year-old Taliban soldier, picked up a large stone and threw it, reenacting the executions. 

''No, I didn't feel sorry for them at all,'' the story quoted him as saying. ''I was just happy to see Sharia being implemented.''

Further attempts to speak to the victims' families were stopped by Taliban police, who incited a small crowd to throw rocks at us when we were slow in retreating from the area. We had enjoyed surprisingly good access and freedom to move around up until that point. It was as if they had no idea or didn't care much that the rest of the world (particularly the West) would consider their actions and policies anathema. In truth, perhaps, those attitudes were never as important as imperial considerations of strategy, economics, and raw power. 

I returned to Afghanistan to spend weeks with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in 2000, and I returned again after 9/11 once the American war began in earnest. I haven't been back since, and I'm far from expert or knowledgeable on any current realities.

But I couldn't help but feel a range of excruciatingly mixed emotions and thoughts as I watched this week's harrowing scenes from Kabul airport, as desperate people clung to the fuselage of an American transport plane before falling to their deaths as it took off. 

Like most observers, I didn't imagine that the Afghan government would be a house of cards quite so brittle. 

And like a generation of journalists who covered Afghanistan in the years before and after 2001, I'm filled with trepidation as Afghanistan begins its next chapter. 

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A Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart in March, scattering into dozens of pieces. Now, a Harvard astronomer has discovered what likely happened: It seems to have collided with a chunk of a Russian rocket.

"This looks to be the first major confirmed orbital collision in a decade," Jonathan McDowell, who spotted the probable crash in a data log from the US Space Force, said on Twitter.

Space Force sensors detected new debris from the breakup of the Chinese satellite, called Yunhai 1-02, in mid-March. Yunhai 1-02 launched in 2019, so it was relatively young and should have been in good enough shape to not fall apart on its own. No verdict about the cause was ever announced.

But the Space Force did quietly update its space-debris catalogue with a new hint on Saturday. Object 48078, a piece of a Russian Zenit-2 rocket that launched in 1996, is now listed with a peculiar note: "collided with satellite."

McDowell spotted that new listing and shared it on Twitter. He went back through the orbital data and found that the Russian rocket chunk and the Yunhai satellite passed within 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of each other at the exact time and day that Yunhai broke apart.

That passing distance is within the margin of error. Both objects would have been zipping around Earth faster than a bullet, so any contact would result in an explosion of debris. The crash created 37 known bits of debris, according to McDowell, though he added that there are probably more uncatalogued pieces.

It doesn't look like the collision was "catastrophic," McDowell said, since the Yunhai satellite has made several orbital adjustments since March, indicating that China can still control it.

"It's a moderately big deal," McDowell told Insider. "It shows that these smaller non-catastrophic collisions are becoming a thing — we will see more and more of them."

The dangers of space debris

The last time two large objects orbiting Earth crashed into each other was in 2009, when a defunct Russian military satellite careened into an active Iridium communications satellite above Siberia. That collision, along with a prior one in 2007, increased the amount of large debris in low-Earth orbit by about 70%.

There have been several false alarms and close calls since then. A dead Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket body sped past each other in space in October, after orbital models suggested they were at "very high risk" of colliding. In January 2020, a dead space telescope and an old US Air Force satellite beat alarming odds of crashing over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In both incidents, nobody could control the satellites to avoid collision.

Already, nearly 130 million bits of space junk surround Earth — from abandoned satellites, spacecraft that broke apart, and other missions. That debris travels at roughly 10 times the speed of a bullet, which is fast enough to inflict disastrous damage to vital equipment, no matter how small the pieces. Such a hit could kill astronauts on a spacecraft.

Every time objects in orbit collide, they can explode into new clouds of tiny chunks of high-speed debris. In fact, the piece of debris that hit the Chinese satellite may have broken off of the original Russian rocket in an earlier collision.

"That's all very worrying and is an additional reason why you want to remove these big objects from orbit," McDowell told Space.com, which first reported his discovery. "They can generate this other debris that's smaller."

