Year: 2020

Russian journalist and activist Ilya Azar was released Sunday after ten days in detention, his punishment for standing on a solo picket protest. President Vladimir Putin’s government has cracked down on opposition demonstrations, and single-person protests are the only kind allowed without prior permission from the authorities. A court sentenced the 35-year-old journalist and municipal…

There have been 467,673 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 5,859 deaths. June 7: 3 things you need to know today Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has ordered to lift some of Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions starting June 1. All non-food shops and some service sector businesses will be able to re-open, he said. The…

New infections have been steadily dropping since mid-May when officials were reporting daily increases of around 11,000 cases. Officials say Russia’s high virus count is the result of mass testing and that a steady decline in new infections and its low fatality numbers mean the country can begin to return to normal. Yet critics have…

The United States on Saturday offered to help Russia clean up a vast fuel spill that has fouled an Arctic river in northern Siberia. “Saddened to hear about the fuel spill in Norilsk, Russia,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote on Twitter. Saddened to hear about the fuel spill in Norilsk, Russia. Despite our disagreements,…

There have been 458,689 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 5,725 deaths. June 6: 3 things you need to know today Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has ordered to lift some of Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions starting June 1. All non-food shops and some service sector businesses will be able to re-open, he said. The city will…

New infections have been steadily dropping since mid-May when officials were reporting daily increases of around 11,000 cases. Officials say Russia’s high virus count is the result of mass testing and that a steady decline in new infections and its low fatality numbers mean the country can begin to return to normal. Yet critics have…

Young right-wing extremists from Germany are receiving combat training from Russian white supremacists whom the United States has blacklisted as terrorists, Germany’s Focus news magazine reported Friday. The U.S. State Department branded the Russian Imperial Movement as a foreign terrorist organization in April, saying it runs two paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg that have…

Russia’s prosecutor general on Friday ordered a review of hazardous structures built on permafrost after concluding that a huge Arctic fuel spill last week was caused by shifting ground. The office of the prosecutor general said in a statement that a preliminary conclusion of the spill’s causes is the “sagging of the ground and the…

Russia’s Communist Party has launched a campaign urging supporters to vote against a set of constitutional amendments that would allow President Vladimir Putin to stay in power for the next decade and a half. Russians are set to vote on July 1 to approve Putin’s changes to Russia’s basic law that would, among other things,…

The Czech Republic has expelled two Russian diplomats after a Russian embassy employee spread a hoax about a planned poison attack on three Prague politicians, officials said on Friday. In April, Respekt newspaper cited security sources as saying that a Russian national using a diplomatic passport had arrived in Prague carrying ricin, a toxic poison…

Over the past year, Siberia has seen disaster on a biblical scale.  Last spring, forest fires enveloped an area larger than Greece, causing $100 million in damage. In what Greenpeace called a “climate catastrophe,” the fires emitted more carbon dioxide in June alone than Sweden does in an entire year. Then, as those fires were…

Russia has managed to contain a massive diesel spill into a river in the Arctic, a spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry told AFP on Friday. “We have stopped the spread of the petroleum products,” the spokeswoman for the taskforce in charge of the accident clean-up said.  “They are contained in all directions, they are not…

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said he expected metals giant Norilsk Nickel to fully restore the environment after an unprecedented Arctic fuel spill, as responders said they had managed to stop the slick from spreading further. A national-level state of emergency was announced after 21,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled from a reservoir that…

Moscow and central Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region will be able to cast their votes online on a set of constitutional amendments that would allow President Vladimir Putin to extend his rule into the next decade, election officials said Thursday. The vote was originally set for April 22 but was pushed back to July 1 due…

Facebook has started labeling media organizations whose editorial decisions may be under the influence of governments, including Russia, and said it will begin blocking ads from those outlets later this year. The move comes after Facebook faced scrutiny for failing to stem foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election and amid heated debate over how…

There have been 449,834 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 5,528 deaths. June 5: 3 things you need to know today Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has ordered to lift some of Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions starting June 1. All non-food shops and some service sector businesses will be able to re-open, he said. The city…

