Chinese and Russian companies are developing and testing an attack drone modeled on the Iranian-made Shahed for shipment to Russia, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing anonymous European officials familiar with the matter. Although the name of the unmanned aircraft under development has not been revealed, Bloomberg says reports by Chinese defense websites and media outlets suggest…
Russia’s FSB security service said Wednesday that a French citizen arrested in Moscow last month was collecting military information that could be used by foreign intelligence agencies to harm Russia. Laurent Vinatier, a researcher with a Swiss conflict mediation NGO, was arrested on charges of breaching Russia’s “foreign agents” law in June, the latest case…
Russia said Wednesday it had destroyed two Ukrainian naval drones that were advancing on its Black Sea port of Novorossiysk overnight. Ukrainian naval drones have sunk several Russian ships in the Black Sea, but strikes as far east as Novorossiysk are rare. “Two unmanned boats traveling in the direction of Novorossiysk were destroyed in the…
A Russian anti-government protester has been jailed and fined for violating wartime censorship laws with his tattoo of the viral phrase “Russian warship, go f**k yourself,” media reported Tuesday. Authorities detained Stepan Zimin after pro-war bloggers published a video of him with the tattoo, which bears the phrase that became a rallying cry for Ukrainian resistance against…
Russia’s capture of the district was also reported by the DeepState military blog, which has links to the Ukrainian army. It said the area had been flattened by Russian bombardments, and that withdrawing was “a logical, albeit difficult decision.” There was no immediate reaction from officials in Kyiv. ‘Protect lives’ The Russian attack on Dnipro…
A senior Muslim cleric in Russia’s republic of Dagestan announced Wednesday that the niqab, a full-face veil worn by some Muslim women, would be temporarily banned as part of safety measures following deadly attacks last month. Gunmen killed 22 people in coordinated attacks on two churches, two synagogues and a police checkpoint in two cities in the…
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, assuming his usual role of the guardian of Muscovites’ safety, recently issued an unprecedented warning: a tornado was coming to the capital. “Tomorrow, we will face another challenge with extreme weather conditions,” Sobyanin said on Telegram on June 19. “There is a chance of tornado formation, which is particularly dangerous. Please…
The toxic environment near the former Aral Sea in Central Asia has led to impaired growth and reduced levels of reproductive hormones among local young people, the state-run TASS news agency reported Tuesday, citing a joint study by Russian and Uzbek scientists. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea — located between Kazakhstan and…
Russia has issued arrest warrants for Ukraine’s former prime minister, foreign minister, finance minister and military commander, Moscow’s court system announced on social media Tuesday. Ex-prime minister Volodymyr Groysman, ex-foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin, ex-finance minister Alexander Shlapak and Ukraine army general Ihor Dovgan are accused of using “prohibited methods of warfare.” The crime is punishable by up…
Russia’s energy giant Gazprom exported 23% more natural gas to Europe last month than it did in June 2023, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing its calculations. The European Union was Gazprom’s biggest and most profitable foreign market before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Europe has been trying to end its energy links to Russia…
The World Bank has upgraded Russia from an “upper-middle-income” to a “high-income” country with per-capita gross national income (GNI) totaling $14,250 in 2023. “Economic activity in Russia was influenced by a large increase in military-related activity in 2023,” the international financial institution said Monday. Russia’s move up the ranks was also boosted by growth in…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday its missile strike on an airfield in central Ukraine has destroyed and damaged seven Ukrainian fighter jets. “As a result of the Russian army’s strike, five active Su-27 multi-purpose fighters were destroyed and two under repair were damaged,” the military said on Telegram. Undated aerial footage accompanying its short statement showed…
At least one person was killed and seven injured when a gas explosion ripped through an apartment building in central Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan, authorities said Tuesday. The blast occurred in the city of Sterlitamak on the second floor of a seven-story building, according to the city’s administration. Municipal authorities named “carelessness in handling household…
Hungary’s Moscow-friendly prime minister Viktor Orban urged Kyiv on Tuesday to work towards a “quick ceasefire” in Ukraine that could pave the way for negotiations with Russia to end more than two years of war. Orban issued the appeal standing next to President Volodymyr Zelensky during a surprise visit to Ukraine, the first by the…
