Photos shared on social media VK by nuclear power company Rosatom show members of the expedition gather around a Russian flag placed on what is reportedly the North Pole point. Many hold flags marked with “Z,” the Fascism-inspired symbol of Russia’s wars of aggression. One person also holds the old black-yellow-white Russian imperial flag.

Reportedly, there were 83 warriors on board the ship, 24 of them heavily decorated so-called ‘heroes of Russia.’ The total number of medals and awards among the expedition members’ amount to 274, the program managers say.

The expedition set out from Murmansk on the 3rd of June and will proceed to the Franz Josef Land before it returns to Murmansk.

Sanctions have forced Russia's biggest private airline to decommission some of its planes, while the country's national carrier has delayed flights because of staffing shortages, it has been reported.

The woes faced by S7 Airlines and Aeroflot are the latest blow to Russian civil aviation since the start of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as a government official warned that passenger numbers in Russia will slump.

The head of Russia's federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsia, Dmitry Yadrov, said that S7 Airlines will decommission its fleet of Airbus A320neo aircraft because sanctions have made it impossible to repair and maintain their U.S.-made Pratt & Whitney engines.......

Russia may not be able to rely on the Chinese currency as initially hoped, as Beijing's banks are forced to comply with U.S. sanctions imposed on Russian President Vladimir Putin's economy in response to the war in Ukraine.

Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of the Central Bank of Russia, said on Thursday that payments issues were one of the key challenges facing the Russian economy. The Central Bank of Russia is taking into account all possible risks, including the risk of suspension of exchange trading in the yuan, Nabiullina told reporters.

Russia had become increasingly dependent on the Chinese currency after the country was cut off from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) banking system in response to the war in Ukraine.

However, a number of China's state-owned banks have recently tightened curbs on funding to Russian firms. This was in response to the U.S. Treasury Department's announcement in December that it would impose secondary sanctions on foreign banks conducting business with companies that support Russia's defense industry......

.....In February, three of China's largest banks—Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Bank of China—stopped accepting payments from sanctioned Russian financial institutions.

The decision was made due to the "risks of secondary sanctions" from the United States, Russian newspaper Izvestia reported at the time. These banks rank first, third and fourth in terms of assets in China, respectively.

Zhejiang Chouzhou Commercial Bank, the leading Chinese bank used by Russian importers, also halted operations in Russia in February, Russian business newspaper Vedomosti reported.

And last month, the Russia division of the Bank of China, which focuses on payments denominated in yuan, halted transactions with Russian banks sanctioned by the U.S. over the war in Ukraine, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported, citing financial sector sources.

An expert previously told Newsweek that the move showed how much Chinese firms fear breaking U.S.-led sanctions.......

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the death of innocent children was painful and terrifying, a day after a lethal strike on Kyiv's main hospital for children.

The pointed remark was an implicit rebuke to the Russian president, who moments earlier had welcomed him to the Kremlin with a warm statement on the importance of the strategic ties between the two countries........

......Russia has promised to discharge Indians who were falsely induced to join its army.

New Delhi has been seeking the release of its nationals whose families say they were lured to Russia by the promise of "support jobs" in the army, and were later forced into active combat in Ukraine......

Russian companies are increasingly unable to make payments for goods slated to be imported from China by rail as Chinese lenders take extra precautions to avoid running afoul of sanctions over Moscow's war against Ukraine.

Since May, payments for about half of these rail shipments are now being refused, Amsterdam-based news agency The Moscow Times wrote on Sunday, citing a Russian source working in logistics. This is reportedly five times the rejection rate of transactions for imports delivered via other modes of transportation.

This development comes as major Chinese banks scrutinize of Russian orders, recipients, and other details. This has resulted in transactions increasingly being put on hold for long periods of due diligence, and even rejected, as these banks seek to dodge the secondary sanctions Washington threatens against those facilitating trade that could support Russia's military base.

The reason cargo deliveries by train are being hit hardest by the rebuffed transactions is that a high number of firms involved in rail transportation are on the sanctions list, one Russian merchant was cited as saying........

As the NATO summit is underway, the alliance on Tuesday moved toward a major boost in arms production as it signed a nearly $700 million contract enabling member countries to produce more anti-aircraft Stinger missiles.

The FIM-92 Stinger is a portable surface-to-air missile system by Raytheon that can be utilized by ground troops or mounted on vehicles to provide short-range defense against aerial threats. The system, first produced in 1978 and upgraded many times, helps troops—without immediate air support—target an enemy aircraft. The Stinger was among the first U.S. weapons delivered to Ukraine following the Russian invasion in 2022.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the Stinger contract at a Chamber of Commerce industry day event that focused on preventing future attacks by increasing alliance members' defense manufacturing capabilities.

