Members of Russia’s lower house of parliament sent to visit Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine on official business are to be exempted from filing tax returns this year, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported Monday, citing two lawmakers. The news follows President Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to waive a transparency measure requiring government officials to publicly disclose…
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Kyiv on Sunday said Russia took Minsk as a “nuclear hostage” after President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, bringing the arms to a country at the gates of the European Union. Putin, who has issued thinly veiled warnings that Russia could use nuclear weapons if threatened, said the move…
DetailsOn March 25, the reactor of Power Unit 2 of Belarus NPP (general designer and general contractor is Rosatom State Corporation Engineering Division) was brought to minimum controllable power level. At 19:42 (Moscow time), the neutron flux was registered for the first time, and controlled self-sustained nuclear reactor began. Achievement of the minimum controllable power…
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday he would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in neighbor and ally Belarus, bringing the arms to a country at the gates of the European Union. Putin has previously issued thinly veiled warnings that he could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine if Russia were threatened, reviving Cold War-era fears. He also said he…
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Kyiv said its forces were “managing to stabilize” the situation around Bakhmut, a now-destroyed city in eastern Ukraine that has seen the longest battle of the Russian invasion. Bakhmut — which once had an estimated population of around 70,000 people — has been virtually emptied of civilians over months of fierce fighting between Russian and…
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It’s not just vodka that must be ice-cold. Let’s be honest. One of the main achievements of Russian culture that Russians’ ancestors generously shared with the peoples of Siberia and the Far East was vodka. Yes, yes, of course: literacy, rifles, collective farms and radio — all that was fine, but they came later. …
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The U.S. Justice Department unveiled spying charges Friday against a Russian who, under a Brazilian alias, studied at a Washington university and then tried to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The Justice Department’s indictment of Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov suggests it will try to contest his extradition to Russia from Brazil, where he is currently…
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The European Central Bank (ECB) has called on Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank to scale down its operations in Russia, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The news comes just a day after Ukraine’s National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) added the Austrian banking group to its list of international sponsors of…
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The United Nations on Friday said it was “deeply concerned” by what it described as the summary executions of prisoners of war being carried out by both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield in Ukraine. The head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, said her organization had documented killings, often…
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The French home improvement retailer Leroy Merlin will transfer control of its stores in Russia to local management, parent company ADEO announced Friday, more than a year since the invasion of Ukraine triggered an exodus of Western businesses. Leroy Merlin was embroiled in controversy last month when a media investigation implicated the company and the French retailer…
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The Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a Russian far-right unit fighting on the side of Ukraine, hit the headlines earlier this month after carrying out an incursion across the Russian border. The attack on Russia’s Bryansk region, in which two people were allegedly killed, was designed to encourage Russian citizens to commit anti-state violence and expose…
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The Kremlin on Friday said that Russia would skip this year’s annual Earth Hour event on Saturday after the country’s authorities designated the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) a “foreign agent.” The move comes as Russia continues to crack down on foreign-linked groups, including environmental organizations, following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Earth Hour, which WWF…
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Патрики: Patriki, slang for the Patriarch Ponds neighborhood in Moscow I’ve gotten way behind in my youth slang. In my recent reading, I was stumped by the word падик. The phrase was about some people в падике (in the [mysterious] padik) so I knew it was a place or a structure. For a while, I…
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In a fresh attempt to avoid punishment for aiding Russia in bypassing Western sanctions, Kazakhstan will launch an online system to track all goods entering and leaving the country next month. The system, which a senior official told Eurasianet is due to come into effect on April 1, appears to be Kazkhstan’s most concerted effort so…
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Denmark has invited Russian energy giant Gazprom to help recover a mystery object that was spotted near the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline six months after sections of it were sabotaged. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who revealed the discovery of the object earlier this month, said experts believe that the object could be a signal…
