The exiled opposition leader of reclusive Belarus on Monday called on the public to be “prepared” for political change following reports speculating on the declining health of strongman Alexander Lukashenko. The 68-year-old who has been in power since 1994 has not been seen in public for six days, skipping important events. He was last seen…
High-ranking Russian officials have been banned from resigning during the war in Ukraine under the threat of criminal prosecution, the iStories investigative outlet reported Monday, citing four sources familiar with the matter. The Kremlin imposed the unofficial ban after many officials expressed a desire to resign from their posts, iStories cited a source close to…
Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot has asked its employees to refrain from recording equipment defects on aircraft, leading to planes regularly flying with malfunctions, according to the investigative news outlet Proekt, citing current and former employees at the airline. A former employee at Aeroflot explained that the policy, in force since last spring, was introduced “to…
Amateur drone sales in Russia have skyrocketed this year as the war in Ukraine has exposed a dire shortage of the small and effective devices on the battlefield, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday, citing the analytical service Moneyplace. Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries recorded a twentyfold increase in sales to 26,700 drones in January-March.…
Russia said Sunday that two of its military commanders had been killed in combat near the frontline hotspot of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. In a rare announcement of its losses on the battlefield, the Russian Defense Ministry said the commander of the 4th motorized rifle brigade, Vyacheslav Makarov, and the deputy commander of the Army Corps…
In 1999, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin emerged as a force to be reckoned with in Russian politics after a decisive victory in Chechnya. His confidence grew with successes in Georgia in 2008 and the audacious annexation of Crimea in 2014. Yet it was in the early hours of Feb. 24, 2022, that Vladimir Putin…
At least one helicopter crashed on Saturday in a southern Russian region bordering Ukraine, local authorities said, with one official saying Moscow has lost four aircraft. In a terse statement on messaging app Telegram, Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of the Bryansk region in southern Russia, said a helicopter crashed in the town of Klintsy. He…
Russia said Saturday that its forces were still pushing inside the frontline town of Bakhmut and had wrested control of an area in the eastern Ukrainian city. “In the Donetsk direction, assault detachments liberated a block in the northwestern part of the city of Artemovsk,” the defense ministry said, referring to Bakhmut by its Russian…
Moscow said Saturday that Kyiv used British long-range missiles to target civilian sites in the eastern city of Luhansk, wounding six children. The defense ministry said that on Friday evening Ukraine’s armed forces had struck two civilian enterprises. “Storm Shadow air-to-air missiles supplied to the Kyiv regime by Great Britain were used for the strike,…
Unit 2 of Gen III+ with VVER-1200 (the general designer and general contractor is Rosatom Engineering Division) of the Belarusian NPP was synced with the grid for the first time and supplied the first kilowatt-hours of electricity to the unified energy system of the Republic of Belarus. The grid connection at the reactor power of…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with Pope Francis and Italy’s prime minister on Saturday as part of a diplomatic tour also involving Germany, as Berlin unveiled a huge new weapons package ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. “An important visit for approaching victory of Ukraine!” Zelensky tweeted shortly after arriving in the EU and NATO…
Dishes made of wild greens — not herbs and lettuces grown in the garden — are not necessarily sign of hard times. Nettle, sorrel, ground elder and wild garlic have all been used in our kitchens since time immemorial. Even today one of the most popular May soups is “green” vegetable soup. In Ukraine and…
South Africans were left angry and baffled on Friday after the US accused their country of secretly shipping a South Africans were left angry and baffled on Friday after the US accused their country of secretly shipping arms to Russia, a charge that triggered both a government rebuke but also the announcement of an inquiry.rms…
French drinks giant Pernod Ricard said Friday it had stopped exporting all its brands to Russia and would no longer distribute them following public pressure over its business activities there. The group, which owns a host of premium drinks brands including Havana Club rum, Jameson whiskey and Mumm champagne, stopped exporting to Russia at the end of April, it…
A pro-Russian official in Ukraine’s partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region has been injured in an explosion that authorities called an assassination attempt, the state-run TASS news agency reported Friday. Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said that an explosive device was placed in a trash can at the entrance of an apartment building in the city of…
