The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group said Saturday that he was ready to send fighters to the Russian Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has come under intense shelling. Thousands have fled villages in southwestern Belgorod after days of attacks that came after an armed incursion from Ukraine. Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has been…
CHISINAU — An estimated 80,000 people packed into the center of the Moldovan capital last month for the largest pro-European Union gathering in years as the ties binding this tiny eastern European country to Russia fray amid the war in Ukraine. EU, NATO and Moldovan flags were visible all over Chisinau’s Great National Assembly Square…
Four civilians were killed on Friday in shelling on Russia’s Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, a local official said, while Moscow’s forces attacked Kyiv for a sixth day in a row. Over the past few days, thousands of residents have fled villages near Russia’s southwestern border as shelling has intensified. Residents from the town of Shebekino,…
French authorities have put up for sale a luxurious multi-million-euro chateau seized from the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who died in 2013 and was a sworn opponent of President Vladimir Putin, the agency handling confiscated assets said Friday. Berezovsky acquired the Chateau de la Garoupe on the Cote d’Azur in the 1990s while post-Soviet Russia’s…
A port in southern Russia will suspend exports of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) — a highly explosive substance — due to an increased number of attacks on areas bordering Ukraine, Reuters reported Friday, citing insider sources. Taman, a port in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, is located near the annexed Crimean peninsula. Its transshipment complex has a…
Refugees from Russian border regions fleeing intensifying cross-border shelling and Ukrainian-backed incursions in recent days expressed despair at their future and anger toward officials in interviews with The Moscow Times. “We have nowhere to go, we have nothing to live for, we don’t know what is waiting for us. People are running away in panic,”…
Authorities in Russia’s Belgorod region — a target of frequent shelling attacks — spent nearly four times as much on public entertainment this year than on civil defense, the Mozhem Obyasnit’ Telegram news channel reported Friday. Ukraine-bordering districts of the Belgorod region experienced repeated shelling and drone attacks since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year,…
The Kremlin has signed a deal to build a bomb shelter on the grounds of Moscow’s most elite hospital days after unprecedented drone strikes on the Russian capital, according to a procurement contract cited by The Moscow Times’ Russian-language service. The 800-person bunker for VIP patients and personnel is expected to be constructed at the…
Two women were killed and two others seriously wounded in a shelling attack on the Russian border region of Belgorod, the region’s governor said. “The Armed Forces of Ukraine fired at a road in the village of Maslova Pristan in the Shebekino district. Shell fragments hit cars passing by. Two women traveling in one of…
Ukraine said Friday it destroyed all 15 missiles and 21 drones from a new wave of overnight attacks that left two people wounded in Kyiv. “The occupiers don’t stop trying to terrorize the capital of Ukraine with attack drones and missiles,” the air force said. “All 15 cruise missiles and 21 attack drones were destroyed,”…
At least two oil and gas facilities were targeted in overnight drone strikes in western Russia, officials said Friday amid intensifying drone attacks across Russian regions near the border with Ukraine. “Two long-range drones attacked fuel and energy complex objects at about 3 a.m.,” said Vasily Anohin, the acting governor of the Smolensk region near…
Russian oilfield service companies earned record revenues in 2022 after major foreign players exited the market due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Vedomosti newspaper reported Friday. According to data from Kasaktin Consulting cited by Vedomosti, Russian oilfield services earned 1.79 trillion rubles ($22.2 billion) in 2022, the highest figure since at least 2018. The international presence…
Sitting at a cafe in the Ukrainian port of Odesa, a local smuggler drew on his cigarette as he explained how the war has disrupted long-established underworld ties between Russia and Ukraine. “The vast majority of Ukrainian criminals took the side of Ukraine,” said 59-year-old Kirim, who spoke on condition that he be given a…
Denmark’s autonomous Faroe Islands said Thursday Russian access to its North Atlantic ports would be restricted to vessels dedicated exclusively to fishing, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Only fishing vessels exclusively conducting fisheries under the bilateral agreement between the Faroe Islands and Russia will be allowed to enter Faroese ports,” the government said. “The activities of…
Russian investigative authorities on Thursday named Roman Popkov, a journalist and former leader of the radical leftist National Bolshevik Party, as the organizer of a prominent pro-war blogger’s assassination. Vladlen Tatarsky, a vocal supporter of the invasion of Ukraine, was killed in a bomb blast after being gifted a golden figurine containing an explosive device…
