The Russian ruble’s slide past 100 against the dollar has exposed a multi-billion dollar dilemma at the heart of the Russian economy: how can the Kremlin carry on funding its war against Ukraine without triggering a surge in inflation and fresh fears of an economic crisis at home? The ruble dipped below the crucial level…
At least 400 Russian tourists have been stranded in Turkey for two consecutive days after a series of plane breakdowns, Russia’s Red Wings Airlines said Monday. “Two Boeing 777 aircraft out of the three available in the airline’s fleet were simultaneously out of service due to technical reasons,” Red Wings said in a statement. The…
Residents of southern Russia’s republic of Dagestan blocked traffic on a federal highway in protest of water outages that are said to have lasted most of the summer, Russian authorities and media reported late Sunday. Traffic was brought to a standstill in the village of Karaman 2, which lies along the highway that connects the…
The Russian ruble slid past 100 against the dollar Monday, its lowest level since late March 2022, just weeks after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The ruble has shed around 30% of its value against the dollar since the beginning of the year, as Russia imports more and exports less. Data from the…
A former candidate for governor who nearly unseated a Kremlin-backed incumbent in Russia’s Far East has been sentenced to six years in jail, Russian media reported Monday. Andrei Ishchenko ran in 2018 as a Communist Party challenger for the governor’s post in the Primorye region, where election authorities annulled results after reports of vote-rigging, a rare…
Poland has detained two Russian citizens for “distributing propaganda materials of the Wagner Group” in the cities of Warsaw and Krakow, the Polish interior minister said Monday. “Both were charged with… espionage and arrested,” Mariusz Kaminski said on social media without providing further details about the detained men. Poland has recently warned of possible provocations…
An ally of jailed Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny went on trial in Siberia Monday on charges of creating an “extremist organization,” a court spokesperson told AFP, as authorities continue to crack down on dissent. Ksenia Fadeyeva, 31, is a former municipal deputy in the Siberian city of Tomsk and was added to Russia’s “terrorist”…
More than 2,500 people have been evacuated due to flooding in parts of the Primorye region in Russia’s Far East, emergency officials said Monday. At least three people are believed to have drowned after heavy rains brought by tropical storm Khanun pummeled Russia’s Primorye region late last week. More than 4,600 homes were flooded and 28 towns…
Ukraine downed three waves of Russian missiles and drones targeting Odesa, its army said early on Monday, the latest in a string of attacks in the southern region on the Black Sea coast. “The enemy attacked the Odesa region three times during the night, using two waves of attack drones, a total of 15, and…
Moscow said Sunday that warning shots were fired from a Russian warship at a cargo vessel heading towards the Ukrainian port of Izmail. The Russian Defense Ministry said the Vasily Bykov patrol ship spotted a cargo vessel sailing under the flag of Palau “en route to the Ukrainian port of Izmail.” The captain of the…
Six people, including a baby girl and her parents, were killed on Sunday by Russian shelling in southern Ukraine, officials said. “Russia killed six people in the region of Kherson,” Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said on messaging app Telegram, releasing pictures showing the aftermath of the attack. One photo showed a column of black smoke…
Russia has evacuated more than 2,000 people from flooded areas in its Far East, emergency officials said Sunday, after Tropical Storm Khanun brought heavy rains to the region. “More than 2,000 people, including 405 children, have been evacuated in Primorye,” the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said on Telegram. The ministry said nearly 5,000 buildings had…
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has inspected troops deployed in the Arctic as well as preparations “to defend specially important installations” in this strategic zone, his ministry said Saturday. Shoigu was accompanied by Alexey Likhachev, head of the state nuclear company Rosatom, and visited Novaya Zemlya, in Russia’s extreme north, a statement said. They also…
Russia air defense forces shot down two Ukrainian missiles over a bridge connecting Moscow-annexed Crimea to the Russian mainland, an official said on Saturday. “Air defence forces shot down two enemy missiles over the Kerch Strait. The Crimean bridge was not damaged,” Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of the Crimean peninsula, said on social media.…
Russia’s federal budget revenue from convict labor has more than doubled from 2016-2022, The Moscow Times’ Russian service reported Friday, citing Finance Ministry data. In 2022, the federal budget received 19.1 billion rubles ($192.4 million) from forced labor performed by convicts for state and private companies, compared to 8.8 billion rubles ($89.4 million) in 2016, according…
Over 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the Kremlin’s invasion a year and a half ago, according to an independent tally conducted by the independent Mediazona news website and the BBC’s Russian service. The two outlets have been verifying the number of Russian troops killed in Ukraine using publicly…
