Month: October 2019

President Vladimir Putin is on a mission to wean Russia off foreign food and modernize the dairy industry, where milking is still often done by hand. To do that, he’s getting help from Europe. Five years after the food embargo banning Dutch gouda and Italian parmesan, Russian companies are trucking in thousands of black-and-white holsteins…

Three Russian military helicopters have landed in the Tabqa military airfield in Syria that the United States abandoned earlier this month, Russian state media reported Tuesday. Syrian government forces took control of the airfield last week when U.S.-led coalition forces left the base as part of the U.S. withdrawal of troops from northern Syria. The airfield had…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has accused Russia, among other countries, of trying to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election through the social network. In at least the third instance this year, Facebook announced Monday that it had shut down one Facebook and 50 Instagram accounts it linked to Russia’s infamous “troll farm.” The U.S.…

Soil samples taken along the route of a planned highway in Moscow are emitting radiation levels that pose cancer risks to residents, Greenpeace Russia said Monday. Activists have warned that the eight-lane highway, which authorities hope to start building next year and finish by 2024, will release buried radioactive dust into the air and the…

President Vladimir Putin has appointed state television presenter Valery Fadeyev as the new head of the presidential human rights council and expelled several prominent liberals from the consultative body. Mikhail Fedotov, the council’s current head, has been dismissed from his position because of his age, Putin’s decree signed Monday said. Fadeyev, who hosted a Channel…

A former journalist may be among the dozens of Russian mercenaries believed to have died while fighting in Libya’s civil war last month, the Znak.com news website reported Monday. Previous reporting said that more than 100 Russian mercenaries arrived at a base in Libya in early September and up to 35 may have died in…

Russia is opening more new floor space in shopping malls than any other country in Europe, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield has found. In the first half of 2019, around 200,000 square meters of new mall space was opened in Russia — equivalent to 27 football fields and accounting for nearly one-quarter of all…

Children and teenagers in St. Petersburg are dying from cancer almost 680% more than they were 10 years ago, according to a new report by the region’s anti-cancer program. Dozens of Russian regions have cut spending on cancer treatments in recent years amid rising costs. Advocacy groups have long campaigned for easier access to cancer…

Russia wants to make its Arctic waters more attractive to shippers than the Suez Canal and could be willing to compensate for potential risks to make that happen. President Vladimir Putin has made development of the Arctic one of Russia’s top long-term priorities and huge projects to export liquefied natural gas via the Northern Sea…

Shares in Russian tech giant Yandex have jumped higher on reports Russia will soften proposals to limit foreign ownership of strategically important tech firms. The government is now considering placing a 50%-minus-one cap on the number of shares that can be held by non-Russian investors — up from the 20% limit proposed in a draft…

Billionaire Elon Musk appeared at a government-run small-business forum in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, making good on a promise after its organizers invited him by billboard. “What is the point of any company? To produce any product or service that is useful to other people,” Musk told delegates via video. “Starting a company…

Turkey’s offensive in Syria has left at least 12 prisons for foreign fighters unguarded, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Monday, warning that hundreds of escaped fighters could return to their home countries. Turkey launched an operation against Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria earlier this month after President Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing U.S.…

A member of an elite Chechen police unit has killed a Russian special-forces police officer after an altercation at a training course in the North Caucasus region, Interfax reported Saturday. The two servicemen reportedly got into a fight during advanced training courses at an Interior Ministry university in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. The Chechen policeman is…

At least 15 gold miners were killed on Saturday when a dam collapsed, flooding an artisanal mining encampment in a remote part of Siberia, officials said. Heavy rains had weakened the dam and water broke through, sweeping away several cabins where the artisan miners lived, about 160 kilometers south of the city of Krasnoyarsk. President…

A State Duma commission on foreign interference says it has found violations of election law by six foreign and independent outlets operating in Russia, Interfax reported Friday. Russian lawmakers created the commission after this summer’s wave of opposition protests in Moscow. At the time, Russia had accused Germany’s Deutsche Welle news outlet, the U.S. Embassy…