A Russian court imposed a fine on U.S. messenger service WhatsApp on Thursday for failing to delete banned content. The 3-million-ruble ($37,000) fine was the first imposed on WhatsApp for such an offense. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, was banned and branded “extremist” by Russian authorities last year. Meta’s other platforms, Facebook and Instagram, were blocked…
As many as 30% of employees in the Russian presidential administration continue to use iPhones for personal communication, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. Peskov’s comments came after Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) announced that it had detected “anomalies” in some iPhones in Russia caused by “malicious software” that it linked to “surveillance operations by American…
The leader of Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary group who served nine years in prison for theft, interfered in U.S. elections and has been accused of war crimes in Ukraine is not someone usually associated with children’s literature. Yet almost 20 years ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin — commonly known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose to prominence…
President Vladimir Putin had used a web of offshore companies to hand out homes near his residence outside Moscow to his ex-wife and daughters, the investigative outlet Proekt reported Thursday. The media investigation is based on the emails of Putin’s former son-in-law Krill Shamalov that had been obtained through a massive data breach by other investigative outlets…
Nintendo has said it will no longer sell games in Russia through its online store as the Japanese giant winds down operations in the increasingly isolated country. The changes, which were announced and came into effect on Wednesday, follow Nintendo’s suspension of product shipments to Russia in March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. Russian customers can still re-download…
Updated to recast with Defense Ministry and Kremlin statements and add other updates. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday it had repelled an attempted incursion by “Ukrainian terrorist formations” as two anti-Kremlin militias made up of Russians claimed to have made it over the border. “Russia’s Armed Forces together with units of the border service…foiled a…
At least eight people were injured in what the governor of a southwestern Russian region on the border with Ukraine described as “endless” shelling early Thursday. Belgorod region Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov accused Ukrainian forces of firing Grad missiles at the border town of Shebekino from midnight to sunrise. Ukraine adheres to a policy of neither…
Russia launched an air attack on Kyiv early Thursday, killing at least three people including a child and bringing fresh terror to the city after a week of strikes. Moscow’s forces have recently launched a series of aerial assaults on the Ukrainian capital, including an unusual daytime attack on Monday that sent residents running for…
When Ukrainian forces launch their long-awaited counteroffensive this summer, they will be up against multiple lines of Russian fortifications stretching hundreds of miles from the Black Sea to Ukraine’s northern border. The military hazards include trenches and anti-tank obstacles, but Russian soldiers have also been busy laying thousands of landmines. “What we’re seeing is just…
Russia’s tank losses during its invasion of neighboring Ukraine surpassed 2,000 this week, according to the latest data from Oryx, an open-source intelligence analysis website. According to Oryx’s report, 1,238 of these tanks were destroyed in combat, 106 damaged, 113 abandoned on the battlefield and 544 captured by Ukraine. However, the real number of Russia’s…
A woman who accused Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential race of sexual assault appeared Tuesday in Moscow, where she said she was asking President Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship. Tara Reade, who worked in Biden’s congressional office for a short period in 1993, said she wanted to stay in Russia after a Republican lawmaker…
A Russian man has been sentenced to 8.5 years in prison for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Federal Security Service (FSB) office, the civil rights organization Solidarity Zone reported Wednesday. Igor Paskar, 46, was arrested in June 2022 after he set fire to the front entrance of an FSB building in the southern Russian city…
Russian lawmakers on Tuesday submitted a bill to parliament that would ban legal or surgical sex changes, the latest in a series of conservative proposals put forward since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine last year. The bill would prohibit “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person,” according to the website of the State…
Berlin will drastically reduce Moscow’s diplomatic presence on its soil after Russia slashed the number of people Berlin can employ in its embassies and institutions in Russia, a foreign ministry spokesman said Wednesday. “We have decided to withdraw consent for the operation of four of the five Russian consulates operating in Germany,” the spokesman told…