New infections have been steadily dropping since mid-May when officials were reporting daily increases of around 11,000 cases. Officials say Russia’s high virus count is the result of mass testing and that a steady decline in new infections and its low fatality numbers mean the country can begin to return to normal. Yet critics have…

Tensions flared between Russia and the United States as the Russian military reportedly seeks to expand its presence in U.S.-controlled northeastern Syria, news outlets reported this week. The latest flare-up follows the Russian military’s reported attempt to build a base near the Turkish and Iraqi borders last week. President Vladimir Putin has ordered talks with Russia’s ally…

A court in Russian-annexed Crimea on Thursday sentenced a Jehovah’s Witness to six years in prison for organizing an extremist organisation, in the latest harsh sentence against the Christian movement. Crimea’s Supreme Court at an appeal hearing sentenced Artyom Gerasimov to six years in a penal colony, the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious organization said in a…

Russia plans to start clinical testing of a coronavirus vaccine on paid volunteers from the general public from next week, Vadim Tarasov, the director of the institute in charge of the study told The Moscow Times on Thursday.  According to Tarasov, there will be 50 participants, and those who complete the full trial will be…

Authorities have blocked access to a city in far northern Russia located near the site of last year’s mysterious nuclear testing accident as the coronavirus outbreak there intensified. The governor of the Arkhangelsk region signed an order to close public access to the city of Severodvinsk this Saturday, the city’s press service said Thursday. Severodvinsk…

President Vladimir Putin has ordered the military to set up a field hospital in a Far East Russian region he described as the latest coronavirus hotspot as Russia’s outbreak continues to shift outside Moscow. Putin shifted his focus to the remote Zabaikalsky region of 1 million residents some 5,000 kilometers east of Moscow two weeks…

Russian emergency workers and marine clean-up specialists on Thursday intensified efforts to clean up a major fuel spill that environmentalists say is the first such accident in the Arctic polar region. A diesel reservoir collapsed at a power station outside the northern Siberian city of Norilsk on Friday, releasing 15,000 tons of fuel into a…

For Sasha, a queer, non-binary person from Moscow, the clashes at home first started around age 13 or 14.  “It was basically made clear to me that I’ll never be accepted in my own family if I ‘keep having homosexual tendencies,’” Sasha, now 18, told The Moscow Times. For years they coped with the tension…

The city of Moscow will end up spending a total of 250 billion rubles ($3.1 billion) on fighting the coronavirus outbreak but will lose double that amount in revenue, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Thursday. The epicenter of Russia’s outbreak with over 40% of its 441,108 cases, Moscow allowed shops to reopen and residents to leave…

There have been 441,108 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 5,384 deaths. June 4: 3 things you need to know today Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has ordered to lift some of Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions starting June 1. All non-food shops and some service sector businesses will be able to re-open, he said. The city…

A US military plane carrying 150 donated ventilators to help coronavirus patients landed in Moscow on Thursday in the second such delivery to Russia, the U.S. embassy said. The plane brought the number of U.S.-manufactured ventilators sent by the United States to Russia to 200, after the first delivery arrived two weeks ago. U.S. ambassador…

A massive diesel spill into a Siberian river caused at least 6 billion rubles (more than $76 million) in damages to waterways above the Arctic Circle, Greenpeace Russia said Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin ordered a state of emergency Wednesday five days after more than 20,000 metric tons of diesel fuel spilled into rivers near the…

New infections have been steadily dropping since mid-May when officials were reporting daily increases of around 11,000 cases. Officials say Russia’s high virus count is the result of mass testing and that a steady decline in new infections and its low fatality numbers mean the country can begin to return to normal. Yet critics have…

Russia’s second-largest city St. Petersburg recorded almost 30% more deaths in May 2020 compared to its average May total over the past decade, official data said Wednesday. St. Petersburg saw 6,427 deaths in May this year, about 28% more than the nine-year average of 5,027 for May, according to civil registry data. The figures, first…

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered a state of emergency and criticized a subsidiary of metals giant Norilsk Nickel after a massive diesel spill into a Siberian river. The spill of over 20,000 tons of diesel fuel took place on Friday. A fuel reservoir collapsed at a power plant near the city of Norilsk,…

