Category: another

Russia on Thursday demanded an explanation from Facebook after the social media giant said it had derailed a campaign to mislead Russians protesting the arrest of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The U.S.-based social network said its automated systems detected and disabled 530 Instagram accounts being used in the campaign against protesters who took to the […]

A Moscow court has overturned the guilty verdict against Yelena Misyurina, the doctor whose conviction in a high-profile medical negligence case sparked national controversy. Misyurina, 46, was sentenced to two years in prison in January 2018 over a botched bone marrow biopsy in July 2013 that damaged a patient’s blood vessels, leading to his death. […]

All but nine Russian regions have begun administering coronavirus vaccines nearly two months into the country’s nationwide vaccination campaign, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday. Russia, the world’s fourth-most affected country by Covid-19, launched the campaign in mid-January with senior officials forecasting 60% herd immunity as early as August. “Some Russian regions, I think it’s nine, […]

The Russian military will receive a pilot batch of the hyped Armata T-14 tanks next year, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Thursday. The Armata T-14, which is undergoing state tests amid multiple delivery delays since its first public display in 2015, will be Russia’s first main battle tank to be deployed in 40 years. “It’s […]

A Russian court has sentenced a pro-Ukrainian activist from annexed Crimea to five years in a maximum-security penal colony and one year in prison on terrorism charges, Interfax reported.  Oleg Prikhodko, 62, openly opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, hung the Ukrainian flag from his house and refused to switch his license plates to Russian ones, […]

Russia is revoking residence permits and deporting, often informally and without written notice, foreign nationals for participating in recent political protests, the Meduza news website reported Thursday. The outlet said it spoke with four citizens of post-Soviet republics who faced deportation orders after attending demonstrations in support of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and the opposition […]

The EU has begun analyzing clinical trial data for Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine — the first step in a process which could lead to the vaccine’s approval for use across the 27-member bloc. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Thursday it had begun a so-called “rolling review” of Sputnik V, in which it will analyze […]

Air fares have more than doubled for flights from Russia to some of the few countries around the world that remain open for tourism, price data from travel agents has shown. The average price paid for a return flight from Moscow to all destinations was 15,700 rubles ($212), at the beginning of March, the Kommersant […]

Slovakia has found itself in a diplomatic row after its prime minister made an offhand joke about paying for Russian coronavirus vaccine shipments with Ukrainian territory. Kiev demanded an apology after Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovič said in a radio interview Wednesday that he promised Russia southwestern Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region in exchange for Sputnik V […]

A Russian fighter jet on Wednesday was scrambled to escort nuclear-capable, long-range U.S. bombers flying over the Baltics, the Russian military said. The U.S. Air Force said earlier that one bomber had flown over the capitals of NATO members Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in a show of solidarity with allies.  Russia’s National Defense Management Center […]

Facebook on Wednesday said it derailed a deceptive campaign to use hundreds of bogus Instagram accounts to mislead people in Russia protesting the arrest of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The network of Instagram accounts used hashtag and location “poisoning” typically associated with spam or financial scams to drown out posts by protesters, according to Facebook […]

Austria’s former foreign minister who danced with President Vladimir Putin at her wedding has been nominated for a seat on oil giant Rosneft’s board of directors, a government decree said Wednesday. In 2018, Karin Kneissl, then Austria’s foreign minister, made headlines when she invited Putin to her wedding and danced with him. The 56-year-old left […]

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny quipped that “everything is fine” and made jokes about prison life Wednesday as he sent his first message from a detention center outside Moscow. In the message posted on Instagram, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic said he was being held in the Kolchugino detention center in the Vladimir region northeast […]

Prominent U.S. investor Michael Calvey, who is facing embezzlement charges in Russia, said on Wednesday he wanted to continue working in the country pending the outcome of his trial. In a case that has rattled Russia’s business community, the founder of Baring Vostok private equity group and several other executives, including French banker Philippe Delpal, […]

Russia has fined the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty media outlet more than half a million dollars so far for violating the country’s controversial “foreign agent” law, Interfax reported Wednesday. RFE/RL has accused the Russian authorities of trying to squeeze it out of the country with “disastrous” foreign agent labeling requirements and fines of up […]

Russia has confirmed 4,278,750 cases of coronavirus and 87,348 deaths. March 3: What you need to know today Russia on Wednesday confirmed 10,535 new coronavirus cases and 452 deaths. Health authorities in Angola, Congo and Djibouti have authorized Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, its developers confirmed Wednesday.  Around 4 million Russians have been vaccinated against the coronavirus so […]

Russia has declared an independent doctors’ union linked to opposition leader Alexei Navalny a “foreign agent,” Interfax reported Wednesday. The Doctors’ Alliance headed by Navalny’s ophthalmologist Anastasia Vasilyeva rose to prominence last year for criticizing the government’s coronavirus response and distributing aid to underfunded regional doctors. Vasilyeva is currently under house arrest for calling on supporters to […]

