There is an old Russian joke that goes like this: Two friends are talking. One says, “Everyone is always sighing: ‘Caruso! Caruso!’ But I listened, and it was nothing special.” “You listened to Caruso?!” his friend asked. “Nah. Rabinovich sang it to me.” It’s actually more sad than funny. You might be able to describe…
Russian authorities will transport 55 asylum seekers who were waiting to cross the now-closed Salla border crossing with Finland to the last open crossing in the north of the Murmansk region, its governor announced Friday. Another 200 foreign nationals who were unable to cross the border have decided to stay in Russia and will be provided…
President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the West had a “dangerous” monopoly over artificial intelligence and Russia needed to rival “biased” Western chatbots with its own technology. The race to develop AI has heated up since the breakout launch of the ChatGPT generative chatbot last year, with Russia and China spending billions to rival…
Kyiv said on Friday more than 13,000 Ukrainians had returned to the country via the only working border crossing with Russia since it opened in the summer. Thousands of Ukrainians have fled almost two years of brutal fighting by traveling to Russian territory but have slowly begun returning since Moscow opened the crossing into Ukraine’s…
Лезть: climb, crawl, push, pester, butt in, hit on, get involved, etc. A couple of years ago I briefly mentioned the verb лезть in an article about another word, thinking at the time that I was doing a grave injustice to лезть. It’s a great little word. Its first literal meaning is to climb or…
A man from the occupied Donetsk region was found guilty of providing information to the Russian military and sentenced to 12 years in prison, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said in a Telegram post. An investigation found the man had sent voice messages to Russian forces in the area with information about the location of…
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Friday that Russia had failed to deliver weapons Yerevan had already paid for and accused Russia’s media of destabilizing his country’s political situation. The remarks highlighted Armenia’s growing rift with its powerful ally after Russian peacekeepers failed to prevent Azerbaijan’s offensive to retake its Armenian-controlled separatist enclave of…
A man in Siberia who bought a fake death certificate to avoid military service in Ukraine has been sentenced to five years in a penal colony, the local news outlet Sibir.Realii reported Friday, citing public court records. Zorigto Arabzhaev, from the republic of Buryatia, was mobilized to fight in Ukraine in November 2022 as part…
A female doctor from the Muslim-majority republic of Dagestan was not permitted to appear on Russian state television in a hijab, she said on social media Thursday. Immunologist Ayshat Idarmacheva said that she had been asked to appear in a segment of flagship state-run broadcaster Channel One’s morning show. But the show’s producer soon withdrew…
Russian and Chinese business executives with government connections have secretly discussed building an underwater tunnel connecting Crimea to Russia, according to communications obtained by the Ukrainian security services and corroborated and reported by the Washington Post. The Russian-built bridge over the Kerch Strait is vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks, having been hit twice since Feb. 2022.…
Rosneft held the annual XVIII Interregional Scientific and Technical Conference (ISTC).
A third wave of Russian forces is attacking the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and systematically shelling the center of the industrial hub, its Ukrainian head said Friday. The nearly-encircled town near the Russian-held regional stronghold of Donetsk has faced a fierce onslaught for more than a month. “The third wave (of assaults) began. They…
At least three exhausted flamingos were discovered by locals in southern Siberia’s republic of Altai following a severe storm that hit parts of Siberia over the weekend, the Saylyugem National Park said Thursday. In a series of events that the national park described as a “flamingo-fall,” local residents discovered the first two frozen and exhausted…
On Friday, 24 November, Svetlana Artemyeva, a researcher at A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, delivered an informative lecture on amazing marine mammals – walruses for the guests of the Rosneft pavilion at the Russia Exhibition and Forum.
