Year: 2022

Two Americans who volunteered to support Ukraine have gone missing and are feared to have been taken prisoner by Russia, officials and family members said Wednesday. Captive Americans would add another layer of complexity to efforts by the United States, which is pumping billions of dollars into Ukraine but trying to steer clear of direct…

President Xi Jinping on Wednesday assured Vladimir Putin of China’s support on Russian “sovereignty and security” — leading Washington to warn Beijing it risked ending up “on the wrong side of history.” China has refused to condemn Moscow’s massive military assault on Ukraine and has been accused of providing diplomatic cover for Russia by blasting…

U.S. President Joe Biden announced $1 billion worth of new arms for Ukraine Wednesday as Pentagon officials defended the pace and quality of supplies as meeting Kyiv’s battlefield needs. Ukrainian troops shelled Russian targets on the frontlines in the eastern Donbas region with newly arrived French Caesar howitzers, as Ukraine officials met in Brussels with…

Russia on Wednesday stepped up the energy pressure on Europe, slashing gas supplies to the continent for the second day in a row in a move blasted as “political” by Germany. A day after Gazprom said it was cutting deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline by around 40%, the Russian state-owned energy giant said it…

Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are forcing local men to join “volunteer” battalions for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, investigative news outlet The Insider reported Wednesday.  Soldiers have reported the use of intimidation, blackmail, or threats of torture and kidnapping against their loved ones, according to The Insider’s sources. While the exact number of…

Russian gas giant Gazprom said Wednesday it was cutting daily gas deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline by a further 33%, after Germany slammed an earlier cut as political. “From 01:30 a.m. Moscow time on June 16 the daily output of the Portovaya compression station will be up to 67 million cubic metrers per day,”…

Swedish furniture retailer IKEA will scale down its business operations in Russia and sell all four country-based factories, the RBC business daily reported Wednesday, citing the company’s press service.   IKEA, which employed some 15,000 people in Russia, temporarily closed its stores and suspended operations of its factories there in March amid the international fallout from…

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russia’s annual showcase event for foreign investors, opened Wednesday amid a reduced participant list, increased secrecy and boycotts by some Western governments.  As the war in Ukraine has sent the Russian economy spinning toward recession and deepened Moscow’s international isolation, SPIEF – once dubbed “Russia’s Davos” – looked…

Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a call Wednesday that Beijing would keep backing Moscow on “sovereignty and security,” according to state media. China is “willing to continue to offer mutual support (to Russia) on issues concerning core interests and major concerns such as sovereignty and security,” Chinese state broadcaster…

A Russian man went on trial in Munich on Wednesday, charged with plotting to kill a Chechen dissident living in Germany on the orders of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The suspect, named as Valid D., is accused of planning the murder commissioned by the state, carrying out shooting exercises with the intended hitman and spying…

A senior executive in charge of aircraft purchases for Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot has been arrested on suspicion of fraud, Russia’s state-run Interfax news agency reported Wednesday. Mikhail Minayev, director of Aeroflot’s fleet planning and aircraft procurement, was placed in pre-trial detention by Moscow’s Khoroshevsky court until Aug. 8. If found guilty, Minayev faces up…

Ukraine pleaded with Western governments Wednesday to decide quickly on sending heavy weapons to shore up its faltering defenses, as Russia said it would evacuate civilians from a frontline chemical plant.  The industrial city of Severodonetsk is under intense bombardment as Russia focuses its offensive on the Donbas region in an effort to secure a…

Russia is experiencing a shortage of commercial drones amid increased demand from the military and China’s exit from the Russian market, the Kommersant business daily reported Thursday. Prices have risen by an average of 30% since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, Kommersant reported, citing industry sources. Prices for drones used in the oil and…

Russia is reconstructing a long-dormant military airport on its far northern Kola Peninsula as part of a major upgrade of Northern Fleet airstrips in the European Arctic.  The Severomorsk-2 airfield which lies 11 kilometers northeast of Murmansk was shut down in 1998. Northern Fleet commander Admiral Alexander Moiseyev said it is among the Russian Arctic…

Russia said Wednesday its forces destroyed a depot containing NATO-supplied arms in western Ukraine as President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Western allies to speed up arms deliveries to his country. “Near the town of Zolochiv in Lviv region, high-precision long-range Kalibr missiles destroyed an ammunition depot of foreign weapons transferred to Ukraine by NATO countries, including 155-mm…

A spokesman for Russia’s National Guard has been killed in battle in Ukraine, a veterans’ organization announced Tuesday. Col. Sergei Postnov served as a war correspondent in the National Guard’s so-called “information response group,” the Russian Interior Ministry’s veterans’ council said on its website. The group said that Postnov died “performing his military duty,” but…

