Anti-Kremlin Russians call Armed Incursion a ‘Success’

Russian nationals fighting on Ukraine’s side on Wednesday hailed as a “success” a brazen mission to send groups of volunteers across the border into southern Russia and back. Russia on Tuesday said it deployed jets and artillery to fight off armed attackers who crossed into the southern region of Belgorod from Ukraine, exposing weaknesses on…

Record Number of Russians Moved to Finland in 2022

Record numbers of Russians, by far the highest in three decades, moved to neighboring Finland in 2022, official statistics published Wednesday showed. A total of 6,003 people moved from Russia to Finland last year, according to Statistics Finland, making it the top country of origin for immigration. Immigration to Finland was up overall, with almost…

Putin’s Antique Map Stunt Stirs Meme Storm

President Vladimir Putin donned his historian cap on Tuesday when Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin brought a 17th-century French map to his office and presented the artifact as evidence that Ukraine did not exist as a state before the Soviet period, a view the Russian leader himself has expressed repeatedly both before and during Moscow’s…

Alexey Likhachev, Director General of ROSATOM, held the meeting with Zhang Kejian, the head of the China Atomic Energy Authority

On May 24, 2023 in Beijing, Alexey Likhachev, Director General of ROSATOM, held the meeting with Zhang Kejian, the head of the China Atomic Energy Authority, on the sidelines of the official visit of the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin to China. The main current and long-term agenda of cooperation between Russia…

Russia to Try 5 Foreigners for Fighting Alongside Ukraine

Russia announced Wednesday that a court in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don will try five foreign men, including three British nationals, accused of fighting alongside Ukrainian forces against Moscow.  The trial will begin on May 31 on terror-linked and other charges. The men are believed to face trial in absentia.  Russian state news agency RIA…

Thousands of Chechens Protest Quran Burning Incident

Thousands of people in Russia’s majority-Muslim republic of Chechnya took to the streets of the regional capital on Tuesday to rally against a recent burning of the Quran. Police in the southwestern Russian city of Volgograd detained Nikita Zhuravel, 19, after he allegedly set fire to a copy of the Quran in front of the…

Prigozhin Says 20K Wagner Fighters Killed in Battle for Bakhmut

Russia’s Wagner mercenary group lost 20,000 fighters while fighting for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, half of which were convicts recruited from prisons, the group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an interview published late Tuesday. Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked catering magnate, has relied heavily on convicts from Russian prisons to fuel Wagner’s offensive in eastern Ukraine,…

Drone Attacks Overnight in Russian Border Region – Governor

The governor of a southern Russian region bordering Ukraine said Wednesday that the territory was targeted overnight by numerous drones following an armed incursion from Ukraine. “The night was not entirely calm. There were a large number of drone attacks. Air defense systems handled most of them,” the governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov,…

Georgia Leader Says Russia Sanctions Would ‘Devastate’ Economy

Georgia’s prime minister told an international forum Wednesday that his government cannot afford to impose sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine war as they would “devastate” the economy. Facing international criticism, Irakli Garbashvili strongly defended his country’s reluctance to take action against its giant neighbor which occupied about 20% of Georgian territory in a 2008…

Russia Seizes Zelensky’s Crimea Apartment

Russian authorities have confiscated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s $800,000 apartment in annexed Crimea, the peninsula’s Kremlin-installed governor said Wednesday. Crimean Governor Sergei Aksyonov listed the property, which Zelensky’s wife Olena Zelenska purchased near the resort city of Yalta in 2013, alongside several Ukrainian-owned assets subject to seizure. These include “large wineries, banking structures, Zelensky’s apartment and…

China’s Xi Offers Russia ‘Firm Support’ in ‘Core Interests’

Chinese President Xi Jinping offered Beijing’s support on Moscow’s “core interests” at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on Wednesday. China and Russia have in recent years ramped up economic and diplomatic cooperation, growing even closer since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine despite Beijing’s insistence that it is neutral in that conflict. Mishustin’s trip…