Olympic officials said Tuesday they will investigate Belarus over claims the team tried to force an athlete now sheltering in Poland’s Tokyo embassy to return home after she criticized her coaches. Krystsina Tsimanouskaya says she fears for her safety if she returns to Belarus, and she is expected to travel to Poland this week after…
A missing Belarusian dissident was on Tuesday found hanged in a park in Ukraine, with police opening a murder probe and supporters accusing the regime of Alexander Lukashenko of killing the activist who helped his compatriots flee repression. Vitaly Shishov, 26, headed the Belarusian House in Ukraine, a non-governmental organization, and was involved in everything…
Russian women will be able to get jobs servicing aircraft for the first time in decades starting next year, according to a Labor Ministry order published Tuesday. The Soviet Union first introduced the list of banned jobs in the 1970s to protect women’s safety and reproductive health. The list persisted into modern-day Russia despite technological…
On August 2, famous traveler Fedor Konyukhov came back after the one-man polar expedition to Murmansk on board of the nuclear icebreaker “50 Let Pobedy”. In the framework of the project “Clean Arctic” he collected information on ice thawing speed, concentration of microplastics, and seismic activity of the Arctic Ocean bottom. For the first time…
A Russian same-sex family who received death threats after their appearance in an organic retailer’s since-deleted promotional material said they have fled the country. The family and Russia’s VkusVill grocery chain were last month targeted in what appeared to be a coordinated hate campaign after a nationalist and homophobic group spread the ad on social…
RASSKAZOVO, Tambov Region – In 2018, Sergei Kalinin decided to leave Moscow and go home to Rasskazovo, a hardscrabble, agricultural town of around 40,000 in central Russia’s Tambov region. He rented out a vacant basement on the town’s central square and fitted it out as a chic, European-style coffee joint, complete with exotic blends and…
Russian opposition figure Lyubov Sobol has been sentenced to 1.5 years of restricted freedom over her role in this January’s mass protests that called for the release of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, her lawyer said. Thousands were detained at the Jan. 23 pro-Navalny protest in Moscow, with widespread reports of police aggression against peaceful…
Heavy smog from some of the worst wildfires to ever hit northern Siberia has blocked the sunlight and turned day into night, apocalyptic footage shared by The Siberian Times on Monday shows. The republic of Sakha, Russia’s largest and coldest region also known as Yakutia, has for the past five months seen wildfires sweep through…
Russia has confirmed 6,334,195 cases of coronavirus and 160,925 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 483,000. August 3: What you need to know today Russia on Tuesday reported 22,010 new coronavirus cases and 788 deaths. The European Union now recognizes vaccination certificates from San Marino, where…
The United States and Russia clashed Monday over the staffing allowed at their respective embassies despite the latest talks aimed at bringing more stability to a turbulent relationship. In an interview, the Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Antonov, deplored what he called “expulsions” of Moscow’s diplomats, saying the United States had become “persistent and creative…
There are certain summer traditions that every Muscovite knows all too well: having a cookout in the park, getting ice cream, going for a cruise on the Moscow River….and the day when paratroopers descend upon the city. Every year on Aug. 2, Russia celebrates Paratroopers’ Day, which marks the anniversary of the Soviet military’s first…
Poland on Monday granted a humanitarian visa to Belarusian athlete Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, who claimed her team tried to forcibly send her back to her authoritarian homeland from the Olympic Games in Japan. The sprinter was in “direct contact” with Polish diplomats in Tokyo, said Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz, adding that Warsaw would do “whatever…
New amendments to Russia’s hunting law will effectively legalize trophy hunting of endangered animals, Greenpeace activists said Monday. Russia is home to 13 endangered species: the Amur tiger, Central Asian and Far Eastern leopard, snow leopard, bison, saiga, Przewalski’s horse, Altai mountain sheep, gazelle, polar bear, Siberian crane, bowhead whale and gray whale. According to…
Kyrgyzstan’s first post-independence leader has been brought back to the country from exile to face questioning over his role in corruption, authorities said Monday. Kyrgyzstan’s national security committee said in a statement that Askar Akayev had been “delivered” to the capital Bishkek but did not state how he had been brought there after 16 years…
