Year: 2021

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on Wednesday appealed to European regulatory authorities to approve Russia’s Sputnik V and other safe coronavirus vaccines as soon as possible. With Sputnik V under review by the EU’s medicines regulator, reports suggested this week that EU officials are considering launching negotiations to buy doses from Russia. The vaccine’s developers announced…

Chechen officials and members of the public are calling for the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta to be banned after it reported on extrajudicial killings in the southern Russian region. The chorus of outrage grew after Novaya Gazeta on Monday published an ex-police officer’s eyewitness account of the torture and execution of 13 detainees in 2017.…

Russia said Wednesday it had summoned its Washington ambassador to Moscow for consultations on its ties with the United States, but stressed it wanted to prevent an “irreversible deterioration” in relations. The announcement from the Russian Foreign Ministry came after U.S. President Joe Biden said Russia would “pay a price” for meddling in U.S. elections…

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the U.S.S.R., believes that the country’s collapse was a violation of “the will of the people” and a referendum to preserve the Soviet system was “necessary and just,” he told Interfax on Wednesday. “The destruction of the Soviet Union was nothing more than a violation of the will of…

Russian lawmakers on Wednesday passed a bill that bans insults against World War II veterans, with offenders facing possible sentences of up to five years in jail.  The move came after a judge last month ruled that jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny was guilty of defaming a World War II veteran who was among a…

U.S. President Joe Biden has agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “killer,” adding that he will “pay” for interfering in the 2020 presidential election in an ABC News interview that aired Wednesday. His pre-taped remarks aired after the U.S. intelligence community’s first assessment of foreign interference in the campaign. The report said Putin likely…

The Kremlin said Wednesday it regretted the UK’s decision to increase its nuclear arsenal, after Britain unveiled plans to bolster its stockpile from 180 warheads to 260 by the end of the decade.  Britain on Tuesday published a document outlining a recalibration of its foreign policy that included the announcement to grow its nuclear arsenal,…

Russian passport holders from separatist-held eastern Ukraine could be allowed to vote in this September’s legislative elections, a lawmaker told Interfax on Tuesday.  “They are citizens of the Russian Federation who have gained all the rights and, accordingly, [can] participate in elections. That’s why Russia is obliged to give them the opportunity to express their…

Russian internet activists fear the state’s slowdown of Twitter traffic could be the thin end of the wedge in a push toward Chinese-style censorship.  While the U.S.-based microblogging service never made it big in Russia — used by only 3% of the population and a minnow compared with YouTube and Instagram — its targeting is…

Russia will attempt to insert itself into a faltering Afghanistan peace process Thursday when it hosts a conference that has drawn high-level delegations from the Taliban and Afghan government — as well as representation from Washington, Pakistan and China. The United States is supposed to complete a withdrawal of all its troops from Afghanistan by…

Russian security officers have detained an alleged Islamic State supporter who was plotting a terrorist attack in southern Russia, the state-run TASS news agency reported Wednesday.  The unnamed suspect, a native of Central Asia, is accused of planning a terrorist attack at a shopping mall in the republic of Adygeya’s capital of Maykop, TASS cited…

Russia has demanded that Twitter delete the independent news website MBKh Media’s account for allegedly publishing an “undesirable” organization’s materials, the outlet said Wednesday. The reported demand comes a day after Russia’s state communications regulator Roskomnadzor threatened to block Twitter itself for failing to delete tweets containing child pornography, suicide and drug use.  MBKh said…

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely authorized influence operations against then-President Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent Joe Biden during the 2020 election campaign, the U.S. intelligence community said in its first assessment on the matter Tuesday. Biden defeated Republican Trump in November, and Putin was one of the only world leaders to wait until the Electoral College certified his…

A group of high-profile Hollywood celebrities has signed a letter calling on the Russian government to halt the prosecution of punk protest group Pussy Riot members Maria Alekhina and Ludmila Shtein, entertainment news site Deadline reported on Tuesday.  The activists face up to two years in prison for Instagram posts demanding the release of political…

The share of Russians who say they’re not interested in politics has reached its highest level of the modern era, a survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency said Tuesday.  According to the poll, nearly one-third of Russians, or 27%, said they are not interested in politics at all, compared to 12% of Russians…

