VIP hunters including senior Russian officials and wealthy businessmen appear increasingly keen to target protected animals and areas across the country. These efforts, when combined with poor government oversight, could threaten the survival of the country’s rare species, experts told The Moscow Times. “Since the tsarist era, hunting has been seen in Russia as an…
Russia ordered the expulsion of the United Kingdom’s defense attache in Moscow on Thursday, a move it said was direct retaliation for London expelling Russia’s defense attache last week. The U.K. had accused Moscow’s defense attache — a diplomat in charge of military affairs — of being “an undeclared military intelligence officer,” a charge Moscow…
Russian paleontologists at St. Petersburg State University said Thursday that they have discovered a new species of fast-running dinosaurs believed to have lived in Siberia at least 100 million years ago. A single specimen of the Kiyacursor longipes was found in the Kiya River of the coal-producing Kemerovo region. The dinosaur belongs to a genus of carnivorous ceratosaurs thought…
A Moscow court ruled Thursday to extend the pre-trial detention of eight men accused of organizing and carrying out the deadly Crocus City Hall concert attack in March. Law enforcement agents arrested four gunmen the day after the March 22 attack, which left 145 people dead and hundreds more wounded. A total of 11 people were…
Russian prosecutors have filed an unspecified lawsuit against the exiled former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his one-time business partner Platon Lebedev, the Vedomosti business newspaper reported Thursday. Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court registered the suit against Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, and the defunct Siberian Leasing Company on May 8, the newspaper said, citing Russia’s database of court cases. Initial…
Russian authorities on Thursday labeled the independent news outlet SOTA as “undesirable,” effectively banning anyone from working with or having links to the organization. Russia’s General Prosector’s Office, which announced the designation, described SOTA’s news coverage as “nothing more than an outright attempt to destabilize the socio-political situation inside Russia.” It also accused the news…
Ukraine on Thursday accused Russia of detaining and killing civilians in the border town of Vovchansk in the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russian forces launched a ground assault last week. “Russian troops are taking civilians prisoner,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on Telegram, adding that intelligence reports suggested Russian forces “trying to gain a foothold in…
Russia’s first transgender politician said Thursday that he has returned to his gender assigned at birth, a surprise announcement that comes amid a nationwide crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community. Roman Alyoshin previously went by the name Yulia Alyoshina, which he said was listed in an internal passport he received in 2020. Last year, while still identifying as a woman, he dropped…
At least 12 million people have visited the Russia Expo at Moscow’s VDNKh exhibition center. The exhibition, which opened in November 2023 and runs through July 2024, describes itself as “a large-scale projection of the entire country” and comes as the Kremlin pushes to increase public patriotism amid the invasion of Ukraine. In addition to…
Ukraine warned Thursday that it faced a “very difficult” situation in its northeastern Kharkiv region, where Moscow has made its largest territorial gains in 18 months since launching a surprise offensive last week. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Kyiv was sending more reinforcements to the area, the Ukrainian army said it had managed to…
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said Thursday that it arrested a man and his girlfriend on suspicion of planning to blow up a railway track in annexed Crimea on orders from Ukraine. The unidentified man and woman were arrested “trying to place an explosive device under the railroad tracks” in April near the city of…
Leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping framed their nations’ ties as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world as they met Thursday in Beijing, where the Russian president is seeking greater Chinese support for his war effort in Ukraine and Russia’s isolated economy. This week’s trip is Putin’s first abroad since his March re-election and…