A Russian court on Wednesday sentenced a journalist to seven years in prison for criticizing the Ukraine offensive in social media posts. Roman Ivanov, 51, was found guilty of spreading “false information” about Russia’s Armed Forces and punished under Moscow’s strict military censorship laws. Moscow has used laws against “discrediting” the Armed Forces or publishing…
Ukrainian drones attacked a metal plant in Russia’s border region of Kursk on Wednesday, causing a fire at a fuel tank, the local governor said. Kyiv meanwhile announced it had intercepted dozens of Russian drones, as both sides launched a wave of overnight aerial attacks in an attempt to hit targets deep behind the front…
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russia has the “best democracy” and lashed out at those who criticize Moscow for its handling of domestic political affairs. “We will no longer tolerate criticism of our democracy and claims that it is not the kind that it should be,” Peskov said during a talk at the World…
A group of men from northern India who claim to have been tricked into fighting for Russia in its war on Ukraine are now calling on their government to help secure their release, Indian media reported Wednesday. In a video published by the broadcaster NDTV, seven men can be seen standing in a dingy room…
The Kremlin said Wednesday that it does not recognize the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for two senior Russian military officers over their role in Moscow’s war against Ukraine. The court accused Lieutenant General Sergei Kobylash and Navy Admiral Viktor Sokolov of targeting Ukraine’s power infrastructure with strikes between October 2022 and March 2023. “We…
Yulia Navalnaya has called on her late husband’s supporters to protest against President Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine by turning up to polling places “at noon” on the final day of Russia’s upcoming election. In January, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who died at an Arctic penal colony last month, announced the protest action —…
Orenburgneft (an enterprise of Rosneft’s oil production complex) introduced a domestic innovative technology to increase operational efficiency of the pipeline system in the fields
The grant programme of Vostsibneftegaz (an enterprise of Rosneft) turned 10 years old. In honour of the anniversary date, the company held a competition and allocated new grants to scientists to support environmental and ethnographic projects in the Evenkia of Krasnoyarsk Region
A Russian man pleaded guilty on Thursday to illegally exporting electronics to Russia for possible military use, in violation of sanctions imposed after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Maxim Marchenko, who lived in Hong Kong, operated a network with two other unidentified Russians that fraudulently bought large quantities of…
Mourners of late opposition activist Alexei Navalny gathered under heavy police presence as they waited outside the Russian Orthodox church in southeastern Moscow where his memorial service will take place later Friday. Authorities have installed metal detectors, security cameras and metal fencing around the perimeter of the church, as well as the nearby cemetery where Navalny…
Moscow is ready to give Kyiv the bodies of Ukrainian prisoners of war who were said to have died in a military plane crash last month, Russia’s presidential human rights commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova said Friday. Russia claims 65 Ukrainian servicemen en route for a scheduled prisoner exchange were killed on Jan. 24 when a missile…
The Komsomolsk Refinery (an enterprise of Rosneft’s refining complex) has installed domestically produced VR simulators to train staff of the electrical equipment workshop
XII Rosneft Winter Sports Games, which took place in Krasnoyarsk from February 25 to 29, has ended
Seda Suleimanova, a young woman from Russia’s republic of Chechnya, was detained in St. Petersburg and returned to her home region last summer. She had fled Chechnya, a conservative, majority Muslim region of the North Caucasus, after her family threatened to kill her for being “insufficiently religious.” This month, rights activists announced that she may have been…
India said Thursday it was working to secure the release of around 20 of its citizens who are “stuck” in the Russian army. Several Indian recruits told AFP this month that they had been lured into joining the Russian military by promises of high salaries and Russian citizenship. “It is our understanding that 20-odd people…
Russian TV personality and blogger Anastasia Ivleeva said Thursday that she will vote for Vladimir Putin in next month’s presidential election after facing a conservative backlash for organizing her “nearly naked” party in December. Ivleeva and several other celebrities issued public apologies after pictures from the private event at a Moscow nightclub were leaked online,…
A Swedish agency for grants for faith institutions said Thursday it was cutting support to the Russian Orthodox Church, after Sweden’s intelligence service warned the church was used for intelligence activities. The Swedish Agency for Support for Faith Communities said in a statement that it was also cutting financial support for the Church, also known…
The European Parliament said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin bore “criminal and political responsibility” for the death of opposition activist Alexei Navalny and should be held to account. Navalny, one of Putin’s most vocal critics, died in prison on Feb. 16 in unclear circumstances but EU leaders have blamed the Russian leader. “The Russian…
Funeral homes in Moscow are refusing to transport the body of opposition activist Alexei Navalny to the church where his public memorial ceremony will take place on Friday, his allies said. “All the hearse services are getting calls from unknown people who threaten them so that they don’t take Alexei’s body anywhere,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira…
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…