A Russian military court on Monday convicted a popular Ukrainian YouTube blogger and journalist in absentia for making public calls to kill President Vladimir Putin. A Moscow military court sentenced Dmitry Gordon to 14 years imprisonment, the TASS news agency reported. Russia has been convicting its opponents in absentia as part of a crackdown since…
The number of people killed in a wave of coordinated attacks in Russia’s southern Dagestan region last month has risen to 22, the regional head said Monday. Gunmen simultaneously attacked two churches, two synagogues and a police checkpoint in two cities in Dagestan on June 23. On Monday, regional Governor Sergei Melikov said the number…
A gay Dagestani man has fled Russia after getting caught in the local police force’s entrapment scheme involving a porn blogger, the North Caucasus LGBTQ+ rights group SK SOS announced Monday. Police in the republic of Dagestan had lured the blogger Matvey Volodin, who performs under the name USSRboy, from Moscow to the majority Muslim republic…
A wind storm enveloped a town in Russia’s Kemerovo (Kuzbass) region in black coal dust on Sunday, media reported. Visibility reportedly dropped to almost zero in the southern Western Siberian town of Kiselyovsk after strong winds lifted dust from the town’s open-pit coal mines into the air. Photos and videos shared on social media showed…
The Kremlin is following the election results in France “very closely,” a spokesman said Monday, after the first round of a snap vote where the far-right National Rally (RN) party won a resounding victory. “The preferences of French voters are more or less clear to us,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The far-right National Rally (RN)…
Authorities in Russia’s Siberian and Far East republics of Tyva and Sakha (Yakutia) have declared states of emergency due to summer wildfires raging across the regions. Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said 75 people died and 2,200 were evacuated from more than 500 active wildfires across the country in the past week. Over two-thirds of these…
Russian attacks killed two elderly women in the town of Ukrainsk in the war-battered eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk on Monday, regional authorities said. The industrial territory has been the target of Russian firepower over more than two years of conflict and the Kremlin’s forces have claimed slow but steady gains there. Donetsk regional prosecutors…
Russia’s patriotic youth organization “Movement of the First” is planning to send schoolchildren to North Korea for summer camp, the group’s Chairman Grigory Gurov told Russian state-run media on Saturday. “We just had a visit by a youth delegation to North Korea … They have the Songdowon camp; we, respectively, have Artek, Orlenok, Smena and…
Russia accidentally dropped at least 38 unguided bombs over its own territory in April 2023-April 2024, The Washington Post reported Monday, citing internal bomb cleanup and evacuation documents it obtained from Ukrainian intelligence. The FAB-500 glide bombs that carry a 500-kilogram payload have fallen on Russia’s Belgorod region which borders Ukraine, the newspaper reported. Russia had started…
Officials in Russian regions bordering Ukraine reported power cuts and water supply issues on Monday after deadly drone attacks by Kyiv. The attacks and shelling on the border region of Belgorod over the past day killed a four-year-old girl and wounded seven people, regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Ukraine regularly targets Russian border regions with…
One person was killed and nine others including an eight-month-old baby were injured Sunday in a strike on a post office in Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, local authorities said. The head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, Oleg Synegubov, said a post office employee was killed. The city of Kharkiv has been regularly targeted by Russian troops,…
U.S. rapper Kanye West has arrived in Moscow for the birthday celebrations of fashion designer Gosha Rubchinsky. The news followed rumors last month that West will perform a concert in Moscow. Western artists have mostly stopped performing in Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which led to massive U.S. and European sanctions on Moscow,…
Russia on Sunday claimed two more east Ukrainian villages as its forces have had the upper hand over Kyiv on the battlefield for months. Moscow has claimed new villages in the east of Ukraine regularly for weeks, as outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces struggle to hold them back. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces had…
Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region declared a day of mourning Sunday, a day after a Russian strike on the town of Vilniansk killed seven people and wounded three dozen. Kyiv also said four people were killed in eastern frontline villages in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the death toll in Vilniansk —near the…
Russia on Saturday claimed another village in eastern Ukraine as it pushes towards the city of Toretsk in a fresh local offensive in the embattled Donetsk region. Toretsk lies north-west of the city of Gorlivka, which has been under separatist control since 2014. The city has been largely spared from the worst of the fighting…
Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the site of the deadliest attack in Russia in two decades, will not operate as a concert venue after it is restored, the regional governor told state-run media on Saturday. The plush venue on the outskirts of the capital burned down on March 22 after a mass shooting during a rock…
