Two people were shot dead in a Ukrainian border village on Saturday morning in a cross-border incursion by a Russian “reconnaissance and sabotage group,” local officials said. The attack happened in Ukraine’s Sumy region inside a five-kilometer (three mile) buffer zone along the border with Russia — an area where Kyiv had asked residents to…
President Vladimir Putin said Friday it was “obvious” Ukraine shot down a Russian IL-76 military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners over the border region of Belgorod this week. According to Moscow, the plane was traveling to the region ahead of a prisoner swap on Wednesday when it was struck by anti-aircraft missiles. It said there…
A man who was detained in Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan amid a region-wide crackdown on protesters and activists has died in police custody, the human rights group Za Prava Cheloveka (ZPC) reported Friday, citing the man’s sister. Law enforcement officers detained Rifat Dautov following a protest last Friday in Bashkortostan’s capital of Ufa, his sister, identified…
Russia’s regions stand to experience the effects of climate change in diverse ways, with some hit much harder than others, according to a recent study co-authored by Moscow-based climatologist Alexander Chernokulsky and economist Igor Makarov. As manmade global warming progresses — with 2023 marking the warmest year ever recorded — Russia may soon find itself…
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday gave the green light for a new nuclear-powered icebreaker, as Moscow seeks to step up commercial trade across its Arctic north. Under Western sanctions for its Ukraine offensive, Russia is hoping to rely on the Northern Sea Route — a shipping lane that traverses the Arctic Ocean — to…
Russian law enforcement officials said Friday that the Il-76 military transport plane that crashed this week was shot down by a Ukrainian missile fired from a village in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The announcement comes a day after Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, opened a terrorism investigation into the crash. Moscow has accused Kyiv of…
Russia and Ukraine said Friday that they have exchanged the bodies of 132 fallen soldiers, just two days after Moscow accused Kyiv of killing dozens of its own servicemen by shooting down a Russian warplane. Moscow received the remains of 55 soldiers, according to Russian lawmaker Shamsayil Saraliyev, the RBC news website reported. Meanwhile, Ukraine repatriated…
Authorities in Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan on Friday held a pro-government rally amid their efforts to contain the public backlash that ensued following the imprisonment of a prominent Bashkir activist. Last week, Bashkortostan witnessed some of the largest protests in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine as thousands gathered in the Ural Mountains region to…
The Russian military is withholding payments and pardons promised to convicted criminals who signed up to fight in some of the most dangerous hotspots in Ukraine, the investigative news outlet IStories reported Thursday. Journalists said they had obtained a copy of a letter sent to President Vladimir Putin by a group of convicts-turned-soldiers, who expressed…
The Kremlin on Friday denied reports that President Vladimir Putin is probing to see whether the United States is willing to engage in talks for ending the war in Ukraine. A Bloomberg report published the day before cited two anonymous sources close to the Kremlin as saying that Putin had indirectly “put out feelers” to unidentified…
Anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin said Thursday that he will not submit signatures endorsing his candidacy that were collected abroad to Russia’s election authorities. According to Russian election laws, a presidential hopeful running from a party not represented in parliament must collect 100,000 unique signatures endorsing his or her candidacy. Nadezhdin, who hopes to run…
The possibility of a nuclear disaster at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine remains “very real,” according to the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest, in March 2022 shortly after the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Regular shelling and drone attacks around the plant have raised…
A Moscow court on Friday extended the detention of American reporter Evan Gershkovich for two months. “The period of detention of Evan Gershkovich… is extended by two months… until March 30,” the court said on the messaging app Telegram. Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was arrested during a reporting trip at the end…
Russia on Thursday opened a “terrorism” investigation over a military plane crash near the border with Ukraine after it accused Kyiv of downing the aircraft, which it said had more than 60 captured Ukrainian soldiers onboard. The Russian defense and foreign ministries have blamed Ukrainian forces for downing the IL-76 transport plane over the southern…
Russia has ended its practice of granting presidential pardons to prisoners who agree to fight in Ukraine, instead offering them conditional release and sending them to the front until the war is over, the BBC’s Russian service reported Thursday. The Wagner mercenary group started recruiting fighters from Russian prisons in the summer of 2022, a…
