Residents of two northern Russian cities are stocking up on iodine that is used to reduce the effects of radiation exposure after a mysterious accident at a nearby military testing site, regional media have reported. The Defense Ministry has given few details of the accident, saying only that two people were killed and six injured…
By the calendar it’s still summer, but the weather is decidedly autumnal. All that means is that you have all the more reason to party! The second half of August is simply packed with small (and not so small) festivals and concerts that you should definitely see if you happen to be in the Russian…
Russia on Friday accused the U.S. Embassy of having meddled in Russia’s internal affairs when it published a map online showing the route of an unauthorized anti-government protest earlier this month. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had summoned a senior U.S. diplomat over what it said was a post on Twitter and the…
Russian lawmakers are moving to further restrict the locations where citizens will be allowed to protest following weeks of demonstrations over Moscow authorities’ refusal to allow the opposition from running for local office. Thousands of Muscovites have taken to the streets in the past month to protest the decision to bar opposition members from running…
On this day 20 years ago, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin the country’s acting prime minister and successor for the presidency. At the time, most Russians knew little about the 46-year-old head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), who had largely kept out of the public eye. The Kremlin’s political opponents, meanwhile, criticized Yeltsin’s…
The world was a very different place in 1999. We were introduced to Britney Spears. Bill Clinton was impeached. Napster was launched. And everyone worried about Y2K and the havoc it would soon wreak on dial-up internet and our giant PCs. It was also the year Vladimir Putin was appointed as prime minister of Russia…
A former top prosecutor in Russia has encountered resistance as he tries to sue Stalin over orders to execute over 80,000 people and send nearly 200,000 to the gulags, Russia’s Kommersant business daily has reported. Ex-prosecutor Igor Stepanov filed a report seeking to launch criminal proceedings against Stalin, citing the Soviet leader’s 1937 order to…
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An aide to Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, at the center of accusations the ruling League party sought millions of euros via a secret Russian oil deal, flew back-and-forth to Moscow last year, news website BuzzFeed said on Thursday. Flight records show Salvini’s former spokesman Gianluca Savoini went to Moscow on three separate occasions…
Background Gazprom Transgaz Nizhny Novgorod is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gazprom that delivers natural gas to 15 regions in the Volga and Central Federal Districts of the Russian Federation. The company’s gas transmission system is composed of trunklines stretching for over 13,000 kilometers. Gazprom Transgaz Nizhny Novgorod operates 54 compressor workshops, 284 gas compressor units, 371 gas distribution stations, and 4 gas refuelers at gas pipeline operation centers. The company’s efficiency…
A senior Russian lawmaker on Thursday accused the United States of meddling in a Moscow city election next month by organizing what he called provocations in the Russian capital, the state-run RIA news agency reported. Andrei Klimov, the lawmaker who oversees the upper house of parliament’s commission to defend state sovereignty, said that a series…
Moscow’s opposition plans to press ahead with more protests this Saturday even after election officials closed all avenues for several Kremlin critics to run for office in the Russian capital next month. The ongoing standoff between Russia’s opposition and its leadership that has taken place in recent weeks has drawn international attention to what would have otherwise…
Russian authorities on Thursday froze a slew of bank accounts linked to jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny as part of a money laundering investigation, Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, and Russian investigators said. Russia’s Investigative Committee announced during protests in Moscow last weekend that it had opened a criminal case into the laundering of 1 billion…
Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino was “shocked” by the positive changes Moscow has undergone during his first visit to Russia’s capital in 15 years this week, the country’s culture minister said, while Tarantino himself said that he visited Russia “to see the people,” not its government. Tarantino was in Moscow for the Wednesday evening premiere of…
