Naval exercises spurred by US support for Ukraine are likely to include port calls in Cuba and Venezuela, says official
Russia plans to send combat vessels into the Caribbean region this summer as part of naval exercises that will probably include port calls in Cuba and possibly stops in Venezuela, a senior US official said on Wednesday.
“As part of Russia’s regular military exercises, we anticipate that this summer, Russia will conduct heightened naval and air activity near the United States. These actions will culminate in a global Russian naval exercise this fall,” the official said.
The US does not see the move involving a relatively small number of vessels and planes as threatening, but the US Navy will monitor the exercises, the official told a small group of reporters.
The Congo is quite common. Articles in front of country names are rare in English, actually quite common in e.g. German, and in any case neither of the two have anything to do with the v vs. na distinction in Russian. Which doesn’t even have articles those are prepositions.
Seriously the “sounds like a province” thing doesn’t make a lick of sense in English. It’s not “The Massachusetts”, “The Ontario”, or “The Tasmania”. Gotta be some phonetic quirk that’s above my paygrade.
That’s because the country’s name is The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I don’t know of any country whose name doesn’t officially include ‘The’ (such as The United States, or The United Kingdom, or the aforementioned Congo) and gets an article superficially added.
The only reason I can think of for Ukraine is that it used to be part of another country and it’s just a holdover of when it was called ‘The Ukrainian Socialist Republic’
As far as the presence of articles (or lack thereof) in Russian, I’m aware, but we aren’t talking about the Russian name of the country, so much as the English.