"There is no way to provide strong defense without a strong defense industry," Stoltenberg said........

In an appeal to Sberbank head German Gref, the lower-house State Duma’s Family, Women and Children Committee said that it had received messages from parents who were “outraged” by the cards.

“We ask you, dear German Oskarovich, to take into account the opinion of parents and deputies of our committee on preventing violations of Russian legislation and to halt the issuance of the Children’s SberCard with the ‘rainbow unicorn’ — a symbol of the LGBT movement,” the state-run TASS news agency cited the committee’s letter as saying.

Russia’s Supreme Court designated the “international LGBT movement,” which does not formally exist, as a banned “extremist” organization in November 2023.

In February, a woman in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod was arrested for five days for wearing rainbow earrings. The court — which pointed to the Supreme Court’s ruling — found the woman guilty of publicly displaying symbols of an “extremist” organization, a misdemeanor offense.

Ryabkov said he believes the move is "just a link in the chain of escalation."

It is "an intimidation tactic, which is pretty much the bedrock of the policy that NATO and the U.S. pursue towards Russia these days. We will work out a reaction in a calm and professional manner," the deputy foreign minister said.

Sanctions hindered the maintenance of the Russian airliner that crashed outside Moscow on Friday killing all three people onboard, it has been reported.

The Sukhoi Superjet (SSJ 100) belonging to Gazpromavia, an airline owned by gas giant Gazprom, crashed in the Kolomensky district of Moscow region.

It had disappeared from radars around 3 p.m. while en route from the Lukhovitsy Aviation Plant to Vnukovo Airport, Russian media reported.......

.......The plane which crashed on Friday had been equipped with French SaM146 engines made by a Franco-Russian joint venture, according to Swiss aviation intelligence provider ch-aviation.

But Mash posted that the aircraft was testing domestic PD-8 engines, being developed to replace the French ones....

Valentina Bondarenko, a top Russian economist, has died at the age of 82 after falling out of her apartment window in Moscow, Russian state-run media reported on Tuesday.

Bondarenko, a leading research fellow at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, fell out of her apartment window on Monday evening, emergency services told news agency Tass.

"She fell out of the window of her apartment, unfortunately, it was not possible to save her, the injuries she received were incompatible with life," the source said........

A top Russian military intelligence officer is reported to have been targeted in a car-bomb attack in Moscow.

Videos circulating on social media appear to show the moment an explosive device detonated in a Toyota Land Cruiser at a parking lot on Sinyavinskaya Street in Moscow.

Multiple Russian news outlets initially, including Russian newspaper Kommersant, reported that the vehicle was carrying 49-year-old Andrei Torgashov—an officer with Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU)—and his wife on Thursday morning, and that they were hospitalized in serious condition.

"Torgashov's legs were blown off," the Astra Telegram channel, a project run by independent Russian journalists, said, claiming that he holds the position of deputy head of a satellite communications center belonging to Russia's military unit 33790, which is based in the Moscow region.....

Russia is no longer involved in the joint development of a long-haul airliner with China.

A representative of state-owned aerospace company the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) confirmed to the BBC that Russia is not now involved in the development of the plane, the C929, it was reported Monday.

Discussions on the aircraft began as early as the 2010s, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and COMAC agreeing to move forward with the project during his visit to China in 2014, the BBC reported.

In 2018 COMAC and Russian partner, state-owned United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), announced they had agreed on the size, physical characteristics, and layout of the plane. The following year a life-size model of its flight deck and cabin was showcased at Russia's MAKS airshow.

At the time, the project was known as the CR929, with CR standing for China Russia. The R has since been scrubbed from recent references to the aircraft.

Mention of Russia's involvement in the project was absent from COMAC's booth at the ongoing Farnborough International Airshow in Hampshire, England, with employees refusing to comment on the matter. There was likewise no mention of Russia on the company's stand at the Paris Air Show last year.....

