Russian training warship arrives in African state
The vessel, part of Russia's Baltic Fleet, was received in the capital Malabo by senior officers of the Equatorial Guinean Navy, Russian Ambassador Karen Chalyan, and embassy staff.
Unlike previous deployments, this year's voyage for the Smolny begins in Equatorial Guinea and will include stops in South Africa, Tanzania, Sao Tome and Principe, the Republic of the Congo, and Vietnam, before concluding in Vladivostok, Russia, in late September.
The ship is carrying around 400 personnel, including 200 naval cadets enrolled in at-sea training. During the Malabo stopover, the cadets are expected to take part in military and cultural events, including a parade, friendly football match, and meetings with local Russians.
The Baltic Fleet's training ship "Smolny" (Project 887) arrived at the port of Malabo, Equatorial Guinea ./July 20/Next:🇸🇹➡️🇨🇩➡️🇿🇦➡️🇹🇿➡️🇻🇳➡️Vladivostok➡️..https://t.co/yOxJdrlOLspic.twitter.com/E1uCtEFEXx
As part of the official program, the commander of the Smolny gave a tour of the vessel to Malabo's senior naval officials. The visit included an inspection of the ship's living quarters – where 15 Tanzanian cadets currently studying in Russian naval academies are also housed – as well as the command bridge and medical bay with the onboard operating room and dental clinic.
This visit follows the Smolny's 2024 port tour across several African countries, including Cameroon, Benin, the Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Namibia, and Angola.
In recent years, Russia has dispatched various naval assets to African ports as part of a broader push to deepen military cooperation and maritime outreach.
In October, the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov docked at the port of Bizerte in Tunisia to mark the 100th anniversary of a stay in Tunisia by the Russian squadron.
Last June, two Russian warships, the Slava-class guided missile cruiser Varyag and the Udaloy-class frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov, arrived at the Libyan naval base in order to strengthen cooperation and coordination between the two countries' fleets.
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Russia Today
6 days ago
- Russia Today
Russian training warship arrives in African state
Russian naval training ship the Smolny has docked in Equatorial Guinea for its second official visit, the African Initiative news agency reported on Sunday. The vessel, part of Russia's Baltic Fleet, was received in the capital Malabo by senior officers of the Equatorial Guinean Navy, Russian Ambassador Karen Chalyan, and embassy staff. Unlike previous deployments, this year's voyage for the Smolny begins in Equatorial Guinea and will include stops in South Africa, Tanzania, Sao Tome and Principe, the Republic of the Congo, and Vietnam, before concluding in Vladivostok, Russia, in late September. The ship is carrying around 400 personnel, including 200 naval cadets enrolled in at-sea training. During the Malabo stopover, the cadets are expected to take part in military and cultural events, including a parade, friendly football match, and meetings with local Russians. The Baltic Fleet's training ship "Smolny" (Project 887) arrived at the port of Malabo, Equatorial Guinea ./July 20/Next:🇸🇹➡️🇨🇩➡️🇿🇦➡️🇹🇿➡️🇻🇳➡️Vladivostok➡️.. As part of the official program, the commander of the Smolny gave a tour of the vessel to Malabo's senior naval officials. The visit included an inspection of the ship's living quarters – where 15 Tanzanian cadets currently studying in Russian naval academies are also housed – as well as the command bridge and medical bay with the onboard operating room and dental clinic. This visit follows the Smolny's 2024 port tour across several African countries, including Cameroon, Benin, the Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Namibia, and Angola. In recent years, Russia has dispatched various naval assets to African ports as part of a broader push to deepen military cooperation and maritime outreach. In October, the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov docked at the port of Bizerte in Tunisia to mark the 100th anniversary of a stay in Tunisia by the Russian squadron. Last June, two Russian warships, the Slava-class guided missile cruiser Varyag and the Udaloy-class frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov, arrived at the Libyan naval base in order to strengthen cooperation and coordination between the two countries' fleets.