A Ukrainian drone attack on a house in a Russian border village killed five people, including two children, the regional governor said Saturday. The drone hit a house in the village of Gorodishche, a tiny village in Russia’s Kursk region, just a few meters from the border with Ukraine. “To our great grief, five people…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday 10 civilians, including a politician and two priests, taken prisoner in Russia and Belarus had been freed in a deal mediated by the Vatican. Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners throughout their two-year conflict, typically in one-for-one swaps, but the release of civilian prisoners is rarer. “We…
A St. Petersburg court has pressed misdemeanor charges against the son of a Leningrad siege survivor who is running to unseat the pro-Kremlin incumbent governor of Russia’s second-largest city, local media reported Friday. Denis Vasilyev was accused of “discrediting” the Russian military, according to the Zaks.ru news website, which cited a local court’s press service. The charges…
Google has added 12 languages of ethnic minority groups living in Russia as part of a major new update to its translation service announced on Thursday. Among the total 110 new languages, Google Translate will now include Bashkir, Chechen, Udmurt and Yakut, among others. In addition to Tatar, which was added in 2020, the U.S. tech…
A Rosneft research expedition to study valuable bird species living in the Yenisei River estuary on the Brekhovsky Islands started from the port of Dudinka
Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), one of Russia’s premier universities that was long considered a bastion of liberal values amid growing conservatism in the country, is raising money to purchase drones for the Russian military, the university’s rector said in an interview published on Thursday. “HSE students serve in a reconnaissance battalion but they…
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) late Thursday invited 22 Russian and 17 Belarusian athletes to compete at the Paris Games as neutrals, while some of them have already said they would not participate. The fresh list of names included competitors from tennis, shooting and rowing. Another list of athletes, released earlier this month, included competitors…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday that it had seen an increase in the number of U.S. drone flights over the Black Sea and vowed a response, warning they could lead to “direct confrontation” with NATO. “Such flights multiply the likelihood of airspace incidents with Russian Air and Space Force aircraft, which increases the risk of…
A Ukrainian drone set an oil depot in the central Tambov region ablaze early Friday, regional authorities said. Tambov region Governor Maxim Yegorov said the drone strike happened at 4:35 am local time. “A small fire broke out and it has been contained,” he said on Telegram, adding that no one was injured in the attack.…
A U.S. citizen jailed in Russia for kicking a police officer two years ago appeared in court on Thursday to face new charges of allegedly punching prison guards and an investigator, Russian media reported. Robert Gilman, 30, was found guilty of attacking a policeman while drunk in the western city of Voronezh in 2022 and…
Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took shelter after a Russian satellite broke into pieces in Earth’s orbit, the American space agency NASA said Thursday. “NASA instructed crews aboard the space station to shelter in their respective spacecraft as a standard precautionary measure after it was informed of a satellite break-up at…
Authorities in the Ural Mountains region of Perm will give out lump sum payments for every newborn child of a soldier fighting in Moscow’s war against Ukraine, regional governor Dmitry Makhonin said Wednesday. “We’ll provide a one-time cash payment to the spouse of the special military operation participant upon the birth of a child,” Makhonin…
Russia’s state financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring has added journalist Artyom Kriger to its list of “terrorists and extremists,” his employer SOTAvision reported on Thursday. Kriger, 23, was arrested last week on charges related to the “extremism” case against late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, according to SOTAvision, an independent news outlet. The journalist was accused of “participation in…
Poland and the Baltic states are urging the EU to strengthen its eastern borders, warning in a joint letter to Brussels of a “looming threat” from Russia and Belarus. The four EU member countries are trenchant critics of Moscow, which they accuse of orchestrating hybrid attacks including “intimidation, instrumentalization of migrants, sabotage, disinformation, foreign information manipulation…
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) falsified evidence against a 15-year-old schoolboy who was jailed last week on terrorism charges, the independent news outlet Mediazona reported Thursday, citing case materials. A Moscow military court ordered Arseniy Turbin to spend five years at a juvenile correctional facility on charges of “participating in terrorist activities.” He was accused of…
