Day: May 17, 2022

This article was corrected with the date of Russia’s occupation of Kherson and updated with details about Russian confiscations of agricultural goods and equipment in the surrounding region.   A top Russian official has promised to revive the occupied southern Ukrainian region of Kherson by rebuilding roads, bridges and buildings destroyed as a result of the…

Precision-guided missiles have been one of the weapons of choice for the Russian Armed Forces since invading Ukraine in late February.  These domestically-produced missiles have been responsible for some of Russia’s most deadly attacks in Ukraine, including  on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of…

Mortgage loans in Russia fell by their largest margin ever in April despite government measures to avert the economic fallout from war-related Western sanctions, the RBC news website reported Tuesday. Russian banks approved 37,200 mortgage loans totaling 130.5 billion rubles ($2 billion) in April 2022. That marked a 75% drop from March, when banks issued 529.3…

Moscow said on Tuesday that two employees of Finland’s embassy in Russia will have to leave the country in response to a similar move by Helsinki. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it summoned Finland’s ambassador to Moscow and expressed its “strong protest” against the expulsion of two Russian diplomats from neighboring Finland…

Russia said Tuesday that 265 Ukrainian soldiers holed up in Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel plant had “surrendered,” contradicting Kyiv’s account that the evacuated soldiers would be exchanged later. “The surrender of fighters from the Azov nationalist unit and Ukrainian servicemen blocked in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol began yesterday,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a…

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Tuesday opened an appeal process for a nine-year prison sentence he was handed in March on charges that he and his allies say are politically motivated. After a brief start to the hearing on Tuesday morning, the court said it would resume the process on May 24 following a…

President Vladimir Putin is involved in Russia’s push to capture eastern Ukraine on a tactical level, British media reported Monday, citing unnamed western military sources. Russian forces are currently attempting to encircle cities under Kyiv’s control in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions after abandoning their initial plan to seize the Ukrainian capital in late February.…

Ukrainian authorities said a rescue mission to extract the last defenders of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol was under way on Tuesday, after hundreds of soldiers were evacuated in an earlier operation. The factory complex had become a symbol of resistance, with around 600 soldiers holed up in underground tunnels and bunkers fighting a rear-guard…

A Russian village on the Ukrainian border was shelled early Tuesday, according to the the governor of Russia’s Kursk region, a day after his counterpart on Ukrainian side reported an attempted Russian incursion. “Today at around 5 a.m., large-caliber weapons were fired at the border village of Alekseevka in the Glushkov district,” Kursk region Governor…