On May 19, a small military plane carrying 16,000 doses of AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines took off from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a Caribbean nation of lush tropical islands famous for the mix of super yachts and fishing boats that bob around its waters. The vaccines, donated through the World Health Organization’s Covax vaccine-sharing facility,…
President Vladimir Putin and Rosneft chief Igor Sechin took a weekend outing to a historic monastery in northwestern Russia that the state-controlled energy giant’s head restored. The Konevsky men’s monastery, located on an island in Lake Ladoga in Russia’s republic of Karelia, was founded in 1393 by Saint Arseny Konevsky, a monk who wished to…
Russia has allocated $1 million to an international program that promotes free media in developing countries over the next five years, its Foreign Ministry announced. The investment comes amid criticisms that Russia is stifling dissent at home in the lead-up to this fall’s parliamentary elections by blacklisting independent news sites and raiding and detaining journalists…
Russia has confirmed 6,312,185 cases of coronavirus and 160,137 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 483,000. August 2: What you need to know today Russia on Monday reported 23,508 new coronavirus cases and 785 deaths. Russia has approved clinical trials of a combination of its Sputnik…
August 2, 2021 Severstal has successfully completed full-scale field pneumatic tests of a new generation of large-diameter pipes (LDP) of strength class X80 with high deformation capacity, confirming their readiness for use in the construction of main gas pipelines. The new generation of pipe products was developed as part of Severstal and Gazprom’s 2019-2022 Scientific and…
Belarusian athlete Kristina Timanovskaya said Sunday she was “safe” and under police protection in Japan after claiming her country had forced her to leave the Tokyo Olympics. “I am safe and they are in the process of deciding where I am going to spend the night,” Timanovskaya said in a statement on Telegram published by…
Yasen Zasursky, the legendary rector of the Moscow University Department of Journalism, died today at the age of 91. Zasursky, whose unusual first name — which means clear or bright — was given by his mother in honor of his father’s eyes, was a child prodigy. He completed school at the age of 14 and was…
Russia has confirmed 6,288,677 cases of coronavirus and 159,352 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 483,000. July 31: What you need to know today Russia on Sunday reported 22,804 new coronavirus cases and 789 deaths. Russia has approved clinical trials of a combination of its Sputnik…
Syzran, Russia, 28 July 2021 – A high-ranking delegation led by Dr. Mohamed Shaker, Minister of Electricity and Renewable Energy of Egypt has paid a visit to one of Russia’s largest machine-building enterprises, JSC TYAZHMASH, which is based in the city of Syzran in the Samara region. The delegation also included Samara Regional Governor Dmitry…
Timing is one of the bigger challenges of entertaining during the summer months in the country. If visitors are coming from the city, their ETA is usually deeply uncertain, dependent as it is on the dreaded “propki” or traffic jams, which snarl every major arterial road leading out of the city. I know lots of…
A Russian district court in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don sentenced three Jehovah’s Witnesses to six years in prison on extremism charges on Thursday, the religious organization told The Moscow Times in an emailed statement. Alexander Parkov and Arsen Avanesov were sentenced to six and a half years, and Vilen Avanesov to six years in…
The Changing of the Kremlin Guards This Saturday at noon you can once again see the Changing of the Presidential Guards in the Kremlin after another coronavirus surge necessitated a temporary halt. Although it is not strictly a performance, the guards twirl and swing and shoot their rifles and march in perfect harmony and symmetry.…
Russian authorities have demanded that YouTube block jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s popular channel that has published viral investigations into corruption and fueled anti-government protests in recent years, his senior ally said Friday. The request comes less than a week after Russia’s internet regulator Roskomnadzor blocked 49 Navalny-linked websites and sought to ban his associates’…
Siberia and other Northern Russian regions are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the impact of the climate crisis, which is accelerating exceptionally fast in the Arctic regions, the international Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) said in a new report on Thursday. The Arctic is warming roughly three times faster than the planet as a whole, scientists…
TENEX in a consortium with specialists of V.G. Khlopin Radium Institute JSC, SSC NIIAR (part of the scientific division of the ROSATOM), FSUE A.P. Alexandrov NITI, as well as the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Geoecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences successfully completed work on a two-year project to study the impact…
Rosneft and the Russian Arctic National Park launched the third stage of the comprehensive project Clean Arctic to study the impact of economic activities on Arctic ecosystems
