Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that Russia was “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners” after Moscow accused Kyiv of downing a military plane carrying dozens of its own captured soldiers. Moscow said 74 people died — 65 of them Ukrainian prisoners of war being flown to a scheduled exchange — when a military…
The documentary film “20 Days in Mariupol” has been nominated for an Oscar in the category of best documentary film. The film, directed by Mstyslav Chernov with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, documented 20 days in the besieged city of Mariupol within the first few weeks of Russia’s invasion. The co-production of…
Russian forces entered the war-battered town of Avdiivka for the first time but were pushed back, its mayor told AFP Wednesday, following months of fierce fighting for the industrial hub in east Ukraine. Moscow in October launched a costly bid to wrest control of the town which has been on the front line of fighting…
VILNIUS, Lithuania — Not Only Coffee, a small coffee shop in the bohemian district of Užupis, has seen an unprecedented flow of visitors to its basement in the past two days. The basement, which is usually ignored by visitors, now acts as a collection point for signatures endorsing Russian presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, whose stance…
An Il-76 aircraft crashed Wednesday morning in western Russia’s Belgorod region which borders Ukraine, killing everyone on board. Footage posted on social media showed what appears to be a large plane falling from the sky and then crashing. The plane was said to have crashed near the town of Yablonovo less than 50 kilometers from…
The head of Far East Russia’s republic of Buryatia on Wednesday submitted a bill to the region’s parliament that aims to scrap mayoral elections in the capital city of Ulan-Ude. Instead of direct elections, Buryatia’s head Alexei Tsydenov proposed that the mayor of Ulan-Ude be elected by the city council, a local legislature. Regional deputies are…
Soviet and Russian film director Yuri Salnikov, who made dozens of films about aviation history, has died at the age of 88, friends reported in Moscow today. The cause of death was a heart attack. Salnikov directed more than one hundred film and television documentaries over his career. A graduate of the Moscow Gerasimov Institute…
Japan in December imported the highest monthly volume of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia in seven years, the RBC news website reported Wednesday, citing data from the Japanese Finance Ministry. Japan is among the world’s largest LNG importers, with Australia, Malaysia and Qatar supplying two-thirds of the energy source, while Russia accounts for 9%.…
The website for anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin experienced an outage on Wednesday that his campaign said was caused by a denial-of-service attack. “Our website has again been subjected to a DDoS attack. The malfunctions will be repaired as soon as possible,” Nadezhdin wrote on the messaging app Telegram. The Moscow Times was unable to…
Russian lawmakers on Wednesday passed in a first reading draft legislation that would allow authorities to confiscate the property of those convicted of “discrediting” and spreading “fakes” about the country’s armed forces. The bill, introduced into the lower-house State Duma on Monday, also proposes seizing money, property and other valuables from those found guilty of inciting “extremist” activity and…
A wave of arrests and detentions has swept Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan following last week’s protests in support of jailed Bashkir activist Fayil Alsynov. Thousands of people protested against Alsynov’s sentencing to four years in a penal colony on charges of “inciting interethnic hatred” in some of the largest street protests in Russia since the…
Russia on Wednesday blamed Kyiv for shooting down a military transportation aircraft said to be carrying 65 Ukrainian soldiers for a prisoner exchange The Il-76 aircraft crashed Wednesday morning in western Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, during a “scheduled flight,” the Russian Defense Ministry said, with authorities later stating that everyone on board the plane had perished. …
WhatsApp and Telegram users in Siberia and Russia’s Far East reported widespread outages of the two messaging apps on Wednesday. Some media outlets speculated that the disruptions were linked to protests in the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) over the killing of a local man. But outages were reported in at least six other regions in Siberia and…