Russian freediver Alexei Molchanov claimed to have set a new Guinness World Record on Tuesday after plunging 80 meters in the icy waters of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Clad in blue diving gear, Molchanov dropped into a hole in the Baikal ice before coming back up smiling, winking and forming the OK sign with his…

Russia will block Twitter within a month if it fails to delete banned content, authorities told state media Tuesday. Vadim Subbotin, the deputy chief of Russia’s state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, issued the warning a week after the country began slowing down the social media platform’s speed over the dispute. The agency acted amid tensions with western…

While Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine has already been authorized by over 50 countries worldwide, it has yet to make its way into one of the world’s largest markets, the European Union.  On March 8, an official at the EU’s medicines regulator was quick to dismiss the idea of granting emergency authorization for Russia’s vaccine,…

Apple has agreed to pre-install Russian apps on all its devices activated within the country starting April 1, the Vedomosti business daily reported Tuesday.  The Russian-developed software will include messengers, internet browsers, antivirus software, email, food delivery and taxi-hailing apps, Vedomosti reported.  According to the agreement, all users who turn on an Apple device purchased…

Russian journalists in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk have started airing “silent broadcasts” as a way to avoid prosecution, the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news outlet reported Monday. The live-streams of protests without commentary follow the detentions of several journalists in recent months for “participation in unsanctioned rallies,” RFE/RL’s Siberian affiliate Sibir.Realii reported. …

Moscow has accused the United States of targeting its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine by pressuring Brazil to reject it, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund that markets the jab worldwide said Monday. An annual U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report published in January said officials had worked to dissuade Latin American countries from accepting aid from…

A court in southern Russia’s republic of Dagestan has ruled a mother of three unfit for custody due to her “immoral” tattoos and piercings, according to media reports. The summer 2020 ruling against Nina Tseretilova is based on Instagram posts submitted by her ex-husband during their custody battle, the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid reported Friday. “It…

A more contagious strain of the coronavirus first discovered in South Africa has been detected in Russia, the country’s health authorities said Tuesday. The officials said two people have been found to have the variant out of over 8,000 tests conducted among Russians arriving from abroad and those with atypical presentations of the disease.  According…

FIFA has opened disciplinary cases against three Russian football players suspected of violating anti-doping rules in 2013, Interfax reported Monday, citing the Russian Football Union’s press service.  The players, two of whom are men and the other a woman, do not play on the Russian national teams, Interfax cited the RFU as saying in a statement. The…

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been moved to the IK-2 penal colony in the Vladimir region to serve his two-and-a-half year sentence, his Instagram account confirmed Monday. Navalny’s whereabouts had been unknown since Friday, when his team said he was moved from a pre-trial detention center outside Moscow where he was being quarantined. Reports citing…

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been moved to the IK-2 penal colony in the Vladimir region, the state-run TASS news agency reported Monday, citing an official court letter it obtained.  Navalny’s whereabouts had been unknown since Friday, when his team said he was moved from a pre-trial detention center outside Moscow where he was…

Three campaign groups announced on Monday a landmark legal case in Moscow against Russian mercenary group Wagner over the torture of a detainee in Syria, aiming to hold to account a murky fighting force with Kremlin links. The legal push against private military contractor Wagner Group follows a wave of torture-related cases in Europe against Syrian…

The prominent Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta said Monday that its offices in Moscow had been targeted with a “chemical attack.” “In the morning a chemical attack was carried out on the building where our editorial office is located,” the independent media outlet’s editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov said in a statement. He added that law enforcement…

The investigative Novaya Gazeta newspaper on Monday has published a former Chechen police officer’s testimony to the extrajudicial killings of dozens of detainees four years ago. The account of Suleiman Gezmakhmayev, a former staff sergeant of the Akhmad Kadyrov Police Patrol Service Regiment, adds damning evidence to Novaya’s investigations claiming that Chechen security officials executed 27…

Russia has confirmed 4,400,045 cases of coronavirus and 92,494 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. According to figures published by state statistics agency Rosstat, Russia’s real coronavirus death toll stands at 131,118, with the virus present in another 69,314 deaths. March 15: What you need to know today Russia on Monday confirmed 9,437 new coronavirus cases…

The developers of the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine said Monday they had reached production agreements in key European countries as the EU’s medical agency deliberates official approval for the Russian jab. The head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev said in a statement that his organization had secured “agreements with companies from Italy, Spain,…