Two people were killed and a nearby city reported a rise in radiation levels when a rocket engine blew up at a testing site in northern Russia on Thursday, forcing authorities to shut down part of a bay in the White Sea to shipping. The brief spike in radiation was reported by authorities in the nearby city…
Russia closed off an area of the White Sea to shipping for a month after the fatal explosion of a rocket engine on a military testing ground in Russia‘s north earlier on Thursday, Interfax cited the port of Arkhangelsk as saying. The explosion of a liquid-propellant rocket engine killed two people on Thursday in Russia‘s northern Arkhangelsk region,…
The first thing Leonid Treskunov did after he was detained during a protest in Moscow on June 12 was call the OVD-Info police-monitoring group. “I googled their hotline number and called them pretty much as soon as I was in the police wagon,” said the 33-year-old Muscovite. “I didn’t know what to do in a…
Russia’s Bal coastal missile system (NATO reporting name SSC-3 or Styx) was moved from its permanent deployment location to the Sredny Peninsula on the Barents Sea coast on Wednesday evening, the Northern Fleet’s press service reported. Sredny Peninsula is the smallest peninsula between the Pechenga Bay and Rybachny (Fisher) Peninsula, a northwestern appendix to the Kola Peninsula.…
Moscow – PhosAgro Group welcomes the adoption of the International Code of Conduct for the Sustainable Use and Management of Fertilizers developed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). According to the FAO, the International Code of Conduct was developed with the aim of eliminating hunger, improving food safety and stimulating the production, distribution…
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan, flooding 1.6 million troops into Manchuria, an area of 600,000 square miles in the North-East of China. Despite a strong Japanese army comprised of a million men awaiting them, the Soviet force, under command of Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, swept into China, Korea and…
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Ankara will not recognize the Crimean peninsula as Russian territory during talks with his Ukrainian counterpart on Wednesday. Russia annexed the Black Sea territory from Ukraine in 2014, incurring several rounds of Western economic sanctions. Moscow maintains that an overwhelming majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia…
Apple is under investigation in Russia following a complaint from cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab and may be abusing its dominant market position, Russia’s anti-monopoly watchdog said on Thursday. Watchdog FAS said it was investigating why a new version of Kaspersky Lab’s Safe Kids application had been declined by Apple’s operating system, resulting in a significant…
Kyrgyz elite security forces attempted to arrest former president Almazbek Atambayev at his house on Wednesday, but his supporters kept them at bay and killed at least one operative, local media and authorities reported. Parliament accused Atambayev of corruption and stripped him of immunity from prosecution in June after he fell out with current president…
A new Russian military drone equipped with stealth technologies has taken flight for the first time, according to footage published by Russia’s Defense Ministry. The military said over the weekend the Okhotnik (“Hunter”) combat drone made “several circles” for more than 20 minutes at an altitude of up to 600 meters before landing. [embedded content]…
Outspoken designer Artemy Lebedev has announced his emigration from Russia in an emotional video address that has left many viewers dubious about its sincerity. A well-known designer and popular blogger famous for his provocative views, Lebedev owns the design studio Art.Lebedev. The studio has developed the official logos of the Russian cities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg…
More than a quarter of children in Russia live below the poverty line, double the national average across all age groups, according to official data. As the number of Russians living in poverty grows amid declining real incomes, researchers say children are significantly more likely to experience economic hardship than other population segments. The United…
Russian election officials have issued a final decision to block opposition candidate Lyubov Sobol from running for Moscow’s city council next month. Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) said it had received 19 appeals from various candidates including Sobol against the Moscow commission’s decision to disqualify them from the ballot on Sept. 8. That decision, based…
RN-Yuganskneftegaz, part of the Rosneft Oil Company oil-producing complex, has reached a new absolute historic daily output record of 198,008 tonnes.