Experts expect more near-collisions like this if nobody removes dead satellites and old rocket bodies from space.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin to release Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny from prison on the one-year anniversary of his near-fatal poisoning.

"I demanded from the Russian President that he free Navalny," Merkel said after talks with Putin, who denied that Navalny was behind bars for his political activity, according to France 24.

The two world leaders met for almost three hours on Friday, Russian media reported.

Navalny, Putin's most prominent critic, this month was charged with with new crimes that could extend his sentence by three years, France 24 said. 

The Russian opposition leader was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Serbia last August, and it nearly killed him. He was subsequently taken to Germany for treatment.

Navalny returned to Moscow in January and was promptly arrested. Shortly thereafter, the anti-corruption campaigner was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating parole — including while he received treatment in Germany — from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that top human rights groups denounced as politically motivated.

His imprisonment led to mass protests in Russia, as well as fresh sanctions from Western powers — including the US. Leonid Volkov, Navalny's chief of staff, in June told Insider that Putin was "dumb" to imprison Navalny because it turned him into a symbol for people to rally behind. The Russian leader has repeatedly rejected the notion that he ordered Navalny's poisoning while throwing cold water on the allegation that the opposition leader's imprisonment was politically motivated.

In a June interview with NBC News, Putin would not guarantee that Navalny would leave prison alive. Navalny's allies have frequently expressed concern about his health behind bars. The Biden administration has warned Putin there will. be severe consequences if Navalny dies while in prison.

Putin has a long record of brutally cracking down on dissent, and his critics have often ended up dead in violent or suspicious ways. Navalny was not the first Putin opponent to be poisoned with Novichok.

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Russia's media authority Roskomnadzor has ordered Apple and Alphabet, Google's parent company, to take the app of the biggest opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin off of their platforms, according to a report.

Roskomnadzor said the app dedicated to publishing stories about Alexei Navalny should be taken off of Google and Apple's app stores because Russian courts have labeled Navalny's anti-corruption foundation as extremist, the Russian news agency Interfax reported on Friday.

Neither Apple or Alphabet were immediately available for comment Saturday about the request. 

The development marks the latest attempt by the Russian government to silence Navalny. Navalny is currently in a Russian prison after returning to the country from Germany, where he recovered from being poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Serbia last August. The Russian government says he is guilty of embezzlement.

Putin and the Russian government's treatment of Navalny continues to draw criticism from abroad. During a Friday meeting with Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Navalny's imprisonment unacceptable and called for his release.

The team of US President Joe Biden has warned Russia of "consequences" if Navalny dies while in custody.

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Russian opposition leader and jailed President Vladimir Putin critic Aleksei Navalny said he is being forced to watch over eight hours of Russian state TV and propaganda films each day in what authorities refer to as "awareness raising,"the New York Times reported. 

The activity is meant to replace hard labor for Russia's political prisoners, Navalny said to The Times in his first interview with a news outlet since his January arrest.  

"You have to sit in a chair and watch TV," he told the newspaper. Reading, writing or doing anything else is prohibited, Navalny claimed.

According to the report, Navalny spends much of his time in prison reading letters in his cell, sweeping the prison yard, and eating his meals.  

"You might imagine tattooed muscle men with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to take the best cot by the window," Navalny said of prison. "You need to imagine something like a Chinese labor camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching." 

The Times reported Navalny criticized Europe and the US for economic sanctions on Russia, saying that they harmed ordinary Russians and suggested they should target top oligarchs who support Putin's regime.

Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for Putin to release Navalny from prison on the one-year anniversary of his near-fatal poisoning with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.

Navalny had returned to Moscow in January from treatment for the poisoning in Germany and was promptly arrested.

Soon after, the anti-corruption campaigner was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating parole — including while he received treatment in Germany — from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that top human rights groups denounced as politically motivated.

Earlier this month, he was charged with new crimes that could extend his sentence by three years.

His arrest sparked mass protests across Russia and sanctions from Western powers. 

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