Russia said Friday it had destroyed 16 Ukrainian drones in the south of the country and over the annexed Crimean peninsula. On Thursday night, “an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack using aerial drones against sites on the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said. “Air…
The Kremlin said Thursday that it “regretted” Armenia’s decision to skip a summit of a Moscow-led security alliance, amid a souring of relations between the two ex-Soviet allies. Neither Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan nor his defense minister showed up to a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Minsk on Thursday, which…
Russia on Thursday sentenced a Ukrainian man to 18 years in prison for trying to blow up buildings in the Moscow-controlled Ukrainian city of Melitopol in a plot allegedly orchestrated by Kyiv, state media said. A military court in Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don found Dmitri Golubev guilty on various “international terrorism” charges for one…
Last month some members of the State Duma proposed renaming towns and villages with what they called “offensive” names and prohibit the use of these names in the future. The parliamentarians making the proposal said that residents in these places complained that people laugh at them. They didn’t want an “offensive” word in their passports…
A leading Russian state television anchor has praised the victory of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders in The Netherlands’ elections, saying his win plays to Russia’s advantage in its war on Ukraine. Wilders — who ran on an anti-Islam, anti-immigration and anti-European Union platform — has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past and…
Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom said Thursday it planned to cut investment spending by a fifth next year amid dwindling gas flows to Europe and a heavy tax burden. Since Russia launched its assault on Ukraine in February 2022, European countries have sharply cut gas imports from Russia in a bid to curb Moscow’s ability…
A Russian murderer and cannibal has been released to fight in Ukraine, the Agentstvo media outlet reported Thursday. Denis Gorin, 44, from the Sakhalin region, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in a special-regime colony for murder in 2018. In 2010, after he was released on parole from a 2003 murder sentence, he stabbed…
Russia has opened a criminal case against prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen on suspicion of spreading fake information about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, the independent Dozhd television channel reported Thursday. Gessen, who was born in Russia but lives in the U.S., was accused of spreading false information about atrocities committed by the Russian army in…
A Russian university student has been placed in pre-trial detention on charges of undergoing terrorist training after he took a photograph outside of a Moscow military enlistment office, the independent Mediazona news website reported from the courtroom Thursday. Prosecutors claim that Ibragim Orudzhev, 22, a student at Belgorod State University, “conducted reconnaissance of the area ……
ROSATOM has completed a significant milestone of a large-scale environmental program for the elimination of the hazardous nuclear and chemical legacy. The Murmansk Region closes the more than ten-year history of the dismantlement of the Lepse Floating Technical Base (FTB), which supported the operation of the first nuclear-powered icebreakers and the spent nuclear fuel storage…
Russia on Thursday announced tightened security in its northern Murmansk region after Finland said it would close all but one border crossing between the two countries. Helsinki said Wednesday the move follows a surge in attempted crossings by migrants seeking asylum in the EU country — which Finland says is a destabilization ploy by Russia.…
A two-year-old girl taken from a Kherson children’s home in 2022 has been adopted by a political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to documents obtained by the BBC. The BBC accessed adoption records and a birth record showing Margarita Propenko was renamed Marina Mironova, with A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov and his wife…
Key technologies of the Russian nuclear industry aimed at addressing the goals of the climate agenda will be presented at COP28. Rosatom is set to participate in a series of events outlined in the business programme of the 28th International Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, opening on November…
Updated with news of Maksudov’s death. A journalist working for Russian state television has died from injuries sustained in a drone attack in Ukraine, the network said Thursday. Moscow has repeatedly accused Kyiv of attacking reporters. Last month, it said three correspondents from the Izvestia news outlet were injured by shelling in the Donetsk region. “Boris…