Russia’s top lawmaker said Thursday that fighters sentenced to death in eastern Ukraine’s pro-Moscow separatist territories “deserve” to die. “The death penalty is the punishment these fascists deserve,” Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower-house State Duma, said, using terminology that President Vladimir Putin has invoked to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Volodin spoke a week…

A Russian court has extended the pre-trial detention of U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner on drug smuggling charges, state media reported Tuesday. Griner was detained at a Moscow airport on Feb. 17, en route to play for UNMC Yekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason, on charges of carrying vape cartridges with cannabis oil in her luggage. …

Russia on Tuesday said it was blacklisting 49 UK citizens, including defense officials and prominent journalists and editors from the BBC, The Financial Times and The Guardian.  London has been one of the most vocal supporters of Kyiv after President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine on Feb. 24. “The British journalists on the list…

Patients in Moscow are being inoculated with expired Russian coronavirus vaccines, The Moscow Times’ Russian service reported, citing sources and eyewitnesses. Epidemiologists say that the expired vaccines aren’t dangerous, but are ineffective against Covid-19. Russia has about 30 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines that are currently past their use-by date and worth more than 23…

Jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a maximum-security prison after his prison term was extended to nine years, his lawyer said Tuesday. The Kremlin’s most vocal domestic foe, Navalny had been at a penal colony in the Vladimir region city of Pokrov east of Moscow since February 2021. His transfer comes in…

Russia’s energy giant Gazprom said Tuesday it would be reducing the daily gas deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany due to the “repair” of compressor units by German company Siemens. “Gas supplies via the Nord Stream gas pipeline can currently be provided in the amount of up to 100 million cubic meters per…

The Georgian government will become a co-owner of Borjomi, the country’s iconic mineral water brand, by taking over shares from its sanctioned Russian owners, the country’s Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said at a government meeting Monday. Borjomi, one of Georgia’s most recognizable brands, had been majority owned by Russia’s Alfa Group since 2013. Alfa was…

Russian forces on Tuesday stepped up efforts to cut off Ukrainian troops in the key industrial city of Severodonetsk in the east of the country despite Ukrainians insisting they were holding on. Moscow has laid siege for weeks to the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which are separated by a river, as the last areas…

Russia has earned a likely record $97 billion in revenue from fossil fuel exports in the first 100 days of its war in Ukraine despite heavy sanctions and Europe’s attempts to wean itself off of Russian energy, researchers said this week. “Russia’s export revenues have been falling since March, but remain record-high” due to soaring energy…

Russia is expected to lose 15% of its millionaires this year as its wealthiest citizens move abroad following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and ensuing Western sanctions, according to a new analysis from a London-based firm cited by The Guardian on Tuesday.  Around 15,000 wealthy Russians who have $1 million in readily available assets will…

A Russian town near the Ukraine border has reported three straight days of shelling, with Tuesday’s attack allegedly targeting a military base. Residents of the Bryansk region town of Klintsy less than 50 kilometers from Ukraine reported witnessing a helicopter hovering over the base before firing off two shots and fleeing. “A shell hit part…

The Kremlin said Monday it sees the “protection” of eastern Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatist Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics (DNR and LNR) as the key goal of its nearly 16-week military campaign. “The republics’ protection is the main goal of the special military operation in general,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state-run RIA Novosti news…

When Vadim and Fyodor waited outside the first McDonald’s to open in the Soviet Union, they stood in line with an estimated 30,000 other people for more than three and a half hours.  Thirty-two years later, the pair were again in line on Sunday as McDonald’s reopened in Russia after a lightning sale and hurried…

Former Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya has been dismissed from her post in the Russian government, weeks after criticizing Moscow’s war in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin removed Poklonskaya from her post as the deputy head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia’s federal agency for international outreach, on Monday. The 42-year-old took up the role in February 2022, after declining…

Nearly 70 Moscow metro passengers and pickters have been detained across the Russian capital on the Russia Day national holiday Sunday, an independent watchdog has said. “At least 67 people were detained by police on Russia Day,” the OVD-Info police-monitoring website said. “Most of them — 43 people — were detained in the Moscow metro…

Russian forces said Sunday they had struck a site in western Ukraine storing US- and EU-supplied weapons, as fighting intensified in an eastern region where the country’s top commander said the land “is covered in blood.” The strike on the town of Chortkiv, a rare attack by Russia in the relatively calm west of Ukraine,…

The head of the Russian Committee for the Prevention of Torture said Sunday he had disbanded the organisation after it was branded a “foreign agent” by authorities, a label he called an “insult”.  “We don’t want to continue working by being labelled ‘foreign agents’. We consider this term an insult and slander,” Sergei Babinets said…

