Month: November 2019

President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to meet most of his flagship economic and development goals during his final term without a significant increase in spending and better performance on a host of key indicators, a new report from a government-owned bank said Wednesday. The National Projects program — a $400 billion package of investments covering…

President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to meet most of his flagship economic and development goals during his final term without a significant increase in spending and better performance on a host of key indicators, a new report from a government-owned bank said Wednesday. The National Projects program — a $400 billion package of investments covering…

The widow of a Russian dissident murdered in London has backed a legal challenge to force Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to publish a report on alleged Russian meddling in British politics. The report by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) was cleared by Britain’s security services but Johnson’s office has not yet released it, meaning it…

Russia’s economy will lose hundreds of billions of dollars in potential growth as a result of climate change, a new report published Wednesday showed. In its new climate resilience index, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) calculated that Russia’s GDP will be 3.3% lower in 2050 than it would be without the hit to growth from…

St. Petersburg will delay its implementation of citywide recycling for at least another year amid fears that it could lead to a spike in the costs of garbage collection and a public backlash, the Kommersant business daily reported Tuesday. Russia launched its nationwide “trash reform” on Jan. 1, 2019, in an effort to tackle a…

Estonia wants Russia to return its territory that it says is annexed by Moscow, its top lawmaker has said as the prospects of a Russian-Estonian border treaty turned grim this year over Tallinn’s territorial claims. Estonia is the only NATO member lacking a ratified border treaty with Russia. The two countries have sparred as recently…

Russian oligarch Mikhail Abyzov built a complex network of offshore companies that were used to move a fortune out of Russia, according to a Swedbank internal draft report obtained by OCCRP and its Swedish partner, national public TV channel Sveriges Television (SVT).  Today he’s charged with defrauding the Russian government and investors of US$60 million,…

Arctic sea ice recovery between Russia and Alaska has slowed to record levels since bottoming out over the summer, according to research, as climate change clears ice quicker and for longer periods. Frozen water vanished from Russia’s Northern Sea Route in mid-August, opening up the Arctic shipping lane coveted by the Russian government. Arctic sea…

Russia is unlikely to agree to deepen cuts in oil output at a meeting with fellow exporters next month, but could commit to extend existing curbs to support Saudi Arabia, three sources said. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets on Dec. 5 at its headquarters in Vienna, followed by talks with a group…

Russia’s Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel and palladium miner, has begun closing down its smelter in the northern Russian city of Nikel just a month after it first announced its plans. Forty-four employees at the furnace will soon turn off the heat for the last time. “The shutdown of the smelter will be going in stages until the end of…

The Kremlin wants Russian lawmakers to refrain from inviting high-level foreign guests to Victory Day commemorations next spring, the Open Media news website reported Monday. President Vladimir Putin has invited several foreign leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, to attend Russia’s parade marking the end of World War II on…

The Russian government doesn’t see domestic violence as a “serious problem” and believes that its scale is exaggerated, the country’s Justice Ministry said in an official response to Europe’s human rights court obtained by the Kommersant business daily. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) this summer had asked Russia to respond to questions regarding…

Police have busted what they say is Russia’s largest synthetic drug lab on a farm outside Moscow, the Interior Ministry said in a statement Tuesday. Police published footage of the clandestine lab on a four-hectare farm in the city of Serpukhov 100 kilometers south of Moscow. It estimated that 1.5 metric tons of synthetic drugs…

Russia said on Tuesday it was bewildered by a Turkish pledge to conduct a new military operation in northern Syria if the area was not cleared of people Ankara calls terrorists, warning that any such move would damage efforts to stabilize the region. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday as saying his country…

Greenpeace activists have blocked a train in Germany carrying a shipment of radioactive waste destined for Russia, the environmental organization said Monday. German exports of depleted uranium hexafluoride, a byproduct of uranium enrichment, resumed to Russia earlier this year. The shipments had been halted in 2009 by Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom following reports that…

Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said Tuesday that a U.S. decision to effectively back Israel’s right to build Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank undermined the legal basis for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday abandoned Washington’s four-decade-old position that such settlements were “inconsistent with international law.”…

The Russian parliament’s commission on foreign interference said it has found several “camps” that allegedly receive funding from abroad to train protesters, both in-person and online, the Kommersant business daily reported Tuesday. Lawmakers formed the commission after this summer’s wave of protests in Moscow, accusing several news outlets and the U.S. Embassy in Russia of…

Russian corporate heavyweights Sberbank and Mail.Ru have finalized a new strategic partnership just one day after Sberbank confirmed it would step-back from its role in tech giant Yandex. In a series of announcements, Sberbank and Mail.Ru confirmed today the terms of a new joint venture to cover their food and taxi businesses, which the pair…

Ruble volatility has fallen to its lowest level in five years, amid a pause in sanctions pressure from the U.S. and more stable macroeconomic policies from the Russian government. The ruble’s implied volatility on the financial markets — a measure of how extreme traders expect swings in the value of the currency will be over…

As the only remaining independent, English-language news source reporting from Russia, The Moscow Times plays a critical role in connecting Russia to the world. Editorial decisions are made entirely by journalists in our newsroom, who adhere to the highest ethical standards. We fearlessly cover issues that are often considered off-limits or taboo in Russia, from…

A Russian lawyer for Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine held in Moscow on spying charges, urged the United States and other countries on Tuesday to push for a prisoner swap with Moscow that could get his client released. Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, was arrested in December and accused of espionage.…

Russian tour operators have begun selling organized tours into war-ravaged Syria despite government warnings for citizens to avoid the country, the Kommersant business daily reported Tuesday. Syria has been wracked by eight years of conflict after anti-government protests in 2011 devolved into civil war. Russia launched a military campaign in 2015 to support its ally…

When John Gartner, a former Rhodesian soldier who now heads the military security company OAM, was approached by a Mozambican official to help fight the Islamist insurgency in the country’s north, he thought he was about to win a lucrative contract.  “We presented them with a first-class proposal in early August. We have so much…

Russian police detained two activists on Monday after they floated a giant inflatable killer whale on the Moscow River outside the Kremlin to call on authorities to protect the creatures, protesters said. Environmental campaign group Greenpeace said it had staged the stunt to urge authorities to ban the capture of whales for educational or cultural…

A controversial Russian lawmaker has offered admitted agent Maria Butina a parliamentary post, Russian news agencies reported Monday. State Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky met Butina the day after she returned to Russia in October, saying that Butina “has many victories ahead.” Butina served most of her 18-month sentence in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty…

Full-scale preparations for the Day of Missile Forces and Artillery have been underway over the past week in the Leningrad region town of Luga, with large-scale shooting exercises, tank battles and rocket launches lighting up the sky. During the Defense-Ministry led rehearsals, personnel carried out reconstructions of a World War II tank battle, tactical exercises…

Russians’ indifference toward U.S. President Donald Trump has reached an all-time high, according to a state-run survey published Monday. Russian lawmakers greeted Trump’s victory in 2016 with thunderous applause and a majority of Russian citizens predicted he would make a competent president when he took office. While Trump ran for office on a platform of restoring…

Russia‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday that Moscow had successfully handed three naval ships it captured last year back to Ukraine. The handover, confirmed by the two countries’ foreign ministries, occurred in the Black Sea off the coast of Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Russia seized the ships on the same area…

Russia’s leading tech company Yandex is planning a major overhaul of its governance structure in a bid to settle ownership disputes with the Russian government. Under the plans, Yandex will create a new “Public Interest Foundation” which will have a significant say in the future of the company, controlling the Yandex’s so-called golden share, which…