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Star U.S. investor Michael Calvey and his French business partner Philippe Delpal have left Russia having complied with the travel restrictions imposed on them with their suspended sentences in a highly controversial fraud case, Interfax reported Friday, citing unnamed sources. A Moscow court in August 2021 handed Calvey a five-and-a-half-year suspended sentence in a trial…
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A court in Siberia has sentenced a Russian citizen to six-and-a-half years in jail on charges of desertion for fleeing to neighboring Kazakhstan to avoid Russia’s mobilization drive last fall, media reported Friday. Former presidential guard officer Mikhail Zhilin, 36, sought asylum in Kazakhstan after entering the former Soviet republic illegally from Russia last fall. As a…
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Russian authorities on Thursday added prominent human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov and journalist Ilya Varlamov to the country’s controversial “foreign agents” registry. Chikov and Varlamov were designated foreign agents for allegedly spreading “inaccurate information about the decisions made by public authorities,” the Justice Ministry said. Chikov, whose Telegram channel has more than 500,000 subscribers, was…
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World Athletics on Thursday lifted the ban on the Russian track and field federation for state-sponsored doping although its athletes remain barred from competition while Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine continues. The Russian federation was banned in 2015 after a damning World Anti-Doping Agency report identified “a deeply-rooted culture of doping.” For the athletics superpower to return to…
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The head of the 11th-century Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, Ukraine’s most significant Orthodox monastery, has said that the monks facing eviction because of their church’s links to Russia will not leave. The golden-domed religious complex overlooking the Dnipro River has a population of monks that were until recently under Moscow’s jurisdiction. The branch of the Ukrainian…
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Russia’s only active female cosmonaut Anna Kikina on Thursday described a “wonderful” atmosphere during her mission to the International Space Station where she traveled aboard a SpaceX spaceship. The orbital station is one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between Moscow and Washington amid a breakdown of ties since Moscow sent troops to Ukraine.…
DetailsMarch 21, 2023, Moscow, Russia. – National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (NRNU MEPhI) announced enrollment of citizens of the Republic of Türkiye to study in the master’s program in Nuclear Physics and Technology. It is planned to enroll 25 students within the program of training qualified engineers for Akkuyu NPP, which is under construction in…
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A Russian entrepreneur accused of smuggling American technologies to Russian arms manufacturers has escaped from house arrest in Italy 24 hours after a court there approved his extradition to the U.S., the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported Thursday. Artyom Uss, 40, the son of the governor of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region, was one of five Russians…
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Russian politician Maxim Katz has been arrested in absentia on charges of spreading “fake news” about the Russian Armed Forces, the independent Mediazona news website reported Thursday. Katz, 38, is well-known for his YouTube channel, where he discusses and criticizes Russia’s military actions in Ukraine to his more than 1.7 million subscribers. In October, Russia’s…
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A court in Belarus sentenced a journalist to three years in prison on Thursday for writing an article critical of the authoritarian country’s powerful KGB secret police, state-run media reported. Moscow-aligned Belarus, ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, has forced most independent media into exile, while critical journalists who remain in the country have…
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The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group is likely to shift his attention away from the war in Ukraine, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Yevgeny Prigozhin plans to turn his focus back to Africa, where his fighters are believed to have a presence in Sudan, the Central African…
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Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has banned the family of prominent Russian-Armenian climate activist and anti-war campaigner Arshak Makichyan from entering Russia for the next 50 years, he announced on social media Wednesday. “It is a lifetime ban, even for my younger brother,” the activist tweeted. Arshak Makichyan, whose family fled the war in Nagorno-Karabakh…
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Russia’s economy will have finished adapting to Western sanctions by 2024, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told the State Duma on Thursday, adding that the country had survived the international attempts to isolate it. After the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine last year, Moscow’s economy was hit with a flurry of sanctions and the exit…
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A massive new gas pipeline to China could help reduce Russia’s reliance on European buyers, but analysts say the project reveals a growing imbalance between the longtime strategic allies. Beijing emerged as an economic lifeline for Moscow last year, above all for its energy purchases, after Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut Russia…
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The Kremlin sees no point in resuming talks with the United States on the New START nuclear arms control treaty, a senior diplomat said Wednesday. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called Moscow’s recent suspension of New START, the last remaining arms control agreement between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, “almost inevitable” given the “cumulative circumstances…
