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The first human in space Yuri Gagarin
[Robert Couse-Baker/Creative Commons]
RUSSIA celebrated Cosmonauts’ Day today, with events taking place across the country to mark the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space on April 12 1961.
His flight in the Vostok 1 spacecraft lasted 108 minutes and earned him the Hero of the Soviet Union award, that nation’s highest honour.
“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!” he famously said.
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history
KEVAN NELSON reports back from a delegation to the epic celebrations for the anniversary of Vietnam’s 1945 revolution, where British communists found a thriving, prosperous socialist country, brimming with ambition and well-earned national pride
MARK HAZELDEN criticises the Western narrative that the incident was an escalation of Russia’s confrontation with the West, given that Belarus, a Russian ally, warned Poland of off-course drones, and the drones were unarmed, cheap wooden decoys
