Authorities do not yet have plans to block VPN services in Russia, the Kremlin said Tuesday, a day after the head of the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League floated the possibility of such a move. Yekaterina Mizulina claimed Monday that the Russian government will “most likely” block VPNs by March 1, though she did not say where she…
Ukraine on Tuesday said it had arrested five former and current intelligence officers it said were secretly working for Russia as part of an influential spy ring. Kyiv said the men were caught passing information to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) about Ukrainian military sites, its defensive fortifications, personal data and strategic energy facilities. “The…
Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) on Tuesday agreed to give pro-peace presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin an extra day to resolve thousands of errors in endorsement signatures before it decides whether to officially register him as a candidate in the March presidential election. Just hours earlier, Nadezhdin said he had asked the CEC to give him…
Russia is suspending imports of bananas and flowers from Ecuador, weeks after Quito agreed to a U.S. weapons deal that will result in Ukraine receiving Soviet-era military equipment from the South American country. The Russian agriculture watchdog, Rosselkhoznadzor, said in a statement that authorizations for five Ecuadoran exporters were suspended from Tuesday due to the…
A Moscow court has ordered the arrest in absentia of popular exiled novelist Boris Akunin over his criticism of Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials announced Tuesday. Authorities charged Akunin, who has not lived in Russia since 2014, with justifying terrorism and spreading “fake news” about the Russian army. Russian law enforcement officials issued a warrant for…
President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Russian parliament will coincide with the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, the business daily Kommersant reported Tuesday, citing four anonymous Kremlin sources. Putin could give his State of the Nation speech to both houses of parliament sometime after Feb. 23 or before March 8, according to…
A two-month-old baby was killed and three others were injured Tuesday in a Russian strike on northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, officials said. “Around 2:30 am, a three-story hotel was destroyed in Zolochiv… following two S-300 missile strikes,” Kharkiv region Governor Oleg Sinegubov said, adding that the child’s mother was among the injured and was hospitalized. …
Bulgaria on Monday arrested an employee of the interior ministry unit for fighting organized crime on suspicion of spying for Russia, the ministry’s chief of staff said. Public media reported that the Directorate General for Combatting Organized Crime (GDBOP) officer was suspected of providing classified information to a former employee of the Russian Embassy in…
Russia’s state financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring has added several U.S. journalists, as well as the former spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, to its list of “extremists and terrorists.” Ashton-Cirillo, a trans woman, responded to Rosfinmonitoring’s designation on X (formerly Twitter) by saying “I know the FSB and Kremlin were thinking about it.” Being…
A Russian court has fined photographer Inna Mosina for posting a rainbow flag on social media, the independent news website Mediazona reported Monday. Mosina was the first person charged with displaying “extremist” symbols after Russia banned the so-called “international LGBT public movement” in November. Mosina faced up to 15 days in prison and a fine…
Russian authorities will “most likely” start blocking major VPN services in March, the head of the Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League said Monday. Downloads of VPNs, which help users access blocked websites, surged in Russia after authorities started blocking Western social media platforms and scores of Russian independent news outlets amid the invasion of Ukraine. “VPNs, especially…
The Ufaorgsintez petrochemical plant (part of Rosneft) started production of a high-octane component for motor gasoline as part of an operational efficiency improvement programme.
