Christian Lowe News

France on Saturday seized a car cargo ship in the English Channel that Washington says was linked to the son of a former Russian spy chief, in one of the first visible displays of the West enforcing sanctions on Moscow over its Ukraine invasion.The "Baltic Leader" was headed to St. Petersburg but was diverted to the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. (0200-0300 GMT), Captain Veronique Magnin of the French Maritime Prefecture told Reuters.The vessel was "strongly suspected of being linked to Russian interests targeted by the sanctions," she said.The United States Treasury Department has issued blocking sanctions against the vessel because…

A French court ruled on Wednesday that a British trawler impounded by French authorities could sail for home, overturning an earlier demand that its captain pay a 150,000 euro ($174,000) bond, a lawyer for the captain told Reuters.The Cornelis Gert Jan was seized last week, with French authorities saying it had been caught fishing for scallops in French territorial waters without a proper license.The lawyer for the Irish captain, Jondy Ward, said earlier the vessel was a pawn in a wider political row between Paris and London over fishing rights after Britain's departure from the European Union. read moreShip tracking website marinetraffic.com showed the vessel was still moored on Wednesday evening in the French port of Le Havre, where it was impounded.

Francois Mayor nudged back on the power and made a subtle adjustment on the wheel as he coaxed his cargo vessel through a narrow point in the Suez Canal—not the Egyptian one, but a replica in the middle of a French forest.This stretch of water was built to train ship captains and maritime pilots how to navigate the Suez Canal—a skill now in the spotlight after the Ever Given cargo ship got wedged in the Egyptian waterway last month in high winds and a sandstorm.The channel is built to one twenty-fifth the scale of a section of the real Suez Canal.

Germany is betting the U.S. administration will take a pragmatic approach to the Nord Stream 2 project to ship Russian gas to Europe and is pushing for the pipeline’s completion in defiance of U.S. opposition, officials and diplomats said.To try to block the $11 billion project, led by Russia’s Gazprom, successive U.S. administrations have imposed sanctions on some entities and warned other companies involved in the project about the sanctions risk.President Joe Biden thinks the pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany is “a bad idea for Europe…

In a return to the age of the clipper, a French company is using a sailing boat to ply the trade routes that pre-dated steam power—and delivering wine and chocolate to environmentally conscious customers on either side of the Atlantic.Sleek and light like its larger predecessors, the aluminum-hulled “Grain de Sail” was custom built in a French shipyard and combines the technology used in modern yachts with a hold that can accommodate up to 50 tonnes of cargo.It docked at Saint-Nazaire, in France’s northwestern Brittany region, on Monday with 33 tonnes of cacao - the raw ingredient for chocolat

Russia on Monday ignored Western calls to release three Ukrainian naval ships it fired on and captured near Crimea at the weekend and accused Kiev of plotting with its Western allies to provoke a conflict.Kiev in turn accused Russia of military aggression and put its armed forces on full combat alert, saying it reserved the right to defend itself. Ukrainian lawmakers were due to decide whether to introduce martial law for two months later on Monday, a move President Petro Poroshenko…

Eleven people on a river cruise were killed when their boat collided with a tugboat late on Monday in the Russian city of Volgograd, which is hosting matches in the soccer World Cup, rescue services said.Emergencies services received notification at around 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) on Monday that the vessels had collided on the Volga River, about 250 meters from the riverbank.There were 16 people on board the pleasure craft, all of them Russians, the RIA news agency cited the local administration as saying.Five people had been rescued…

Russian aluminum giant Rusal has stopped placing orders with two logistics firms that ship its exports, executives with the firms said on Tuesday, in a sign of deepening problems for the company after it was hit by U.S. sanctions.Rusal and its major shareholder Oleg Deripaska were included on a U.S. sanctions blacklist this month, leading to anxiety among many of its customers, suppliers and creditors who fear they too could be hit by sanctions through association with the company.A number of traders and customers of Rusal's aluminum have stopped buying the firm's products…