The Kremlin on Wednesday called for the rights of ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to be respected, following clashes this week over local election results that left more than 80 people injured. “We believe that all the lawful rights and interests of the Kosovo Serbs must be respected,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “We support…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had “destroyed” what it claimed was Ukraine’s last warship. The landing ship Yuri Olefirenko was struck by “high-precision” Russian Aerospace Forces weaponry in the Black Sea port of Odesa on Monday, the Defense Ministry said in a daily briefing. It was not immediately possible to verify Moscow’s assertion and…
A Kremlin-linked entrepreneur accused of smuggling U.S. military technology to Russia had fled house arrest in Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the events. Artyom Uss, 41, the son of the ex-governor of Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region, escaped in March the day after…
Russia said it was evacuating hundreds of children from villages due to intensifying shelling in the border region of Belgorod, where the situation was deemed “alarming” by the Kremlin. Russia has seen stepped-up attacks on its soil over a year into its Ukraine campaign, with an unprecedented incursion last week in the southern region of…
Russia has focused near-daily attacks on the Ukrainian capital recently, sending missiles and drones overhead in the early hours and even broad daylight. While Ukraine says it has mostly managed to intercept the barrages and has reported only two deaths from falling debris, the strikes raise questions about the motives for such disruptive tactics in…
A Ukrainian woman seeking to return her forcibly transferred godson and his brother from Russia has been detained and deported from Moscow, state media reported Tuesday. Olga Hurulia said she was instructed to retrieve the two boys, who had been taken from southern Ukraine’s Moscow-occupied Kherson region, according to a video of her interrogation at…
A fire erupted at an oil refinery in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region on Wednesday after a likely drone attack, its governor said as local officials reported a downed drone near another refinery. Governor Venyamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram that there were no casualties and the blaze at the Afipsky oil refinery had been put out after…
At least one person has been killed and a number of others injured after a shelling attack on a Russian region bordering Ukraine, the region’s governor said Tuesday. Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the shelling struck a temporary shelter for evacuees from the region’s Shebekino district, which lies on the Ukrainian border and has reported…
A Russian military court has sentenced eight mobilized soldiers to prison terms of up to seven years for deserting their unit in eastern Ukraine, the independent Mediazona news website reported Tuesday, citing their lawyer. The soldiers had been sent to a field camp in the Moscow-occupied region of Luhansk after being drafted in September as…
Russian officials and pro-Kremlin voices were split over Tuesday’s unprecedented drone attack on Moscow and its surrounding areas, with some downplaying the attack and others sharply criticizing the country’s defense capabilities. President Vladimir Putin called the incident a provocation by Kyiv but appeared calm in televised comments, saying that Moscow’s air defense systems “worked fine”…
Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Tuesday’s drone attack on Moscow and the surrounding region on “terrorist activity” and called it an attempt to “intimidate” ordinary Russians. “The Kyiv regime has chosen… the path of attempting to intimidate Russian citizens and striking residential buildings,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted Putin as saying. “We do not…
Luxury houses owned by the Russian elite and President Vladimir Putin’s main out-of-town residence were just a few kilometers from where drones were shot down Tuesday during a major attack on the Russian capital, according to a crash site list published by a Russian parliamentary deputy. Since the Soviet era, Moscow’s western suburbs — where…
Russia has issued 1.5 million passports in occupied Ukrainian territories, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said Tuesday. Residents of the occupied regions told AFP this month that they had been pressured into taking up a Russian passport, necessary for using basic public services. Kyiv has described the passport handouts as an effort to suppress Ukrainian identity.…
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Tuesday that he and other inmates in his prison colony are forced to listen to pro-war and anti-Semitic songs several times a day as part of the prison’s “re-education” efforts. Navalny is serving his jail term in the IK-6 prison in the Vladimir region east of Moscow, a facility…
Russia on Tuesday told the West to stop its “deceitful propaganda” after more than 30 peacekeepers deployed in a NATO-led mission in Kosovo were injured in clashes with ethnic Serbs. Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, but Belgrade and Moscow have refused to recognize it. Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally, also effectively barred Kosovo…
Updated to add more details on the attacks, eyewitness accounts and context. Moscow was targeted by a swarm of drones early Tuesday morning, marking the first time that unmanned aerial vehicles have struck residential areas of the Russian capital since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. The attack on Moscow, located more than…
