The anti-war Russian-Belarusian rock band Bi-2 said Tuesday that its members face deportation from Thailand after they performed a concert on the resort island of Phuket last week. Seven members of Bi-2, some of whom are dual citizens of Israel and Australia, were detained by Thai immigration authorities on Wednesday following the Phuket concert. Bi-2…
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…
President Vladimir Putin on Saturday said Ukraine “glorifies” Adolf Hitler’s SS killing squads and vowed to “eradicate Nazism,” as he opened a memorial marking 80 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad. The Russian leader has repeatedly invoked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War to justify his…
Two people were shot dead in a Ukrainian border village on Saturday morning in a cross-border incursion by a Russian “reconnaissance and sabotage group,” local officials said. The attack happened in Ukraine’s Sumy region inside a five-kilometer (three mile) buffer zone along the border with Russia — an area where Kyiv had asked residents to…
“Humans are the middle link of evolution, necessary for the creation of the crown of nature’s glory — a shot of cognac and a slice of lemon,” the brilliant writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky once jokingly wrote. The statement about human beings is debatable, but that the chicken evolved for purely culinary purposes is the…
President Vladimir Putin said Friday it was “obvious” Ukraine shot down a Russian IL-76 military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners over the border region of Belgorod this week. According to Moscow, the plane was traveling to the region ahead of a prisoner swap on Wednesday when it was struck by anti-aircraft missiles. It said there…
A man who was detained in Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan amid a region-wide crackdown on protesters and activists has died in police custody, the human rights group Za Prava Cheloveka (ZPC) reported Friday, citing the man’s sister. Law enforcement officers detained Rifat Dautov following a protest last Friday in Bashkortostan’s capital of Ufa, his sister, identified…
Russia’s regions stand to experience the effects of climate change in diverse ways, with some hit much harder than others, according to a recent study co-authored by Moscow-based climatologist Alexander Chernokulsky and economist Igor Makarov. As manmade global warming progresses — with 2023 marking the warmest year ever recorded — Russia may soon find itself…
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday gave the green light for a new nuclear-powered icebreaker, as Moscow seeks to step up commercial trade across its Arctic north. Under Western sanctions for its Ukraine offensive, Russia is hoping to rely on the Northern Sea Route — a shipping lane that traverses the Arctic Ocean — to…
Russian law enforcement officials said Friday that the Il-76 military transport plane that crashed this week was shot down by a Ukrainian missile fired from a village in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The announcement comes a day after Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, opened a terrorism investigation into the crash. Moscow has accused Kyiv of…
Russia and Ukraine said Friday that they have exchanged the bodies of 132 fallen soldiers, just two days after Moscow accused Kyiv of killing dozens of its own servicemen by shooting down a Russian warplane. Moscow received the remains of 55 soldiers, according to Russian lawmaker Shamsayil Saraliyev, the RBC news website reported. Meanwhile, Ukraine repatriated…
Феминитив: feminine job title The decision of Верховный Суд Российской Федерации (The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation) about the so-called Международное движение ЛГБТ (International LGBT Movement) that was made public without authorization last week is an extraordinary document. It is 19 pages of paragraph-long sentences, lists of violations, accusations, sins, instructions, directives and so on without any facts,…
Authorities in Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan on Friday held a pro-government rally amid their efforts to contain the public backlash that ensued following the imprisonment of a prominent Bashkir activist. Last week, Bashkortostan witnessed some of the largest protests in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine as thousands gathered in the Ural Mountains region to…
It’s been almost two years since Russians began migrating to Serbia, which is now home to one of the largest Russian war diasporas, totalling 370,000 by the end of 2023. Yet the community still largely lives in a parallel world of their establishments — bars, restaurants, music nights and art exhibitions. In an attempt to…
The Russian military is withholding payments and pardons promised to convicted criminals who signed up to fight in some of the most dangerous hotspots in Ukraine, the investigative news outlet IStories reported Thursday. Journalists said they had obtained a copy of a letter sent to President Vladimir Putin by a group of convicts-turned-soldiers, who expressed…
The Kremlin on Friday denied reports that President Vladimir Putin is probing to see whether the United States is willing to engage in talks for ending the war in Ukraine. A Bloomberg report published the day before cited two anonymous sources close to the Kremlin as saying that Putin had indirectly “put out feelers” to unidentified…
Anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin said Thursday that he will not submit signatures endorsing his candidacy that were collected abroad to Russia’s election authorities. According to Russian election laws, a presidential hopeful running from a party not represented in parliament must collect 100,000 unique signatures endorsing his or her candidacy. Nadezhdin, who hopes to run…
The possibility of a nuclear disaster at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine remains “very real,” according to the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest, in March 2022 shortly after the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Regular shelling and drone attacks around the plant have raised…
A Moscow court on Friday extended the detention of American reporter Evan Gershkovich for two months. “The period of detention of Evan Gershkovich… is extended by two months… until March 30,” the court said on the messaging app Telegram. Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was arrested during a reporting trip at the end…
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…
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…
Russian strikes on Ukraine on Tuesday killed 18 people and wounded 130, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, warning that the death toll could increase as rescue efforts were ongoing. The strikes hit the capital Kyiv and the northeastern city of Kharkiv in a deadly day for Ukraine as Russia’s invasion drags on for almost two years.…
Coordinated raids in five countries have led to the arrest of three people suspected of smuggling goods to Russia that could have military uses, EU judicial agency Eurojust said on Tuesday. Authorities in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Canada, and the Netherlands conducted a joint investigation into the export of technological and lab equipment that contravened EU-wide…
Belarus on Tuesday detained at least 24 people, including recently freed political prisoners, Minsk’s leading rights group said, warning families of regime critics to be vigilant. Ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, Belarus has for almost four years brutally cracked down on anyone who took part in massive anti-regime protests in 2020. “There are…
MOSCOW — Will the Kremlin allow an anti-war candidate to run for the presidency? That’s the main question for the thousands of Russians who have stood in long lines to show their support for presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin in recent days. Despite an ongoing debate over whether or not Nadezhdin is a Kremlin-backed spoiler candidate,…
Russia on Tuesday flatly rejected allegations that it had deported Ukrainian children since its invasion, but said at the UN that more than 700,000 had moved into its territory. Ukraine has said that 20,000 children have been forced to move to Russia since the war erupted in February 2022. President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the…