Workers lowered a hammer and sickle from a towering sculpture overlooking Kyiv on Tuesday in a campaign to remove Soviet icons that ramped up after Russia invaded last year. The 62-meter-high steel figure of a woman holding a sword and shield bearing the U.S.S.R.-linked symbols was unveiled in 1981 as a memorial to Soviet victory in World…
MOSCOW — Tatiana moved to Russia from Sloviansk, a town located in a Kyiv-held part of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, in March 2022 as shelling attacks intensified near her home. After arriving, she was able to receive Russian citizenship fairly quickly, she told The Moscow Times, under a simplified process for Ukrainians. Although Tatiana, who declined…
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, one of Russia’s most renowned literary and cultural figures, announced in a Telegram post that she could no longer write. “That’s it,” she wrote. “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for…
Russia’s plans to launch a crypto-based “Digital Ruble” are not going to help it avoid Western sanctions in the foreseeable future, experts say, despite Russian officials’ claims that the new currency could deal a fatal blow to the U.S.-led global financial system. A new law paving the way for the roll-out of the Digital Ruble…
A court in southern Russia has sentenced a former regional administration official to 12 years in prison on charges of providing Ukraine with state secrets, local media reported Tuesday. The Krasnodar Region Court found the unidentified former official guilty of treason and handed him a 12-year sentence in a maximum-security prison. He was accused of…
Authorities in Kazakhstan have approved Moscow’s request to extradite a Russian cybersecurity expert wanted by the FBI, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Tuesday, citing Artyom Oganov, an official at the Russian consulate in Almaty. Nikita Kislitsin, a department head at Russian cybersecurity firm F.A.C.C.T., was detained by Kazakh law enforcement on June 22…
At least nine Russian military enlistment offices have been targeted in arson attacks linked to phone scams in recent days, media outlets reported Tuesday. The first such incidents occurred in annexed Crimea and the central city of Kazan on Saturday, when two middle-aged women were detained trying to set local enlistment offices on fire, according…
Russia said Tuesday it had downed another wave of Ukrainian drones aimed at vessels in the Black Sea and Moscow, as an office block in the capital’s main business district was struck for the second time in a few days. “Two Ukrainian (unmanned aerial vehicles) were destroyed by air defense systems over the territory of the…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that three Ukrainian sea drones targeted two Black Sea Fleet patrol boats in a second unsuccessful attack near annexed Crimea in two weeks. The patrol boats, Sergei Kotov and Vasily Bykov, perform control-of-navigation tasks 340 kilometers southwest of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol. “All three unmanned…
An office tower in Moscow was struck by a downed drone on Tuesday, Russian officials said, in the second such instance in just three days. “Several drones were shot down by air defense systems while trying to fly to Moscow. One [drone] flew into the same tower in [Moscow] City as last time. The facade…