Miners in Russia’s Ural Mountains region have demanded to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin as their strike against their mine’s closure and mass layoffs entered a second day, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europa reported Friday. The strike at the Mariinsky emerald mine, located on Europe’s largest emerald deposit, started Thursday, when 80 to…
Russian Armed Forces Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said Friday his country’s strong military partnership with China provides stability around the world. Gerasimov, who is commander of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, made the remark during a videoconference with his Chinese counterpart, Liu Zhenli. “The coordination of Russian and Chinese efforts on the…
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that a long-expected counteroffensive from Ukraine had begun but Kyiv had so far “failed” to reach its goals. “We can definitely state that this Ukrainian offensive has begun,” Putin said in a video interview published on Telegram by a Russian journalist. “But the Ukrainian troops did not reach their…
A group of Ukrainian “prisoners of war” has been handed over to Hungary, according to the Russian Orthodox Church, with Kyiv saying Friday they had not been informed of the move. The transfer took place on Thursday “with the blessing” of Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Kirill “within the framework of cooperation between churches and at…
Сборище: a crowd, a gang Are there many words in Russian that have one meaning in the singular and another in the plural? In most cases the plural just means a lot of the singular. And that’s sometimes true with сбор/сборы. Sometimes сборы are a lot of сбор, as it were. But there are a…
Russian-installed authorities in occupied Ukraine are developing a centralized “information space” for pro-Russian mass media and outreach, the Vedomosti business daily reported Friday. Russia claims to have annexed four regions of Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — in September 2022 following widely disputed referendums, despite failing to fully control any of them. Moscow-installed…
Russia’s Central Bank on Friday extended its interest rate pause, the longest in more than seven years, as inflation pressures sparked by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine continued to loom over the economy. The Central Bank maintained its key interest rate at 7.5%, a move widely expected by analysts. But the Bank also hinted at future…
Iceland said Friday it would suspend work at its embassy in Russia as of Aug. 1, the first country to do so, and asked Russia to limit its operations in Reykjavik. “The current situation simply does not make it viable for the small foreign service of Iceland to operate an embassy in Russia,” Foreign Minister…
Ukraine’s SBU security service on Friday published an intercepted phone call in which an alleged Russian soldier claims that Tuesday’s explosion at the Kakhovka dam was organized by a Russian sabotage group. “They [the Ukrainian military] didn’t blow it up. That was our sabotage group. They wanted to scare [Ukrainians] with this dam,” said the…
The Netherlands’ highest court ruled Friday that a priceless collection of Crimean gold must be handed over to Ukraine, the latest move in a legal tug-of-war spanning almost a decade. The treasures, dubbed the “Scythian Gold,” were loaned to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam just before Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014. Both Ukraine and…
Seismologists from the Norwegian Seismic Array monitoring group (NORSAR) have detected signals of an explosion in the area of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam, which collapsed Tuesday and caused catastrophic flooding in the south of the country. Data from NORSAR’s regional seismic stations showed signals of an explosion on June 6 at 02:54 a.m. local time (1:54 a.m.…
Authorities in Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya have pressured Chechens to fight in Ukraine using money and force since the start of the war, according to a report published Thursday by the SK SOS human rights organization. “The invasion of Ukraine was another opportunity for [Chechen leader] Ramzan Kadyrov to curry favor with Vladimir…
Russian oil companies have exported 37% more gasoline so far this year despite Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Friday. January-May 2023 gasoline exports from Russia neared 2.5 million tons, the publication said, citing an unidentified source familiar with the data. Russia exported about 2 million tons of gasoline…
One hundred of the biggest Western companies still operating in Russia posted net profits totaling 1.1 trillion rubles ($13.3 billion) in 2022, the exiled independent Russian news website Novaya Gazeta Europe reported Thursday. The results, based on the financial statements of Russian-registered legal entities that are fully or partially foreign-owned, mark a 54% increase from…
Ukraine and Russia accused each other of shelling rescuers and evacuees in the flood-hit Kherson region on Thursday as Moscow said its forces fought off a Ukrainian offensive in another part of the front line. Emergency services were still racing to rescue people stranded by the flood-swollen waters of the Dnipro River, which have forced…