Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on Wednesday blamed Russia’s annexation of Crimea on Republicans, though the invasion took place on President Barack Obama's watch. 
Russia did not hold its annual May 9 Victory Day parade commemorating the war in Europe against Nazi Germany for the first time in 25 years due to the coronavirus pandemic. Russia analysts say this cancellation does not bode well for Russian president Vladimir Putin's poll numbers. 
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a new government on Tuesday which he described as a break with the past, bringing in some fresh faces but retaining many senior ministers. 
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw military exercises near Crimea on Thursday, which included the launch of the hypersonic 'Kinzhal' missile, the TASS news agency reported. BEIRUT/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin met Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Tuesday, the Russian leader's second trip to Syria since Moscow intervened decisively on the Syrian president's behalf in a civil war. 
Rep. Norma Torres (D., Calif.) said on Friday that Russian president Vladimir Putin has compromising information on President Donald Trump but provided no evidence when pressed about it. 
Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) on Monday floated a conspiracy theory against President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite admitting she didn't have the facts to prove it.
Former White House national security expert Fiona Hill testified Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin viewed American fracking as a "great threat to Russian interests;" top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, have called for an outright ban of the practice. 
I called attention last week to a CNN story in which chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reported that the United States chose to extract a highly-placed Kremlin spy due to concerns that "President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence," including during a May 2017 meeting with Vladimir Putin. That would have been a major scoop, but The Washington Post and The New York Times followed with their own stories and neither confirmed the most incendiary part of Sciutto's reporting. In their telling, the decision to extract the spy was firmly made before Trump was even president, and solely in response to media speculation about a U.S. source close to Putin. 
CNN chief national security correspondent and former Obama diplomatic staffer Jim Sciutto had a major scoop Monday, reporting that "in a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government." 