President Vladimir Putin supervised major test launches of ballistic and cruise missiles on land, air and sea Thursday. The three-day Grom (Thunder)-2019 exercises involved five submarines, more than 100 aircraft, 200 missile launchers and 12,000 Russian troops. They aimed to test the readiness of Russia’s command structure and how efficiently its orders are carried out…

Russian intelligence services are actively recruiting students from the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the independent Proekt online outlet reported in an investigation Thursday. MGIMO is considered one of Russia’s elite academic institutions, training future government leaders and diplomats, as well as businesspeople, journalists and thinkers. Its alleged ties to Russia’s secret services came…

Russia plans to pay more attention to the impact climate change is having on its vast permafrost area. Thawing of once permanently-frozen ground covering more than half of Russia is putting buildings, pipelines and other infrastructure at risk of damage.  With the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, that’s a…

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, warned on Friday that the world was drifting into a dangerous era of militarized politics and appealed to Moscow and Washington to sit down for urgent nuclear arms control talks. Gorbachev, whose 1980s arms control push and democracy-oriented reforms helped end the Cold War, made the comments to the…

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul believes President Vladimir Putin is fighting against the tide of history and that Russian society will not “tolerate disenfranchisement and oppression forever.” In an interview with The Moscow Times touching on topics from Putin through sanctions to arms treaties, Barack Obama’s former man in Moscow said it would…

Economists have raised questions over a surprisingly healthy batch of economic data released by the Russian statistics agency Rosstat. Statistics published Thursday evening showed an unexpected and significant jump in real disposable incomes of an annual rate of 3% in the third quarter of the year, off the back of a 0.1% fall in the…

Russia’s consumer-protection watchdog has drafted a bill to phase out production of single-use plastic bags, the pro-Kremlin Izvestia tabloid reported Friday. Greenpeace estimates that more than 26 billion plastic bags are handed out annually in shops across Russia. State polling has shown this year that almost one in four Russians are willing to give up…

Ecuador’s interior minister has said that Russian IP addresses were used in online attacks against the South American country’s government amid weeks of protests against austerity measures. Ecuador‘s President Lenin Moreno declared a state of emergency Oct. 4 as massive nationwide protests broke out against the elimination of four-decade-old fuel subsidies. On Monday, Moreno officially…

Two defendants standing trial in an extremism case slit their wrists in court on Thursday, local media reported. In March 2018, Russian prosecutors accused 10 members of the Novoye Velichiye (New Greatness) group, most of whom are in their late teens, with extremist activities. Prosecutors say the defendants were part of a Telegram chat group…

Russia’s Natural Resources and Ecology Ministry has called for action to protect wild reindeer on the Taymyr Peninsula in the country’s Far North because the population has halved over the past two decades.    There are now 400,000-450,000 of the animals in the region, down from 1 million in 2000, the ministry said in a statement…

The United States has recently shared intelligence with Russia about a terrorist plot, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence agency said Thursday. FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov’s remarks come almost two years after news that the CIA helped Russia foil a terror attack in St. Petersburg. The FSB said it detained seven Islamic…

Investigators in the city of Novgorod have launched a criminal case into the alleged rape of a local female journalist by a chief editor, more than two weeks after she had first filed a report about the incident. It is the latest case in Russia in which a woman has alleged sexual assault by a…

Oleg Sentsov was the most high-profile prisoner among the 35 Ukrainian detainees who returned home last month in exchange for 35 prisoners wanted by Russia. The 43-year-old filmmaker was detained in Crimea in 2014 and sentenced to 20 years in a Russian maximum security prison on terrorism charges he says were trumped up. The European…

The Russian government has drastically watered-down its new package of climate change legislation after push-back from the country’s leading businesses, Russian daily Kommersant reported. Plans for quotas on carbon emissions at Russia’s largest companies, a new national carbon trading system and penalties for the biggest polluters have now been scrapped. Instead, Russia will only go…

