Russian serviceman Anton Yerygin has died in hospital after receiving serious injuries in the Syrian province of Homs, the TASS news agency reported Wednesday. He suffered serious wounds from shelling by militants, TASS reported, citing a spokesman from the Khmeimim air base in Latakia, Syria. Yerygin had been escorting vehicles from the Khmeimim base for maintenance work when the shelling occurred, the spokesman said.

A Russian court has seized the British estate of former Bank of Moscow chief Andrei Borodin, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday. Borodin, who is accused of multi-billion dollar embezzlement in Russia, bought the Park Place estate in Berkshire five years ago for £140 million ($200 million), the Kommersant newspaper reported.

Russia's agriculture watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor plans to ban all vegetables and fruit imports from Turkey next week, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday. According to deputy head of Rosselkhoznadzor, Yulia Shvabauskene, the agency is considering this measure as “they continue to find Turkish food products that need to be quarantined,” Interfax reported.

Curtis M. Scaparrotti, commander of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe Curtis Scaparrotti, a U.S. Army General, is no stranger to tension. For the past three years, he has been the Pentagon's senior officer on the Korean Peninsula. There, Scaparrotti was responsible for commanding U.S. forces deployed along the world's most notorious flashpoint, the demilitarized zone separating a flourishing South Korea from its unpredictable and potentially hostile neighbor to the north.

Ukrainian police have opened a criminal investigation against Russian pranksters who wrote a fake letter from Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to jailed pilot Nadiya Savchenko, her lawyer wrote on Twitter Thursday. The letter urged Savchenko to end her hunger strike in protest of the 22-year jail term given to her by a Russian court. The Ukrainian had been found guilty of involvement in the death of two Russian journalists.

"Singing in the Rain" has been showing at Moscow's Rossiya Theater since Ocober last year. A chorus donning black tuxedos and bowler hats twirl multicolored umbrellas as rain pours down on them from the stage rafters. Shrieks of delight from spectators in the front rows — caught by the deluge — mingle with exuberant applause. It seems that “Singing in the Rain” has made a splash in more ways than one on the Moscow stage.

A new initiative will allow Muscovites to grow vegetables in the city's parks, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reported Thursday. Each participant in the “Dacha in the Big City” scheme will be given a small plot of land in which to grow vegetables, Moscow Parks representative Darya Simonenko told the TASS news agency. “Vegetables may be planted in certain parks this summer and will yield a small harvest in fall.

Independent Russian media company RosBusinessConsulting (RBC) has been accused of defrauding shareholders of one million rubles ($15,400), the Kommersant newspaper reported Thursday. The Russian Interior Ministry launched the criminal case in late April after claims from shareholder Alexander Panov that he was deprived of his stock following the media holding's sale of a company in which he held shares.

Russia has signed an international agreement on the exchange of financial information, state news agency TASS reported Thursday. The head of Russia's Federal Taxation Service (FNS) Mikhail Mishustin said that Russia will join the global system of data exchange between tax authorities in different countries in 2018.

A batch of illegally imported luxury goods estimated to be worth 12.5 million rubles ($192,600) has been seized by the Russian Federal Customs Service, the Vedomosti newspaper reported Thursday. The case is believed to be the largest smuggling find in the last 25 years, said Alexander Smelyakov, head of the Customs' Department's Public Relations team.

Maria Lipman As Donald Trump has risen from a remote contender to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the U.S. media commentary has been an unending flow of dismay, despair, anxiety and anger. Some commentators rather desperately discussed possible ways to prevent Trump from winning the nomination, but this proved meaningless on May 3, when Trump won the Indiana primaries and his remaining competitors withdrew from the race.

In early May, the moves came thick and fast. In Portugal, police swooped on a Russian criminal network that bought control of struggling lower-league football clubs and used them to launder millions of euros. Meanwhile, in London, hedge fund boss turned campaigner Bill Browder presented evidence to British members of parliament that $30 million stolen in one of Russia’s most high profile frauds had passed through the country’s banks.

A 120-year-old Russian woman has entered the record books as the second longest-living person in the world, the Rossiskaya Gazeta newspaper reported Thursday. Born in 1896, Tanzilya Bisembeyeva has lived in a small village in the Astrakhan region of southern Russia all her life, the newspaper reported. Despite working in the fields for more than 60 years, she lives on a minimal pension because the people who could prove her work record on paper have all died, her son told reporters.

Ukraine's resistance to allow civil society experts to play a role in establishing the anti-corruption bureau remains “a major source of contention,” the International Monetary Fund said in a staff discussion note published Wednesday.

A man from the city of Magnitogorsk in Russia's Chelyabinsk region has been sentenced with three and a half years in a penal colony after taking part in a terrorist training camp in Syria, the state-owned RIA Novosti reported Thursday. The 30-year-old man had been recruited for training online while working in South Korea in the summer of 2014, local Security Services (FSB) said at a press conference. After traveling to the camp in the Aleppo area in Feb.