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Russia’s AYYA T1 smartphone brand has sold fewer than 1,000 units since it came to market over a year ago, the Vedomosti business daily reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources close to retailers. Only 905 AYYA T1 devices have been purchased since retail chains began selling them in October 2021, just 18% of the 5,000 AYYA T1…
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Russia has significantly raised its volume of gasoline exports in recent months after rerouting supplies to Africa and the Middle East due to Western sanctions, the Vedomosti business daily reported Thursday, citing trade data. Russian gasoline exports averaged 193,250 barrels per day (bpd) between December 2022 and March 2023 so far, according to estimates by…
DetailsOn March 21, 2023, the first heavy and oversized equipment for the El-Dabaa NPP, the core catcher for Unit 1, arrived to the El-Dabaa NPP construction site in Egypt (the general designer and general contractor is ROSATOM Engineering Division). In the beginning of March 2023, the ship carrying three main components of the core catcher…
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Maria Pevchikh, an investigator for Alexei Navalny, has been named the new chair of the board of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the jailed Kremlin critic announced Wednesday. Navalny’s announcement follows the scandal-ridden resignation of his right-hand man Leonid Volkov from the FBK board chairmanship earlier this month. “Her public work over the past two years has…
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Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced plans to modernize anti-missile defense systems in Moscow on Wednesday following a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory. Several air defense systems have appeared on rooftops around Moscow this year amid fears that Ukraine, supplied with advanced weaponry from its Western allies, could be capable of targeting Russia’s capital. …
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MOSCOW — Underdog, a tiny bar in the central Kitai-Gorod neighborhood, was crowded and noisy on Tuesday night despite a violent police raid days earlier in which visitors had been threatened with electric shock devices and forced to sing pro-Kremlin songs. “I think we need to show our support,” one visitor at this punk, hipster…
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Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine and their families have increasingly been complaining of delayed salary payments, independent news outlet Verstka reported on Wednesday. Residents of 52 Russian regions as well as the annexed Crimean peninsula have said their family members currently fighting in Ukraine have been receiving delayed or partial salary payments, while some haven’t been…
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Russia will introduce special social security benefits for children wounded in the war in Ukraine, the state-run TASS news agency reported Wednesday, citing presidential children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. “The president supported this [decision] and now it is being worked out by the corresponding government departments,” the agency quoted Lvova-Belova as saying. “I hope there…
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Authorities in the agricultural heartland of central Russia are bracing for the spread of anthrax after a rash of three cases were registered there in recent days, according to state media. Two people were hospitalized with anthrax symptoms in the republic of Chuvashia 600 kilometers east of Moscow last Wednesday. Authorities quarantined the village of Staroye…
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Poland’s prime minister on Wednesday branded the China-Russian alliance “dangerous” after Chinese leader Xi Jinping wrapped up a three-day visit to Moscow. “The Chinese president’s visit to Moscow makes us anxious, this China-Moscow axis is dangerous,” Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters after hosting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Warsaw. Xi left Russia on Wednesday following…
DetailsThe Comprehensive Long-Term Cooperation Program in the area of fast reactors and nuclear fuel cycle closure was signed on March, 21, on the sidelines of the state visit of Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, to Russia. The document was signed by Alexey Likhachev, Director General of ROSATOM, and Zhang Kejian, the…
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Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first trip to Russia since 2019 this week in a state visit that was designed to project the ever-closer relationship between Moscow and Beijing to the world. While Beijing sought to frame the visit as a peacemaking endeavor, positioning itself as a potential mediator in peace talks with Ukraine,…
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Russia’s former election chief Vladimir Churov, who was ultimately removed from his post after overseeing massive electoral fraud that led to some of Russia’s biggest pro-democracy protests, has died at age 70, state media reported Wednesday. Churov suffered a “massive stroke” last week and died in hospital on Wednesday morning after undergoing surgery, the state-run…
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The Russian navy “repelled” a drone attack on the port of Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea early on Wednesday, the Kremlin-backed governor of the city said. The peninsula, seized by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, is home to Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet and has been hit by a series of drone attacks since the Kremlin’s offensive…
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Russia ramped up its fish exports to the European Union in 2022 despite tensions over the war in Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Wednesday, citing trade data. Last year’s supply volumes to the European Union increased by 18.7% to a total of 198,800 metric tons, according to the Russian Fishery Industries Association (VARPE). The…