Russia said Friday a decision by the U.K. to deliver Storm Shadow long-range missiles to Ukraine was an extremely hostile move. By announcing it would deliver the air-launched deep-strike weapon, Britain became the first country to provide longer-range armament to Kyiv. “We see this decision as an extremely hostile step from London, aimed further pumping…
President Vladimir Putin on Friday ordered officials to develop measures aimed at reversing the mass emigration of Russian citizens sparked by the invasion of Ukraine and the country’s “partial” mobilization of reservists. Putin’s decree on amendments to Russia’s state migration policy notes that the emigration of Russian nationals abroad “increased” in 2022 “due to changing…
Residents of Yuldus, a Tatar village in western Siberia destroyed by ongoing forest fires, have called on the head of Russia’s republic of Tatarstan to invest 500 million rubles ($6.5 million) into the area’s reconstruction. “The republic won’t lose much [by allocating] half a million, but…we will know that Tatarstan hasn’t forgotten about us,” local…
The head of Russia’s private Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin on Friday said Moscow’s conventional army was leaving its positions near the eastern Ukraine hotspot town of Bakhmut. His comments came just after Russia’s Defense Ministry announced it had redeployed forces around to take up stronger defensive positions north of Bakhmut. “This is not called…
A major university in Russia’s Volga region is urging students to report “suspicious” peers to the authorities amid heightened anxieties over possible sabotage acts aimed at hampering the war effort. Penza State University’s vice-rector in charge of security, Vladimir Shimkin, flagged a Federal Security Service (FSB) warning that a group of 15-to-21-year-olds are allegedly plotting attacks…
Police in Russia’s second-largest city St. Petersburg have formed a special unit for shooting down drones, the city’s Interior Ministry said Friday, as concerns have risen over drone attacks on Russian territory amid its war on Ukraine. The so-called “sky control unit” in St. Petersburg mainly consists of officers who have served in Russian-occupied areas…
Измена: replacement (sometimes); betrayal (sometimes) If there is one bit of Russian that continues to confuse me, it’s prefixed verbs. You know — when you take a basic verb and then add при-, от-, из-, пере-, об-, за-, or по-, at the beginning of the verb to get seven new verbs with 27 meanings, except…
British consumer goods giant Unilever has doubled profits and increased ad spending in Russia despite its pledge to stop profiting from the market after Moscow invaded Ukraine last year, investigative media reported Friday. Unilever became the first major European food company to stop imports and exports from Russia, as well as media and ad spending there,…
The Kremlin on Friday denied it was meddling in Turkey’s presidential election campaign, after Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival accused Moscow of spreading “deep fakes” targeting him. Turkish opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu claimed earlier this week that Russia was behind an online smear campaign against him ahead of the crucial election on Sunday. …
When an oil depot in Russian-annexed Crimea was attacked in late April, the resulting fire sent a plume of thick black smoke into the sky. The incident at the facility in Sevastopol was one of at least five attacks on oil infrastructure in southern Russia in less than two weeks. There was also a double…
Ukraine claimed Friday to have retaken swathes of ground near the frontline city of Bakhmut, as Russia reported having repelled an attack along a broad stretch of the front line. The rival reports from the battlefront indicated an increase in fighting after months of relative stability, as expectations grow over Kyiv’s spring offensive. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head…
The United States is considering easing sanctions against Moscow in order to secure the release of jailed Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan from Russian prison, CNN reported Thursday, citing unnamed senior White House officials. The U.S. has classified Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, as “wrongfully detained.” The “narrow…
Ukrainian forces have launched preparatory strikes on Russian military targets ahead of their highly anticipated counteroffensive, CNN reported Friday, citing a senior unnamed U.S. military official. “Shaping” operations prepare the battlefield for advancing forces by attacking weapons depots, command centers and armor and artillery systems. CNN describes these operations as a standard tactic employed ahead…
Russian prisoners are increasingly denied parole amid efforts by the Wagner mercenary group and later the Defense Ministry to recruit convicts for the war in Ukraine, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reported Thursday. Only 23,000 requests for conditional early release (CER) were granted in 2022 out of nearly 59,000 requests reviewed by courts, according to judicial…
Russia has added exiled actor Artur Smolyaninov and former Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksii Arestovych to its list of “terrorists and extremists,” the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday. Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a criminal case in January against war movie star Smolyaninov, 39, for his support of Ukraine and criticism of the war. At the time,…