A mass die-off of northern fur seals and Steller sea lions was discovered by a group of conservations in Russia’s Far East, local media reported Thursday. Photos published online showed the animals’ carcasses scattered across the shore of Tyuleniy Island, located around 17 kilometers off the coast of Sakhalin. Conservationists from the Friends of the…
Three employees at a waterpark in annexed Crimea were forced to sing a song in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin after being filmed dancing to a Ukrainian pop song, authorities said Friday. A Russian pro-war Telegram channel that describes itself as a “register of Russophobes, Ukrainian Nazis and traitors” shared video of the waterpark…
TBILISI, Georgia — Nino Takaishvili, an ethnic Georgian from Moscow, clearly remembers Aug. 8, 2008, the day that the Russian army invaded her ancestral homeland while she was on her first trip abroad in Paris. She also remembers the surprise she felt when her Russian-speaking guide began the tour with words that seemed to have…
Russia on Friday claimed to have improved its fighting positions around the northeast Ukraine town of Kupiansk, as Kyiv’s troops struggle ahead with their counteroffensive in other areas. Moscow also launched a volley of hypersonic missiles at western Ukraine in an attack that killed an eight-year-old boy in a part of the country that has…
Google has started blocking its popular workplace apps for Russian companies under U.S. sanctions, the Kommersant business daily reported Friday, citing anonymous sources at two major IT companies. Around 30% of Russian companies’ corporate information is stored on Google Workspace services, which include Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and other cloud-based tools, according to one of the…
“They took my relatives to the war in Ukraine.” In an emotional Instagram post, exiled Chechen human rights lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev said authorities in his home region had forcefully taken four of his closest male relatives to the frontlines in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Donetsk region. It was far from the first time Yangulbaev’s family has been…
Russian air defense systems shot down a drone flying over Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Friday morning, as Vnukovo international airport temporarily halted flights. “One drone attempted to fly over the city. It was eliminated as a result of air defense work,” Sobyanin wrote on the Telegram messaging app. He said there were no injuries…
Heavy rains brought by tropical storm Khanun have led to flooding in parts of the Primorye region in Russia’s Far East, media outlets reported Friday. Emergency officials warned that the situation was worsening in several flood-hit districts due to continuing rainfall. No casualties or evacuation orders were reported. Video shared by the independent news outlet Govorit NeMoskva…
Russia on Friday launched its first probe to the Moon in almost 50 years, a mission designed to provide renewed momentum to the country’s space industry, which has been struggling for years and has become increasingly isolated amid the war in Ukraine. The launch of the Luna-25 lander is Moscow’s first lunar mission since 1976,…
Two people were killed on Thursday after Ukraine shelled a small village in the Russian border region of Bryansk, the region’s governor said. Bryansk governor Alexander Bogomaz said earlier that one man had died but later announced another person was killed. “At present, two civilians have been killed by the Ukrainian armed forces,” he said on…
As many as 5,000 law enforcement employees left their jobs at Russia’s Interior Ministry in July, the police body’s head announced Thursday. “The personnel shortage is very large. I would even call it critical,” Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev was cited as saying at an internal ministry meeting by Interfax. The Interior Ministry encompasses an array of agencies…
Activists from several Russian regions have called on the government to explain its move to raise limits for the concentrations of harmful pollutants in the air. A number of Russian cities have long been plagued with air pollution problems, particularly industrial cities such as Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Norilsk and Krasnoyarsk. They are among the 12 cities…
Russian authorities will seek a new trial for a man who criticized a child for wearing a pro-war hat following an outcry from Russia’s community of staunch war supporters, prosecutors said Thursday. A court in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg in June fined Alexander Neustroyev 7,000 rubles ($70) on charges of “hooliganism” as part…
Ukraine urged civilians near the northeastern front line to evacuate on Thursday as Russia ramped up an assault to capture the territory already once seized during the conflict. Kupiansk and the surrounding areas of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region were liberated by Kyiv’s forces last September, but Moscow has since pushed back on the region. “Given the…
Rosneft, the Government of the Sverdlovsk region and the Nizhny Tagil Administration signed a 10-year concession agreement for the development of a heat supply complex in Nizhny Tagil.
