Germany became the second country to condemn Moscow over the publication of a list of companies Russia claimed are helping produce attack drones for Ukraine, warning that "direct threats" are "unacceptable."
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Speaking with RFE/RL's Radio Farda, Mansoureh Shojaee, an Iranian women’s rights activist based in the Netherlands, says the regime is coercing women into "revenge-driven" militancy amid war with the United States and Israel. In videos shown by pro-government media outlets, crowds of Iranian women were filmed holding guns, flags, and children at the recent rally titled Self-Sacrificing Daughters Of Iran, where pink weapons were on display.
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Ukrainian drones hit the Tuapse Black Sea oil port, Russian officials said, causing a fire and at least one death in the second attack on one of the country's major southern ports in the past week.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criticized an easing of sanctions on Russian energy, writing on X that “every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war.”
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Hopes that shipping would resume through the Strait of Hormuz proved short-lived on April 18, as Iranian forces attacked at least three civilian ships after Tehran announced it was reversing its decision to reopen the vital waterway.
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Ilya Remeslo, a longtime pro-Kremlin blogger who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after abruptly directing strongly worded criticism at Russian President Vladimir Putin, says he has been released after a month in the facility in St. Petersburg.
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Iran said it has opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping traffic for the reamiiner of a 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, and US President Donald Trump again suggested that Washington and Tehran could reach a deal to end the US-Israeli war with Iran in the near future.
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Prayers for peace, cease-fires, and an ongoing energy crisis dominated the seventh week of the conflict in the Middle East.
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The Czech Republic demanded an explanation after Russia’s Defense Ministry published a list of companies it claimed are helping produce attack drones for Ukraine and bellicose former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called it “a list of potential targets” for the Russian military.
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US President Donald Trump said the United States and Iran are "very close" to a deal to end the war and that US and Iranian negotiators could meet for a second round of talks this coming weekend.
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US President Donald Trump suggested that talks with Iran could resume in a day or two, while the US military said that no ships slipped through a naval blockade targeting vessels headed to or from Iranian ports in the first 24 hours of the restrictive measure.
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The US military said it would begin a blockade of ships traveling to and from Iranian ports following the failure of US-Iranian peace talks on the weekend. Former sailors who navigated tankers through the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s told RFE/RL that today’s crisis echoes that conflict four decades ago.
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