Moscow hotels have the highest occupancy rates in Europe, the Vedomosti business daily reported Wednesday, citing data from consulting company Cushman & Wakefield.  Unlike other European cities, the Russian capital has remained relatively open with only limited restrictions imposed when new coronavirus infections began to soar in the fall. Since late January, most restrictions have […]

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has named another relative to a high-level government post in the southern Russian republic that enjoys federal subsidies while maintaining relative autonomy from Moscow, state media reported Tuesday. Kadyrov’s third cousin Khas-Magomed Kadyrov, 30, follows in the footsteps of two Kadyrov daughters in their early 20s as well as two nephews […]

The Moscow metro plans to implement contactless fare payment using facial recognition technology at all metro stations by the end of the year, Interfax reported Tuesday, citing metro security service head Andrei Kichigin.  To use the FacePay system, passengers must have a Russian bank account that has their biometric data on file, according to Kichigin. […]

A top aide of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny called for sanctions on top Russian oligarchs in an interview with AFP, as the United States followed the EU in imposing sanctions on some officials. Leonid Volkov also said Navalny’s anti-corruption movement was hoping to unseat “at least 60 to 70” deputies from President Vladimir Putin’s United […]

Russia has warned the United States not to “play with fire” after it imposed sanctions Tuesday in response to the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The U.S. froze assets and criminalized transactions with seven senior Russian officials, including the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and blacklisted 14 companies and entities for export […]

European Council chief Charles Michel said Tuesday the EU has no plans to lift punishing sanctions against Russia that were imposed over the conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine has been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions following Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.  Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russia […]

Russian law enforcement is investigating the theft of radio equipment from a launch site at the Baikonur cosmodrome, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Tuesday.  Traces of a break-in at launch pad No. 110 were first discovered on Feb. 19. The launch pad’s entrance was broken open and radio parts containing rare earth metals […]

The United States and the European Union have imposed new sanctions on senior Russian officials over the poisoning and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, officials announced Tuesday. President Joe Biden’s first Russia sanctions since taking office in January are coordinated with EU actions against four top Russian justice and law enforcement officials. A senior U.S. […]

Non-renewable energy was used to move frozen wind turbines back online in Texas during last month’s deep freeze, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday. An unprecedented winter storm in the southern U.S. state knocked out half of its wind power as well as natural gas and coal capacities. Pundits and state officials said that iced-over […]

A year after the coronavirus pandemic plunged the global economy into turmoil and sent stock markets tumbling, Russia has emerged as one of the world’s best performers. Russia’s economy shrank by just 3.1% in 2020 — far less than advanced economies — and could reach its pre-pandemic size within the next 12 months. The most […]

Armenia has faced days of political crisis after its prime minister’s remarks on a Russian missile system that Yerevan used during last fall’s war against Azerbaijan sparked demands for his resignation. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan clashed with the general staff of Armenia’s armed forces after he claimed that Iskander missiles supplied by Russia — Armenia’s […]

Azerbaijan had deployed an Israeli-made defense system to shoot down a Russian-made missile that Armenia launched in the closing days of last fall’s war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Middle East Eye news website reported Monday. An unnamed official said Yerevan had launched a Russian Iskander missile “directly into the capital” of Azerbaijan […]

Slovakia on Monday received a first shipment of Russian vaccines as it battles the world’s highest Covid death rate, the second EU state after Hungary to receive the Sputnik doses. “You can see behind me the first shipment of the two million Sputnik V vaccines,” Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic told reporters at a press […]

The Kremlin has dismissed research findings which showed Russians were more likely to be financially suffering as a result of the coronavirus than households in other countries. A Nielsen survey, published Monday, found 53% of Russian respondents said they were worse off as a result of the crisis — that was twice the level recorded […]

Two UN human rights experts called Monday for an international investigation into the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, and demanded his “immediate release” from a Russian penal colony. Agnes Callamard, the UN’s top expert on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, and Irene Khan, the expert on freedom of opinion and expression, made the call […]

Two UN human rights experts called Monday for an international investigation into the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, and demanded his “immediate release” from a Russian penal colony. Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, and Irene Khan, the top expert on freedom of opinion and expression, stressed the […]

A U.S. warship docked in Sudan Monday a day after a Russian frigate arrived in the same key Red Sea port where Moscow is planning to establish a naval logistics base, an AFP correspondent said. The arrival of the guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill to Port Sudan follows Washington’s delisting of Khartoum as state […]

A second Russian police officer has been suspected of leaking security officers’ travel data from the day of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday.  A major media investigation in December published the names of Federal Security Service (FSB) chemical-weapons experts who it said tailed Navalny for years, including on the […]

In accordance with a now-established custom, Kyrgyzstan’s president performed his first foreign visit by going to Russia and paid tribute to President Vladimir Putin. The trip produced little of substance beyond mutual commitments of goodwill. That was important enough in and of itself, however, since Sadyr Japarov’s credentials with Moscow have to date not looked […]

Nearly two out of three Russians believe the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus is a bioweapon created by humans, a survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency said Monday. According to Levada’s results, 64% of Russian respondents said Covid-19 was artificially created as a new form of biological weapon. That compares with 23% who […]