Russia Today
13-07-2025
- Russia Today
Meet the Frenchman who became Russian nobility – and the Russian exile who charmed de Gaulle
'My life – what a novel!' Napoleon is said to have exclaimed. Two lesser-known men might have echoed that sentiment: a French-born Russian named Traversay, and a Russian-born Frenchman named Peshkov. Opposite in origin, parallel in destiny – their lives form a curious symmetry. All but forgotten by modern reference books, Jean-Baptiste de Traversay – known in Russia as Ivan Ivanovich – was among the most capable naval commanders of his era. The Russian version of his name isn't a footnote, but a clue: his story was anything but typical. Born in 1754 to a family of naval officers on the Caribbean island of Martinique, Traversay was just five when he was sent to France. Following family tradition, he studied naval warfare in Rochefort and Brest. For a marquis, the life of a junior officer ferrying cargo between France and the colonies was hardly glamorous. But his fortunes changed in 1778, when France joined the American colonies in their war against Britain. During the American War of Independence, Traversay commanded several captured British ships. After the pivotal Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, he took charge of the Iris, a vessel the British had previously seized from the Americans. It was the Iris that carried the ceasefire to British-occupied New York. In 1786, at just 32 years old, he was promoted to captain of the first rank. When the French Revolution broke out, Traversay was back in Martinique. As the navy disintegrated, so did his future in France. He fled with his family to Switzerland for safety. He would never again see the palm trees of his childhood. Then came the unexpected twist. While contemplating, perhaps with some disbelief, the Swiss mountains, the lifelong sailor received a surprising invitation – from another French émigré, Admiral Nassau-Siegen, not exactly known as Catherine the Great's finest naval mind. The Russian court was looking for foreign talent, and in 1791 Traversay arrived in Saint Petersburg. Almost immediately, he was made a major general and rear admiral in the Imperial Navy. But his appointment didn't last long. The Russian Navy, eager to emulate the British Royal Navy, soon reinstated its English-born officers. Traversay, once welcomed, was now a redundancy. He was dispatched to Coblenz in the Holy Roman Empire, where French royalist exiles had gathered, to act as a liaison between the empress and the counter-revolutionary forces. It was, in short, a return to dry land – and to tedium. Unsurprisingly, the assignment didn't suit a man who had spent more than two decades at sea. By 1793, he was back in Russia, this time commanding a flotilla at the naval fortress of Rochensalm (modern-day Kotka, Finland). Soon after, he was appointed military governor of the fortress, tasked with guarding against any renewed threat from Sweden. Under Catherine's successors, Paul I and Alexander I, Traversay's stature rose again. In 1802, Alexander promoted him to admiral and placed him in command of the Black Sea Fleet, while also naming him governor of Kherson province. The strategic naval ports of Nikolaev and Sevastopol fell under his authority. His final battle came in 1807, during the Russo-Turkish War, when he and Admiral Pustoshkin led the siege and destruction of Anapa, a fortress on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Traversay's reputation had grown to the point that, following the Franco-Russian treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon himself invited him to return to France and rebuild the navy. Naval warfare was one of the few arenas in which Napoleon was not at his best. He even asked Traversay to name his conditions. But the marquis refused. His loyalty, by then, belonged entirely to Russia. In 1809, he was recalled to Saint Petersburg to serve as Minister of the Navy. The boy from Martinique, once ferrying cargo across the Atlantic, had risen to the highest level of Russian government. Before Napoleon's invasion in 1812, Traversay had become a subject of the Russian Empire and restructured the Baltic fleet. After the Napoleonic Wars, Russia's economy was in shambles, and the Navy's budget was slashed. The Baltic fleet could no longer train in open waters, and Traversay had to confine operations to the far eastern edge of the Gulf of Finland. The area became known, not without irony, as 'Markizova Luzha' – the Marquis's Puddle. Yet even with limited means, Traversay looked outward. He championed Russian expeditions into the Arctic and Antarctic. Otto von Kotzebue explored the Pacific from Kamchatka to the Sandwich Islands; Bellingshausen discovered and named the Traversay Islands; and Russian expeditions charted the Bering Strait and the Arctic coastline of Alaska. In 1821, already in his late sixties, Traversay asked to retire. Alexander I refused – but allowed him to leave the capital and run naval affairs from his country estate, 120 kilometers outside Saint Petersburg. For the next seven years, Russia's navy would be administered far from any sea. Only under Nicholas I, in 1828, was Traversay finally