One of Russia’s most powerful men, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, is set to visit North Korea this weekend, in a sign of deepening relations between Moscow and Pyongyang as North Korea gets pulled deeper into Russia’s war in Ukraine.

During a rare news conference on Friday, the head of the French military, Thierry Burkhard, said Russia remains a “lasting, close” threat.

U.S. relations continues and has not faded, although the U.S. administration is acting in a zigzag manner, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the RIA news agency in remarks published on Friday.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. and Russia have exchanged new ideas for Ukraine peace talks after he met with his Russian counterpart in Malaysia on Thursday.

It’s a key refuge for Moscow’s wealthy, including the record producer Iosif Prigozhin. He insists he still loves President Vladimir V. Putin, no matter what you’ve heard.

Moscow sweltered on Friday in a heatwave with temperatures topping 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the Russian weather service, breaching a municipal record registered nearly 30 years ago.

Washington has said the treatment of Glavprodukt, the only U.S. company Moscow has seized, will influence a planned reset of U.S.-Russia relations.

From 2015 to 2018, she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. JIM TOWNSEND is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Moscow has ordered the closure of Poland's Consulate in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in a tit-for-tat move as relations between the countries remain strained over a Warsaw fire that Poland alleges was Russian sabotage.