Day: November 8, 2019

More than 30,000 people have been found guilty of violating Russian protest law over the past 15 years, according to a study by the independent OVD-Info police-monitoring group. The study looked at cases involving Article 20.2 of Russia’s Administrative Code, known as the “protest article.” Since 2004, the text of Article 20.2 has grown fourfold,…

Russia plans to ask Latvia to extradite Russian journalist Alexander Shvarev to face charges of slandering oligarch Alisher Usmanov, Interfax reported Friday. Authorities in April raided the Moscow offices of Russia’s Rosbalt news outlet, where Shvarev works, in connection with a defamation lawsuit brought by Usmanov. Shvarev is undergoing medical treatment in Riga, according to…

Fans of CSKA Moscow clashed with fans of Hungary’s Ferencváros TC ahead of the two teams’ UEFA Europa League match in Budapest, as seen in videos posted on social media. The first clash happened in the Budapest metro Thursday, when CSKA fans packed metro cars, then broke glass bottles and doused the police with water. Стачки…

More than a quarter of young Russians have never heard of the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, the independent Levada Center pollster said ahead of its 30th anniversary. The Berlin Wall divided the German city’s Soviet-occupied eastern sector from American, British and French-occupied West Berlin when it was built in 1961. Communist…

Professor Alexei Kotov greets his colleagues as he navigates the poorly-lit corridors of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution in the south of Moscow, where he has been a leading researcher and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since Soviet times. “This whole street was built during the Stalinist period, and I don’t think…

Around 56 million Russians across 143 cities are breathing bad air, the Russian state weather and environment service said in its annual atmospheric pollution report. Roshydromet assessed the concentration of pollutants across a total of 246 Russian cities and towns in 2018. It noted that 89% of all monitored cities exceeded pollution norms that year. …

The Russian financial sector is “more stable and more transparent than ever before,” according to the governor of Russia’s Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina. The country’s banks are finally becoming an attractive option for investors, and the sector is now a “partner for real companies and the real economy,” Nabiullina told an Association of European Businesses…

Russia on Friday began selling tickets for direct train journeys to Crimea, bypassing Ukraine and further cementing its 2014 annexation of the peninsula. Direct trains from Moscow and St. Petersburg will start to run in late December, replacing the route that ran through Ukraine before the annexation. Russia already opened a road section of its…

Bribe allegations leveled in court against a VTB Group executive may complicate the Russian state-owned bank’s attempts to recoup a $535 million loan that’s part of a major debt scandal in Mozambique. A New York court heard testimony last month that the VTB executive in charge of the deal, Makram Abboud, took $2 million in…

One year after the start of the yellow-vest protests in France, many locals are dismissing traditional French media as “fake news” and are tuning in to a new favorite channel — RT (formerly Russia Today). How did a channel that is financed by the Kremlin and accused of being an arm of Russian propaganda become…

Russia has deployed military helicopters to patrol an area near Syria’s border with Turkey in order to help protect Russia military police working on the ground, Interfax said on Friday. Turkish and Russian forces are holding joint patrols in northeastern Syria to monitor an agreement struck by Moscow and Ankara after Turkey launched an offensive…

Russia’s plans to cancel 20,000 Soviet-era laws and regulations may be hampered as officials cannot find the original documents and wording of the relevant decrees. The Justice Ministry wrote to the government yesterday requesting an extension to an original Nov. 15 deadline for the compilation of a list of laws still in force since Soviet…

French President Emmanuel Macron warned fellow European countries that NATO is dying, citing a lack of coordination and U.S. unpredictability under President Donald Trump, comments that were welcomed in Moscow. In an interview with The Economist published Thursday, Macron expressed doubt about U.S.-led NATO’s security maxim that an attack on one ally is an attack…

Key MH17 witness Vladimir Tsemakh is ready to provide testimony to Dutch and Ukrainian investigators about the plane tragedy, but only on pro-Russian separatist territory in eastern Ukraine, his lawyer has said. Tsemakh, who was captured by Ukrainian forces and later returned to Russia for fighting on the side of pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass,…