Gazprom said on Friday it had held talks with Japan's Mitsubishi Corp. on Friday about cooperation at the Russian gas giant's Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant.   The talks, in the Russian city of St Petersburg, were between Gazprom head Alexei Miller and Takehiko Kakiuchi, the president and CEO of Mitsubishi Corp, Gazprom said in a statement.   It said the talks focussed on the planned construction of a third production train at the Sakhalin-2 LNG plant. (Reporting by Christian Lowe; editing by Alexander Smith)

A new ferry line between isolated North Korea and its neighbour Russia docked for the first time at the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok on Thursday. The ferry's Russian operators say it is purely a commercial venture, but it coincides with what some academics say is a drive by North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, to build ties with Moscow in case its closest ally China turns its back. Journalists were unable to see passengers disembarking from the ship, the North Korean-flagged Mangyongbong, because Russian officials kept them away from the quayside, citing unspecified security reasons. Reuters television was able to speak to three passengers, who said they were representatives of Chinese tourism agencies.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told a visiting delegation of Turkish ministers on Tuesday that it expected Ankara to lift restrictions on Russian grain exports to Turkey, the Russian government said in a statement. Russian and Turkish ministers meeting in Moscow on Tuesday reached "a common understanding" that further work was needed to resolve differences over trade, and agreed to hold intensive consultations over the next two weeks, the statement said. Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek…

An ice-breaking tanker docked for the first time at Russia's Arctic port of Sabetta to test a new route that could open the ice-bound Arctic Ocean to ships carrying oil and liquefied gas. The route is eagerly anticipated by energy firms that want to develop resources in the Arctic but face obstacles in getting oil and gas from remote and freezing fields to world markets. Environmental activists fear commercial shipping in the Arctic -- now possible because climate change has thinned…

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed on Friday to draw up proposals this year to end a row over a group of disputed islands that has bedevilled relations between their countries for over 70 years. The dispute stems from the Soviet Union's decision, in the final days of World War Two, to seize the islands - known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the Southern Kuriles - that Tokyo says are its sovereign territory. Concessions over the islands would carry risks for Putin but could boost Japanese investment in Russia at a time when Moscow, battered by low global oil prices and Western sanctions, badly needs an injection of cash.

Earlier this year, an old refrigerator ship called the Georgiy Agafonov, built to transport fruit and vegetables for the Soviet Union, was quietly gathering rust in the Ukrainian port of Izmail where the Danube flows into the Black Sea. Its owners, a Ukrainian state company, assumed it would never sail again. When a Turkish company offered to buy it for $300,000, they watched as the hulk was towed away, presumably for scrap. Nine months later the ship is back at sea, renamed Kazan-60, reflagged as part of Russia's naval auxiliary fleet, and repurposed as an unlikely part of Moscow's biggest military operation outside the old Soviet boundaries since the Cold War.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said he believed many European leaders were eager to end the standoff over sanctions with Russia. "I think that many in Europe including the politicians, my colleagues, ... (want) to get out as soon as possible of a situation, which is damaging our cooperation," Putin said during a visit to the Crimea peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine earlier this year. He added that he had recently spoken to his French counterpart Francois Hollande and felt this also reflected the French president's mood.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia should step up its presence in the Arctic and challenge other nations in exploring the world's largest untapped natural reserves, days after it started shipping its first oil from the region. Russia's ambitions in the Arctic have for some time been raising eyebrows among other states vying for a presence there, but the Kremlin's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula is likely to put its Arctic plans under greater scrutiny.

At least three people were killed in a gunfight in the early hours of Sunday near a Ukrainian city controlled by pro-Russian separatists, shaking an already fragile international accord that was designed to avert a wider conflict. The incident triggered a war of words between Moscow and Ukraine's Western-backed government, with each questioning the other's compliance with the agreement, brokered last week in Geneva, to end a crisis that has made Russia's ties with the West more fraught than at any time since the Cold War. The separatists said armed men from Ukraine's Right Sector nationalist group had attacked them. The Right Sector denied any role, saying Russian special forces were behind the clash.