An influential pro-Kremlin billionaire wants to bankroll a conservative religious troll farm, the Open Media news website has reported, citing an unnamed political scientist who works with the Kremlin. Konstantin Malofeev has long financed the Kremlin’s drive to spread so-called “family values,” including last year’s U.S.-Russian summit of right-wing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and…

President Vladimir Putin’s favorability has dropped by 10 percentage points since 2017 even though he still enjoys high job approval numbers among Russians, according to an independent Levada Center pollster survey published Monday. Putin’s approval rating reached an all-time high of 87% in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. It began falling throughout 2018…

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko maintained his hold on power after results published early on Monday showed not a single opposition candidate had won a seat in parliamentary elections over the weekend. Lukashenko has governed the former Soviet country with an iron fist for a quarter of a century and plans to extend his rule beyond…

Russia will return three captured naval ships to Ukraine on Monday and is moving them to a handover location agreed with Kiev, Crimea’s border guard service was cited as saying by Russian news agencies on Sunday. A Reuters reporter in Crimea, which Russian annexed from Ukraine in 2014, earlier on Sunday saw coastguard boats pulling…

A court in St. Petersburg has ordered the release of a Church of Scientology leader from pretrial custody two years after he was arrested, the Russian city’s court system announced Friday. Ivan Matsitsky was among five people taken into custody on extremism, illegal entrepreneurship and incitement charges during a 2017 raid on the church’s St.…

Russia’s intelligence agency the Federal Security Service (FSB) could be behind the disappearance of $450 million worth of cryptocurrency from an online exchange platform, the BBC has reported. The BBC investigation into how Wex, an online exchange for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, went out of business in 2018 has revealed fresh links between the platform’s…

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has criticized Russia for making it pay for combat aircraft deliveries and threatened to revise a key border control pact in the latest public rift between the close allies. Belarus on Wednesday received two of the 12 Russian Su-30SM fighter jets it ordered in 2017, with two more expected next week.…

An estimated 8% of Russians have disabilities, but they are rarely seen on Moscow’s streets. Activists say it’s because the city lacks accessibility for people in wheelchairs. We spent a day with Diana, a young joyful woman who is disabled, to see what it’s like to travel by metro in Moscow.

Russia, Norway and Lithuania conducted an exchange of spies on Friday, securing the return of several captured agents to their home countries, the head of Lithuanian counterintelligence said. Previous reports suggested that Moscow, Oslo and Vilnius were discussing exchanging two Russians jailed in Lithuania, two Lithuanians sentenced for spying in Russia, and a Norwegian, Frode…

A well-known zoo and safari park owner in Russian-annexed Crimea has announced he is giving away more than 30 bears from one of his parks — otherwise he’ll be forced to euthanize them. Oleg Zubkov owns the Taigan lion park 46 kilometers west of Simferopol, where bears taken from circuses and private zoos live alongside…

Russia landed attack helicopters and troops at a sprawling air base in northern Syria vacated by U.S. forces, the Russian Defense Ministry’s Zvezda TV channel said on Friday. Armed Russian military police were shown in footage aired on Zvezda flying into the Syrian air base in northern Aleppo province near the border with Turkey and…

Lithuania’s president has pardoned two Russian nationals in a move that could pave the way for a possible three-way spy exchange between Russia, Norway and Lithuania, its presidential office said Friday. Last week, Lithuanian parliament amended legislation to allow President Gitanas Nausėda to pardon people convicted of a crime in Lithuania in exchange for Lithuanian…

Fear of extinction as a result of runaway climate change has shocked the world into scrambling to reduce carbon emissions and develop green technologies before it’s too late. Russia’s most powerful business lobby, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), has a different take on the crisis.   “We have to maximize our sales of…

Russia’s state oil giant Rosneft could be helping Venezuela secretly export millions of barrels of oil, as the Latin American country seeks to avoid U.S. sanctions against its crude exports, Bloomberg has reported. In a bid to avoid international detection, a Rosneft-contracted oil tanker, named Dragon, turned off its GPS transmitter before sailing from Europe…