Day: April 27, 2020

Six-time short-track Olympic champion Viktor Ahn announced Monday he is retiring due to repeated injuries.  Ahn, 34, was born in South Korea but became a naturalized Russian before the 2014 Sochi Olympics where he won three gold medals.  In a letter published by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency, he said permanent knee pain and…

The mayor of Prague has said he is under heightened police protection the day after Czech media reported on an alleged Russian plot to poison him. Zdenek Hrib confirmed the news in a Monday interview with the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station. On Sunday, the Czech news website Respekt, citing anonymous intelligence sources, reported that an individual…

Russian doctors mistrustful of official coronavirus data have launched an unofficial list of their colleagues who have died from the virus. The news comes as a growing number of hospitals across Russia have reported Covid-19 outbreaks among doctors and patients in recent weeks.  At least 69 Russian doctors have died from coronavirus-related complications as of…

Russian and Belarussian doctors mistrustful of official coronavirus data have launched an unofficial list of their colleagues who have died from the virus. The news comes as a growing number of hospitals across Russia have reported Covid-19 outbreaks among doctors and patients in recent weeks.  At least 69 doctors in the two countries have died…

President Vladimir Putin’s “business tsar” has called for the government to end the economic lockdown and reopen the economy. Boris Titov, the president’s business ombudsman, announced Monday he will organize an online protest Friday calling for businesses to be reopened, as frustration at the government’s economic response to the coronavirus grows throughout Russia’s business community.…

Nurses have quit en masse from Russia’s top coronavirus hospital in Moscow over poor working conditions and low wages, the investigative news website Open Media reported Monday. A former nurse who said she quit the Kommunarka hospital after almost two months told the outlet that more than a dozen nursing staff had left in that…

Russian paratroopers in the Arctic have carried out a test landing from an altitude of 10,000 meters in what officials say is a historic exercise. “Today, for the first time in world history, we conducted a group landing of personnel with special parachute systems in Arctic conditions from a height of 10,000 meters using oxygen…

Russia re-entered the world’s top five defense spending nations in 2019 after briefly falling to sixth place the previous year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s latest annual report published Monday. Global defense spending saw its highest one-year increase since 2010 last year, rising by 3.6% to  $1.917 trillion, the Swedish think…

President Vladimir Putin is not waiting out the coronavirus pandemic in a bunker, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday. Putin began working remotely at the start of April, a week after visiting Russia’s main coronavirus hospital in Moscow whose chief doctor tested positive for the deadly virus soon after the president’s visit. “There are always…

Russia will begin drawing up lockdown exit plans to switch the economy back on, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said Monday. In a meeting with ministers, Mishustin ordered various government departments to start working out how businesses could get back to work once the coronavirus pandemic becomes less severe, news site RBC reported. “As the situation…

The head of a Siberian hospital repurposed for coronavirus patients is in critical condition after she fell from the hospital building following a conference call with health officials, local media reported Saturday. Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, 47, fell from a fifth-floor window of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Hospital for War Veterans after talks with the head of the…

A Russian Orthodox Church official has urged women not to reprimand their husbands during coronavirus lockdown in order to avoid domestic conflict — and to punish themselves if they do. Bishop Panteleimon’s remarks come three years after Russia scrapped criminal punishments for first-time domestic abuse offenses and as the coronavirus pandemic has stalled efforts to…

A prisoner in penal colony no. 1 in the city of Yaroslavl has less than three months left of his three-year sentence for drug possession. But with the coronavirus raging around Russia, July 15 feels like an eternity away.  “It’s impossible to keep any sort of distance from each other here,” he said. “The guards…

As the new coronavirus that has killed more than 206,000 people worldwide continues to spread, Russia has stepped up its measures to slow the pandemic’s spread within its borders. There have been 87,147 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 794 deaths. MT The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia as of April…

The majority of Russia’s cases are in Moscow, although Covid-19 patients have been confirmed in every one of Russia’s 85 regions and the spread is accelerating outside the capital. Since March 30, all of Moscow’s 12 million residents have been ordered to stay in their homes with few exceptions. City officials have warned the capital…

The Russian economy has been rocked by the coronavirus outbreak, and fears the fresh OPEC+ oil production pact between Russia and Saudi Arabia will not be enough to address a historic fall in demand. The turmoil has shocked traders around the world and resulted in sharp volatility on the Russian stock markets and swings in…