A Russian military plane that crashed near the border with Ukraine was supposed to transport senior Russian officials before a last-minute change of plans was made, Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesman claimed Thursday. Russia accuses Ukraine of shooting down one of its Il-76 transport planes over the Belgorod region on Wednesday, killing all 74 people on board, including…
Russian authorities have launched an animal cruelty investigation into the death of a pet cat thrown from a train in freezing conditions, state-run and independent Russian media reported Thursday. Twix, a ginger and white cat, became the focus of national attention when he was filmed being thrown off a Russian Railways train after escaping from…
A Russian court has handed down the country’s first-ever sentencing against a person for appearing in an interview with an “undesirable” organization, the independent news website Mediazona reported Thursday. Activist Nadezhda Nizovkina from the Far East Russian republic of Buryatia appeared on the independent news channel Dozhd during a broadcast in August, just two months after…
A St. Petersburg court on Thursday sentenced Daria Trepova to 27 years in prison for the killing of prominent pro-war blogger and propagandist Maxim Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, the independent Mediazona news website reported. The sentence is the harshest known sentence handed down to a woman in modern Russian history, Mediazona said. Trepova,…
MOSCOW — A Moscow court has sentenced Igor Girkin, the former commander of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and an ex-security officer, to four years in prison on extremism charges linked to his criticism of Russia’s war strategy in Ukraine. The criminal case against Girkin, a convicted war criminal in the West, is one of…
Russian anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin has gathered over 150,000 signatures endorsing his bid to run in the March election, his campaign website showed Thursday. While Nadezhdin hit the milestone of 100,000 signatures needed for the Russian Central Election Commission’s (CEC) review on Tuesday, his campaign had stressed that it would aim to collect 150,000…
Ukrainian security services orchestrated an overnight drone attack on an oil refinery in the southern Russian town of Tuapse, a Ukrainian security source told AFP Thursday. Kyiv has ramped up strikes on Russian oil and gas facilities over the past two months, part of what it has called “fair” retaliation for Russian strikes on its…
Ukraine’s SBU security service on Thursday opened a criminal investigation into the downing of a Russian military plane that Moscow said killed 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. Kyiv has not said whether captured Ukrainian soldiers were killed — or whether it was involved — in Wednesday’s shooting down of a military transport plane over Russia’s western Belgorod…
Two black boxes have been recovered from the crash site of a Russian Il-76 military transport plane that crashed Wednesday, state-run news agencies reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources in Russia’s emergency services. Moscow accuses Ukraine of shooting down the aircraft in the western Belgorod region, killing all 74 people on board, including 65 Ukrainian prisoners of…
Russian authorities have designated the independent youth news outlet DOXA as “undesirable,” according to a senior member of Russia’s lower house of parliament said Thursday. DOXA, which has openly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said State Duma deputy Vasily Piskarev had asked the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office to blacklist the news outlet in November 2022. “The General…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that Russia was “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners” after Moscow accused Kyiv of downing a military plane carrying dozens of its own captured soldiers. Moscow said 74 people died — 65 of them Ukrainian prisoners of war being flown to a scheduled exchange — when a military…
Russian forces entered the war-battered town of Avdiivka for the first time but were pushed back, its mayor told AFP Wednesday, following months of fierce fighting for the industrial hub in east Ukraine. Moscow in October launched a costly bid to wrest control of the town which has been on the front line of fighting…
VILNIUS, Lithuania — Not Only Coffee, a small coffee shop in the bohemian district of Užupis, has seen an unprecedented flow of visitors to its basement in the past two days. The basement, which is usually ignored by visitors, now acts as a collection point for signatures endorsing Russian presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, whose stance…
An Il-76 aircraft crashed Wednesday morning in western Russia’s Belgorod region which borders Ukraine, killing everyone on board. Footage posted on social media showed what appears to be a large plane falling from the sky and then crashing. The plane was said to have crashed near the town of Yablonovo less than 50 kilometers from…
The head of Far East Russia’s republic of Buryatia on Wednesday submitted a bill to the region’s parliament that aims to scrap mayoral elections in the capital city of Ulan-Ude. Instead of direct elections, Buryatia’s head Alexei Tsydenov proposed that the mayor of Ulan-Ude be elected by the city council, a local legislature. Regional deputies are…