Moscow has a new tourist attraction. Called In.Visible Moscow, it is described on the company’s website as “an authentic cinema-walk through the streets of Moscow.” As it turns out, In.Visible Moscow is a walking tour reimagined. The technology is like any guided walking tour: a pair of headphones and a guide. The difference is that…
Harry, a slight 20-year-old man dressed in a classic white shirt, black trousers and a baseball cap that hides his hair, passes through the turnstiles in the reception area of the high-rise housing The Moscow Times office with a deadpan expression. Harry is not his given name and he is using someone else’s documents to…
U.S. authorities have arrested a Russian immigrant on suspicion of illegally smuggling restricted firearms parts inside packages of jeans and sneakers into Russia. Vladimir Kuznetsov, 58, is alleged to have exported parts to assemble sniper rifles and other firearms without licenses “by methodically mislabeling the packages” for two and a half years. U.S. law enforcement…
More than 40 students and teachers from Slovakia paid a familiarization visit to Novovoronezh NPP. The visit was supported by ROSATOM. The foreign guests visited the Atomic Energy Information Center in Voronezh and then headed to the viewing point of innovative power units of Novovoronezh NPP. A NRNU MEPhI senior lecturer gave a lecture to…
Russian authorities ordered mobile operators to cut access to mobile data services during last weekend’s opposition protests in Moscow, marking the first documented case in Moscow’s history, Russia’s Internet Protection Society NGO has said. Russia’s first documented instance of authorities ordering to stifle mobile internet access took place in the country’s republic of Ingushetia in October,…
August 6, 2019 saw the completion of concrete works for the Unit No. 2 of Rooppur NPP (Bangladesh) turbine hall foundation slab. The slab structure received 3 782 tonnes of rebars and 23 550 cubic meters of concrete. As Sergey Lastochkin, the Vice-President of Rooppur NPP construction of ASE (Rosatom Engineering Division), project has pointed…
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday pressed Russian leader Vladimir Putin for a resumption of peace talks after four Ukrainian soldiers were killed by shelling in the eastern Donbass border region. Conflict between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed forces has killed an estimated 13,000 people since 2014. A ceasefire deal brokered by France and Germany ended…
Russia’s law enforcement and security officials have committed more crimes in 2018 than they did the previous year, according to a media report citing official data. Authorities investigated 6,613 crimes committed by members of 10 key security and law enforcement agencies in 2018, according to data from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office cited by the…
Russia called outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman a professional diplomat late on Tuesday, but said he had been unable to improve battered Russia-U.S. ties because he had been hamstrung by domestic U.S. politics, the state-run TASS news agency reported. Huntsman, who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017, said in a…
Russian prosecutors said on Tuesday that some of the vast Siberian wildfires that environmentalists have dubbed a climate emergency were started on purpose by arsonists trying to conceal illegal logging activity. President Vladimir Putin called in the army last week to help firefighters battle fires raging in remote Siberian forestland that had spread to an…
Moscow residents are more likely to support the recent wave of opposition protests in Russia’s capital than oppose them, according to the independent Levada Center polling agency. Thousands have taken to the streets of Russia’s capital for the past four weekends in support of the opposition candidates barred from running for the Moscow City Duma…
Russia‘s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday it had summoned the Japanese ambassador in Moscow to complain about what it said was criticism from Tokyo that bordered on “an attempt to interfere in Russia‘s domestic affairs.” Tokyo earlier this month called a visit by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to one of four islands claimed by both Japan…
The U.S. ambassador to Russia has resigned after two years as he considers a run for governor in his home state of Utah, the state’s Salt Lake Tribune newspaper reported Tuesday. Jon Huntsman served as the U.S. envoy to Moscow for two years during a fraught period in relations between the two countries. During his…
No object is as synonymous with Romanov Russia as a Fabergé imperial Easter egg. Each of the fifty eggs commissioned by the last Russian tsars is intricate, flawless, and unique. Gleaming and glittering behind bullet-proof glass in well-fortified museums, they are vibrant talismans of the lost sepia-colored world of the Romanovs. Of the fifty imperial…
A newly formed Federal Security Service (FSB) cybersecurity branch will gain the power to block websites without a court order, Russia’s national domain coordinator announced Tuesday. The FSB branch joins the ranks of several IT firms, as well as the state media watchdog Roskomnadzor, that hunt down websites that spread malware and are used for…
Russia has told Norway its navy and air force will hold exercises near the Nordic nation’s Arctic waters later this month, a worrying sign of greater assertiveness by its eastern neighbor, the Norwegian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. NATO member Norway and neighboring Russia have both increased their military presence along NATO’s northern flank following…
