US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in their first contact since the Ukraine war, saying he pressed him to accept a proposal on freeing two Americans held in Russia. “We had a frank and direct conversation. I pressed the Kremlin to accept the substantial proposal that we…
Few people in Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan had heard of Alik Kamaletdinov before May, when he wrote a viral VKontakte post calling on locals to sign up for a Bashkir battalion to take part in Russia’s offensive in Ukraine. More than 800 Bashkirs aged between 18 and 50 expressed interest in joining in just two…
Хавать хочу: I wanna eat When you are on a diet — сидеть на диете — it’s best not to flip through cookbooks, click on Instagram recipes, or read anything that makes you salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs. You must not, for example, read about много пельмешек, маленьких, ладненьких, кругленьких (many little meat dumplings…
A former regional activist for jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been imprisoned for 6.5 years for sharing a video of a mock execution of top Putin lieutenants. Opposition blogger Sergei Komandirov, 26, was detained in October 2021 on criminal charges of justifying terrorism for sharing a controversial video depicting a mock trial of “Vladimir…
A Ukrainian court on Friday reduced to 15 years a life sentence handed down to a Russian soldier for pre-meditated murder in the country’s first war crimes trial. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, was sentenced to life in prison in May after being found guilty of fatally shooting a 62-year-old civilian in northeastern Ukraine in the early…
The Kremlin expressed “solidarity” on Friday with China’s stance on Taiwan after Chinese President Xi Jinping warned U.S. leader Joe Biden not to “play with fire” over the self-ruled island. “Certainly we are in solidarity,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “We respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and believe that no country in the…
Footage that emerged on social media late Thursday appears to show a Ukrainian prisoner of war being castrated by Russian fighters, igniting shock and outrage in Ukraine. The Moscow Times is unable to independently verify the authenticity of the video. The minute-and-a-half-long video, which The Moscow Times has chosen not to republish, shows what appears…
President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited a port in southern Ukraine to oversee grain being loaded for export onto a Turkish ship, the presidency said on Friday, following a deal with Russia brokered by the UN and Turkey. “The first vessel, the first ship is being loaded since the beginning of the war. This is a Turkish vessel,”…
Russia and Ukraine accused one another over the shelling of a prison in separatist-held eastern Ukraine that killed at least 40 Ukrainian prisoners of war. “Ukrainian security forces fired [U.S.-supplied long-range missile systems] HIMARS rockets at a pre-trial detention center near Olenivka tonight,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement carried by state news agencies. …
Russia’s population shrank by a record average of 86,000 people a month between January and May, state statistics agency Rosstat has said. The decline surpasses the previous record contraction of 57,000 people a month in 2002, when Russia’s population shrank to 145.3 million from nearly 146 million the previous year. Russia’s population has fallen to…
Eight foreigners have been killed and four injured in a fire at a Moscow hostel, news agencies reported early Friday. The flames broke out on the first floor of the building in southwestern Moscow due to likely equipment failure or a power grid emergency, the state-run TASS news agency cited an unnamed emergency services source…