President Vladimir Putin is seeking to withdraw Russia’s recognition of a Geneva Conventions provision on protecting victims of war. Spurred by Russian lawmakers, Putin issued a decree Wednesday revoking the Soviet Union’s statement accompanying its 1989 adoption of the additional protocol to the conventions. Adopted in 1977, Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions aims…

The Kremlin on Thursday questioned the tone of a letter sent by U.S. President Donald Trump to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which it called highly unusual for correspondence between heads of state. The White House on Wednesday released the Oct. 9 letter, in which Trump urged Erdogan: “Don’t be a tough guy” and…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to monitor the online behavior of young Russians and to produce “moral and spiritual education” content for them. Young Russians have been targeted by several government initiatives in recent years, including a ban on minors attending protests and efforts to provide them with a military and patriotic…

Russia said on Thursday it would issue a formal note of protest to the United States after police caught three U.S. diplomats in what it said was a restricted area near a closed military testing site. The diplomats were stopped by police after they arrived by train on Monday and were sent back, the Russian…

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has denied reports that senior officials and their relatives have been tortured in secret prisons in his republic for showing disrespect and disloyalty to him and his family. The independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported this week that members of Kadyrov’s inner circle have been tortured since August and forced to confess…

Russian authorities are drawing up plans to require all visiting foreigners to submit fingerprints upon arrival, the country’s deputy police chief has said, as experts warned that the move would hurt tourism. Russia has prosecuted more than 30,000 foreigners so far in 2019 for violating migration law, Russia’s Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Gorovoy said at…

Russia removed three U.S. diplomats from a train near the site of a mysterious military testing accident on Monday because they did not have special permits to be in the area, Interfax reported Wednesday. Russia’s state nuclear agency, Rosatom, has acknowledged that five of its nuclear workers were killed in an Aug. 8 explosion during…

The Swedish navy spent almost $2 million hunting for a Russian submarine off the coast of Stockholm that turned out to be a broken buoy, Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet newspaper has reported. Sweden said in 2014 it had proof that a foreign submarine had been operating illegally in the Stockholm archipelago after suspicions sparked the country’s…

The Trump administration dispatched its top officials to Turkey on Wednesday for emergency talks to try to persuade Ankara to halt an assault on northern Syria, while Russian troops swept into territory abandoned by Washington in a sudden retreat. Robert O’Brien, White House national security adviser since last month, arrived in Turkey aiming to meet Foreign…

Russian police have arrested five more people on suspicion of assaulting police officers at opposition protests this summer, marking a new wave of trials in the so-called “Moscow case.” Russians took to the streets nearly every weekend this summer after a slew of opposition politicians were barred from taking part in Moscow’s local election. The…

Russian opposition activist Lyubov Sobol has been named one of the world’s 100 most influential women by the BBC, becoming the only woman from Russia to be included in the list. The list published Wednesday names 100 women from around the world who “give us their vision of what life could look like in 2030.” Sobol,…

Russian forces have crossed the Euphrates river in northern Syria and reached areas outside the city of Kobani, pushing eastward with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Syrian Observatory said on Wednesday. The troop movement comes days after the SDF cut a deal with the Syrian government for army troops to deploy at the border…

Russia’s security agencies have identified more than 5,500 Russian citizens who have traveled abroad to fight alongside terrorists, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) said Wednesday. “Criminal cases against almost 4,000 of them have been opened,” the state-run RIA news agency quoted FSB director Alexander Bortnikov as saying at a meeting of security…

This summer, images from Russia of police beating protesters with batons and dragging them off to armored vans flashed across the world’s screens so often they became routine.  Sparked by the arrest of an investigative journalist on fabricated drug charges, the mass rallies then became weekly affairs after opposition politicians were blocked from running in…

Russia is considering banning foreign companies from taking a lead role in designing and building the country’s green energy infrastructure, Russian daily Vedomosti said on Wednesday. New proposals currently being discussed would block contracts for new wind and solar farms, along with other renewable energy production projects, from being awarded to non-Russian entities. Analysts say…