Moscow prosecutors have asked a court to strip a couple of parental rights for “endangering” their toddler by bringing him to an opposition protest two weeks ago. Footage published shortly after the July 27 demonstration in support of opposition candidates barred from running in Moscow’s local elections claimed to have identified an “instigator” as a…
Moscow prosecutors have asked a court to strip a couple of parental rights for “endangering” their toddler by bringing him to an opposition protest two weeks ago. Footage published shortly after the July 27 demonstration in support of opposition candidates barred from running in Moscow’s local elections claimed to have identified an “instigator” as a…
Russia’s labor force has declined for the third year straight, totaling 75 million people of working age during the first three months of 2019, researchers say. Russia is attempting to increase labor productivity by the end of President Vladimir Putin’s current term in 2024, following a failed attempt to increase productivity by 2018. Unpopular pension…
Nine men have been placed in pre-trial detention while one is wanted on suspicion of taking part in “mass unrest” by protesting in support of opposition candidates barred from running in Moscow’s local elections. Police detained more than 2,000 people overall during protests on July 27 and Aug. 3 in central Moscow, using violence in…
As Russia’s Northern Fleet strives to complete its newest Arctic base on the coast of the remote Laptev Sea, construction works have been progressing at a hectic pace. The establishment of the garrison in Russia’s Far East town of Tiksi was first announced by the Northern Fleet’s then-Head Commander Nikolai Yevmenov in September 2018. In a meeting with regional…
The solemn ceremony with regards to the Nuclear Fuel Supply Contract for Rooppur NPP was held between JSC TVEL and the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission in Dhaka on August 6, 2019. TVEL JSC is designated as the single source supplier of nuclear fuel for both units of Rooppur NPP during their entire lifecycle. “As a…
At least four civilians have been wounded in a rocket attack on Russia’s military base in Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Rebel commanders and rights groups have said Russia and its Syrian ally stepped up aerial strikes last week in a new and bloodier phase of a three-month-old assault on the last opposition…
A series of blasts at a Russian military base in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk may have been caused by “human error,” a senior Defense Ministry official said Tuesday. Dramatic footage posted online Monday showed huge explosions on the horizon after an ammunition depot caught fire, with flames leaping into the sky followed by belching…
The most well-known and renowned Russian artist of the 19th century, Ilya Repin’s influence and significance in art has been likened to Leo Tolstoy in literature – a writer who was one of his best and most famous subjects. Repin was born in Kharkhov – now Ukraine – where his father traded horses and…
Police in St. Petersburg have reportedly detained at least 11 LGBT activists, three of whom were taken away in an ambulance, at an unauthorized Pride event on Saturday. Local administrations in recent years have either banned gay pride parades outright or backtracked on earlier promises to allow them, often citing a 2013 law banning “homosexual…
Fans of FC Zenit St. Petersburg have been accused of racism following the signing of black Brazilian winger Malcom, an allegation that the club has since denied. FC Zenit signed Malcom from Spanish champions Barcelona for an initial fee of $44.39 million last week. Days later, a banner spotted in the fan section during Zenit’s…
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Monday that Moscow would be forced to start developing short and intermediate-range land-based nuclear missiles if the United States started doing so after the demise of a landmark arms control treaty. The United States formally left the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia on Friday after determining that…
Background The key areas of activity of Gazprom Dobycha Orenburg are production, treatment, and transportation of hydrocarbons and a number of commercial products of partner companies. The main source of raw materials for the company is the Orenburgskoye oil, gas and condensate field that contains unique components including methane, ethane, propane, butanes, helium, mercaptans, etc. This is why the Orenburg Gas Processing and Helium Plants…
Yegor Zhukov, a student at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, was detained on Aug. 2 on suspicion of “mass unrest,” a crime punishable with up to eight years in prison, after he took part in Moscow’s mass opposition protest on July 27.Zhukov’s classmates say he has been targeted for openly showing his opinion on the…
Thousands of people took to Moscow’s streets for the fourth weekend in a row to demand that city authorities allow opposition-minded candidates to be allowed on the ballot for the Sept. 8 City Duma elections. Opposition candidate Lyubov Sobol, virtually the only leading opposition figure who hadn’t yet been jailed ahead of Saturday’s protest, was…
The annual International Army Games takes place this month in Patriot Park on the outskirts of Moscow, giving various combat units from the military a chance to compete against one another and show off their skills. Teams from 25 countries have gathered to battle it out with a tank biathlon, military police firing lines, field…