Russia’s state communications regulator on Monday has accused Twitter of “maliciously violating Russian law” by failing to take down thousands of tweets containing banned information. According to Roskomnadzor, Twitter has not deleted 2,862 posts out of the more than 28,000 requests for removal the agency has sent since 2017. This includes 2,336 posts relating to […]

Russia has confirmed 4,257,650 cases of coronavirus and 86,455 deaths. March 1: What you need to know today Russia on Monday confirmed 11,571 new coronavirus cases and 333 deaths. Around 4 million Russians have been vaccinated against the coronavirus so far, state-run TASS news agency reported Friday citing Russia’s Health Ministery representative.  Guatemala became the latest country to […]

Freezing winds blow through a vast hangar in the Russian Arctic where giant, once-gleaming machines are still and a layer of snow has covered empty vats. Owned by the mining giant Norilsk Nickel, a leading operator in Russia’s northwestern resource-rich region of Murmansk, the Nikel metallurgical plant was a major source of pollution for decades. […]

Russian officials said Sunday that Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is in a prison colony in Vladimir region, three hours outside Moscow, where he will spend the next two and a half years.  Four former inmates of penal colony IK-2 — which Russian state media have identified as the institution where the opposition leader will do […]

The hard-hit Czech Republic has requested a delivery of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine in response to the delayed arrival of EU-procured jabs and will also consider Chinese inoculations, the president said Sunday. The EU member tops the world in new infections per 100,000 people over the last 14 days and is second only to neighboring […]

A Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday carrying Russia’s first satellite for monitoring the Arctic’s climate, the Roscosmos space agency said.  Video published by the Russian space agency showed the Soyuz blaster launching against grey skies at 06:55 GMT, carrying an Arktika-M satellite.  Space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin wrote […]

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday urged Russian President Vladimir Putin and new U.S. President Joe Biden to push for deeper restrictions on nuclear weapons. Tensions soared between the two nations under previous U.S. leader Donald Trump, fuelled by allegations of sweeping cyberattacks and a litany of other disagreements. But soon after Biden took […]

Several thousand Russians and Western diplomats paid tribute at a Moscow bridge on Saturday where opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead six years ago, as the United States said it was “deeply troubled” by the Kremlin’s growing intolerance of free speech. Nemtsov was one of President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critics until he was killed […]

Russia has confirmed 4,234,720 cases of coronavirus and 85,743 deaths. Feb. 27: What you need to know today Russia on Saturday confirmed 11,534 new coronavirus cases and 439 deaths. Around 4 million Russians have been vaccinated against the coronavirus so far, state-run TASS news agency reported Friday citing Russia’s Health Ministery representative.  Guatemala became the latest country to […]

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin halted a vote Friday on whether to restore a statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky outside the domestic intelligence headquarters in the Russian capital.  The vote, which kicked off Thursday and was set to last a week, offered Muscovites a choice between a statue of Dzerzhinsky, who is seen […]

The FBI on Friday has added Kremlin-linked catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin to its wanted list with a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to his arrest, a move that he called “a witch hunt.” The FBI accuses Prigozhin of “conspiracy to defraud the United States” by sponsoring the Internet Research Agency, the St. […]

President Joe Biden said Friday that the United States will “never” accept Russia’s annexation of part of Ukraine seven years ago. “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula, and we will stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts,” Biden said in a statement marking the anniversary of the Russian invasion […]

Polar bears are being forced to adapt to a land-based diet as their hunting grounds in the rapidly melting Arctic shrink, Russian scientists said Friday on the eve of International Polar Bear Day. Polar bears have been forced south by rising temperatures and melting ice cover, limiting their ability to hunt seals and walruses and […]

As the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s discovery of the world’s first cases of transmission of bird flu from animals to humans is prompting experts to warn that the country’s increasing large-scale industrial meat production could create conditions for future viruses to thrive. While the H5N8 strain of avian flu has been ravaging […]

More Russians are opposed to President Vladimir Putin’s re-election today than at any other point since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, an independent survey said Friday. According to the Levada Center polling agency, 41% of Russian respondents said they would not like Putin, 68, to remain president beyond 2024, while 48% said they would. It […]

Leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a penal colony where he will serve out his jail sentence, the head of Russia’s prison service said on Friday. President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent was this month sentenced to two years and six months in a penal colony for breaching parole terms while he […]

The founder of a new party vying for a spot in Russia’s parliament has acquired a sports website lauded as an independent media outlet unafraid of open political discussions, the site announced Friday. Alexei Nechaev, the founder of a leading cosmetics company, is seeking to gain seats in the State Duma this fall as the […]

Russian officials have condemned the United States’ airstrikes in Syria, accusing Washington of an “outrageous” violation of international law on Friday. U.S. President Joe Biden directed airstrikes overnight against infrastructure facilities in eastern Syria belonging to what the Pentagon said were Iran-backed militant groups, killing at least 22 people. In its statement, the Pentagon added […]