The world’s largest wild reindeer population could disappear in the next few years if the Russian government does not crack down on overhunting, according to a new study published by a group of researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Over the past 20 years, the size of Siberia’s Taymyr reindeer population has seen a fourfold decrease,…
Georgian security officials said Monday that they intercepted several explosives claimed to be from Ukraine and intended to be transported to the southwestern Russian city of Voronezh. Georgia’s State Security Service (SSG) said the explosive devices, which were allegedly sent from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, arrived by minivan at the Georgian-Turkish border crossing on Jan. 19…
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been filmed visiting Moscow in recent days as rumors swirl over whether he plans to interview President Vladimir Putin. Photographs of the conservative media personality in the Russian capital first emerged over the weekend when he was seen attending a concert at the Bolshoi Theater. A reporter from…
A Ukrainian strike on a bakery in the occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk over the weekend killed three officials, Russian-installed representatives said Monday. The Kremlin has blasted the attack that killed at least 28 people as a “monstrous terrorist act.” On Monday, authorities in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region said a local government minister and…
Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has found flaws in more than 15% of the signatures of endorsement collected by pro-peace presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, his campaign team said Monday. Nadezhdin, who has emerged as the leading pro-peace voice ahead of the March presidential election, submitted some 105,000 signatures to CEC for review last week. But…
Tech giant Yandex announced Monday it has agreed to sell its Russian assets to a consortium of Russian investors for 475 billion rubles ($5.2 billion). The deal marks an end to more than two decades of Western investment in Yandex, which for years was seen as the crown jewel of Russia’s fast-growing tech industry and…
Commissioning of the first land-based small plant is planned for 2028. Rosenergoatom (electric power division of ROSATOM) has officially become the operating organization of a small (SNPP) in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Alexey Likhachev, Director General of ROSATOM, signed a relevant order. The SNPP design is based on the latest Russian development – the…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday said he visited troops at the southern frontline village Robotyne, which Kyiv retook from Russian forces last summer but is again under heavy attack. Kyiv recaptured the small village in the southern Zaporizhzhia region in August last year in what it hailed as a major success in the counteroffensive…
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko visited South Korea to discuss the Ukrainian war and bilateral ties, Seoul’s foreign ministry said Sunday, as the two countries trade increasingly heated rhetoric over the nuclear-armed North. Rudenko, Russia’s deputy foreign minister handling Asia-Pacific affairs, met his South Korean counterpart Chung Byung-won on Friday, Seoul’s foreign ministry said…
Russia said Sunday the death toll from a Ukrainian strike on a bakery in the occupied eastern city of Lysychansk climbed to 28 people, including a child. The strike hit almost two years into Russia’s grinding offensive in Ukraine, where the front has barely moved in months but attacks have intensified this winter. Moscow’s occupation…
Ukrainian shelling on the eastern occupied city of Lysychansk killed at least 20 people, Russia said Saturday, with at least 10 others wounded and rescue operations ongoing. Moscow’s occupation forces said Kyiv had targeted a bakery that is popular on weekends. The attack hit almost two years into Russia’s Ukraine offensive. Lysychansk, a city in…
Russian police on Saturday detained a group of around 20 journalists, including an AFP reporter, covering a central Moscow protest by the wives of men mobilized to fight in Ukraine. A detained AFP video journalist said the Russian and foreign reporters were being transported in a van to a police station. The group of all…
Ukraine’s air force on Saturday said it downed nine out of 14 drones launched by Russia over southern and central regions overnight. Kyiv said most of the drones were directed at energy facilities in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, where thousands have been without power since Russian strikes on Friday. The outages have mainly affected the…
You can’t say that people in the USSR didn’t know what spinach was. But they had a very superficial knowledge of it — often just from pictures in their grandmothers’ cookbooks. We can’t remember a single spinach recipe from the Soviet period. But before socialism, spinach was the Russian dream. You might say your dream…
A fire broke out overnight at a major Russian oil refinery in the southwestern Volgograd region, authorities said Saturday, after a drone strike claimed by Ukraine. A Ukrainian defense source told AFP that Kyiv’s SBU security service had “organized” the attack, which came after months of Ukrainian drone attacks against Russia. “Last night, the air…
Russia on Friday named veteran human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov, head of the Nobel Prize-winning Memorial group, a “foreign agent.” Moscow has labeled hundreds of activists and independent journalists “foreign agents” in recent years as part of a sweeping crackdown on dissent. Russia’s Justice Ministry said Orlov “opposed the special military operation in Ukraine, disseminated…
