Police in St. Petersburg have been filmed dragging a local election monitor out of a building as observers accuse officials in Russia’s second-largest city of staging the “dirtiest” campaign in the country. No official results have been declared in the five days since St. Petersburg held the municipal vote, leading some election commission members to…
A newly discovered comet hurtling toward the orbit of Mars has scientists scurrying to confirm whether it came from outside the solar system, a likely prospect that would make it the second such interstellar object observed in our planetary neighborhood. The trajectory of the comet, first detected by Crimean astronomer Gennady Borisov, follows a highly…
Alexander Rosenbaum was born into a medical family in Leningrad on Sept. 13, 1951. He qualified as a doctor, but became one of Russia’s most famous bards, or singing poets, best known for his so-called blatnaya pesnya songs about criminal subculture. His most popular songs are “Gop-Stop,” about two gangsters executing an unfaithful lover, and…
Russia’s Healthcare Ministry has drafted a bill to introduce excise taxes on electronic cigarettes, Russian news agencies reported on Friday, citing minister Veronika Skvortsova. Russia has in the past decade tightened tobacco sales regulations as part of a wider campaign to reduce smoking. “The manufacturers of these products are actually pulling (people) into a new…
Russian officials who had allowed a rumored CIA informant to violate a travel ban and subsequently flee to the United States have been “punished,” Interfax reported, citing an unnamed official familiar with the situation. U.S. media reports said a CIA informant in the Russian government had been extracted and brought to the U.S. in 2017.…
Igor Rybakov co-founded a roofing-supply company in Russia in the 1990s, becoming one of the country’s youngest billionaires. He stepped back four years ago to focus on managing his fortune and philanthropy. His latest endeavor is music. Rybakov, 47, released his debut album this month devoted to his wife Ekaterina. The five-track work mixes elements of trip-hop and pop,…
Russian President Vladimir Putin raised a shot of vodka to Russian soldiers on Thursday, while visiting the town of Botlikh in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. Putin promised to visit Dagestan in June during annual phone-in conference. Botlikh resident said that Putin, then-Prime Minister visited the region during the days of armed conflict in…
Israel must be allowed to act freely against Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday during a visit to Sochi, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss security coordination in Syria. The two leaders have met more than a dozen times in recent years and the countries’ militaries have been working…
The Russian military said it has discovered a new island in the Arctic where maps had previously shown a peninsula as climate change accelerates the disappearance of sea ice. The Defense Ministry last month confirmed the discovery of five new Arctic islands off the coast of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Russia has been increasing its…
A district assembly in Prague voted on Thursday to remove a statue of a Soviet World War Two marshal and replace it with a more general memorial following a row that has drawn in the Czech president and Russian authorities. The statue of Marshal Ivan Konev, who led the Red Army forces that liberated most…
Every fall, Russia’s reading public is offered a new dose of esoteric musings and funny word play from the novelist Viktor Pelevin. While it may be a nuisance for those who have never been hooked on his work, it is now a notable annual literary event for those expecting his latest release. This year’s work…
Russia’s state finance watchdog has placed a popular YouTube blogger accused of “mass unrest” during Moscow’s recent election protests on its list of extremists ahead of his trial. Yegor Zhukov, 21, was detained last month on charges of “organizing mass unrest,” a crime punishable by up to eight years in prison. A court ordered Zhukov’s…
Russia has asked the United States via Interpol to confirm the whereabouts of a former Kremlin official who Russian media have said may have been a U.S. spy exfiltrated in 2017, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday. Zakharova made the comment after U.S. media reports, confirmed to Reuters by two sources, said a…
VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network run by Mail.ru Group Ltd, is starting its own dating app Lovina centered around quick-fire videochats. The Lovina app offers a videochat to users who liked each others’ profiles, or sets a “carousel” of limited-time videochats for random users, in a model similar to speed dating when men and women…
School administrators in Siberia have threatened to expel a 4th-grade student for wearing a man bun styled after his hero, the Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, in an incident that has sparked an outcry across Russia. The hair-raising controversy gained nationwide attention this week after the 10-year-old aspiring football player was reprimanded for coming to…