President Vladimir Putin signed a nuclear deterrence policy document Tuesday which reaffirms Russia’s allowance of first nuclear strikes in retaliation to non-nuclear attacks. Its publication, which has until now has been classified, comes less than a year before the last major U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control treaty is set to expire without extension. The world’s two…

Russian election officials say activists are not allowed to campaign against a package of constitutional amendments that would allow President Vladimir Putin to extend his 20-year rule into the next decade, the RBC news website reported Tuesday. Putin announced the vote will take place on July 1 after the coronavirus outbreak that has infected more…

Cities across the United States have been rocked by a week of protests against police brutality and injustice toward African-Americans that have at times turned violent and destructive. Multiple incidents involving police violence against demonstrators and journalists were broadcast live at riots nationwide following the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in police…

There have been 432,277 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and 5,215 deaths. June 3: 3 things you need to know today Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has ordered to lift some of Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions starting June 1. All non-food shops and some service sector businesses will be able to re-open, he said. The city will…

Russia saw its first coronavirus infection in mid-to-late January, a Moscow city official has said, contradicting official reports which say that Russia’s “patient zero” appearing in March. The statement comes amid reports that China, the country where the pandemic originated, withheld critical information about the new coronavirus from the World Health Organization in the early…

A legal agreement was reached Wednesday between France’s far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen and a Russian firm suing it over a massive unpaid loan, a Moscow court said. “An amicable agreement was reached between the parties. The judge approved it,” a court spokeswoman told AFP after the first hearing into the…

Russian air strikes have hit Syria’s last major rebel bastion for the first time since a March ceasefire came into force, a war monitor said on Wednesday. The Russian strikes on Tuesday evening and at dawn on Wednesday hit an area of the northwest where the boundaries of Hama, Idlib and Latakia provinces meet, the…

One person has died in a fire at a hospital in Russia’s second city St. Petersburg, emergencies services and hospital staff said Wednesday. Bedsheets caught on fire in one of the buildings of the Botkin hospital around 6:00 a.m., first responders told the state-run TASS news agency.  “The patient was alone in the room. There…

New infections have been steadily dropping since mid-May when officials were reporting daily increases of around 11,000 cases. Officials say Russia’s high virus count is the result of mass testing and that a steady decline in new infections and its low fatality numbers mean the country can begin to return to normal. Yet critics have…

Wildfires in Russia have burned across a combined area the size of Greece so far in 2020, surpassing official estimates threefold, Greenpeace Russia said as it braces for blazes to erupt this week and peak next month. Russia’s Federal Forestry Agency has identified 12.3 million acres of wildfires raging across the country’s forests so far…

Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday demanded that Washington “take urgent measures” to stop police violence against journalists, including one for Russian state media. “We are outraged about the ongoing violence used by American law enforcement against international media covering the protests in the U.S., including Russian,” the ministry said in a statement. “We demand that…

A Russian court on Tuesday committed to a mental asylum a Siberian shaman critical of Vladimir Putin, a move rights groups condemned as a repressive move to silence a dissenter. Alexander Gabyshev, a self-styled shaman from Yakutsk, northern Siberia, last year set out to walk from his home to the Kremlin to “banish” the Russian…

It took less than a week after he said Russia’s coronavirus crisis had peaked for President Vladimir Putin to fast-track a vote on constitutional reforms allowing him to serve more Kremlin terms. By pushing ahead with the public vote on July 1 — despite Russia still recording thousands of new cases every day — Putin is looking to…

A video backing constitutional reforms that President Vladimir Putin is putting to a national vote next month sparked widespread criticism Tuesday for its anti-gay message. In the video made by a media group called Patriot linked to U.S.-sanctioned Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, a small boy from a Russian orphanage finds out he is being adopted by…

Local authorities in Siberia have declared a state of emergency after 20,000 metric tons of diesel fuel seeped into a river sparking concerns from environmentalists.  The World Wildlife Fund environmental group on Tuesday praised local efforts to contain the spill with a floating dam, blocking dangerous pollutants from flowing into a lake near the Arctic…