Armenia and Azerbaijan on Thursday blamed each other for an exchange of fire along their restive border, which killed one person and wounded four days ahead of EU-hosted peace talks. The Caucasus neighbors have been locked in a decades-long territorial dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, which has reignited in recent months. Russia urged…
Russian authorities will launch construction of a village outside Moscow for conservative-minded Americans and Canadians next year, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday. Russia has for years positioned itself as a bastion of “traditional” values in contrast with Western liberalism as its relations with the West have deteriorated over its 2014 annexation of Crimea…
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Thursday that he has been returned to solitary confinement for the 15th time since he was imprisoned in 2021. “Yesterday at 8 in the evening I was released from solitary confinement. Today at 9:30 in the morning I’m back in solitary,” read a tweet shared by Navalny’s team. According…
A Russian court has sentenced a former teacher to five and a half years in prison for referring to last fall’s Crimean Bridge explosion as President Vladimir Putin’s “birthday gift” online, independent media reported Thursday. Nikita Tushkanov, 28, was accused of “approving of” the blasts, which badly damaged the bridge linking mainland Russia to annexed Crimea,…
A Moscow confectioner fined for making cakes decorated with anti-war slogans told The Moscow Times that she plans to keep opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite harassment from pro-war figures and the risk of jail. Anastasia Chernysheva was ordered to pay 35,000 rubles ($446) last month on charges of “discrediting” the military over cakes with…
Russia is waging a “very difficult” military campaign in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a rare concession of the Russian military’s underwhelming performance over a year into its war on Kyiv. “It’s a very, very difficult operation and of course certain goals have been achieved in a year,” Peskov told the Bosnian Serb broadcaster ATV…
Russia’s budget deficit has surpassed the government’s entire 2023 target in the first four months of the year as wartime spending and falling energy revenues continued to cut into the state budget. The federal budget deficit rose to 3.42 trillion rubles ($45 billion) in January-April 2023, according to the Finance Ministry figures published Wednesday. Revenues fell…
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Wednesday calling up military reservists for annual training as legal experts say those who turn up could face pressure to sign contracts to be sent to fight in Ukraine. Such trainings are a routine event in which reservists undergo two-month combat readiness drills in the Armed Forces, National…
The United States has for the first time transferred millions seized from a Russian oligarch to a fund for rebuilding Ukraine, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. Some $5.4 million seized from Russian tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev was handed over to the State Department to be used to “remediate the harms of Russia’s unjust war,” Attorney General…
A senior Ukrainian military official said Wednesday that Russian forces had dropped back from some areas near Bakhmut after limited counterattacks by Kyiv’s forces in the longest-running battle of Moscow’s invasion. Commander of Ukrainian ground forces Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russian troops had fallen back in some regions of the front in the eastern Donetsk region…
Russia said on Wednesday that a roadmap to normalize ties between Syria and Turkey will be drafted following a meeting of their foreign ministers in Moscow. Earlier Wednesday the foreign ministers of Turkey and Syria held their first official meeting since the start of the Syrian civil war more than a decade ago. The talks in…
Type “Is Russia fascist?” into a search engine and you will find no shortage of op-eds and articles seeking to enlighten you. RFE/RL, Al Jazeera, Politico, and The New York Times are just some of the major outlets that have published articles weighing up divided expert opinion on the issue. The title of “Z Generation:…
Poland will stop using the official name for Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave and revert to its historic equivalent, the government in Warsaw said Wednesday, drawing Moscow’s ire. Citing a recommendation by a state commission tasked with standardizing foreign names in the Polish language, Poland’s development minister Waldemar Buda said Kaliningrad would now officially be called Konigsberg (“Krolewiec”…
Russia has seized four tugboats belonging to a subsidiary of Danish shipping giant Maersk in Russia’s Far East, according to the group, which ceased operations in the country after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “On April 25 we were informed a local court has ordered the tugboats cannot leave Russia and also transferred custody of the…
A total of 7.4 billion Swiss francs ($8.3 billion) of reserves and assets of the Russian Central Bank are being held in Switzerland, the Swiss economic affairs ministry said Wednesday. Transactions related to the management of Russia’s Central Bank assets and reserves have been prohibited since a month after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in…
