Page 5 - Being Held News Today

The Swedish and Finnish prime ministers have told a joint press conference in Helsinki that they will further buttress their security cooperation, amid a surge in diplomatic activity in both those non-NATO countries since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine late last month.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that punitive sanctions imposed by Western countries following Russia's invasion of Ukraine are "akin to a declaration of war" and warned that any country that attempts to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine would be considered a party to the conflict.

A spokesman for Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the Turkish president will speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 6 and that Ankara is ready to do what it can to stop the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine's government has started a website to recruit foreign volunteers to an "international legion" to fight invading Russian troops, following repeated calls by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for outsiders to join in his country's defense.

Turkish workers at the Gemont factory in Russia's Tatarstan region have protested that their U.S.-dollar pegged salaries are being paid using an exchange rate from before the ruble plunged in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

A Russian-friendly Ukrainian lawmaker has been detained by Ukrainian soldiers after they said he was taking pictures of a military checkpoint in Kyiv, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russian invasion since last week.

The U.S. Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Russian opposition activist and former Moscow lawmaker Yulia Galyamina has been detained and charged with violating the law on public events over her attempt to organize a protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A Russian air strike has killed six people, including a child, in the village of Markhalivka near Kyiv, regional police say.

An ethnic Kazakh from China's northwestern province of Xinjiang who was held in immigration custody in Ukraine for months says he has been released and is on his way to an unspecified Western country.