Updated with court ruling. A Moscow court has fined the editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta for breaking wartime censorship laws, the publication reported Thursday. Sergei Sokolov, who replaced Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov as Novaya Gazeta’s head editor last year, was found guilty of “discrediting” the Russian military in an article published…
President Vladimir Putin has secretly assigned “political instructors” to Russian government ministries and state agencies to ensure loyalty among officials, the independent news outlets Meduza and IStories reported Thursday, citing leaked Kremlin files obtained by an international team of journalists. The political instructors — called “deputy heads for social and political work” — are tasked with instructing…
Russia said Thursday it had defeated an attempted landing by Ukrainian special forces on the Tendra Spit sandbar in the Black Sea held by Russian troops, killing “up to 25” Ukrainian personnel. “Russian forces… destroyed a Ukrainian commando group…. trying to land on speedboats,” the Defense Ministry said in its daily update. It said that…
A court in a Russian border region on Thursday sentenced a Ukrainian man to 12 years in prison on espionage charges for passing military information to Ukraine’s secret services. Russia has arrested and imprisoned dozens of people for allegedly cooperating with Ukraine’s army and intelligence agencies since it launched its full-scale military offensive in February…
Thanks to the support of RN-Uvatneftegaz (an enterprise of Rosneft Oil Company’s upstream complex), scientists from the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences have confirmed the fact that the red-nosed forest reindeer is a permanent resident of the Tyumen Region.
President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual State of the Nation address on Thursday, using the speech to send a message of defiance to the West, which he accused of instigating the war in Ukraine, but also to highlight state social support programs and the Russian economy’s resilience against Western sanctions. “The West miscalculated and ran…
New Zealand announced Thursday that it has imposed a new round of sanctions against Russia aiming to curb Moscow’s efforts to evade current restrictions over its war in Ukraine. “By targeting evasion methods, the government is contributing to the robustness of the sanctions system,” Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement, describing Russia’s sanctions…
Russia’s most prominent opposition figure Alexei Navalny died on Feb. 16 in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year prison sentence, dealing a major blow to the country’s beleaguered opposition. Ahead of next month’s presidential election, which President Vladimir Putin is expected to easily win, Russia’s opposition is divided more than ever before — both physically,…
LONDON — Marina Litvinenko, activist and widow of poisoned Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, told The Moscow Times that Yulia Navalnaya must “find her own voice” as she starts to build a political career following her husband’s death. Navalnaya announced last week that she would continue the work of her husband Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent…
A Russian court has overturned the parole granted to a summer camp director who was jailed over the deaths of 14 children in a boating accident, media reported Wednesday. Yelena Reshetova was among several people arrested following the June 2016 incident at the Samozero camp in the northern republic of Karelia, where a rafting party carrying dozens…
The number of criminal cases against “foreign agents” in Russia more than doubled last year compared to the preceding two years, the investigative news outlet Vyorstka reported Wednesday. Hundreds of journalists, activists and civil society figures have been branded “foreign agents” in recent years amid the Kremlin’s widening crackdown on independent media and the opposition. …
Russia will take measures against Sweden following its accession to NATO, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. Sweden on Monday cleared the final hurdle to become the 32nd member of the U.S.-led military alliance after Hungary, the last holdout in accession talks, ratified the Nordic country’s membership. Stockholm dropped years of military non-alignment when it applied for…
Latvia’s Justice Minister said that Russian citizens who live in the Baltic country and plan to vote in Russia’s upcoming presidential election “essentially support” Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “We can’t prevent Russian citizens from entering the embassy. What they do there and why they do it is their own business with the state of which they are…
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, urged European politicians to “investigate” the Western assets of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle on Wednesday. “You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions,” Navalnaya told the European Parliament in Strasbourg. “The most important thing is people who…
Russia’s threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons in an armed conflict is lower than previously made public, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, citing leaked military documents. In 2020, President Vladimir Putin approved a new nuclear deterrence policy that permits the use of nuclear first strikes in several scenarios, such as those where Russia’s existence as a state…
