Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s party was set Sunday to retain a majority in parliament on the last day of three-day elections in which most Kremlin critics were barred from the ballot. The vote comes in the wake of an unprecedented crackdown on the opposition this year, with Russian authorities jailing Putin’s best-known domestic foe Alexei … Read more
Senior diplomats from the United States and Russia held what the State Department described as “substantive and professional” talks on arms control and other strategic issues on Wednesday despite myriad other differences that have sent relations into a tailspin. The State Department said the discussions in Geneva produced no breakthroughs but said they did yield … Read more
The United States is preparing new sanctions against Russia over the poisoning of critic Alexei Navalny, who blames the Kremlin for the near-fatal incident. “We are preparing another package of sanctions to apply in this case as well,” US President Joe Biden‘s national security advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday. Source link
US President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will hold their first summit next month in Geneva, both sides said Tuesday, though no breakthrough is expected in the fraught relationship. The meeting in the wealthy Swiss city — home to many UN organizations and location of a historic 1985 summit between Soviet leader Mikhail … Read more
The Russian president went up to the brink — and then, with the eyes of the world upon him, stepped back from it. State television images on Friday showed Russian forces that had amassed near Ukraine — sparking fears of an imminent full-scale war in Europe — being loaded onto trains and ships to be … Read more
There are the booms that echo again, and parents know to tell their children they are only fireworks. There are the drones the separatists started flying behind the lines at night, dropping land mines. There are the fresh trenches the Ukrainians can see their enemy digging, the increase in sniper fire pinning them inside their … Read more
She burst into the hospital morgue, and the bodies were everywhere, about a dozen of them in black bags on stretchers. She headed straight for the autopsy room, pleading with the guard in a black jacket, “Can I speak to the doctor who opened up my father?” Olga Kagarlitskaya’s father had been hospitalized weeks earlier … Read more
BRUSSELS: It took just three months for the rumor that COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon to spread from the fringes of the Chinese internet and take root in millions of people’s minds. By March 2020, belief that the virus had been human-made and possibly weaponized was widespread, multiple surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center … Read more
MOSCOW: A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to prison on charges that he violated the terms of his probation while he was recuperating in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning. Navalny, who is the most prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, had earlier denounced the proceedings as a vain attempt by the … Read more
MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin signed legislation on Tuesday that allows former presidents to become lawmakers for life in Russia‘s upper house of parliament once they leave the Kremlin, a government website showed. The legislation follows sweeping changes to the Russian political system initiated by Putin this year that, among other things, allow him to run … Read more