A St. Petersburg military court has sentenced teenager Yegor Balazeikin to six years for attempting to set fire to army registration offices, the independent Novaya Gazeta Europe news website reported Wednesday. Balazeikin, 17, had become an opponent of the war in Ukraine after his uncle was killed in battle. According to investigators, he attempted to set fire to…
An official from Russia’s Natural Resources Ministry has been arrested on bribery charges, local media reported Tuesday. Alexei Yakovlev, 48, is accused of receiving a large-scale bribe from Elvina Novoselova, the director of Taganay National Park in the Chelyabinsk region, which he headed from 2010 until he became an official in Moscow in January 2021.…
Russia said Wednesday that a Ukrainian drone struck a group of journalists in the frontline region of Zaporizhzhia, wounding a reporter from the Rossiya 24 state TV channel. Moscow has repeatedly accused Kyiv’s army of attacking its reporters, including last month when three correspondents from the Izvestia news outlet were injured by shelling in the…
President Vladimir Putin is yet to formally announce his plans to run for re-election next year, but he might already have an unlikely potential competitor in Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist from the Tver region who announced her bid for the presidency last week. “Why did I make this decision? I love our country, I want…
A Russian pop song by singer Katya Lel has gone viral on TikTok this month with videos of women dancing in fur coats and hats with earflaps. The viral version is a sped-up remix of the original “Moi Marmeladnyi (My Marmalade),” which was released in 2004. Its lyrics roughly translate to: “Again, it feels like…
As many as 90 residents of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Dagestan could have been jailed following the anti-Israeli riot at Makhachkala International Airport, according to an analysis of court records by the independent Mediazona news website. A mob of about 1,200 locals stormed Makhachkala’s airport on Oct. 29, seeking to find and attack Jews and…
Russian singer Eduard Sharlot was detained upon his arrival in St. Petersburg from Armenia, where he had published a video of himself burning his Russian passport, media reported Wednesday. In the passport-burning video published on Instagram in June, Sharlot, 25, uses a lighter to set his passport aflame before addressing the Ukrainian government, saying in the…
The Kremlin said Wednesday that it had not changed its policy of pardoning prisoners in exchange for fighting in Ukraine, after local media reported a “satanist” killer had been released. Nikolai Ogolobyak, 33, was sentenced to 20 years for the ritualistic murder of four teenagers in 2008. He was freed earlier this month after fighting…
Specialists from Rosneft’s research institute in Tyumen have upgraded the RN-Lab corporate information system developed to automate laboratory-based core and formation fluid analysis.
Officials in the Kemerovo (Kuzbass) region are grappling with the aftermath of a powerful storm that struck Siberia on Sunday, as Moscow begins scrutinizing how local authorities responded to the natural disaster, Telegram channel Russian Decadence said Wednesday, sharing video recordings of the officials’ meeting. While addressing subordinate civil servants, the Novokuznetsk mayor Sergei Kuznetsov resorted…
Russia said Wednesday a humanitarian emergency was unfolding at one of its checkpoints on the Arctic border with Finland, where it said hundreds of migrants were stranded in freezing temperatures. More than 500 asylum seekers have crossed from Russia to Finland since November, Finnish public broadcaster YLE says, mostly from Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.…
A Russian actress was killed by Ukrainian shelling while performing for the Russian military in the Moscow-occupied Donetsk region. The death of Polina Menshikh, 40, was confirmed to the state-run TASS news agency by regional officials and in a VKontakte post by a St. Petersburg theater. “It is with great pain that we inform you…
On the evening of June 23, Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was preparing to give the order for his men to march to Moscow and demand the removal of Russia’s military leadership after months of rising tensions. Meanwhile, a seemingly unremarkable event was unfolding inside the State Duma’s imposing Stalinist headquarters a few hundred meters…
Russia has detained a French citizen for illegally entering the country from Estonia and opened a criminal investigation, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said Tuesday. EU and NATO member Estonia shares a 300-kilometer border with Russia and tensions between the countries have increased since the beginning of Moscow’s large-scale military intervention in Ukraine last year.…
This is the first time that Rosneft specialists have diagnosed bacterial and sponge communities (frames) in well sections in Eastern Siberia in Cambrian sediments, the first geological period of the Paleozoic era.