An inspection made by the Murmansk prosecutor’s office revealed poor anti-terrorist measures at Saida, Andreeva and Gremikha bays, the Kommersant business daily has reported. The law enforcement officials brought the violations to court, asking to oblige the defendant to install extra physical barriers of protection and other means to enhance security. All three sites are operated by…
Russia condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to annex the Jordan Valley ahead of a meeting between the Israeli leader and President Vladimir Putin later on Thursday, warning it could sharply increase regional tensions. Netanyahu, who is campaigning for re-election on Sept. 17, announced on Tuesday he intended to “apply Israeli sovereignty” to the…
At least two inmates have been housed in a tower long thought to be abandoned at the infamous Butyrka prison in central Moscow, the Public Monitoring Commission (PMC) prison watchdog has said. The 19th-century Butyrka prison has held notable figures behind its bars, from persecuted Soviet-era writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Isaac Babel to Adolf Hitler’s…
Airstrikes by U.S.-led coalition forces in Syria have killed or wounded many civilians, indicating that required precautions were ignored and war crimes may have been committed, United Nations investigators said on Wednesday. Syrian government and allied Russian warplanes are also conducting a deadly campaign that appears to target medical facilities, schools, markets and farmland and…
At least 17 protesters rallying against the results of a local election in Far East Russia have been detained Tuesday night after security officials threw a smoke grenade into the bus they were in. Hundreds of protesters have demanded a re-do of Sunday’s vote in the republic of Buryatia’s administrative center of Ulan-Ude, where a…
Russian authorities have swept through at least 150 homes and offices of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s allies across the country early Thursday as part of what his allies say is a politically motivated investigation. This is at least the third wave of raids linked to Navalny in the past week. The first two were reportedly part…
The United States has imposed travel restrictions on two Siberian investigators over the alleged torture of detained Jehovah’s Witnesses this year. Investigators in the city of Surgut were alleged to have stripped, suffocated, doused with water and applied stun guns on at least seven Jehovah’s Witnesses who were detained on extremism charges in February. Russia…
A Moscow court has returned theater director Kirill Serebrennikov’s criminal fraud case to prosecutors two years after his high-profile arrest, a move that observers say is a key step toward his case being thrown out. Serebrennikov was detained in August 2017 on charges of embezzling 68 million rubles ($1 million) in government funds as part…
Background Gazprom Dobycha Irkutsk, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gazprom, operates gas and gas condensate production and treatment facilities and acts as an engineering and construction customer for the pre-development of gas and condensate fields in the Irkutsk Region, with Gazprom acting as the license holder. The Kovyktinskoye gas and condensate field, with Gazprom Dobycha Irkutsk acting as its development operator since 2011, serves as a resource base…
Wildfires that burned across swathes of Siberia this summer have been fully extinguished in the Irkutsk region, Interfax cited regional authorities as saying Wednesday. Irkutsk is one of several regions that have been affected by the “unprecedented” wildfires throughout Siberia since June. The wildfires exceeded 3 million hectares, an area the size of Belgium, at…
Release September 11, 2019, 16:20 A working meeting between Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee, and Slavenko Terzic, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Serbia to the Russian Federation, took place in Moscow today. The meeting participants expressed appreciation for their cooperation in the energy sector. The parties paid particular attention to the continuing expansion of gas transmission infrastructure in Serbia, highlighting…
A Russian soldier has been found dead in an Armenian city where Russia has a military base, Armenian investigators told the state-run TASS news agency Wednesday. The 23-year-old serviceman’s body was found with signs of violent death, TASS quoted Armenian investigators as saying. The unnamed soldier had been stationed at the Gyumri military base in…
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller visited the Kremlin for talks with President Vladimir Putin just days after returning from high-level meetings in Beijing. Natural gas export was on the president’s agenda, including the building of infrastructure for deliveries to China. Putin told Miller that he wanted to see deliveries of natural gas from the Yamal Peninsula…
A Bulgarian investigation into alleged espionage involving Russian non-governmental organizations is not intended to influence relations with Moscow, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said on Wednesday. Prosecutors charged the head of a Bulgarian non-governmental organization (NGO) on Tuesday with spying for Russia as part of a scheme they said aimed to draw Bulgaria away from its…