Russia’s lower-house State Duma on Wednesday passed a bill that would ban advertisers from working with “foreign agents,” a move that will likely make it next to impossible for independent media outlets hit with the designation to earn money. If signed into law, businesses would no longer be able to advertise their products and services…
A public funeral for late opposition activist Alexei Navalny will be held Friday afternoon at a church in southeastern Moscow, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh announced on social media Wednesday. The funeral service will take place at a Russian Orthodox church in Moscow’s Maryino district, where Navalny had lived with his wife and two children before being poisoned in…
Russian authorities are investigating a woman in the Moscow region town of Lyubertsy for kicking out a Ukraine war veteran from the cafe she owns. Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said Wednesday that its chief Alexander Bastrykin had ordered for a criminal case to be opened into “incitement of hatred” after pro-war activists…
Recast with appeal for help. Pro-Russian rebels in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria appealed to Russia for “protection” on Wednesday amid fears the territory could open a new flashpoint in Moscow’s war with neighboring Ukraine. The thin strip of land has been de facto controlled by pro-Russian forces since the collapse of the Soviet Union…
Finnish state energy company Fortum said Tuesday it had launched legal proceedings to claim compensation from Moscow over the seizure of its Russia-based assets. In April, the Kremlin took control of the Russian divisions of Fortum and Germany’s Uniper in retaliation to the seizure of Russian assets in Western countries. Together, the two companies own more than 10…
A lawyer who helped the mother of late opposition figure Alexei Navalny recover his body from prison authorities was briefly detained, independent media reported Tuesday. Vasily Dubkov had accompanied Lyudmila Navalnaya to Salekhard, the capital of Russia’s Yamal-Nenets autonomous district, following Navalny’s death in a nearby prison colony on Feb. 16. He and other Navalny lawyers helped…
Over a dozen Western ambassadors including U.S. envoy Lynne Tracy paid homage to Boris Nemtsov on Tuesday, nine years after the Russian politician was murdered near the Kremlin. Nemtsov was one of President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critics until he was shot and killed on a Moscow bridge on Feb. 27, 2015. “Nemtsov’s legacy continues to inspire…
Russia’s state financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring has added exiled opposition lawmaker Gennady Gudkov to its list of “terrorists and extremists.” Gudkov, a former KGB colonel, served in Russia’s lower-house State Duma from 2001 until his ouster in 2012 over what an ethics committee said was unlawful entrepreneurship. At the time, the 67-year-old denied any wrongdoing and…
With Russia’s presidential election weeks away and early voting already underway in parts of Russia and occupied Ukraine, campaign season is in full swing. While President Vladimir Putin is all but certain to win in the March 17 vote, his political organization and the three candidates allowed to run against him are nonetheless blanketing television and the internet…
A Russian strike in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region on Tuesday killed two police officers and wounded four others, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said. The Sumy region borders Russia and has been targeted throughout Moscow’s two-year invasion, but it is still far from fighting hotspots further to the south. The police officers were visiting a…
Russia’s Science and Higher Education Ministry has created a new psychology course that trains future mental health professionals to instill traditional conservative values in their patients, the youth news website Doxa reported Tuesday. The new course, which will be offered to both undergraduate and master’s students, is called “Individual Spiritual Security and Traditional Russian Spiritual and…
Police in Moscow have detained at least four people who were previously arrested at memorials to the late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, the rights group OVD-Info reported Tuesday. Hundreds were arrested across Russia for laying flowers at memorials in the days after Navalny died at a remote Arctic prison on Feb. 16. OVD-Info said Mikhail…
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that sending troops to Ukraine was not in the interests of Western countries, after French President Emmanuel Macron said the option was on the table. “This is absolutely not in the interests of these countries, they should be aware of this,” Peskov said after being asked about Macron’s statement,…
A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered the arrest in absentia of exiled opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov over his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gudkov, who served in Russia’s lower-house State Duma from 2011 to 2016, said in October that he had been charged with spreading “fake news” about the Russian military. Russia’s Interior Ministry…