The share of Russians who view the invasion of Ukraine as a mistake has reached a new high, according to survey results from the Russian Field polling agency published Thursday. For the first time since the start of the war, 37% of respondents say they would reverse Moscow’s decision to launch its so-called “special military operation”…
Amid snow-covered trees in eastern Moscow, a group of clergymen leads a prayer service to honor an upcoming church dedicated to those who died in military conflicts. A young man, identified as a participant in what the Kremlin calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine, blesses the church, stressing the importance of prayers “for those…
The United Nations’ top court said Friday it has jurisdiction over Ukraine’s lawsuit against Russia on allegations of falsely using the Genocide Convention to justify its invasion. Kyiv has accused President Vladimir Putin of misapplying the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention to launch the “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022. Putin said part of…
Теплоснабжение: central heating A couple of weeks ago there was a major accident in Siberia that left hundreds of homes in Russia without heat for weeks. It happened in particularly cold weather — of course it did, because закон подлости (Murphy’s law) is the only law that still works perfectly in Russia today. As a…
Russia has created more than half a million new jobs in its defense sector to meet soaring demand on the battlefield, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. The Kremlin has thrown massive resources at its full-scale assault on Ukraine, with the defense sector accounting for much of the sanctions-hit economy’s growth. “In the last year…
The writer Ludmila Ulitskaya is the latest Russian author to be banned in Russia. A few days ago Ulitskaya was the victim of a prank by Vovan and Lexus, pseudonyms of Vladimir Krasnov and Alexei Stolyarov, who have been pranking celebrities and politicians by telephone since 2011. According to reports, they called Ulitskaya and pretended to…
Updated to add Fedulov’s addition to the wanted list. Russian authorities are seeking the arrest of two more lawyers of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, months after three other former and current Navalny lawyers were detained. The Interior Ministry added Olga Mikhailova to its wanted list without specifying the crime that she is accused of…
BELGRADE, Serbia — Russian nationals registered some 9,000 new businesses in Serbia by the end of 2023, a number that is set to grow in 2024, according to the Serbian Business Register Agency (APR). The data reflects the Russian community’s interest in laying down long-term roots nearly two years after the invasion of Ukraine sparked the…
A Russian model and photographer who helps Ukrainian refugees flee the war has been arrested on criminal charges of undermining state security, the independent news website Mediazona reported Friday. Nadezhda Rossinskaya, who goes by the name Nadine Geisler, is accused of posting information about collecting humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian military’s Azov Regiment on Instagram last August. …
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed on Friday that two French aid workers had been killed in a Russian strike in Ukraine and condemned the attack as “outrageous.” Ukrainian officials said the two men died in a recent drone attack in southern Ukraine. “Two French aid workers have been killed in Ukraine by a Russian strike.…
Russian election authorities said Friday that signatures of endorsement for anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin included “dead souls,” thus appearing to set the stage for his disqualification from the race. Nadezhdin, who has emerged as the presidential election’s leading pro-peace voice, said Wednesday he had submitted 105,000 signatures to the Central Election Commission (CEC) for review.…
A Russian journalist was kidnapped and threatened over his reporting on combat drone production in the central city of Izhevsk, a local Telegram news channel where the journalist works said Thursday. Izhevsky Venik wrote that its reporter Alexander Skvortsov left his home around midnight on Sunday to pick up “exclusive materials from an informant.” Three…
Ukraine said Friday that tens of thousands of people were without power after a barrage of two dozen Russian drones damaged energy infrastructure in the central part of the country. The overnight attack echoed the systematic bombardments by Russian forces last winter that left millions in Ukraine without power, heating or water for extended periods.…
The Kremlin on Friday denied claims by Kyiv that it had ignored requests to return the remains of Ukrainian prisoners of war who allegedly died in a military plane crash last week. “The administration did not [receive Kyiv’s request],” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state-run news agency RIA Novosti. Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service…
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and his allies have called on supporters to protest against President Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine by turning up to vote “at noon” in the March presidential election. “Go vote against Putin and the war, and urge everyone to do the same,” Navalny said Thursday on X (formerly Twitter). Navalny,…
Moscow has instructed its diplomats to “pursue” exiled Russian celebrities who speak out against their country’s war in Ukraine, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing two anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The Foreign Ministry’s instructions were reportedly issued to Russian diplomats posted in so-called “friendly” countries — those that have avoided taking sides over Russia’s invasion.…