Russian lawmaker Oksana Pushkina, the deputy chairman of the State Duma’s committee on family, women and children, will not seek re-election in her district in this September’s legislative elections, she told the RBC news website reported Monday.  “I will not hide the fact that the Moscow region’s governor sees another person as the main contender…

European Union officials are considering launching negotiations to purchase Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, Reuters reported Monday, citing EU diplomatic and official sources. The move would mark a major turnaround for Brussels, which has publicly dismissed Russia’s global vaccine supply campaign as a propaganda effort while facing criticism for its own sluggish vaccine rollout. Faced…

Russian scientists on Saturday launched one of the world’s biggest underwater space telescopes to peer deep into the universe from the pristine waters of Lake Baikal. The deep underwater telescope, which has been under construction since 2015, is designed to observe neutrinos, the smallest particles currently known. Dubbed Baikal-GVD, the telescope was submerged to a…

Russian police on Saturday arrested dozens of opposition politicians and municipal deputies at a conference in Moscow, organizers and participants said.  Participants from more than 50 of Russia’s regions had gathered to discuss parliamentary and local elections in September at a forum organized by a project backed by prominent Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Forty minutes…

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has sown division among former Eastern Bloc countries, analysts say, with some seeing it as a godsend and others as a Kremlin propaganda tool. Countries in the region have been particularly hard hit by the virus and find themselves torn between a readily available jab from their old ally and European…

The World Economic Forum has dropped St. Olga of Kiev from its list of influential women after Ukraine’s ex-president criticized the organization for calling her the founder of Russia. Before being taken down, St. Olga’s profile on the WEF web page dedicated to International Women’s Month described her as “the progenitor to modern-day Russia” and…

Dozens of countries took Russia to task at the UN on Friday over its imprisonment of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, and slammed numerous “arbitrary arrests” of his supporters. In a historic joint statement delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council, 45 countries voiced alarm at “the deteriorating situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms”…

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been moved to an unknown location from a detention center outside Moscow where he had been quarantined, his Twitter account said Friday. Navalny was similarly transferred from a Moscow jail last month, turning up at a Vladimir region detention center where he was under quarantine a week later. He was sentenced…

Russia’s arms sales last year were not affected by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a senior official said Friday, making it one of the country’s only industries to come out unscathed. “Our order book remained at a level of $50-55 billion,” said Dmitry Shugayev, who heads the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation. “We…

Over 6,300 surveillance cameras in Russia are not secure, making them vulnerable to cybercriminals, experts told the Kommersant business daily Friday. Dark web users can easily access footage and private data from the CCTV cameras installed at places like industrial plants, businesses and smart home systems as they have public IP addresses, Kommersant cited experts…

Five Chechen men went on trial in Austria for outing and harassing female compatriots for exhibiting “Western behavior,” Austrian media reported Thursday. The defendants were accused of running an online chat where they threatened, intimidated and occasionally abused Chechen women for allegedly not adhering to strict Islamic rules, according to the Die Presse daily. “The…

Russian prosecutors on Friday charged three men over the 2009 murder of one of the country’s most notorious gangsters and drug traffickers who had served time in both Russian and U.S. prisons. Vyacheslav Ivankov, alias Yaponchik or The Little Japanese, was shot in the abdomen in July 2009 by sniper fire as he left a…

Slovakia’s health minister has announced his resignation after coming under pressure from the country’s four-party ruling coalition for ordering Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, Reuters reported Thursday.  Slovakia became the second EU country after Hungary to purchase Sputnik V for national use, bypassing EU authorization of the jab. Prime Minister Igor Matovic ignited backlash from…

The mutating H5N8 strain of avian flu has a high risk of human-to-human transmission, Russian authorities warned Friday. Anna Popova, who heads Russia’s health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, made the prediction nearly a month after scientists detected the first case of H5N8 transmission to humans at a southern Russia poultry farm. “There’s a fairly high degree of…

Russians’ life expectancy plummeted in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted President Vladimir Putin’s goal to increase lifespans, according to state figures cited by the RBC news website Thursday. Annual life expectancy dropped for the first time in 17 years from a record of 73.3 years in 2019 to 71.1 years last year, according to…