Japan in December imported the highest monthly volume of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia in seven years, the RBC news website reported Wednesday, citing data from the Japanese Finance Ministry. Japan is among the world’s largest LNG importers, with Australia, Malaysia and Qatar supplying two-thirds of the energy source, while Russia accounts for 9%.…
The website for anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin experienced an outage on Wednesday that his campaign said was caused by a denial-of-service attack. “Our website has again been subjected to a DDoS attack. The malfunctions will be repaired as soon as possible,” Nadezhdin wrote on the messaging app Telegram. The Moscow Times was unable to…
Russian lawmakers on Wednesday passed in a first reading draft legislation that would allow authorities to confiscate the property of those convicted of “discrediting” and spreading “fakes” about the country’s armed forces. The bill, introduced into the lower-house State Duma on Monday, also proposes seizing money, property and other valuables from those found guilty of inciting “extremist” activity and…
A wave of arrests and detentions has swept Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan following last week’s protests in support of jailed Bashkir activist Fayil Alsynov. Thousands of people protested against Alsynov’s sentencing to four years in a penal colony on charges of “inciting interethnic hatred” in some of the largest street protests in Russia since the…
Russia on Wednesday blamed Kyiv for shooting down a military transportation aircraft said to be carrying 65 Ukrainian soldiers for a prisoner exchange The Il-76 aircraft crashed Wednesday morning in western Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, during a “scheduled flight,” the Russian Defense Ministry said, with authorities later stating that everyone on board the plane had perished. …
WhatsApp and Telegram users in Siberia and Russia’s Far East reported widespread outages of the two messaging apps on Wednesday. Some media outlets speculated that the disruptions were linked to protests in the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) over the killing of a local man. But outages were reported in at least six other regions in Siberia and…
Russian strikes on Ukraine on Tuesday killed 18 people and wounded 130, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, warning that the death toll could increase as rescue efforts were ongoing. The strikes hit the capital Kyiv and the northeastern city of Kharkiv in a deadly day for Ukraine as Russia’s invasion drags on for almost two years.…
Coordinated raids in five countries have led to the arrest of three people suspected of smuggling goods to Russia that could have military uses, EU judicial agency Eurojust said on Tuesday. Authorities in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Canada, and the Netherlands conducted a joint investigation into the export of technological and lab equipment that contravened EU-wide…
Belarus on Tuesday detained at least 24 people, including recently freed political prisoners, Minsk’s leading rights group said, warning families of regime critics to be vigilant. Ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, Belarus has for almost four years brutally cracked down on anyone who took part in massive anti-regime protests in 2020. “There are…
MOSCOW — Will the Kremlin allow an anti-war candidate to run for the presidency? That’s the main question for the thousands of Russians who have stood in long lines to show their support for presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin in recent days. Despite an ongoing debate over whether or not Nadezhdin is a Kremlin-backed spoiler candidate,…
Russia on Tuesday flatly rejected allegations that it had deported Ukrainian children since its invasion, but said at the UN that more than 700,000 had moved into its territory. Ukraine has said that 20,000 children have been forced to move to Russia since the war erupted in February 2022. President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the…
A court in Germany has banned the U.S. edition of Forbes magazine from claiming that Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov has close ties to President Vladimir Putin, the RBC news website reported Tuesday, citing an obtained copy of the ruling. Forbes, citing an anonymous expert, reported in early February 2022 that Usmanov “has repeatedly fronted for Putin…
Russia’s exclusion from the international scientific community since the start of the war in Ukraine hampers global researchers’ understanding of the Arctic at a time when climate change is rapidly changing the region’s ecosystems, according to a new study published in the British scientific journal Nature. The study’s authors found that removing Russian field stations…
Russian prison authorities have banned inmates from making video calls, a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council said Tuesday. More than 1,500 video call devices are installed in prisons across Russia, council member Eva Merkacheva told the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets. But earlier this month, Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) deputy chief Alexander Khabarov is said to…
Chad’s transitional president General Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno embarked Tuesday on an official visit to Russia “at the invitation” of President Vladimir Putin, the two states announced. Deby “left [the capital of Chad] N’Djamena this morning for Moscow at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin,” the Chad presidency said on its Facebook page. The Kremlin…