Moscow said Thursday that it hopes Armenia joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) would not affect relations between the two countries. Armenia, which formally joined the Hague-based court on Thursday, has gradually distanced itself from Russia in recent months. Yerevan is now required to arrest President Vladimir Putin if he sets foot on Armenian territory,…
Dmitry Bykov is not upset that his books have been banned in Russia. To the contrary, he is quite pleased. “I’m grateful to [the Russian government] because I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he told The Moscow Times via video call. For years, Bykov has been one of Russia’s most celebrated…
Russian investigators concluded Friday that two missiles launched from a U.S.-made surface-to-air system shot down a military transport plane near the Russian-Ukrainian border last week. Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said over 100 fragments of MIM-104A anti-aircraft missiles, as well as hundreds of body parts, were recovered from the crash site in the western Belgorod region. …
Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said Thursday that its special forces had destroyed a Russian warship off the coast of annexed Crimea using a group of waterborne drones. “The enemy ship was patrolling the Black Sea near Lake Donuzlav in occupied Crimea,” the GUR said in a statement. Ukrainian military officials identified the vessel as…
A Moscow court has commuted the suspended sentence of U.S investor Michael Calvey after he pleaded guilty to controversial fraud charges, the state news agency Interfax reported Thursday. Calvey and his French business partner Philippe Delpal were accused of a $34 million embezzlement scheme related to loans issued by a bank owned by Calvey’s Baring…
A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November. According to Egida, law enforcement agents tasked with combating…
“I can only cry in response,” Rostislav Murzagulov says when asked whether he feels homesick for his native republic of Bashkortostan. For Murzagulov, a former PR chief of Bashkortostan’s head Radiy Khabirov, visiting his home republic in Russia’s Ural Mountains region is a distant prospect. Once a self-described “systemic liberal politician,” Murzagulov resigned from his…
Updated with Kremlin’s statement. Turkish banks have started closing Russian corporate accounts following threats of secondary sanctions from the United States, the Vedomosti business daily reported Thursday, citing financial consultants and business owners. U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in December announcing secondary sanctions on foreign banks suspected of supporting Russia’s war against…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that air defense systems had shot down 11 Ukrainian drones over regions in the western part of the country. “Tonight, the Kyiv regime attempted to commit terrorist attacks against structures on Russian territory using drones,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. “Air defense systems intercepted and destroyed drones over…
The United Nations’ top court on Wednesday mostly rejected Ukraine’s claims that Russia was financing “terrorism” in eastern Ukraine, saying only that Moscow had failed to investigate alleged breaches. Kyiv had accused Moscow of being a “terrorist state” whose support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine was a harbinger of the full-fledged 2022 invasion. It…
A pro-war symbol and one of President Vladimir Putin’s favorite quotes have been chosen as the official logo and slogan of the 2024 presidential election, in what observers say is an effort to indirectly influence the public to vote for the incumbent leader. The Central Election Commission (CEC) announced Monday that the Latin letter “V”…
Russian authorities are taking steps to hinder voting by its citizens living abroad in the upcoming presidential election, in what some observers call a move to restrict votes cast by anti-war emigres. Those hoping to vote from outside the country will face a reduction in polling places and no option to vote online — while…
The rate of forest destruction caused by wildfires in Russia’s northern latitudes more than tripled between 2012 and 2021 compared to the previous decade, according to a new study by the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). Using satellite data, researchers calculated the extent of woodland devastation due to wildfires in…
Russian investigators have concluded that a U.S. Patriot air defense system was used to shoot down an Il-76 military transport plane that crashed near the border with Ukraine last week, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. “It’s been definitively established that the plane was shot down by an American Patriot air defense system,” Putin said during…
The “Multi-D Digital Products for the Construction of a Complex Engineering Facility” project launched by Atomstroyexport JSC (which is part of the Rosatom State Corporation Engineering Division), has become the winner of the “KulibIT-2023 ”National Digitalization Award” in two categories, to take a special prize from the competition organizers. The final competition was held in…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has awarded Serbia’s former top spy with the Order of Friendship for maintaining close ties between the two countries’ intelligence agencies, the nationalist political party that the ex-spy chief heads announced Tuesday. Aleksandar Vulin, who resigned from Serbia’s Security and Information Agency in November, received the state decoration from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence…