Ukraine’s top commander Valery Zaluzhny was on Thursday removed from his post, in the biggest shake-up of Kyiv’s military leadership since Russia’s invasion began almost two years ago. The popular general had led the Ukrainian army since the start of the war, pushing back a vastly more powerful invading force in the first months of…
At least six civilians in southwestern Russia’s Belgorod region have been wounded in Ukrainian shelling, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said Thursday. A man received shrapnel wounds when a “kamikaze” drone attacked a bus in the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka, less than 5 kilometers from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Gladkov wrote on the messaging app Telegram. He later…
Russian concert promoters in early February received an expanded list of musicians banned from performing in the country, the independent news website Meduza reported Thursday, citing two anonymous music industry sources. The names of 50 recording artists and bands reportedly include both vocal critics of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as those who have…
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin accused the United States of “interfering” in their countries’ domestic affairs during a telephone call on Thursday, the Kremlin said. Xi and Putin denounced the “U.S. policy of interfering in the internal affairs of other states” during an hour-long call. “The leaders of the two…
Finland has extended the closure of its border with Russia until April 14, as a recent surge of asylum seekers it accuses Moscow of orchestrating shows no sign of abating, the Nordic country’s Interior Ministry announced Thursday. Finland has not reopened its eastern border with Russia since closing it in December over what it called…
Kazakh-born businessman Vasily Anisimov is at least the seventh billionaire to renounce his Russian citizenship after the invasion of Ukraine, Forbes Russia reported Thursday, citing documents provided by the exiled oligarch. Anisimov, the former owner of the license for the “Putinka” vodka brand and the real estate holding Coalco, is reportedly listed as a citizen…
It means completion of general construction works in Unit 1 containment and transition to the equipment start-up-and-adjustment phase. February 08, 2024, Büyükeceli, Mersin Province, Türkiye. – A “clean area” has been arranged in the reactor compartment of Akkuyu NPP Unit No. 1. This term means a prepared working space for controlled assembly of a reactor,…
Large numbers of Russian troops are pushing to capture the frontline town of Avdiivka, its Ukrainian mayor said Thursday, escalating a months-long effort to capture the industrial hub. Late last year, Moscow launched a costly bid to seize the town, which has been caught up in fighting since 2014 when it briefly fell to Moscow-backed…
Russian election authorities on Thursday disqualified pro-peace presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin from the March election over alleged errors in his endorsement signatures. The veteran politician’s campaign has presented a rare challenge to a tightly controlled election in which President Vladimir Putin is likely to win a fifth term, with thousands of Russians lining up to…
A powerful explosion rocked the suburbs of the city of Izhevsk in central Russia on Wednesday night, with state-run media reporting that the blast occurred at a machine and missile production facility. Videos shared on social media showed a large fireball lighting up the night sky over the testing grounds of the Votkinsk Machine Building…
Amid the plains of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Dagestan lies Novaya Urada, a village of 1,000 residents. This community, some 30 kilometers northwest of the regional capital Makhachkala, has deep roots in livestock farming and each year draws tourists hoping to photograph a vibrant poppy field nearby. Yet Novaya Urada was thrown into upheaval…
A St. Petersburg military court on Wednesday sentenced a university student to nine years in prison for making public calls to join the Ukrainian army and for his native republic of Karelia to secede from Russia. Andrei Vasyurenko, 19, was detained in March on charges of “planning to commit high treason by defecting to the enemy’s side,”…
The Kremlin-appointed head of the republic of Bashkortostan slammed a proposal to honor the memory of a local man who died in police custody after being arrested last month during mass protests. Prominent Bashkir dancer Rif Gabitov asked to hold a moment of silence for the deceased Rifat Dautov at a meeting on Tuesday with Bashkortostan head Radiy…
In a densely populated Moscow neighborhood intersected by two major highways and surrounded by high-rises is, improbably, a village. Right next to supermarkets, 8-lane roadways, noise and lights stand just over a hundred cottages on quiet tree-lined streets. It’s called the “artists’ village” possibly because the streets are named after famous Russian artists, or possibly…
RN-Nyaganneftegaz, an enterprise of Rosneft Oil Company’s oil and gas production complex, invested more than 585 million rubles in environment-oriented and restoration measures over 2023.
Prosecutors in Far East Russia’s Khabarovsk region are seeking to ban the so-called “Ya/My Furgal movement,” according to a statement published on the Russian Justice Ministry’s website. The phrase “Ya/My Furgal” (Russian for “I’m/We’re Furgal”) has been used by supporters of jailed ex-Khabarovsk region Governor Sergei Furgal since his detention in 2020, which sparked some of…
Russia’s human rights body has concluded that the son of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov did not commit a crime when he was filmed assaulting a teenager who was detained for burning a Quran, online media reported Wednesday. Adam Kadyrov, 16, was filmed in September kicking and punching Nikita Zhuravel, 19, who was arrested last year in…
Swedish prosecutors said Wednesday that they will drop their investigation into the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, citing a lack of jurisdiction. Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said he would “hand over material that can be used as evidence in the [ongoing] German investigation” into the pipelines’ destruction. The Swedish Prosecution Authority…
A key Chinese bank used by Russian importers has stopped all settlements with Russia, setting the stage for a “logistics collapse” in the coming weeks, the business daily Vedomosti reported Wednesday, citing anonymous businesspeople and financial consultants familiar with the matter. Chouzhou Commercial Bank, which became the main transaction channel for Russian importers after the…
Russia fired dozens of missiles and drones at Ukraine on Wednesday in a “massive” early morning attack that killed at least five people and injured more than 30, officials in Kyiv said. The wave of strikes came as the EU’s top diplomat was in the Ukrainian capital and with Kyiv calling on its Western allies to…
Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson confirmed Tuesday that he has traveled to Moscow to interview President Vladimir Putin, putting an end to speculation surrounding the purpose of his visit to Russia and whether he intended to ultimately meet with the Russian leader. “We’re here to interview the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We’ll be…
Norway has rejected an asylum application from a man claiming to have deserted Russian mercenary group Wagner and fled to the country, his lawyer told a Norwegian newspaper on Tuesday. Andrei Medvedev, 27, alleges he fought in Ukraine as a member of Wagner for four months before deserting. He sought asylum after fleeing to Norway…
The recent arrests of two Russian volunteers helping Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war and living under occupation have thrown the future of this aid into uncertainty, activists and observers told The Moscow Times. Nadezhda Rossinskaya, also known as Nadin Geisler, was arrested on Feb. 1 upon returning to the Belgorod region and charged with “publicly…
Allies Russia and Belarus are working to create a shared database of “extremists,” the Belarusian ambassador in Moscow said Tuesday. Ambassador Dmitry Krutoy said it was “perplexing” that some websites blacklisted in Russia remained accessible in Belarus and vice versa. “Let’s say these entities or people flee to Russia and face no criminal proceedings there,” Krutoy told…
The mayor of the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil has accused Ukrainian special services of stoking social tensions by drawing attention to the recent assault of a secondary school student, local media reported Tuesday. Last month, local law enforcement officials launched a criminal case into the assault of an 11-year-old girl outside of her school, which…
Some parts of the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka are in a “critical” condition as they fight off Russian shelling and incursions, a local official said on Tuesday. Russia launched a renewed push to capture Avdiivka in October, with troops on three sides of the town pounding it with relentless artillery strikes in a bid…
Russia has released $9 million in frozen North Korean assets after the isolated country provided Moscow with arms for its war against Ukraine, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing anonymous Western intelligence officials. Pyongyang is under a range of UN and U.S. sanctions over banned nuclear weapons tests, and the arrangement appears to meet…
Rosneft’s Samara group of refineries won again the All-Russian Environmental Contest «Leader of Environmental Protection Activities in Russia».
President Vladimir Putin’s administration is seeking to use former Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s visit to Moscow as a propaganda coup both in Russia and the United States, four sources close to the Kremlin have told The Moscow Times on condition of anonymity. “Tucker has been expected here for a long time. He is welcome…
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…