The chief technical officer of a Russian fireworks company with storage facilities at an optical plant outside Moscow was detained in connection with a criminal probe into a deadly explosion on its territory, authorities said Thursday. A woman died from severe burns, 60 others were wounded and 12 remain missing after a powerful explosion Wednesday…
Arkady Volozh, the co-founder of Russia’s Yandex tech giant, condemned the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday following backlash for his apparent attempt to distance himself from Russia on his personal website. “I am categorically against Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine,” Volozh said in a statement shared with The Bell news website, adding that he…
Residents of Makhachkala in southern Russia’s republic of Dagestan late Wednesday barricaded the city center following three days of blackouts. Locals blocked traffic with wooden pallets, which police officers were seen taking away later in the evening, as shown in footage shared by the state broadcaster “Dagestan.” “Three days without electricity! We’re choking!” shouted one…
As the head of the Kot i Pyos (“Cat and Dog”) charity in the Far East republic of Buryatia, Natalya Filippova takes care of about 500 animals. “We recently had a puppy fall sick; his kidneys were failing. Our director, along with our colleagues, drove him to Novosibirsk in a car, so that he could…
Russian authorities on Thursday designated the independent investigative organization Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), which conducts open-source investigations of the Russian military, an “undesirable organization.” The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office accused CIT of publishing the personal details of Russian soldiers “which were later used to discredit” the Russian military. Discrediting the Russian Armed Forces’ actions abroad has…
Russia last year experienced a record number of explosions, leading to dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries, the independent news website Vyortska reported, citing a report by the Emergency Situations Ministry. Overall, 83 blasts ripped through residential buildings, warehouses, cars and mines in 2022, according to the cited ministry report on 2013-22 emergency response…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said early on Thursday it had downed 11 Ukrainian drones near Crimea overnight, as well as two drones flying toward the capital Moscow. “Two unmanned aerial vehicles flying in the direction of Moscow were destroyed,” the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. It also said two Ukrainian drones…
Russia’s absence from the Saudi-hosted summit to find a peace framework for the war in Ukraine exposed the Kremlin’s vulnerabilities despite the fact that no final joint statement or document was signed, four current and former Russian officials familiar with Russia’s diplomacy admitted to The Moscow Times. The weekend summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was…
Ukrainian shelling on Wednesday killed one and injured four people in Russia’s border region of Belgorod, the governor said, targeting a region that has been hit by repeated Ukrainian strikes. “The village of Gorkovsky in the Graivoron district came under fire from the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Vyacheslav Gladkov announced on social media. “One person died — a…
Moscow on Wednesday accused Poland and Finland of threatening its border security and vowed to respond to “multiplying” risks from NATO member countries along Russia’s western frontier. In recent weeks, Poland has beefed up its border security with neighboring Belarus following reports that fighters from the Wagner mercenary outfit have established a new base in…
An elite Chechen military unit has been deployed as a police force in the occupied Ukrainian nuclear city of Enerhodar, Al Jazeera reported Wednesday, citing interviews with engineers who fled the town and its remaining residents. Russian forces captured Enerhodar, which hosts the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, in the early days of its February 2022…
The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is celebrated on 9 August.
Updated with new injury count. A powerful explosion ripped through an optical equipment factory outside Moscow, triggering a “total evacuation” from all nearby buildings, local authorities said Wednesday. At least 35 people were injured, with four in serious condition, authorities told state media. Plumes of smoke billowed high into the air from the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical…
Updated with new injury count, death toll, missing persons. A powerful explosion ripped through an optical equipment factory outside Moscow, triggering a “total evacuation” from all nearby buildings, local authorities said Wednesday. Plumes of smoke billowed high into the air from the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant in the town of Sergiyev Posad, around 70 kilometers northeast…
Andrzej Kshetussky was one of hundreds of thousands of Belarusians who peacefully protested against the fraudulent re-election of their country’s longtime leader, Alexander Lukashenko, in 2020. Three years after those protests were brutally repressed, he is now fighting alongside the Ukrainian army against invading Russian forces. “We lost all protest infrastructure [and] oppositional organizations in…
Grozny, the capital of Russia’s majority-muslim republic of Chechnya, has established sister city ties with the occupied southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, over a year after it was devastated by invading Russian forces. “Grozny Mayor Khas-Magomed Kadyrov and head of Mariupol’s [Russian-installed] administration Oleg Morgun signed an agreement establishing twin city relations between the cities,”…
Russia’s state-run news agency Rossiya Segodnya has applied to trademark the brand of Ekho Moskvy, the liberal radio station that was banned following the invasion of Ukraine, according to Russia’s Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent). Sputnik Radio, one of several Rossiya Segodnya products, took over Ekho Moskvy’s FM frequencies after it was taken off…
Two Ukrainian drones headed toward Moscow were shot down Wednesday, Russian authorities said, the latest in a surge of drone attacks targeting the capital. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app that “both [drones] were shot down by air defense,” noting that one was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of…
A former Austrian foreign minister who danced with Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding has been residing in a Russian village this summer, local media reported Tuesday. Karin Kneissl made headlines in 2018 when Putin attended her wedding at an Austrian vineyard, where both were photographed waltzing arm-in-arm. Kneissl revealed in an interview with…
A Siberian glacier has turned crimson red from algae bloom, raising the likelihood of even faster ice melt than at the current rate triggered by climate change, Russian scientists warned Monday. Red algae covers glaciers in the Altai Mountains near Russia’s borders with Kazakhstan and Mongolia every year, Tomsk State University’s (TSU) Faculty of Geology…
Rescue workers combed through the rubble of damaged apartments in the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, a day after Russian strikes killed at least seven people. The target of the missile attack was a command post of the Ukrainian armed forces, the Russian Defense Ministry indicated in a daily briefing. Pokrovsk, which…
Russia’s largest known military equipment storage facility has been stripped of nearly half of the Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles that were stored on its grounds before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, The Moscow Times’ Russian service reported, analyzing satellite imagery of the storage site. The Vagzhanovo military equipment depot — located outside…
Moscow on Tuesday accused Ukraine of inciting Russians to set fire to military recruitment offices, following a recent uptick in the number of arson attacks. Since President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine last year many military recruitment offices across Russia have come under attacks. The General Prosecutor’s Office linked the attacks to the “successful advance of…
Poland has resumed pumping oil through a key pipeline linking Russia to Europe that was damaged over the weekend, the Polish pipeline operator PERN said Tuesday. Though flows through the Druzhba pipeline have dropped sharply after Russia invaded Ukraine, its operation was partly halted late Saturday after Polish operators discovered a leak at one of its sections. PERN…
Russian exports to China dropped in July, the first time since steadily rising in the months following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing Chinese customs data. China’s July 2023 imports from Russia declined by 8% compared to July 2022, totaling $9.2 billion. China’s overall monthly imports shrank 12.4%. It was…
Poland’s government on Monday accused Belarus and Russia of orchestrating another migration influx into the European Union via the Polish border in order to destabilize the region. “We’re talking about an operation organized by the Russian and Belarusian secret services that is getting more and more intense,” Polish Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wasik told reporters. Tomasz Praga,…
Nearly 100 wildfires are currently burning in Russia’s Far East republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the local branch of the Russian emergencies ministry said Monday. The 98 wildfires have engulfed a combined area of 125,600 hectares (310,364 acres) of land — roughly half the size of the country of Luxembourg, authorities said. Emergency officials added that…
Russia has reallocated healthcare spending from dozens of its regions to build and repair hospitals in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, the Vedomosti business daily reported Monday, citing a government decree. Sixty-one out of 85 Russian regions — including annexed Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol — saw cuts of some 2.4 billion…
The appearance of several tons of dead fish in a forest in Russia’s Far East Kamchatka region has prompted local authorities to open a probe into unauthorized dumping. The inspection was initiated after photos of the incident appeared on social media, depicting a vast amount of fish strewn across the ground. Kamchatka regional authorities said…