Updated with historical context. Russian prosecutors announced Thursday that they have asked a court to recognize crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its then-collaborator Finland in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk as a “genocide.” The Prosecutor General’s Office said archival documents and witness testimonies indicated that over 8,000 civilians and 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war…
Lyudmila Vasilyeva, at 83 years old, has a long history of activism. A Leningrad siege survivor and pensioner, Vasilyeva is now a hopeful for governor of Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg. She aims to challenge the incumbent, Alexander Beglov, who is running from the ruling, pro-Kremlin United Russia party. Calling for the end of the…
Authorities in Moscow have condemned Wednesday’s attempted military coup in Bolivia and warned against “destructive foreign interference” in the South American country. Two Bolivian army leaders were arrested on Wednesday after soldiers and tanks took up position in front of government buildings, in what President Luis Arce called an attempt to overthrow his government. “We…
A senior federal law enforcement official said Thursday that Russia has sent 10,000 recently naturalized citizens to fight in Ukraine amid Moscow’s manpower shortage. Male migrants who receive Russian citizenship are required by law to register with the Russian military and can be called up to serve in the army during mobilization. “We’ve begun to…
Updated to include deaths, more injuries. Three people were killed and dozens of others were injured when a passenger train derailed in Russia’s Far North, law enforcement authorities said Thursday. Nine passenger cars out of 14 overturned late Wednesday near the town of Inta in the republic of Komi, with over 200 people said to have…
Сhechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has called on law enforcement and security officials to kill the family members of suspected Islamic militants following deadly attacks on religious sites in the neighboring republic of Dagestan over the weekend, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) affiliate Kavkaz.Realii reported Wednesday. “If [the suspected shooter] is connected with Shaitans, then…
Russia’s revenue from oil and gas sales this month is expected to reach 812 billion rubles ($9.4 billion), Reuters reported Tuesday, a reflection of how Moscow has managed to weather the storm of Western sanctions imposed after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The projection, based on Reuters’ own calculations, would mark a more than 50%…
MOSCOW — “I will get an anti-war tattoo for every year of the war. Since the war never ends, I will mark each anniversary,” said Zhenya, pointing to a tattoo reading Net Voyne (“No to war”) on an exposed part of their body. In today’s Russia, these two words can land one in prison for…
EU countries on Wednesday agreed to new sanctions against Belarus over the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine so that they align more closely with measures targeting Russia and close holes that have allowed Moscow to circumvent restrictions, officials said. “EU Ambassadors agreed in principle on a new package of sanctions targeting Belarus,” Belgium, which holds the…
Russia’s lower-house of parliament on Wednesday passed a bill that would allow for annual increases to the amount working retirees receive from their state pensions as part of President Vladimir Putin’s promise to boost social spending during his fifth term in the Kremlin. In 2016, Putin suspended the yearly indexation of pensions for working retirees —…
The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for ex-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Army Chief Valery Gerasimov, calling them “absurd” and lacking in legal force. The Hague-based court said Tuesday it had issued arrest warrants for the pair over a barrage of Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian energy…
Police in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan have arrested a man after he made false claims on Tuesday night that a shooting in the region’s capital city was imminent, coming just days after armed attacks on local religious sites left nearly two dozen people dead. The man, whose name law enforcement authorities did not…
An Afghan journalist and feminist activist who fled to Russia more than two years ago due to fears of prosecution by the Taliban has returned to Afghanistan, her lawyer told the Fontanka news outlet on Tuesday. Kobra Hassani was among a group of 12 Afghan nationals who were detained in St. Petersburg in May 2022…
Two people have been arrested in connection with the deadly fire at a former electronics research institute outside Moscow, Russian investigators said Wednesday. At least six people were killed when the top floors of the former Platan Research Institute building — which was rented out to dozens of other companies — caught fire in the…
Dozens of Russian soldiers who were released as part of a recent prisoner exchange with Ukraine arrived in Moscow on Wednesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. Russian and Ukrainian officials announced late Tuesday an exchange of 90 prisoners of war each, the biggest swap between the two warring sides in almost five months. The United Arab…