Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old veteran politician with a background in physics, promises to end Putin’s “fatal mistake” in Ukraine, halt mobilization and free political prisoners, including Alexei Navalny. He also pledges to reverse anti-LGBTQ+ and military censorship laws. Nadezhdin has been criticized by some for being ambiguous on the status of Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, … Read more
The couple was initially detained on Wednesday, according to human rights group OVD-info. After searching their apartment and finding sketches of anti-war messages, the Russian authorities took the couple to the Federal Security Service for interrogation, OVD said. Dyudyaeva, who describes herself as the “darkest artist of the Northwest” of Russia, has previously had her … Read more
The Kremlin has laughed off an attempt by the CIA to recruit spies from Russia via social media. “Somebody should tell the CIA that VKontakte is much more popular here than the banned X [formerly Twitter] and that VKontakte has a much larger audience,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday, according to state-run news agency … Read more
Thousands of protesters rallied in south-central Russia on Wednesday after a court sentenced Fayil Alsynov, an indigenous rights activist for the local Bashkir ethnic group, to four years in a penal colony on charges of inciting ethnic hatred. The demonstration took place outside the courthouse in Baymak, a town of 17,000 inhabitants nearly 2,000 kilometers … Read more
Dozens of Ukrainian children from a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine were taken to Belarus and sent to “emergency survival training” with the Belarusian military, according to local media. The Belarus 4 Mogilev state television channel reported on Wednesday that 35 children from the city of Antratsyt in eastern Ukraine, which Russia has occupied since 2014, … Read more
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree this week granting Russian citizenship to a former Bosnian Serb soldier accused of war crimes in the 1990s. Ratko Samac, a former officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, is wanted in Bosnia and Herzegovina on war crimes charges connected to the expulsion of non-Serb civilians from the Bosnian … Read more
A Russian singer who got in trouble for performing on stage wearing only a sock to cover his genitals was arrested at a St. Petersburg airport as he planned to leave the country. Maxim Tesli, lead singer of Russian band The Puppies, was charged with petty hooliganism. He was planning to flee Russia, according to … Read more
Germany’s sports minister, Nancy Faeser, has called on the International Olympic Committee to examine “very carefully” the backgrounds of Russian and Belarusian athletes competing in next year’s Olympic Games in Paris. Faeser’s comments came a day after the IOC, headed by Germany’s Thomas Bach, announced that Russians and Belarusians would be able to compete in … Read more
Who could have seen this coming?! Russian President Vladimir Putin is on track to maintain his grip on the country’s top job until the end of the decade, declaring his intent to win an election even his own officials have said is more or less a formality given the near-total clampdown on domestic opposition. The … Read more