An apple farmer, an airline caterer and an out-of-work graduate are among the Indian nationals to have been recruited into the Russian military as it wages war on Ukraine. Two years into the war, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died in the conflict, and Moscow is on a global quest for more combatants,…
Russia will impose a six-month ban on gasoline exports starting March 1 to meet rising domestic demand, the RBC news outlet reported Tuesday, citing two government sources and a representative of Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak. Novak was said to have told Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in a letter last month that demand for fuel…
In 2023, the biological waste treatment complex of the Ufa Group (an enterprise of Rosneft’s refining complex) processed 22.11 million m3 of industrial wastewater
A Moscow court sentenced veteran human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov to two-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday for speaking against the war in Ukraine and “discrediting” the Russian military. Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Memorial human rights group, is one of the few prominent anti-war figures who have stayed in Russia since the…
A court in Russia’s republic of Chechnya has sentenced a young man to three-and-a-half years in prison for burning a Quran, the independent media outlet Sotavision reported Tuesday. Nikita Zhuravel, 20, was detained in May 2023 on suspicion of publicly burning the Muslim holy book in the southern region of Volgograd. Local authorities granted a…
A Ukrainian drone struck a car in the Russian border village of Pochaevo on Monday, killing three people and wounding three others, the region’s governor said. Pochaevo is less than five kilometers from the Ukrainian border in Russia’s Belgorod region, which Moscow says has been repeatedly targeted by Kyiv’s forces. “The Ukrainian army attacked a…
Russian prosecutors are seeking a six-year prison sentence for PR expert and activist Yaroslav Shirshikov, who was among the first to report on U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich’s arrest in March last year, local media reported Monday. Shirshikov has said he gave an interview to Gershkovich and helped him with his reporting not long before the…
Updated with court ruling. A Russian court has handed a two-year prison sentence to PR expert and activist Yaroslav Shirshikov, who was among the first to report on U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich’s arrest in March last year, local media reported Tuesday. Shirshikov has said he gave an interview to Gershkovich and helped him with his reporting…
“You can be at home, with all the windows closed, and suddenly you start to smell some kind of burning odor,” said Andrei Skovorodnikov-Erlikh, a resident of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, of his city’s “black sky” alerts. “When you look outside, everything is covered with a noticeable smog. By the second or third day…
Russian billionaire Yury Antipov and his wife have been detained in connection to a fraud investigation, the state-run news agency TASS reported Monday, citing law enforcement sources. The news came on the same day that the billionaire’s steel plants in the city of Chelyabinsk were seized by the Russian government, with prosecutors arguing that the plants had…
A public farewell for late Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny will be held later this week, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said Monday. “We’re looking for a hall to hold a public farewell to Alexei. The time is the end of the work week,” Yarmysh wrote on X (formerly Twitter). She also asked supporters for suggestions…
Early voting for Russia’s presidential election has begun in remote areas of the country and parts of occupied Ukraine, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia reported Monday, citing election authorities. While regular voting in the presidential race is due to take place between March 15 and 17, people in occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions…
Ukraine said Monday it had withdrawn from the settlement of Lastochkyne in eastern Ukraine, which Russia said it had captured, the latest in a string of Russian advances after the fall of Avdiivka. As the war enters its third year, Moscow’s troops have mounted heavy attacks and taken Avdiivka — a key eastern town —…
Updated to add the Financial Times’ and Deutsche Welle’s report. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny died ahead of a planned prisoner swap between Moscow and Western governments, the late Kremlin critic’s allies said Monday. “In early February, [President Vladimir] Putin was given an offer to swap the FSB killer Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a prison…
Danish police said Monday that they were closing their investigation into the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany, a move dubbed “close to absurd” by the Kremlin. Neighboring Sweden closed its investigation in early February citing a lack of jurisdiction, meaning only Germany now has an ongoing investigation into…