permitted to step down – after more than 18 years as the empire's highest-ranking naval officer. Just over fifty years after Traversay's death, in another province of the former Russian Empire, a boy was born whose life would follow the same arc – only in reverse. Zinovy Mikhailovich Sverdlov was born in 1884 in Nizhny Novgorod, the eldest son of a relatively well-off Jewish family steeped in revolutionary ideals. His younger brother, Yakov, would become a key figure in Vladimir Lenin's inner circle – widely believed to have played a central role in the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Zinovy, by contrast, was the black sheep. Restless and reckless, he preferred roaming the streets of Nizhny Novgorod and loitering along the Volga to sitting in a classroom. That changed when he met the writer Maxim Gorky, who took the spirited teenager under his wing. As Gorky's secretary, Zinovy followed him across Russia, absorbing his politics, literature, and theatrical experiments – and sharing his brushes with arrest and imprisonment. He also developed a reputation as a charming womanizer. In 1902, Gorky formally adopted him. Zinovy was baptized and took his adoptive father's real surname: Peshkov. With the Russo-Japanese War looming in 1904, Peshkov had little interest in being drafted. So he left – wandering through Finland, England, Sweden, Canada, and then across the Pacific, from San Francisco to New Zealand. In 1907, he reunited with Gorky in Italy. The writer had founded what came to be known as the 'School of Capri' – a quasi-utopian circle of artists, exiles, and revolutionaries who gathered at his villa on the island. Among the regulars were opera star Fyodor Chaliapin and a rising Bolshevik named Vladimir Lenin. It was a formative time for Peshkov. He absorbed ideas, made connections, and observed the revolutionaries up close – remaining, however, immune to Lenin's particular brand of charisma. While on Capri, he married briefly, but domestic life didn't suit him. Peshkov remained, above all, a seeker of adventure – and of women. When World War I broke out in August 1914, Peshkov made a baffling move – one that would define the rest of his life. Though he had no real ties to France, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Fluent in Russian, French, English, Italian, and German, he was a natural fit for a unit that drew men from across the globe. He was quickly given command of a squad. But his time on the front was short. In May 1915, a bullet shattered his right arm during combat. The only way to save his life was amputation. Decorated for bravery, Corporal Peshkov was formally discharged. But by 1916, he volunteered again – this time 'for the duration of the war.' The battlefield, however, was only the beginning. In Paris, Peshkov caught the attention of Philippe Berthelot, a senior diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Struck by the one-armed legionnaire's charisma and multilingual talents, Berthelot sent him to Washington to assist with French efforts to rally American support for the war. Then came 1917 – and revolution. The French government dispatched a mission to Kerensky's provisional government in Petrograd, hoping to keep Russia in the fight against Germany. Peshkov returned to his homeland, and to Maxim Gorky and his family – staunch supporters of the revolution, unlike him. But soon came the Bolsheviks, the October coup, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the Eastern Front. Paris had no illusions about Lenin's government. Eager to support the anti-Bolshevik cause, France sent its trusted Russian agent to advise the White Armies. Peshkov traveled from one front to another – from Ataman Semenov in Vladivostok to Admiral Kolchak in Siberia to General Wrangel in the Caucasus. But the Red Army, under Trotsky's command, proved unstoppable. Despite his military assignments, Peshkov never quite left behind his taste for pleasure. After the Russian Civil War, he returned from the Caucasus with a new companion – Princess and socialite Salomea Andronikova, who introduced him to the salons of Parisian artists, aristocrats, and intellectuals. But the charms of 1920s Paris were only a brief interlude. In 1922, Peshkov was sent to French Morocco to join Marshal Lyautey, the colony's military commander. Still officially Russian (he would become a French citizen in 1923), he had little formal command experience. Lyautey reportedly said of him: 'He was a great soldier, but never really a military man.' Yet nothing ever seemed to intimidate Peshkov. He was wounded again in battle – this time in the leg – and joked that fate had struck him 'for the sake of symmetry.' His unusual career as a soldier-diplomat grew steadily in North Africa and the Middle East. By the time World War II broke out, he was still posted in the colonies. When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, he made his way to London and joined the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. The two men had never met. De Gaulle took his time before assigning Peshkov a mission. First, he sent him to South Africa to coordinate weapons shipments; then to West Africa to rally French