President Vladimir Putin has lifted a flight ban and visa regime with Georgia, against which Russia fought a brief war in 2008, the Kremlin said on Wednesday. According to a decree released on Wednesday, Putin has introduced a 90-day visa-free regime for Georgian citizens from May 15. Another decree resumed air travel between Russia and Georgia.…
The two military veterans seated next to President Vladimir Putin at Tuesday’s Victory Day parade on Red Square did not fight in World War II, the Agentsvo investigative outlet reported. Putin is traditionally flanked by World War II veterans on Victory Day, which celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 with a…
AFP’s Ukraine video coordinator Arman Soldin was killed on Tuesday by rocket fire near Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine, AFP journalists who witnessed the incident said. The attack happened at around 4:30 p.m. (13:30 GMT) on the outskirts of the town close to Bakhmut, the epicenter of the fighting in eastern Ukraine for several months.…
Support for Yevgenia (Zhenya) Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk has flooded Russian media abroad and social media inside and outside Russia. The director and author of the play “Finist the Brave Falcon” were taken into custody on May 5 for two months of pre-trial detention under the charge of “justifying terrorism.” The charge is punishable by…
KURSK, Russia — The main World War II memorial complex in this western Russian city was fenced off and guarded by dozens of police officers on Tuesday morning as celebrations marking the 78th anniversary of the Soviet defeat over Nazi Germany got underway. Visitors who came to lay flowers were carefully checked with metal detectors. …
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said peace negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine were “not possible at this moment,” in an interview published by Spanish daily El Pais on Tuesday. His statement came as the leaders of Russia and Ukraine both called for victory during events commemorating the end of World War II. “It is…
Russia’s ambassador to Poland was blocked by activists from laying flowers at a Soviet memorial in Warsaw on Tuesday, the day Russia celebrates Victory Day over Nazi Germany in World War II. Several dozen activists also unveiled an art installation at the entrance to the memorial, comprising hundreds of Ukrainian flags and crosses for Ukrainians…
Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said Tuesday that he had received a letter from Russia’s Defense Ministry threatening to charge his mercenary outfit with treason if they withdrew from Bakhmut, for months the focal point of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In a video published on the messaging app Telegram as Russia kicked off Victory Day…
Updated with details of military parade in Moscow and recast throughout. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a combative speech Tuesday attacking the West and claiming that Russia’s future depended on the outcome of the war in Ukraine as he attended a slimmed-down military parade on Red Square to mark Victory Day. “Civilization again finds itself…
Ukraine was hit by a barrage of Russian missiles for the second night in a row Monday and early Tuesday, just hours before Moscow’s planned May 9 celebration of the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. Russia fired 25 missiles between late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, according to the…
Updates with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s arrival in Moscow on Monday evening. The leaders of six former Soviet republics are now expected to attend Russia’s annual Victory Day parade in Moscow on Tuesday, after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko arrived unannounced in Moscow on Monday evening for what his press service said would be a “working visit.”…
Russia will “develop” its military installations in Central Asian ally Kyrgyzstan, the Kremlin said Monday, following talks between the two countries’ leaders in Moscow. “The heads of state emphasized the importance of strengthening the Kyrgyz Republic’s armed forces and developing Russian military facilities on its territory,” the Kremlin said in a statement. Kyrgyzstan, a majority-Muslim…
Updated with leaders of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan planning to attend Russia’s Victory Day celebrations. Russia is due to hold drastically scaled-back Victory Day celebrations Tuesday amid heightened security concerns following last week’s drone attack on the Kremlin and an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive. The 78th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of…
The suspect in the car blast that wounded pro-Kremlin nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin and killed another person has been indicted on charges of terrorism and arms smuggling, Russia’s top investigative body said Monday. Alexander Permyakov faces up to 20 years in prison on charges of terrorism and 15 years for arms smuggling, Russia’s Investigative Committee, which…
President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed Monday that Russian forces would be defeated in Ukraine just as Nazi Germany was beaten in 1945, during an address commemorating the end of World War II. His speech recorded at a war memorial in Kyiv comes one day ahead of Victory Day in Moscow, a Soviet war anniversary to be…