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President Vladimir Putin’s grip on Russia has endured another turbulent year marked by humiliating Ukrainian incursion, the overthrow of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, skyrocketing food prices, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s death in prison and a terrorist attack in Moscow that killed nearly 150 people. Twenty-five years since assuming power after Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation on New Year’s […]
Russia and Ukraine swapped more than 300 prisoners of war on Monday in an exchange brokered by the United Arab Emirates ahead of New Year’s Eve, officials from both countries said. The two sides have exchanged hundreds of captive soldiers since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in one of the […]
Vladimir Putin admitted Saturday that Russian air defence was working when an Azerbaijani Airlines plane tried to land in Grozny before crashing, breaking the Kremlin’s silence as speculation mounted Russia may have accidentally shot down the plane. The Russian leader called his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, apologizing for the incident that took place in Russian […]
Russia warned on Saturday of severe environmental damage from a huge oil spill in the Black Sea caused when two tankers collided in a storm near Crimea, which declared a state of emergency. One tanker sank and another ran aground on December 15 in the Kerch Strait between Russia and the annexed Crimean peninsula. Thousands […]
A court in central Russia’s Samara region sentenced singer Eduard Sharlot to five and a half years in prison for “rehabilitating nazism” and insulting religious feelings, state media reported Friday. “The final sentence is five years and six months, to be served in a penal colony,” the judge presiding over the singer’s case was quoted […]
An Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday was downed by a Russian air defence system, four sources in Azerbaijan with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters. Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 came down near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of Russia in which Moscow has used air […]
St. Petersburg will open a new metro station this week, Governor Alexander Beglov announced Thursday, marking the former Tsarist capital’s first new metro station in five years. The Gorny Institute metro station, located on Vasilievsky Island, will extend the fourth (or “orange”) line westward. It will begin operations at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, with its […]
Russia’s state financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring added exiled Russian-Canadian activist Pyotr Verzilov to the country’s list of “terrorists and extremists,” state media reported Tuesday. Verzilov, a former member of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot, was sentenced to over eight years in prison in absentia earlier this year under wartime censorship laws. Authorities accused him […]
A major environmental disaster is unfolding along southern Russia’s Black Sea coast after a storm damaged two oil tankers last weekend, spilling thousands of tons of heavy fuel that has now washed ashore. In the week since the Volgoneft 212 sank and the Volgoneft 239 ran aground, social media has been flooded with videos showing oil-slicked […]
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico made an unannounced visit to Moscow on Sunday for what he and the Kremlin called a “working meeting” with President Vladimir Putin. Fico made the trip days after reaching a deadlock in a dispute with the government in Kyiv over the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine to Slovakia, with […]