Biologists of the Siberian Federal University (SFU) conduct large-scale studies of the Taymyr-Evenki population of wild reindeer, involving, among other things, aerial counting of individuals
American Ryan Murphy accused Evgeny Rylov of doping after he was beaten by the Russian in the Olympic 200m backstroke on Friday, sparking an angry denial from Moscow. Murphy raised doubts about the result when he claimed he was “swimming in a race that’s probably not clean.” Rylov said he was “surprised” by Murphy’s “strange”…
Nastasia Dvoyankina, a 31-year-old art teacher from Yekaterinburg, was just managing to make ends meet. But when found out in December 2020 that she was pregnant, she realized her monthly salary of 30,000 rubles ($410) would not be enough for two. “I started looking around, trying to figure out how I could increase my income,”…
Chief editor of the independent investigative outlet Proekt, Roman Badanin, will not return to Russia amid what critics call a Kremlin crackdown on non-state news outlets, Reuters reported Thursday. Russia’s Justice Ministry added Badanin and three other Proekt journalists to its list of “foreign agents,” while the Prosecutor General’s Office outlawed the outlet itself as…
A British judge on Thursday said she expected to rule later this year on a libel case brought against a journalist over claims made in her book about Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Judge Amanda Tipples told the High Court in London after two days of preliminary legal arguments that she planned to issue a judgment…
Brazil plans to cancel its orders for Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Reuters reported Thursday, as Moscow seeks to shore up domestic supplies in the face of a coronavirus surge fueled by the Delta variant. Brazil would be the second Latin American country to cancel its Sputnik V order after Guatemala did so this week. Two…
Jailed Kremlin’s critic Alexei Navalny’s outlawed Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), on Thursday published an investigation on YouTube claiming that Russian state TV hosts Yevegny Popov and his wife Olga Skabeeva own Moscow real estate worth more than 300 million rubles ($4 million). Popov, a host on Rossiya 1, is also running for a seat in Russia’s…
Russia’s troubled laboratory module Nauka on Thursday successfully docked with the International Space Station, said the Russian space agency Roscosmos, after more than a decade of delays. “There is contact!!!” Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter. Images released by Roscosmos showed the new addition to the Russian segment of the ISS docking with the…
Global Tiger Day is celebrated annually on July 29 and was established in 2010 to draw attention to the problems of preserving the population of this predatory animal
Russia has fined Google over $40,000 for failing to store the data of Russian users on local servers, a court spokeswoman said Thursday, the first time the U.S.-based tech giant has been fined for the offense. The Russian government has been seeking to tighten control over the Russian segment of the web and develop a…
Russian athletes have won a total of 25 medals in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics under the neutral Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) flag. Here’s our guide to team ROC: Why can’t Russian athletes compete under the Russian flag? In 2015, the Russian government was accused of doping — administering performance-enhancing drugs to athletes to help them…
Russia reported 799 coronavirus deaths Thursday, tying the national record of pandemic-related fatalities for the third time in less than a month. Russia’s Covid-19 task force previously reported 799 deaths on July 16 and July 24. The country’s total death toll of 156,977 is the sixth-highest in the world, but experts say the true figure…
As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smoldering forests from burning even more. Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometer (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of…
Oleg Baklanov, the last member of a failed coup against then U.S.S.R. leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, has died aged 89, the head of the Russian space agency said on Wednesday. “Oleg Dmitriyevich Baklanov, who led our rocket and space industry and headed the ministry of general machine-building of the U.S.S.R., has passed away,” the head of…
A court in southern Russia has sentenced 10 anti-lockdown protesters to up to six and a half years in jail, the Kommersant business daily has reported. Over 2,000 protesters gathered in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of North Ossetia, on April 20, 2020, to demand an end to the regional self-isolation orders as…
The Russian internet watchdog said Wednesday social media accounts linked to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny should be blocked, as Moscow turns up the heat on the opposition ahead of parliamentary polls. Earlier this week Roskomnadzor blocked 49 websites linked to President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal domestic critic including his main website navalny.com as well as…
