Russia on Thursday opened a “terrorism” investigation over a military plane crash near the border with Ukraine after it accused Kyiv of downing the aircraft, which it said had more than 60 captured Ukrainian soldiers onboard. The Russian defense and foreign ministries have blamed Ukrainian forces for downing the IL-76 transport plane over the southern…
Theater director Yevgeniya (Zhenya) Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were back in court right after the New Year’s holidays to determine if they would be released from pre-trial detention. The two women have been held since May 2023 on charges that the play “Finist, the Brave Falcon,” written by Petriychuk and directed by Berkovich, contained…
Russia has ended its practice of granting presidential pardons to prisoners who agree to fight in Ukraine, instead offering them conditional release and sending them to the front until the war is over, the BBC’s Russian service reported Thursday. The Wagner mercenary group started recruiting fighters from Russian prisons in the summer of 2022, a…
A Russian military plane that crashed near the border with Ukraine was supposed to transport senior Russian officials before a last-minute change of plans was made, Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesman claimed Thursday. Russia accuses Ukraine of shooting down one of its Il-76 transport planes over the Belgorod region on Wednesday, killing all 74 people on board, including…
Works on installation of inner and outer parts of steel structures of the passive heat removal system (PHRS) deflector in the design position were performed in two days at the Rooppur NPP construction site in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (the general designer and general contractor being the Rosatom Engineering Division). The complexity of this…
Russian authorities have launched an animal cruelty investigation into the death of a pet cat thrown from a train in freezing conditions, state-run and independent Russian media reported Thursday. Twix, a ginger and white cat, became the focus of national attention when he was filmed being thrown off a Russian Railways train after escaping from…
A Russian court has handed down the country’s first-ever sentencing against a person for appearing in an interview with an “undesirable” organization, the independent news website Mediazona reported Thursday. Activist Nadezhda Nizovkina from the Far East Russian republic of Buryatia appeared on the independent news channel Dozhd during a broadcast in August, just two months after…
A St. Petersburg court on Thursday sentenced Daria Trepova to 27 years in prison for the killing of prominent pro-war blogger and propagandist Maxim Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, the independent Mediazona news website reported. The sentence is the harshest known sentence handed down to a woman in modern Russian history, Mediazona said. Trepova,…
MOSCOW — A Moscow court has sentenced Igor Girkin, the former commander of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and an ex-security officer, to four years in prison on extremism charges linked to his criticism of Russia’s war strategy in Ukraine. The criminal case against Girkin, a convicted war criminal in the West, is one of…
Russian anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin has gathered over 150,000 signatures endorsing his bid to run in the March election, his campaign website showed Thursday. While Nadezhdin hit the milestone of 100,000 signatures needed for the Russian Central Election Commission’s (CEC) review on Tuesday, his campaign had stressed that it would aim to collect 150,000…
Ukrainian security services orchestrated an overnight drone attack on an oil refinery in the southern Russian town of Tuapse, a Ukrainian security source told AFP Thursday. Kyiv has ramped up strikes on Russian oil and gas facilities over the past two months, part of what it has called “fair” retaliation for Russian strikes on its…
Ukraine’s SBU security service on Thursday opened a criminal investigation into the downing of a Russian military plane that Moscow said killed 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. Kyiv has not said whether captured Ukrainian soldiers were killed — or whether it was involved — in Wednesday’s shooting down of a military transport plane over Russia’s western Belgorod…
Two black boxes have been recovered from the crash site of a Russian Il-76 military transport plane that crashed Wednesday, state-run news agencies reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources in Russia’s emergency services. Moscow accuses Ukraine of shooting down the aircraft in the western Belgorod region, killing all 74 people on board, including 65 Ukrainian prisoners of…
Russian authorities have designated the independent youth news outlet DOXA as “undesirable,” according to a senior member of Russia’s lower house of parliament said Thursday. DOXA, which has openly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said State Duma deputy Vasily Piskarev had asked the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office to blacklist the news outlet in November 2022. “The General…