Moscow on Monday expressed “serious concern” over fresh tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been locked for decades in a deadly territorial conflict. The comments from the Foreign Ministry came a day after Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint on the only land link to the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, sparking anger from Armenia. Armenia…
Russia’s Sberbank on Monday announced that it has developed a rival technology to ChatGPT, the widely popular Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence chatbot released in November. Called Gigachat, the Sberbank chatbot is said to excel among its peers — ChatGPT in particular — thanks to its excellent Russian-language comprehension as well as its ability to generate images,…
A “Ukrainian” drone has been found outside Moscow, an official said on Monday, adding this had led local authorities to call off a Victory Day parade for security reasons. Moscow has accused Ukraine of being behind a number of drone attacks on military infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. On Monday, Igor Sukhin, head of the…
Russia has expropriated 20 billion rubles ($250 million) in “voluntary contributions” into its budget from foreign businesses that have left the country in the past four and a half months, the RBC news site reported Monday. Hundreds of mostly Western companies have either fully exited or scaled back operations in Russia since it launched a full-scale…
The headline-grabbing decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last month to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges has caused nervousness among the Russian elite, according to current and former officials who spoke to The Moscow Times. While Russia formally condemned the decision, with ex-President Dmitry Medvedev even…
The chief of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his men fighting in the flashpoint eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut would kill rival soldiers and take no more prisoners. He was reacting to a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel’s posting of an alleged recording of what it said were two Ukrainians deciding to shoot a Russian prisoner…
Russian companies across a wide range of sectors are facing record staff shortages this year as the country grapples with population decline, a wartime exodus and military losses amid its offensive on Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday. Employee availability hit its lowest value since record-keeping began in 1998, the newspaper said, citing a…
Over 300 foreign correspondents have called for the release of jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in an open letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov published Monday. Among the signatories are journalists with decades of experience reporting from Russia, some having arrived in Moscow as far back as the early 1960s, while others…
The son of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has claimed that he fought with Russia’s Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine in a rare example of the children of senior Russian officials serving at the front. Nikolai Peskov, 33, who also uses the last name Choles after his British stepfather, is the son of veteran Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. …
Azerbaijan on Sunday set up a checkpoint on the only land link between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, sparking an angry response from its archrival Yerevan. The move fuels tensions between the ex-Soviet Caucasus nations that fought two wars over Azerbaijan’s Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh. “The units of the Azerbaijani Border Service established a border…