A Kremlin investigation is likely to focus on Islamist militants from the volatile North Caucasus as terror returns to the Russian capital.
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/ 15 November 2010
Two young men beat a Russian journalist unconscious outside his office on November 8, 48 hours after another reporter was attacked with an iron bar.
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/ 25 February 2008
While "oligarchs" from the era of former president Boris Yeltsin were purged by the Kremlin, a new breed of super-rich tycoons has thrived under Vladimir Putin, bringing the number of dollar billionaires in the country to more than 100. Russia now has the most billionaires in the world after the United States, which has 415. Germany is third with 60.
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/ 25 February 2008
While ”oligarchs” from the era of former president Boris Yeltsin have been purged by the Kremlin, a new breed of super-rich tycoons has thrived under Vladimir Putin, bringing the number of dollar billionaires in the country to more than 100. Russia now has the most billionaires in the world after the United States, which has 415. Germany is third, with 60.
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/ 20 October 2006
On Thursday scores of foreign humanitarian aid groups and charities that failed to meet a deadline for registration under a controversial new law had to suspend their work in Russia. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Danish Refugee Council are among those obliged to cease their activities.
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/ 16 October 2006
Georgia’s ambassador to Moscow this week struck out at the Kremlin, saying Georgians living in Russia were ”hiding at home in fear” after a Kremlin-backed campaign of intimidation. Tbilisi has accused Russia of ”ethnic cleansing” after it deported 400 Georgians from its territory following the spy scandal that saw four alleged Russian military intelligence officers detained and then ejected from Georgia earlier this month.
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/ 12 October 2006
The killer was waiting on the ground floor. Anna Polit-kovskaya, a tall, elegant figure with steel-grey hair and black clothes, descended in the lift to collect the shopping bags she had left in her Lada outside on the street. It was 4.10pm on Saturday. As the doors opened, a young man in a baseball cap stepped forward and fired two shots into her heart. The third hit her shoulder; the fourth her head.
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/ 29 September 2006
Life is not all plain sailing for Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the flamboyant leader of the Russian republic of Kalmykia. For a start, his Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit II needs constant repairs thanks to the rutted roads of his impoverished fiefdom. And then there is the danger of alien abduction. He has already been press-ganged into one trip on a UFO — seven years ago when he was on a business trip to Moscow.
Far from civilisation in the endless tundra of the far north, an army of workers is toiling to fuel President Vladimir Putin’s vision of a new Russia. In summer a swarm of mosquitoes and gnats rises from the festering swamps, crawling down collars and up trouser legs. In winter the temperature plummets to -60°C.
A simple house and its inhabitants in Butovo, on the southern outskirts of Moscow, have become a cause célèbre throughout Russia. The Prokofyev family who live in it are the talisman of local residents struggling to protect their homes from demolition by the city’s government.