– ‘Shameful abuse’ of courts – Abramovich, in a statement released by his lawyers in March, said the book was having “a damaging effect, not only on my personal reputation but also in respect of the activities of Chelsea Football Club”. But representing Belton and HarperCollins, lawyer Andrew Caldecott said the libel claim “starts on…
The film of the rising star of Russian cinema Kira Kovalenko “Unclenching the Firsts” won the Grand Prix in the section “En Certain Regard” of the 74th Cannes Film festival. Kovalenko’s success did not come as a surprise to the film industry and audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was produced by Alexander…
US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov touched elbows and wore face masks as they opened the talks, according to photos by the US mission in Geneva. “The discussions in Geneva were professional and substantive,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said. “We remain committed, even in times of…
Russian athletes at the Tokyo Olympics have so far won seven gold, eight silver and four bronze medals, putting them in fourth place overall. They’re competing under a neutral Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) flag due to a ban stemming from state-sponsored doping violations. Take a look at our gallery of Russian winners:
On July 27, power unit No.2 of Belarus NPP (its General Designer and General Contractor being ROSATOM Engineering Division) has proceeded to the reactor plant hot functional test, which is the most large-scaled stage of commissioning works before the physical start-up. The permit to carry out this technological process was issued by the Gosatomnadzor of the…
Russia will bolster Central Asian ally Tajikistan’s military with weapons, equipment and training amid a “deteriorating” situation in neighboring Afghanistan, Moscow’s defense minister said Wednesday on a visit to the country. Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will hold joint military drills next week near Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban has made huge military gains…
Russian authorities have blocked jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s mirror website using the tools that help telecom providers “isolate” Russia’s section of the internet, the privacy NGO Roskomsvoboda said Tuesday. Navalny rolled out the website navalny.app after authorities blocked his main website navalny.com alongside nearly 50 sites linked to him Monday because of “banned extremist…
U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday accused his Russian counterpart of seeking to disrupt the 2022 congressional elections by spreading “misinformation.” “Look at what Russia is doing already about the 2022 elections and misinformation,” Biden said during a trip to the office of the director of national intelligence near Washington, referring to information he receives…
Russian law enforcement officers on Wednesday searched the home of Roman Dobrokhotov, the chief editor of the investigative news website The Insider, less than a week after it was labeled a “foreign agent.” “Apparently there’s a search at mine. The police are knocking,” Dobrokhotov tweeted early Tuesday. Following several hours of searches, during which authorities seized…
President Alejandro Giammattei announced Tuesday that Guatemala has cancelled its order of a second batch of eight million Russian-made Covid-19 vaccines due to a delivery delay of a previous order. The president told reporters that his administration had renegotiated its contract with Moscow and would no longer buy the additional eight million Sputnik V doses…
Russia’s women gymnastics team capitalized on the dramatic departure of Simone Biles from the U.S. team to win the Olympic title on Tuesday. The U.S. team withdrew Biles from the final after a disappointing opening vault and Russia went on to beat the champions from the last two Games by more than three points. Britain…
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny Tuesday called on supporters to mobilize ahead of key parliamentary polls after authorities blocked dozens of websites linked to his opposition movement. On Monday, Russia’s media regulator barred 49 websites linked to Navalny including his main website navalny.com as pressure mounts on opponents of President Vladimir Putin ahead of September…
Russian athletes are competing in the Tokyo Olympics under a neutral Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) flag due to a ban stemming from state-sponsored doping violations. Here’s a running list of medals they’ve won so far: July 27 Swimming — Gold men’s 100 meters backstroke for Evgeny Rylov, 24. — Silver men’s 100m backstroke for Kliment…
The St. Petersburg election commission has banned the former head of jailed Kremlin’s critic Alexei Navalny’s headquarters, Irina Fatyanova, from running in elections to the city’s legislative assembly, she said on Twitter Tuesday. According to Fatyanova, the election commission accused her of leading an extremist organization, citing a Moscow court decision to outlaw all the…