A Moscow library has ousted its resident cat after a patron wrote a letter of denunciation against him, media reported Monday. Markiz, a black-and-white cat with long hair, had been living at the library in northwestern Moscow’s Strogino district for eight years. He was sent to live in a foster home after pensioner Igor Pochkin, a…
A member of the European Parliament from Latvia has spent decades secretly working for Russian security services, according to a new investigation by The Insider, citing leaked emails between the lawmaker and her suspected “handlers.” According to The Insider, Tatjana Zdanoka served as an “international observer” in Moscow’s 2014 referendum that paved the way for…
President Vladimir Putin is believed to own a highly-guarded residence near Russia’s border with Finland, the investigative outlet Dossier Center reported Monday. Located 30 kilometers from Finland in northwestern Russia’s republic of Karelia, the residence allegedly belonging to Putin features “three modern-style houses on the shore of Marjalahti Bay, two helipads, several yacht piers, a…
Ukraine fired artillery rounds at the Russian-held city of Donetsk on Monday, killing at least three people and wounding three others, Kremlin-backed officials said. Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia and its proxy forces since 2014, has repeatedly been targeted by what Moscow has called indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling. Video distributed by Russian…
Teenage Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva received a four-year ban from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Monday for failing a doping test prior to the 2022 Winter Olympics. Valieva was found to have “committed an Anti-Doping Rule Violation (ADRV) under Clause 4.1 of the All-Russian Anti-Doping Rules of 24 June 2021,” said…
The European Union on Monday announced sanctions against the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League and its head Yekaterina Mizulina for silencing Russian anti-war content creators and reinforcing government censorship. “The [European] Council today approved additional restrictive measures… in view of the continuing deterioration of the human rights situation in Russia,” the Council of the EU said…
Ukraine on Monday rejected Moscow’s claim that it had captured a village in the northeastern part of the country. The Russian army said Monday it had “liberated” the small village of Tabaivka, located in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. Tabaivka lies near the border with the partially occupied Lugansk region and had a pre-war population of…
A 72-year-old pensioner was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for allegedly sharing a post online about Russia’s military casualties in Ukraine, rights groups said Monday. Yevgeniya Maiboroda, from Russia’s southern Rostov region, was prosecuted under a law that prohibits the deliberate spreading of “false information” about the Russian army. Maiboroda pleaded…
Authorities in three regions in northwestern Russia have turned off internet access at night to improve anti-drone technology, the business newspaper Kommersant reported Monday, citing three anonymous sources with Russia’s telecom operators. The previously announced LTE wireless broadband outages in the Leningrad, Novgorod and Pskov regions on Jan. 25-30 were needed to “fine-tune law enforcement equipment…
A Siberian court has found the former mayor of Tomsk guilty of abuse of power, Russian media reported Monday, over three years after he became the center of an anti-corruption expose by jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. Tomsk’s Sovetsky District Court found ex-mayor Ivan Klyayn guilty of abusing his power during a road construction project, adding…