Day: November 25, 2019

Russia should be hit with a four-year Olympic ban and barred from all world championships for the manipulation of data retrieved from a tainted Moscow laboratory, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Monday. The recommendations were made by WADA’s independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) and will be put to the executive committee at meetings in…

Russia should be hit with a four-year Olympic ban and barred from all world championships for the manipulation of data retrieved from a tainted Moscow laboratory, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Monday. The recommendations were made by WADA’s independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) and will be put to the executive committee at meetings in…

Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff Valentin Yumashev has made headlines for his candid interview about President Vladimir Putin’s career in the late 1990s. Shortly after Yumashev’s appointment as unsalaried adviser appeared on the Kremlin’s website in June 2018, the Kremlin revealed that he had actually served in that role for 18 years…

Cold War sleuths have discovered a fourth Soviet spy within the United States’ atomic bomb project whose work helped the Soviet Union end Washington’s monopoly on nuclear arms, The New York Times reported Saturday. The Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb just 49 months after the U.S. detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in…

A Moscow deputy has called for President Vladimir Putin to block a prominent homeless NGO from opening a shelter in Russia’s capital, warning of the organization’s foreign backing and the spread of diseases. The Nochlezhka homeless charity, founded in St. Petersburg in 1990, has faced strident criticism from Muscovites opposed to its plans to open…

At least eight suspected Russian intelligence officers traveled to Bulgaria around the time a local arms dealer was poisoned in 2015, the investigative outlet Bellingcat reported on Saturday. Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev survived the April 28, 2015, poisoning attempt in Sofia. Investigators reopened Gebrev’s case in 2018 when he linked his poisoning with that…

Officials from Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya have called on members of its diaspora to stop their countrymen from “disgracing the Chechen people,” the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported Monday. This is the first time that the Chechen diasporas of the U.S. and especially Canada have been called upon to stop fellow Chechens who behave…

Turkey will test a component of its newly acquired Russian air defense system, a step that risks escalating a dispute with the U.S. and touching off possible sanctions. The lira reversed gains. Military aircraft will be used in the capital Ankara on Monday and Tuesday during the testing of the S-400 system’s radar-detection equipment, a…

Four out of five women convicted for premeditated murder in Russia had been defending themselves from domestic violence, according to machine-learning research published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and the Mediazona news website Monday. Critics say Russia’s 2017 decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence has eroded protections for women, while supporters defend it for…

Konstantin Malofeyev rose to fame in Russia’s corporate wars of the late 2000s. He became one of the most powerful people in telecommunications, but the devoutly Orthodox tycoon almost lost everything in a bitter dispute with state-owned bank VTB. In 2014, he was sanctioned by the West for providing support to rebels in eastern Ukraine.…

On the morning of Nov. 11, 36-year-old Lyudmila Sokolova gathered her two children into her arms and jumped out of the window of her ninth-floor apartment in northeast Moscow. Her baby girl died with her and her six-year-old son was hospitalized in serious condition. Sokolova had called an ambulance four times that morning because her…