This article contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers. A self-confessed member of a Satanist sect serving a 20-year prison sentence for murder and the desecration of dead bodies has been freed after completing six months of military service in Ukraine, the local 76.ru news website reported Tuesday. Nikolai Ogolobyak, 33, from…
The BBC has included Russian feminist poet and activist Daria Serenko and firefighter Sofia Kosacheva in its 2023 list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world that was revealed on Tuesday. Daria Serenko is a feminist thinker and the author of two books of feminist and anti-war prose. She is also among…
Abnormally high November temperatures in Russia’s Far East are preventing local bears from hibernating, with some animals wandering around their winter dens in a “half-asleep state,” the Amur region’s Wildlife Conservation Authority said Tuesday. While many bears have already accumulated the fat needed for their long seasonal sleep, the “improperly” high air temperature hinders them…
In the past week, at least 150 migrants with expired Russian visas have been detained in the republic of Karelia while heading to the Finnish border, according to the RBC news website. The governor of Karelia’s press secretary, Marina Kabatyuk, told RBC most of the migrants had been detained after Nov. 18. The migrants are…
A Moscow court has ordered the arrest of leading Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova in absentia, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported on Tuesday. Tolokonnikova, 34, the feminist protest and performance art group’s co-founder, was charged with insulting the religious feelings of believers, RIA Novosti said, without providing further details. The activist, who currently…
Russia said Tuesday it was holding joint naval exercises with India in the Bay of Bengal, as the two countries bolster security ties despite Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. The United States has in the past voiced concern about India holding joint drills with Russia, which has been trying to expand its influence in the region.…
Russia said on Tuesday it fended off Ukraine’s attempts to get to the occupied eastern bank of the southern Kherson region, and claimed Kyiv’s army had suffered “colossal losses.” The Ukrainian army said last week it had pushed Russian forces back three to eight kilometers from the banks of the Dnipro River, which would have…
A video of an evangelical church service in St. Petersburg featuring songs about ballistic missiles and the chorus “Russia for Christ” went viral over the weekend, prompting Pastor Olga Golikova of the Light of Christ Mission Church to respond this Sunday. The video, published in March, featured Golikova speaking over background singers and music while…
European Union countries are in talks to limit the movements of Russian diplomats within the EU’s border-free zone after the Czech Republic raised concerns about potential spies evading monitoring, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. Last week, Prague shared a document outlining ideas to prevent spying activities for the EU’s 12th package of sanctions against Moscow, which…
Russian special forces are planning to remove Ukraine’s leadership from power by the end of 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said. In an interview with the British tabloid The Sun published late Monday, Zelensky claimed Russia would use “any means available to them,” including assassination, in the operation supposedly dubbed “Maidan 3.” “The goal…
Wives and mothers of Russian soldiers who have been mobilized for the war in Ukraine are facing restrictions and intimidation as they demand to bring their loved ones back from the front. On Sunday, a group of women held an anti-mobilization protest in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the independent news outlet Vyorstka reported. Similar…
Russian President Vladimir Putin will take part in a virtual summit of the BRICS group of nations on Tuesday to discuss the Israel-Hamas war, the Kremlin said. The meeting will be chaired by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the hope of drawing up a common response to the more than six-week conflict. “On Nov.…
Russian airlines have been invited to launch regular flights to North Korea, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday. Russia’s state civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia sent offers to airlines Aeroflot and Aurora to assess their readiness to launch flights to Pyongyang, Kommersant said, citing unspecified sources. A Rosaviatsia delegation visited counterparts in North Korea last week…
The scale of Russian grain theft in occupied Ukraine likely constitutes the war crimes of starvation and pillage, a new report by the Global Rights Compliance legal practice has said. Russia’s billion-dollar operation — which involved seizing Ukrainian grain storage facilities, building new railways, and transferring huge cargo ships to Black Sea ports both before…
The sentencing of artist and musician Alexandra Skochilenko is “horrific” and “mortally dangerous,” a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council has said. “It was known from the very beginning that Alexandra has an intolerance to certain foods and a number of other illnesses,” the state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted Eva Merkacheva as saying…
The Finnish Defense Forces are helping the country’s Border Guard construct temporary fences on the Russian border after the Finnish government closed four border crossing points in response to an increased flow of third-country asylum seekers coming from Russia. Since September, over 300 undocumented asylum seekers, mostly young men from the Middle East, have arrived…
Russia has placed Ukrainian singer Jamala on its federal wanted list on unspecified criminal charges, Russian state agencies reported Monday. The singer’s name and photo appeared on the Interior Ministry’s database, without further information about what she was accused of doing. A singer of Crimean Tatar origin, Jamala won the 2016 Eurovision contest with “1944,” a song about…