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Moscow would be “forced to react” if Britain gives Ukraine military supplies, including armour piercing ammunition which contains depleted uranium. “The United Kingdom… announced not only the supply of tanks to Ukraine, but also shells with depleted uranium. If this happens, Russia will be forced to react,” Putin…
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An Italian court has approved the extradition to the United States of a Russian entrepreneur accused of smuggling U.S. technologies to Russian arms manufacturers, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported Tuesday. Artyom Uss, 40, the son of a Siberian governor, was arrested at Milan’s Malpensa Airport on Oct. 17, 2022. He was one of five…
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Chinese President Xi Jinping’s closely watched visit to Moscow this week has been filled with statements trumpeting a new era of relations between the two allies as they increasingly align themselves against the West. But while it dominated headlines, Xi’s reunion with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who he has called a “dear friend,” is unlikely…
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Xi Jinping promised to strengthen coordination with Russia at a Kremlin summit with President Vladimir Putin on the Chinese leader’s first visit to Moscow since the beginning of Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Both nations seek allies to counteract Western power and the two are expected to sign a raft of economic cooperation agreements. Putin called…
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Russia announced Tuesday that it was extending until the end of June oil production cuts of 500,000 barrels per day, a response to Western sanctions that were due to expire at the end of March. “In accordance with the current market situation, the decision to voluntarily reduce production by 500,000 barrels per day will be…
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More than 60 environmental groups in Russia have called on President Vladimir Putin and the Justice Ministry to remove the “foreign agents” label from the Russian chapter of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “We consider the listing of the WWF as a foreign agent to be extremely erroneous, unfair and unreasonable,” the activists said in…
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Russian energy giant Gazprom announced it had reached a record level of daily gas volume supplied to China through the Power of Siberia pipeline on Tuesday. The announcement came as Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the second day of a state visit with the leaders expected to sign agreements in areas…
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Recast to add Orlov’s criminal charges. Russian authorities have opened a criminal case against the co-chair of Russia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning civil rights group Memorial on Tuesday following sweeping raids against the group’s members. Oleg Orlov has been charged with repeatedly violating Russia’s law against “discrediting” the army, Memorial said on its Telegram channel. The law, passed…
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A military drone has attacked an oil pumping station for the Druzhba pipeline near the Ukrainian border, the regional governor said Tuesday, blaming Kyiv for the strike. The Druzhba pipeline, one of the largest oil pipelines in the world, runs through Russia’s Bryansk region several dozen kilometers from the border with Ukraine. “The armed forces of Ukraine, using…
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Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China would prioritize ties with Russia, calling the two “great neighboring powers” as he prepared for a second day of talks with Vladimir Putin expected to focus on Ukraine. The Chinese president also said he invited the internationally isolated Putin to visit China later this year as both leaders seek…
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The longtime head of Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has been replaced by a former policewoman and one-time member of a pro-Kremlin youth movement. “Marina Loshak voluntarily resigned from her post as director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which she had held since 2013, on March 20,” Russia’s Culture Ministry was…
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A local state of emergency has been declared in the town of Dzhankoi in the north of Russian-annexed Crimea following a drone attack late Monday, Interfax quoted the head of the city administration Igor Ivin as saying on Tuesday. Ukraine said the attack had destroyed Russian cruise missiles, though it denied responsibility for the “mysterious”…
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Russia delivered enriched uranium to France on Monday in a move the NGO Greenpeace described as “scandalous” following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. A cargo ship unloaded cylinders of uranium from Russia at the French port of Dunkirk on Monday morning, according to an AFP journalist. Greenpeace said the delivery confirmed France’s dependence on the Russian nuclear industry, which…
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Russian state oil giant Rosneft posted a sharp drop in its annual profit on Monday in the wake of Western sanctions against the country. The company announced a net profit of 813 billion rubles ($10.5 billion) for last year, down 7.9% from 2021. Rosneft said “non-monetary factors played a large role in determining the dynamics”…
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A Russian university student has been added to the federal wanted list after she fled the country to evade prosecution for criticizing the war in Ukraine, the independent Sota news outlet reported Monday. Olesya Krivtsova, 20, from the northern city of Arkhangelsk, faces more than 10 years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” and…
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