The restaurant that launched McDonald’s in Russia in 1990, heralding Moscow’s opening after decades of Soviet rule, reopened Sunday with a new name and logo in a potent reminder of the upheaval sparked by the conflict in Ukraine. The U.S. fast-food giant announced on May 16 that it would exit Russia in the wake of…

A pro-Russian separatist leader in eastern Ukraine said Sunday he would not alter the death sentences handed to two Britons and a Moroccan for fighting with the Ukrainian army.  “They came to Ukraine to kill civilians for money. That’s why I don’t see any conditions for any mitigation or modification of the sentence,” Denis Pushilin,…

Authorities in the Moscow-occupied city of Kherson in southern Ukraine handed out Russian passports to local residents for the first time on Saturday, news agencies reported. Russia’s TASS agency said 23 Kherson residents received a Russian passport at a ceremony through a “simplified procedure” facilitated by a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in…

After fleeing Russia in the days after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Mikhail entered the European Union illegally by fording a river in Bosnia and Herzegovina and making his way over the border into Croatia. His successful crossing followed three failed attempts to get into the EU. “I was afraid of police, bears,…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country’s forces were “doing everything” to stop the Russian offensive, with fierce battles in the east and the south. Kyiv said Friday it had launched new air strikes in the captured southern region of Kherson, one of the first areas to be taken by Russia after the February 24 invasion. But…

Local authorities in cities across Russia have removed banners with the letter “Z” – a symbol of support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – in recent days as the war appears to enter a new phase of bloody fighting and limited territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.  The head of the A Just Russia political party,…

A Russian suspect accused of downing Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 told Dutch judges on Friday he had “nothing to do with the disaster,” as the long-running trial concluded. Oleg Pulatov is one of four men on trial in absentia for shooting down the jetliner in July 2014 as it passed over war-torn eastern Ukraine, killing…

President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia has been able to “get a grip” on inflation after data showed almost a month of no inflation.  “From the second half of May, price growth has stopped completely. Now inflation is at the zero mark,” Putin told a government meeting.  But while stable prices might sound like…

The Russian government will buy over 970 million rubles’ ($17 million) worth of Russian flags and coats of arms to install in rural schools as part of a wider push for “patriotic” education amid the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov in April said that starting Sept. 1, schools will raise the Russian…

Russia’s Central Bank cut its key interest rate on Friday as the country’s economy recovers faster than expected following sanctions imposed on Moscow over its military action in Ukraine. The Bank of Russia cut the rate to 9.5% from 11%, saying in a statement that “inflation is slowing faster and the decline in economic activity…

A former Russian government official was detained at a Moscow airport this week on suspicion of embezzling over $15 million from a Siberian metro construction project’s budget, media reported Friday. According to the RBC news website, Federal Security Service (FSB) agents apprehended Oleg Mitvol, a former ecology official and a Moscow city prefect in the…

Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president chomped on a burger at an American diner with Barack Obama, praised independent media and made ambitious promises of reform to create a more open Russia. But with the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine raging for over three months, he now vows to make enemies of Russia “disappear,” warns of military…

Seven in 10 European businesses expect to cut their investments in Russia this year as Western sanctions over the Ukraine invasion and Moscow’s countermeasures have forced them to revise their outlooks, according to an Association of European Businesses (AEB) survey. The companies’ forecasts mark a dramatic reversal from their strong performance in 2021, when three-quarters of…

The first vehicle bridge between Russia and China opened to freight traffic Friday as Moscow pivots to Beijing amid the crisis in relations with the West over its invasion of Ukraine. Most building work on the Blagoveshchensk-Heihe bridge across the Amur River was completed in late 2019.  Transportation between the border cities with close economic…

Ukraine has depleted its stocks of Soviet and Russian-designed weaponry and is now completely dependent on allies for arms to defend against Russia’s invasion, U.S. military sources say.  Once part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s army and its defense industry were built around Soviet and Russian-standard equipment, small arms, tanks, howitzers and other weapons not…

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday compared his current actions to Peter the Great’s conquest of the Baltic coast during his 18th-century war against Sweden. After visiting an exhibition in Moscow dedicated to the 350th birthday of tsar Peter the Great, Putin told a group of young entrepreneurs that “you get the impression that by fighting…

Moscow is set to rename a square close to the capital’s German embassy in honor of one of Ukraine’s breakaway republics. If authorities approve the plans, the embassy’s address will change to “Luhansk People’s Republic Square.” The separatist region is backed by Russian forces, with President Vladimir Putin recognizing the area as an independent country…