WorldcrunchKommersant (“The Businessman”) was founded in 1989 as the first business newspaper in the Russia. Originally a weekly, Kommersant is now a daily newspaper with strong political and business coverage. It has been owned since 2006 by Alisher Usmanov, the director of a subsidiary of Gazprom.
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council, considers which candidate would be better for Russia. While it’s often thought that Moscow should hope for Donald Trump to win, his first term as president shows his “transactional” nature and otherwise minor impact on foreign policy.
Fighting in the Kursk Oblast — following Ukraine’s incursion into the region — is not abating, and volunteers from across Russia are coming to help: bringing goods and food, evacuating residents and providing medical assistance. Kommersant correspondent Alexander Chernykh visited a makeshift clinic and observed how volunteer doctors are saving wounded soldiers near the front line.
Russia’s investment in the Arctic continues with reports of a new joint project with India. This comes with the development of a Siberian station called Snezhinka (Snowflake), at the center of both scientific and economic development of the Northern territories in the times of global warming.
Saudi Arabia is set to host non-Western countries to discuss how to initiate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. Moscow-based daily Kommersant takes an in-depth look at what the high-level talks, slated for Aug. 5 in Jeddah, mean for Russia — who wasn’t invited to the summit —, Ukraine and the world.
Ahead of the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is on a diplomatic tour of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Turkey. Two of those countries, Bulgaria and Turkey, may prove to be particularly important for Ukraine’s future.
Alexander Lukashenko recounts how he took charge of the operation to defend Moscow from Yevgeny Prigozhin, and looks to shift the region’s balance of power. “I am as much a participant in these events as Putin. So if someone in Russia talks about Lukashenko mediating, there is no mediation!”
A fourth physicist from the Novosibirsk Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been detained on treason charges. The scientists’ research is linked to the development of hypersonic missiles, and an open letter now warns that Moscow’s arrests of its top researchers will cause Russia to fall behind in the development of such weapons.
An annual report has revealed Russians’ anxieties. This year, contracting COVID has been replaced by food shortages, inflation, and internet blackouts.
For many countries, the global food crisis has already begun. As enough food to feed the world for several weeks remains trapped in Ukraine, Russia and Turkey met to discuss the problem. But they cannot solve it alone, says independent Russian media Kommersant.
It’s a different kind of “migration” indeed, from Instagram to VKontakte, after U.S. social media were banned in Russia. It’s yet another kind of difficulty for Russians trying to continue with daily life.
Like from a Pushkin tale, Soviet embargo, or even a COVID lockdown, Russia is at home when it is proudly or despondently cut off from the external world. And after a post-Soviet pause of opening up, here we are again, says Russian writer Yury Saprykin.
A top analyst at one of Moscow’s most prestigious research institutes comes down clear and strong: Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine will leave the country isolated on the world stage, with grave consequences for the country’s future.
Russia has decided to cut off relations with the Western military alliance. But Moscow says it was NATO who really wanted the break based on its own internal rationale.
Fishing nets, industry and other human-caused dumping are poisoning Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s largest, deepest (and oldest) lake. Bigger than all the North American Great Lakes combined, it’s at risk after 25 million years of life.
Russian sushi delivery Yobidoyobi removed an advertisement with a Black man and apologized for offending the Russian nation, while a grocery chain was attacked for featuring an LGBTQ couple.
Last year’s election of reformist president Maia Sandu was the first step. But now the anti-graft, pro-Europe forces are about to dominate the Parliament. But what will it look like on the ground?
To succeed in withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan White House will need the active help of the Central Asian countries. However, with these post-Soviet republics in play, Russia wants a say.
In Moscow daily Kommersant, a long and fiery response from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the U.S. and European tactics during and after this month’s Putin-Biden summit.
In a recent government meeting, the Russian strongman once again showed off his trademark flare for political theater, promising, among other things, to leave his foreign foes toothless.
Russian authorities have more than a few questions to face, including where U.S. forces may relocate after exiting the troubled, central-Asian republic.
London is taking a hardline against Moscow since Trump’s departure left Putin increasingly isolated.
In order to circumvent French and German mediation, the Kremlin is leaking secrets to the press as a defacto policy of stalling in its seven-year-long conflict with Ukraine.
Moscow and Washington are attempting to work out how to communicate with each other after Joe Biden insulted Vladimir Putin.
The opponents of ‘Europe’s last dictator’ are trying to avoid loss of life and focusing new energy on labor strikes.
A Russian political analyst asks whether it is in Moscow’s interest to send military forces into Belarus in support of embattled leader Alexander Lukashenko.
Violent clashes continue to rock Belarus after opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was forced to flee the country, following President Lukashenko’s reelection.
The imposition of quarantine and self-isolation has hit migrant workers hardest of all. They have nothing to live on in Russia but have no way of returning home.
-OpEd- MOSCOW — Despite the predictions before this past week’s NATO summit of a major split in the alliance, and some awkward moments among its respective leaders, the meeting itself concluded without any real substantive complications. Even traditional anti-globalist clashes we’ve come to expect from these kinds of gatherings were absent. As for Russia, it […]
MOSCOW — Last month, the Interior Minister of Cyprus Constantinos Petrides announced the revocation of 26 “citizenships by investment” that had been granted before stricter criteria of this program was introduced in 2018. Though Petrides refused to name those who had lost their so-called “golden passports’, Kommersant has recently revealed some of the names on […]
MOSCOW — For the first time, the U.S. Congress has recognized the mass killings and deportations in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 as genocide. So why now? It doesn’t seem that the United States has anything really to gain from the country of Armenia. Two of the four borders of the country are […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The USA betrayed the Kurds. This was the blunt interpretation from Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the Turkey-Russia agreement on northeast Syria signed earlier this week in Sochi. The Kurds have been the Americans’ most loyal allies in Syria, yet Washington abandoned them. Now Kurdish military units […]
As Trump leads a U.S. retreat from the region, Russia has methodically moved back into a position of influence that it had in Soviet times.
May marked the 25th anniversary of the ceasefire that ended Armenia and Azerbaijan’s war for the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. It wouldn’t take much to reignite fighting.
Ukraine’s president-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy has learned how to appeal to the whole country — but now this former comedian has to learn how to rule it.
A view from Russia on the topic of Russian-American relations: time to keep a low profile.
MOSCOW — On April 13, a Russian court decreed an immediate blocking of the app Telegram across the country. The decision came after the refusal of Telegram to provide Russian security services with access to users’ private messages. The authorities said it was a necessity in the fight against terrorist threats. However, Pavel Durov, founder […]
Washington is threatening to use the so-called ‘Magnitsky Act’ to target Chinese officials for sanctions in response to Beijing’s mistreatment of the Uighur Muslim minority in northwestern China.
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The list is long: the scandal around the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, an unprecedented expulsion of Russian diplomats, sanctions leading to the fall of the ruble and a hit on aluminum giant Rusal, retaliatory sanctions, strikes on Syria and over-the-top rhetoric of official Moscow during and after all-the-above crises. […]
MOSCOW — Following a series of demonstrations against the political class that began across Armenia on April 13, the country’s prime minister Serzh Sargsyan has resigned. His duties are being temporarily carried out now by First Deputy Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan. In Moscow, the events in Armenia have prompted a public reaction from Maria Zakharova, […]
As parliamentary elections nears, voter frustrations are fueling a campaign in the landlocked, former Soviet republic, to integrate with Romania and the EU.