The Kremlin on Tuesday mocked the CIA for using Western social media platforms to recruit Russian operatives disillusioned with the country’s political leaders. The U.S. spy agency’s ad, released Monday, depicts a fictional Russian intelligence officer who gradually comes to the realization that the country’s “true enemy is from within” and decides to contact the…
Online services at some Swedish government agencies and shops have been disrupted in a ransomware attack believed to have been carried out by a Russian hacker group, IT consultancy Tietoevry said. The Swedish-Finnish group, which provides online security systems, said the problem could take weeks to fix. It said one of its data centers in…
A Russia-based company has become the legal owner of tech giant Yandex as it prepares to separate from its Dutch parent company, the state-run Interfax news agency reported Tuesday. MKAO Yandex was registered last month in the Kaliningrad region’s Oktyabrsky Island, an offshore zone known as a “special administrative region.” In addition to offering low taxes,…
Moscow plans this year to cut financing for the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies, the Russian edition of Forbes reported Tuesday, citing budget figures. The Kremlin claims to have annexed parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, a move widely condemned by the international community. Last year, the four regions received some 513…
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — “I feel pain and shame that my naivety and gullibility led to such catastrophic consequences.” As Daria Trepova gives her final word in court, two policemen stand in front of the glass cage for defendants, obscuring her from view. “I still don’t plead guilty but I acknowledge my moral responsibility,” the…
Multinational tech giant Apple has paid the Russian government 1.2 billion rubles ($13.2 million) in fines, Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) announced Monday. The Russian agency said it found Apple in violation of its anti-monopoly legislation in July 2022 for banning app developers from informing customers about purchase options outside the App Store. Western sanctions…
Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry said it will ban entry to Russian media executive Tina Kandelaki over her remarks about the country’s language policies, local media reported Monday. Kandelaki, deputy CEO of the state-holding Gazprom-Media and head of the entertainment broadcaster TNT, criticized Kazakh authorities earlier this month for renaming some railway stations in the Central Asian country…
MOSCOW – Thousands of Russians have been lining up in the capital and across the country to leave signatures in support of presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, who is campaigning for peace with Ukraine. Nadezhdin, 60, who is running from the Civic Initiative party, must gather the signatures of 100,000 supporters by the end of January…
Snow in the Siberian city of Achinsk has turned into a muddy gray that many suspect was caused by pollution from a nearby aluminum oxide factory, local media reported Monday. Photos and videos shared online show snowdrifts throughout the city, with a population of 100,000 people, covered in a thick layer of gray dust. “Some…
Cats are the most popular pet in Russia, with about half of Russians reporting one in their household. Over the past weekend, social media has been in an uproar after a pet cat named Twix was thrown from a train and died in freezing conditions. What happened? Twix, a ginger and white cat, was traveling…
Updated with Russian officials’ remarks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday signed a decree calling for the preservation of Ukrainian national identity in Russia. The decree, announced to coincide with Ukraine’s Day of Unity on Jan. 22, states that “Russia has systematically destroyed national identity and oppressed Ukrainians in the lands historically inhabited by them,” namely the…
Russian pro-war singer Shaman’s latest single about a “hero who came home alive” has sparked an online debate over its potentially hidden references to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. Shaman, whose real name is Yaroslav Dronov, came out of relative obscurity and has become one of the most recognizable faces of Russia’s propaganda machine after…
Authorities in northwestern Russia’s Leningrad region warned residents late Sunday that the territory, with a population of over 2 million, could come under attack from drones following a recent spate of strikes on local energy infrastructure. “A high-alert regime has been declared at critical infrastructure facilities in all districts,” the Leningrad region’s press service announced on…
The Kremlin on Monday blamed Ukraine for an attack on a gas terminal at the Baltic port of Ust-Luga over the weekend. The facility belonging to Novatek, Russia’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, was set ablaze on Sunday in the western port town, close to the border with Estonia. “The Kyiv regime continues to…
A Russian plane believed to be carrying six people has crashed in mountainous northeastern Afghanistan, the air transport agency Rosaviatsia announced Sunday. The Falcon 10 “disappeared from the radar” and communication was lost on Saturday evening, the federal agency said. “According to preliminary information, six people were aboard the aircraft: four crew and two passengers.”…