Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed that a team of independent inspectors can travel to the Moscow-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant via Ukraine, the French presidency said on Friday. The apparent resolution of a dispute over whether inspectors travel to the plant via Ukraine or Russia came as a senior U.S. defense official said Ukraine’s forces…
Russian gas deliveries to Europe through the Nord Stream pipeline will cease from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2 for “maintenance,” Russian energy giant Gazprom said Friday, raising the prospect of energy shortages in Europe. “It is necessary to carry out maintenance every 1,000 hours” of operation, Gazprom said in a statement. “On Aug. 31, 2022,…
Как дела?: How’s it going? Years ago whenever I would ask an acquaintance “Как дела?” (How are things?), he’d answer: “В Кремле дела, у нас делишки”. Since дела can mean matters, affairs, or work and делишки can mean minor tasks or errands, I understood it as a joke that meant something like “The Kremlin is…
Traces of the Soviet past are disappearing from countries in eastern Europe as part of their wider efforts to distance themselves from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Countries that had been within Moscow’s orbit during the Soviet period — particularly Poland and the Baltic states — have moved to remove Soviet-era monuments from their…
Russian authorities are building the “largest” military-patriotic youth education center in the country’s northwest amid a wider militarization of young Russians that has accelerated since Russia invaded Ukraine, pro-Kremlin media has reported. The Avangard teaching center in the Vologda region is expected to hold its first training camp in 2023, with 5,000 children and teens expected…
The rebranded Russian successor of the Starbucks coffee shop chain has opened with a localized logo, the latest rebranding of a Western franchise that had left the country over its invasion of Ukraine. Starbucks, which employed 2,000 people across its 130 stores in Russia, suspended work and deliveries into Russia on March 10. The Seattle-based…
Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to attend the Group of 20 summit in Bali this November, Indonesian President Joko Widodo confirmed for the first time Thursday. “[Chinese leader] Xi Jinping will come. President Putin has also told me he will come,” Widodo told Bloomberg following phone talks with the Russian leader. The Kremlin said earlier…
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Thursday of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine during his first face-to-face talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia’s invasion began, echoing pleas from the UN’s chief. A flare-up in fighting around Europe’s largest nuclear facility in Russian-controlled southern Ukraine has sparked urgent warnings from world leaders, and UN chief Antonio…