Serbia’s plan to join a Russian-led economic union is drawing fire from the European Union, which the Balkan nation says it wants to be part of. The EU’s executive commission has made clear that Serbia will have to cancel any bilateral trade agreements with other countries if and when it joins the EU, and leaders…
St Petersburg – PhosAgro CEO Andrey Guryev took part in the opening ceremony of the 21st Mendeleev Congress on General and Applied Chemistry, which was held today at the St Petersburg Mining University. Taking place 9–13 September 2019 under the auspices of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the congress is one…
The GQ Russia Person of the Year awards — typically an ordinary star-studded affair — turned political Tuesday night when recipients took turns voicing their opinions on this summer’s high-profile news stories. Award winners praised the recent Russian-Ukrainian prisoner exchange and the release of Meduza investigative journalist Ivan Golunov amid near-unprecedented outcry over his arrest…
Russia warned Europe’s human rights tribunal it risks opening a “Pandora’s Box” of politically motivated cases if it accepts Ukraine’s claims that Moscow-led forces committed atrocities in the Crimea. The legal gambit by Russia’s Deputy Justice Minister Mikhail Galperin came as both sides faced off at the first public hearing at the European Court of Human…
Alexander Beglov has been confirmed the winner of Sunday’s gubernatorial vote in St. Petersburg following a controversial campaign. Russians voted in local and regional elections nationwide Sunday, including in gubernatorial elections in 16 regions. Critics said St. Petersburg’s gubernatorial race suffered from a lack of real competition against Beglov, a Kremlin ally who has been…
Rosneft Oil Company has expanded the range of petrochemical products sold at the exchange trades of the Saint Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange (SPIMEX).
Russia on Wednesday condemned as lies and slander suggestions a suspected CIA mole in President Vladimir Putin’s administration had handed over information to the United States about alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential elections. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made the comment after U.S. media reports, confirmed to Reuters by two sources, said a CIA informant…
Russian state oil major Rosneft said Tuesday that attempts to curb its business in Venezuela would be illegal and that the United States was using the threat of sanctions as a form of unfair competition. The U.S. could impose sanctions on Rosneft “at some point,” U.S. special envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams said Tuesday as…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a bee in his bonnet about debt. Having lived through the 1998 crisis when Russia’s financial system was wiped out for the want of a few billion dollars to meet the government’s obligations, there has been a strong “never again” meme that has run through the Kremlin’s financial policy. Amongst…
Russia has the world’s third-highest suicide rate, the World Health Organization said Monday in a global study published ahead of World Suicide Prevention Day. Globally, nearly 800,000 people die by suicide every year — more than are killed by malaria or breast cancer, or by war or homicide, the WHO said. The UN public health…
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov plans to start making films again and to champion the rights of prisoners in Russian jails, he said on Tuesday, days after being freed in a landmark prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia. Sentsov was the most high-profile prisoner to be swapped on Saturday among 35 Ukrainian detainees to return home…
Russia is cautiously optimistic about the exit of U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, Russian media quoted the country’s officials as saying on Wednesday. U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly fired Bolton amid disagreements with his hardline aide over how to handle foreign policy challenges such as North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Russia. Dmitry Novikov, the…
Bulgarian prosecutors charged the head of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) on Tuesday with spying for Russia as part of a scheme they said aimed to draw Bulgaria away from its Western allies and towards Moscow. Bulgaria, Moscow’s most loyal satellite in Soviet times, is now a member of NATO and the European Union but has close cultural…
Voter support for Russia’s ruling party has fallen significantly in the major Crimean port city of Sevastopol since 2014, the RBC news website has reported, citing official data from regional and local elections held across the country Sunday. United Russia, which supports President Vladimir Putin, saw a decline in support in nearly every region compared…
Release September 10, 2019, 18:00 With support from the International Institute of Welding, the 2019 Arc Cup International Welding Competition took place in Langfang, China. The competition involved more than 300 professionals from 10 countries. The Russian Federation was represented by a team of 19 welders who had won awards and prizes at industry competitions. Among the participants was Anton Kamenskikh from Gazprom Transgaz…