* Evan Gershkovich - US journalist, 16 years for espionage
* Paul Whelan - US security consultant, 16 years for spying
* Alsu Kurmasheva - RU/US journalist, 6.5 years for "spreading false information"
* Vladimir Kara-Murza - RU dissident, 25 years for "spreading "false information"
* Ilya Yashin - RU opposition, jailed for "spreading false information"
* Oleg Orlov - RU human rights activist ("Memorial"); 2.5 years for "discrediting Russian forces"
* Lilia Chanysheva - RU opposition; 9.5 years for "extremism" (Navalny's group)
* Ksenia Fadeyeva - RU opposition; 9 years for "extremism" (Navaly's group)
* Sasha Skochilenko - RU artist; 7 years for anti-war messages
* Kevin Lik - DE/RU citizen; 4 years for "treason" (emailing pictures of RU troops)
* Rico Krieger - DE citizen; death sentence in Belarus for accusation of 'planting explosives'
* Andrei Pivovarov - RU opposition; jailed for directing an “undesirable organisation” (Khodorkovsky's foundation)
* Dieter Voronin - RU/DE journalist; 13 years for "treason" (received classified information)
* Patrick Schoebel - DE citizen; jailed for drug trafficking (cannabis gummy bears)
* Herman Moyzhes - RU/DE lawyer; treason charges
* Vadim Ostanin - RU oppostion; 9 years for "extremism" (Navalny's group)

Russia's proposed natural gas pipeline to China hit a roadblock on Friday after the landlocked East Asian country Mongolia moved to exclude the project in its national action program through 2028.

About a third of Moscow's proposed Power of Siberia-2 pipeline project—which will connect Russia's gas fields in its Altai region to northeast China—was supposed to be built in Mongolia, which borders both China and Russia.

Russia's gas sales have withered because of the ongoing war in Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin has since sought to expand the country's foothold in China and other markets. Figures released in January, however, showed that Russia's gas sales to China have failed to make up for the lost trade with Europe caused by Western sanctions imposed over the conflict, which is now in its third year.......

Alexei Soldatov, a Russian internet pioneer and a founder of the first internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.” Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill.

Soldatov, who was known at the Kurchatov Institute for using computers more than anyone else to do his work, dreamed of building a network at the institute. He formed a team of programmers around him. In 1990 they began to think about how they could connect the institute with other research centers in the country. They needed a name for this network, so ran a random word-selection program in English. The program came up with Relcom.

In August of that year, the Relcom network became a reality, connecting the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow to the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. Further connections were established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines with extremely narrow bandwidth, meaning it was only capable of exchanging simple e-mails. But the Relcom team dreamed of connecting with the world.

On Aug. 28, 1990, the very first Soviet connection to the global internet was made when Kurchatov programmers exchanged emails with a university in Helsinki thanks to Relcom. Having connected the isolated country to the rest of the world, Relcom expanded rapidly. Many began using the company’s name as a shorthand term for the internet or email.

It was a very anti-Soviet idea — to connect people instantly both within the country and the world. The Soviet Union was a country where hierarchy was everything, and where any act required obligatory pre-authorization.

The Russian state is by its nature vindictive and increasingly violent. Locking up the father of Russia’s internet illustrates perfectly the way the Kremlin treats the people who helped contribute to the modernization and globalization of the country.

His true crime in the eyes of this vicious regime? An independent mind, genuine integrity, and a son who lives in exile, writing about their homeland’s descent into dictatorship.

Two U.S. researchers say they have identified the probable deployment site in Russia of the 9M370 Burevestnik, a new nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile touted by President Vladimir Putin as "invincible."
[...] the weapon - dubbed the SSC-X-9 Skyfall by NATO - has an almost unlimited range and can evade U.S. missile defenses. But some Western experts dispute his claims and the Burevestnik's strategic value, saying it will not add capabilities that Moscow does not already have and risks a radiation-spewing mishap.

The Burevestnik has a poor test record of at least 13 known tests, with only two partial successes, since 2016, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), [...]
The setbacks include a 2019 blast during the botched recovery of an unshielded nuclear reactor allowed to "smolder" on the White Sea floor for a year following a prototype crash [...]

"The Skyfall is a uniquely stupid weapon system, a flying Chernobyl that poses more threat to Russia than it does to other countries," [...]

Experts assess that it would be sent aloft by a small solid-fuel rocket to drive air into an engine containing a miniature nuclear reactor. Superheated and possibly radioactive air would be blasted out, providing forward thrust.

"It’s going to be as vulnerable as any cruise missile," said Kristensen. "The longer it flies, the more vulnerable it becomes because there is more time to track it. I don't understand Putin's motive here."

He called the Burevestnik a "political weapon" that Putin used to bolster his strongman image before his 2018 re-election and to telegraph to Washington that it cannot dismiss his concerns over U.S. missile defenses and other issues.