Russia fired a barrage of missiles at Kyiv on Monday sending panicked residents running for shelter in an unusual daytime attack on the Ukrainian capital following overnight strikes. A series of explosions rang out in Kyiv on Monday as Russia targeted the city for the second time in 24 hours. AFP journalists heard at least…
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Kenyan leaders on Monday on a surprise visit to Nairobi, as Moscow and Kyiv both seek to bolster support from African nations over the war in Ukraine. Lavrov’s trip to the East African powerhouse comes on the heels of a trip to the continent last week by his Ukrainian…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that allows elections to be held in areas under martial law, Russian state-controlled media reported Monday, paving the way for votes to take place in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Russian regional elections are scheduled for September and presidential elections are set to be held in spring next year. The…
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which lies on the border with Ukraine, said Monday that Russia was in a “state of de facto war” and called for the annexation of adjacent Ukrainian territory. “We live in a state of de facto war. Whether we like it or not, it’s happening,” Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said…
Russia has issued an arrest warrant for United States senator Lindsey Graham for “Russophobic statements,” Russian media reported Monday. Russian officials and state-conotrolled media have slammed Graham for comments he made during a Friday meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the U.S. politician’s third such visit since the start of the war. In…
Updates with statement of military damage in Western Ukraine. Kyiv repelled another large volley of overnight air strikes, officials said Monday, as the Ukrainian capital was still picking up the pieces from the biggest drone attack to hit it since Russia’s invasion began. Local air defenses managed to fend off more than 40 drones and…
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday congratulated Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has collaborated closely with Russia on key international issues despite disagreements, on his re-election. “Your victory in these elections is the logical result of your dedicated work as head of the Turkish Republic,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin website. Putin told…
Corrected to reflect that one person was injured, not killed, in warehouse fire. Russia carried out its “most important” drone attack on Kyiv overnight Saturday-Sunday since the start of the invasion, Ukrainian military authorities said. Forty of the 54 drones launched targeted the capital, killing two people and wounding three. “In total a record number…
When animation artist Varvara returned to Russia earlier this year for the first time since fleeing abroad after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the main emotion she felt was surprise. Not by how much had changed in her homeland after over a year of war — but by how little. “If you read the…
Shelling in Russian regions bordering Ukraine killed two people on Saturday, regional authorities said. The regional governor of Belgorod said there were fresh attacks, a day after dozens of strikes. “One person was killed. He was a security guard…he was outside at the time of the shelling” in the Shebekino area, Vyacheslav Gladkov said. He…
Two drones damaged an administration building of an oil pipeline in Russia’s western Pskov region, the regional governor said Saturday. The explosion is the latest in an escalating series of attacks in Russia amid the Ukraine offensive. “Early morning, an explosion damaged the administrative building of the oil pipeline near Litvinovo, Nevelsky district,” governor Mikhail…
Russia failed Friday in a bid to prevent Ukraine taking a place on the World Health Organization’s Executive Board, on a day which also saw North Korea gain a berth. Ten countries joined the board for a three-year term but Russia tried to exclude Ukraine, which it invaded 15 months ago, from joining the 34-nation…
Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday declined an invitation to travel to St. Petersburg during a telephone call with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The refusal came just days after a spat between Lula and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky at the G7 summit in Japan, where a planned meeting between the pair fell…
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told China’s special envoy Li Hui on Friday that there were “serious obstacles” to resuming peace talks, blaming Ukraine and Western countries. “The Russian foreign minister reaffirmed Moscow’s commitment to a political-diplomatic resolution of the conflict, noting the serious obstacles to the resumption of peace talks created by the Ukrainian…
Amid reports this week that Russia has canceled its biggest air show, experts told The Moscow Times that there was little point in holding the International Air and Space Salon (MAKS) because the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions mean there will be so few foreign buyers present. Western countries imposed stringent sanctions on Russia’s…