More than 20 million Russians risk losing their jobs to automation over the next decade if they don’t develop new skills, according to new research. Economists estimate that robots will take over more than 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide by 2030. Automation is expected to lead to major job losses despite bringing in increased productivity…
An academic in central Russia died Tuesday after setting himself on fire over what has been reported as an act of protest over perceived government policy against his native language. Albert Razin, 79, was hospitalized in critical condition in the republic of Udmurtia after committing an act of self-immolation outside an administrative building in the…
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On Sept. 6, 100 years after its first premiere, Dziga Vertov’s first film, “Anniversary of the Revolution,” had its second Moscow premiere at the Oktyabr Theater. The film had been thought to be lost, but film historian Nikolai Izvolov found it in pieces in the state film archives and painstakingly restored it and put it…
The world’s only remaining civilian nuclear-powered cargo ship, the Sevmorput, is sailing south into the Norwegian Sea en route to St. Petersburg with 204 refrigerated containers of frozen fish from the Pacific aimed for the market in European Russia. The ship will arrive in St. Petersburg by the end of this week after sailing south along…
Russia’s Health Ministry has ordered a comprehensive study on the effects of electronic cigarettes in the wake of at least five deaths related to the use of the devices in the United States. The American Medical Association on Monday urged Americans to stop using e-cigarettes of any kind until scientists have a better understanding of…
Security officials have carried out searches in five of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s regional offices across Russia, days after local elections where he urged supporters to vote strategically against Kremlin-aligned incumbents. The raids in the cities of Ufa, Samara, Perm, Chelyabinsk and Saransk took place less than a week after Navalny’s Moscow offices were raided.…
The first concert of the unique Russian-British Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra has been held in the Sirius Park of arts and sciences in Sochi.
A top U.S. spy who was reportedly evacuated from Russia could have been a senior Kremlin official’s aide who now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, the Kommersant business daily has reported. The United States had allegedly extracted one of its highest-level moles in the Russian government in 2017 over fears he could be caught,…
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Far East Russia overnight to demand a re-run of this Sunday’s local election won by a pro-Kremlin candidate and to call for the release of an anti-Putin shaman’s supporters, local media have reported. Igor Shutenkov won 52.25% of the votes in the republic of Buryatia’s administrative center of Ulan-Ude, beating…
It’s “pathetic” for adults to read comic books, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky has said, sparking backlash among the country’s comic book fans. Mainstream comic book culture began to catch on in Russia earlier this decade after years of lingering Soviet-era stigma that placed “serious literature” on a pedestal at the expense of disdained mass…
Russia’s Defense Ministry has declassified a trove of documents relating to a Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact signed 80 years ago which historians say paved the way for the start of World War II. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact pact on Aug. 23, 1939. A secret protocol that accompanied the non-aggression treaty divided…
Russia and Ukraine on Saturday exchanged 35 prisoners each in a carefully negotiated swap that could signal a thaw in relations. The swap — which included high-profile figures like filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and potential MH17 witness Vladimir Tsemakh — was seen as a key step toward resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has claimed more…
Lev Tolstoy was born into a family of Russian nobility in Tula in 1828. The fourth of five children, Tolstoy’s mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine. He and his siblings were then raised by relatives. At 16, he enrolled in Kazan University and began studying law and languages.…
France’s foreign minister said on Monday Europe and Russia should try to overcome their mutual distrust and work towards improving relations but that it was still too early to lift EU sanctions against Moscow. The European Union imposed the sanctions over Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in 2014 and its support for pro-Russian armed…
Each year, Muscovites celebrate the founding of Moscow in 1147 with a huge citywide bash during the first weekend of September. From free entry to museums to special performances and parades through the city center, there was no shortage of ways to wish the Russian capital a happy birthday. Here are a few of our…