colonies to the Free French cause. There remained one continent Peshkov hadn't touched: Asia. De Gaulle sent him to China to meet with Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic of China, locked in a brutal struggle against both Japanese forces and Communist guerillas. Peshkov impressed his hosts so thoroughly that in 1944 he was appointed French ambassador to China. Two years later, he became ambassador to Japan. The once-rowdy boy from provincial Russia now found himself decorating General Douglas MacArthur with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor – France's highest distinction, created by Napoleon himself. In 1950, Peshkov left Japan and settled permanently in Paris. Two years later, he was himself awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor – France's highest distinction – for a second time. Charles de Gaulle wrote to him: 'You have had a beautiful and noble career, my dear general. As for me, I can assure you that you were the right man at the right moment, wherever duty called. And I will add – you did it with style.' De Gaulle had a deep admiration for the 'magnificent one-armed man,' as Peshkov's soldiers had once called him. When the general returned to power in 1958, he gave the aging diplomat several final missions. The most delicate came in 1964. France had decided to recognize Mao's People's Republic of China – but wished to inform Chiang Kai-shek, in exile on Taiwan, with dignity and respect. Peshkov was the natural choice. Ivan Ivanovich Traversay died in 1831, in Luga near Saint Petersburg. Zinovy Peshkov died in Paris in 1966. Both had served the country of their choice – not for years, but for decades. In this age of renewed suspicion and closed doors, it may be hard to imagine a French admiral building Russia's navy – or a Russian exile representing France before Chiang Kai-shek. And yet, it happened. Not once, but twice. The lives of Jean-Baptiste de Traversay and Zinovy Peshkov remind us that for all the rivalry and political rupture between France and Russia, the ties between the two run deeper than we often care to admit. Across oceans, ideologies, and empires, these two men chose loyalty over birthplace, service over nationhood, and meaning over certainty. Perhaps the past still holds a map to rediscovering what was never fully lost.
Russia Today
12-06-2025
- Russia Today
Python rescued from electric fence in South Africa (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
With unwavering dedication to conservation, a python ensnared in electric clear-vu fencing at a secret conservation site was successfully freed and given CPR. In a remarkable display of teamwork and quick thinking, security officers, technicians, Durban snake rescuer Nick Evans, and veterinarian Dr Carla Goede came together last week to rescue the python that was entangled in the electric fence while trying to squeeze through. Evans said the electric fence triggered the alarm, and security responded. The first officer on the scene ran back into the bush to get some sticks and tried wedging the electric cables off the python until help arrived. 'Clever thinking,' Evans remarked. He said more security officers arrived, but not much could be done while the electric fence was on. This prompted a call for technicians, who rushed to help. 'Meanwhile, Carla and I had been called, and were on our way, desperately hoping not to arrive to a dead python. Electric fences frequently kill pythons,' Evans said. 'When we arrived, we had no rescue work to do. The technicians had arrived promptly, switched the fence off, and security managed to untangle the python.' Evans said it was astonishing how these snakes manage to squeeze through clear-vu fences. He also said it was remarkable how security managed to pull that off. 'At first, we were delighted with this good news. However, we then saw the state of the python; he was lifeless,' Evans said. 'Carla, being a vet, immediately started feeling for a heartbeat. It had one, but it was very faint. She started rubbing and massaging it, just about giving the poor python CPR. 'Once the heart rate improved slightly, we put it in a box and carried it to the car.' Evans said Goede cradled the python on her lap as she did with the last python they had entangled in a fence. She provided warmth for the snake. The car heater was also on for the drive home, but the python remained still. In the morning, they hoped for good news. 'First thing the next morning, we woke up and went to open the box, which we had stuck a heating pad against. To our relief and joy, the python was alive! Its tongue was flickering, and it was moving. What a massive relief!' Evans exclaimed. In the days that followed, they decided the python was fit for release and set it free. 'We cannot thank the security and technicians enough for what they did for this snake. If they hadn't acted so fast, this python would certainly have died. These guys care so much about the pythons in this area and have rescued a few,' Evans said. 'They're not full-time, professional snake-catchers. They've had some training, had quite a bit of experience now, but the rest is dedication and bravery.'First published by IOL
