When Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko walked up to the state-run TASS news agency’s Soviet brutalist headquarters a few blocks from the Kremlin on July 5, no one suspected that he would announce the appointment of a new general director. TASS’s general director Sergei Mikhailov, 54, who was honored with the presidential Order of Friendship…
Four Russian fertility clinic employees and two surrogate mothers have been handed jail sentences of varying lengths as part of the country’s first surrogacy investigation, state media reported Friday. Authorities launched Russia’s first-ever surrogacy probe in 2020 after one of the babies born to a surrogate mother was found dead in an apartment outside Moscow. Moscow’s…
Russia intends to stick to a nuclear test ban moratorium despite withdrawing its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Foreign Ministry said Friday. “We intend to keep the moratorium that was introduced more than 30 years ago in place,” said a ministry statement. But any nuclear tests by the United States would…
Russia’s oil pipeline monopoly Transneft sent hundreds of its employees to fight in Ukraine last summer as the Kremlin struggled to recruit soldiers for its war, according to an investigation by the independent news website IStories. Journalists said that, in the months before President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial” mobilization in September 2022, Transneft was sending and…
Втайне: secretly, in secret A translator friend of mine recently announced with some fanfare that he had found the most misspelled word in the Russian language. He had documented 11 misspellings, which is impressive — although I’m sure my personal record for misspelling здравствуйте over the years has topped that. In any case, the word…
Russia’s fourth-largest city of Yekaterinburg has been plagued by snow sculptures of erect penises over the past week, prompting calls among some residents for authorities to crack down on the practice. Local media first spotted a giant snow penis in a public square outside the Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater and the Ural State University on…
Alexander Lukashenko, President of the Republic of Belarus, and Alexey Likhachev, Rosatom Director General, visited Belarus NPP. The ceremony at the NPP was attended by Alexander Lukashenko, President of the Republic of Belarus, and the management of the fuel and energy sector of the country. Alexey Likhachev, ROSATOM Director General, and Viktor Karankevich, Minister of…
The Kremlin on Friday dismissed a new package of U.S. sanctions, saying Russia had learned to “overcome” such economic hurdles since the Ukraine conflict began. Washington on Thursday sanctioned several Russian energy and finance companies as well as individuals and firms in Turkey, China and the United Arab Emirates it said were supporting Russia’s offensive…
Russian left-wing activist and anarchist Lev Skoryakin has been found inside a Moscow detention center weeks after going missing in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, the Memorial human rights group said Friday. Skoryakin was allegedly tortured at Moscow’s Butyrka detention center after being abducted from a Kyrgyz jail on Oct. 17 and flown to Moscow…
A court in St. Petersburg made an unusual move to hold a session inside a strip club as part of litigation over unauthorized renovations. The court described the off-site session at the X.O. Men’s Club as an “official necessity” in a tongue-in-cheek statement released Thursday. Local authorities accuse X.O. Men’s Club of “impacting the apartment building”…
Russia’s Tver region has outlawed the act of “coercing women” into undergoing an abortion, becoming the second such region to do so amid growing concerns about a looming nationwide abortion ban. “Persuading, suggesting, bribing or deceiving” a woman into having an abortion is now punishable by a range of fines, according to the new regional law…
When Father Alexei Volchkov signed an open letter to the Russian government in March 2022 calling for peace and an end to the war in Ukraine, he knew there would be backlash. “What happened was inevitable, really,” he told The Moscow Times. “I was severely reproached by people who were close to me. Some thought…
A Moscow court has sentenced exiled Russian-Canadian activist Pyotr Verzilov to more than eight years of prison in absentia for spreading “war fakes,” the Mediazona news website reported Friday. Moscow’s Basmanny District Court found Verzilov, who is currently residing outside Russia, guilty of spreading “deliberately false” information about the Russian Armed Forces. He was handed…