A mediator from Europe's OSCE security body headed to eastern Ukraine on Saturday seeking the surrender of pro-Russian separatists as the Kiev government declared an Easter truce following a peace accord with Moscow. Gunmen occupying public buildings in Donetsk and other Russian-speaking border towns refuse to recognise an accord in Geneva on Thursday by which Russia, Ukraine and Kiev's U.S. and EU allies agreed that the OSCE should oversee the disarmament of militants and the evacuation of occupied facilities and streets. The coming days may determine whether unrest following the overthrow ofUkraine's pro-Moscow president can be contained. Russia, which annexed Crimea last month in the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War, denies running the separatists or planning to invade.

The Ukrainian government said it will not attack pro-Russian separatists over the Easter weekend as its U.S. ally threatened Moscow with new sanctions if it fails to persuade the militants to surrender. The Kremlin denies having control over gunmen who want their eastern regions to follow Crimea in being annexed by Russia. Moscow scolded Washington for treating Russia like a "guilty schoolboy" following their agreement in Geneva on Thursday that Ukrainian militants should disarm and vacate occupied buildings. Ukraine's government, short of effective forces, has shown little sign of trying to recapture the dozen or so town halls, police stations and other sites seized over the past two weeks, despite proclaiming the launch of an "anti-terrorist operation".

A day after an international deal in Geneva to defuse the East-West crisis in Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists vowed not to end their occupation of public buildings and Washington threatened further sanctions on Moscow if the stalemate continued. Leaders of gunmen who have taken over city halls and other sites in and around Donetsk this month in pursuit of demands for a Crimea-style referendum on union with Russia rejected the agreement struck in Geneva by Ukraine, Russia, theUnited States and European Union and demanded on Friday that the leaders of the Kiev uprising must first quit their own government offices. Moscow renewed its insistence that it has no control over the "little green men" who…

Moscow. weapons. forces of Ukraine," Turchinov said in an address to the nation. months of pro-Western protests, for being behind the rash of rebellions across Russian-speaking towns in eastern Ukraine. "We will not allow Russia to repeat the Crimean scenario in the eastern regions of Ukraine," Turchinov said. in Ukraine's government under control. "It is now the West's responsibility to prevent civil war in Ukraine," the ministry said in a statement. A United Nations Security Council diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the council would meet at 8 p.m. GMT) in New York at Russia's request. Another diplomat said negotiations were under way on Ukraine's participation. bore "the telltale signs of Moscow's involvement". the table, and there's a lot in between," she added.

Kremlin. warned it will act to protect eastern Ukraine's Russian-speakers if they come under attack. operation" to re-assert Kiev's control in Slaviansk. flying over the town's police headquarters where militants were holed up. windows," Avakov wrote on his Facebook page. any one had been hurt. into Slaviansk, but there was no independent confirmation of this. Sunday business. Ukraine that began when the Moscow-backed president was pushed out, and Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula. to a Russian military incursion, though Moscow has strenuously denied any such intention. further military intervention," said Laura Lucas Magnuson, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will travel to Kiev on April 22, becoming the most senior U.S.

Pro-Russian militants raised their flags over official buildings in two eastern Ukrainian cities on Saturday, deepening a stand-off with Moscow which, Kiev warned, was dragging Europe closer to a "gas war" that could disrupt supplies across the continent. At least 20 men armed with pistols and rifles took over the police station and a security services headquarters in Slaviansk, about 150 km (90 miles) from the border with Russia. Officials said the men had seized hundreds of pistols from arsenals in the buildings. The militants replaced the Ukrainian flag on one of the buildings with the red, white and blue Russian flag. Some local residents helped the militants build barricades out of tyres in anticipation that police would try to force them out, a Reuters photographer at the scene said.