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said Monday that it has “dismantled” a financing ring for a Syrian militant group. “As a result of the activities carried out in 22 Russian regions, 49 members of a terrorist network involved in the collection and transfer of funds for the needs of militants operating in Syria were detained,”…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday his country’s victory “depends” on Western support and that he was “sure” the United States would approve a critical package of military aid. He also said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in two years of war with Russia, in a rare admission of military losses. “Whether Ukraine will…
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has held power since 1994, said on Sunday he intended to seek re-election next year, which could extend his grip on the country to 36 years. He was speaking on the day Belarus, a neighbor and ally of Russia, held parliamentary elections decried as a sham by the opposition. “Tell…
Sri Lanka said Sunday it had ended long-term tourist visa extensions for thousands of Russians and Ukrainians using the policy to live on the island since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “The government is not granting further visa extensions,” Commissioner-General of Immigration Harsha Ilukpitiya told AFP, giving a March 7 deadline for departure. “The flight situation…
VORONEZH, Russia — Valeria, a 28-year-old journalist, was woken up in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions last Saturday. On Feb. 17, when the Defense Ministry announced that it destroyed four drones near her block, she had to sleep in her bathroom for fear of shelling. “I heard about five explosions,…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised victory against Russia on the second anniversary of the invasion on Saturday as his troops fight on despite a lack of Western aid and recent Russian gains. “We will win,” he said at a ceremony at Kyiv’s Gostomel airport, which was targeted by Russia in the first days of the…
The body of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been handed to his mother, more than a week after he died in an Arctic prison colony, his spokesperson said on Saturday. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, died on February 16 in one of Russia’s toughest prisons in northern Siberia, where he was…
MOSCOW — For most Russians, their country’s two-year war with Ukraine has long faded into the background of everyday life. “The average Russian is just waiting for this to end,” was how one Moscow resident described prevailing sentiments about the war. “The idea of ‘let me live my life and leave me alone’ resonates with many…
Ukraine on Saturday said it hit one of Russia’s largest steel plants with a drone strike on the second anniversary of Moscow launching its invasion. Russia reported a fire in the huge Novolipetsk (NLMK) factory in the western Lipetsk region, with images on social media showing a huge blaze. If confirmed, the attack would be…
Russian police on Saturday detained at least four people, including reporters, at a weekly protest outside the Kremlin by the wives of mobilized soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The wives of mobilized soldiers have staged rare protests in Moscow demanding their spouses be brought home from Ukraine. A video published by SOTA, an independent media outlet,…
Russia’s ethnic minorities continue to suffer outsized fatalities in the country’s two-year war in Ukraine, a trend that analysts warn will have long-term destructive impacts on these communities. Though ethnic Russians comprise the majority of deaths in absolute terms, Russia’s non-Slavic minorities and indigenous peoples are greatly overrepresented among the casualties relative to their share…
Alexei Navalny’s widow said Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered that his arch critic’s body should not be handed over to his family after his death in an Arctic jail nine days ago. Navalny’s mother said authorities in the Arctic town of Salekhard are threatening to bury him on the prison grounds if she…
KAMYANKA, Ukraine — Two weeks after Ukraine liberated this village in the Kharkiv region in September 2022, Viktor, a local farmer and tractor driver, and his wife Larissa returned to their home for the first time since the Russian occupation. Half a year earlier, the couple had managed to escape the advancing Russian army. For…
On Feb. 24, 2022, people across Ukraine awoke to the sound of Russian missiles as President Vladimir Putin declared what he called a “special military operation.” Two years later, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced, tens of thousands of civilians and combatants have been killed and a number of cities and towns have been destroyed…
The United Kingdom is offering British passports to Russian officials in exchange for intelligence information, the British newspaper i reported Friday, citing three anonymous U.K. intelligence sources and one former Russian informant. The report comes just over half a year after the head of Britain’s MI6 spy service, Richard Moore, urged Russians appalled by the…
Boris Nadezhdin says he will not rally his supporters to protest against his exclusion from next month’s presidential election — because, he says, he has learned from “Alexei Navalny’s mistakes.” “It would mean exposing my supporters to the police and Rosgvardia’s batons,” Nadezhdin told The Moscow Times, referring to the inevitable crackdown awaiting unauthorized protests…