Amendments to Latvia’s immigration law took effect April 29, allowing authorities to revoke temporary residency permits for repeated administrative offenses.
A strike on the village of Voznesenovka in the Shebekino district of Russia’s Belgorod region killed three people and wounded eight on April 29, according to preliminary reports.
Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has demanded that Apple and Google remove the mobile app of iStories, an independent Russian investigative outlet, from their stores, iStories reported.
A Russian disinformation network known as Storm-1516 has been operating in the West since 2023, actively spreading fabricated stories and interfering in the political processes of foreign states. The group is believed to include former employees of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll factory and has been linked to the GRU. Storm-1516 has been accused of interfering in elections in the United States, Germany, and Hungary. One of the group’s most recent operations involved publishing a fake BBC report cl...
Russia’s Federal Tax Service and central bank are jointly developing criteria to automatically flag income Russians earn from undeclared business activity, the Russian business news outlet RBC reported, citing two sources (the article is behind a paywall; a summary is available from Frank Media).
The head of a department at the Novosibirsk regional veterinary authority has been found dead, the Novosibirsk-based news outlet “Sibirsky Express” reported, citing a source. His wife, Yelena Tur, confirmed the death.
Ukrainian drones struck the oil-loading infrastructure at the port of Tuapse overnight, sparking a large fire after debris fell at the site. The Krasnodar Krai operational headquarters said no one was injured. Within a few hours, satellite images showed smoke had spread at least 140 kilometers (87 miles).
Boiling oil spilled onto a street outside an oil refinery in Tuapse, Krasnodar Krai, after a storage tank boiled over during a fire there on April 28. Alexei Klushin, head of the regional Emergency Situations Ministry office, described the incident to Governor Veniamin Kondratyev in a conversation posted to the governor’s Telegram channel.
Russians who use VPNs are not looking for an alternative perspective online — they are looking for “what the enemy is saying,” Valery Fadeyev, the head of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, said. He called it “something unnatural” to use services that circumvent internet restrictions.
Russian users downloaded VPN apps from Google Play 9.2 million times in March 2026 — 14 times more than in the same month a year earlier — the Russian business daily Kommersant reported, citing data from the service Digital Budget.
Estonia’s Internal Affairs Ministry has drafted legislation that would bar Russian and Belarusian citizens from buying real estate in the country, ERR reported.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Presidential Library in St. Petersburg on April 27, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.
Russia’s Digital Development Ministry has directed internet services to block users who have VPN enabled, citing security concerns.
Russian forces struck Odesa with a massive drone attack overnight on April 27, the head of the city’s military administration, Serhiy Lysak, said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 25 signed three laws extending benefits to the families of servicemen killed in the war, seriously wounded Rosgvardiya personnel, and workers who have returned from military service.
A fire at a marine terminal in Tuapse entered its fourth day before firefighters gained the upper hand. By the morning of April 24, the Krasnodar Krai emergency operations center reported that crews had contained the blaze and extinguished the open burning. Work to fully put out the fire was continuing, the center said, with 276 personnel and 77 pieces of equipment on scene.
A man claiming to be a Ukrainian serviceman crashed a video conference at Kuban State Agrarian University in which students were being urged to sign contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry and go to war.
Russia’s Federal Security Service said it had uncovered a plot to assassinate the leadership of Roskomnadzor, the country’s federal censorship agency. The FSB’s public relations center said agents foiled a planned car bombing targeting the agency’s senior officials on April 18, 2026, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.
Russia’s Investigative Committee released Eksmo CEO Yevgeny Kapyev and three other senior executives at the publishing house on April 23, after they had been detained in connection with a criminal “extremism” case over the sale of queer literature. The state-run Russian news agency TASS first reported their release, citing law enforcement.
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The Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov at the Kremlin and expressed support for Kadyrov’s bid for another term as the region’s head.
Firefighters have fully extinguished the blaze at the Tuapse oil refinery, the Emergency Situations Ministry’s press service said.
A member of the Russian opposition platform at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has been suspended after effectively defending “honor killings” in the North Caucasus. Journalist Alexander Plyushchev published a statement to that effect from PACE President Petra Bayr.
St. Petersburg’s city administration plans to sharply cut the number of spectators at the May 9 military parade at Palace Square, the St. Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka reported, without citing a source.
Russians barred from leaving the country after receiving military draft notices will not be able to exit through Belarus, the State Border Committee of Belarus told the news outlet Belsat.
Russia has contained the spill of burning oil that spread through Tuapse after Ukrainian drone strikes on an oil refinery there, Emergency Situations Ministry head Alexander Kurenkov said at an operational headquarters meeting in the city.
Statements by Ruslan Kutayev — president of the Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus and a member of the PACE platform representing Russia’s indigenous peoples — are generating widespread debate in the Russian opposition. In an interview with a Ukrainian YouTube channel, he said that when the time comes, Chechens will “return to Moscow” and control the Russian capital so that it “doesn’t get uppity with the surrounding peoples.” Journalist Alexander Plushev later invited Kutayev onto his progr...
Vladimir Putin broke his silence on Ukrainian drone strikes against oil infrastructure in Tuapse, addressing the issue during a meeting on election security. Pavel Zarubin, host of the program Moskva. Kreml. Putin (“Moscow. Kremlin. Putin”), published a clip of his remarks on his Telegram channel.
Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that Ratmir Mavliyev, the head of Ufa’s city administration, has been detained on suspicion of abuse of office and corruption.
Drone debris struck an oil refinery in Tuapse in the early hours of April 28, setting it on fire, the operational headquarters of Krasnodar Krai reported.
A human rights group that assists North Caucasus residents fleeing violence has called for a member of the Russian opposition platform at PACE to be removed after he effectively justified “honor killings” in Chechnya, the independent Russian broadcaster TV Rain reported. The group, SK SOS, is seeking the removal of Ruslan Kutayev.
Vladimir Putin told lawmakers and senators gathered in St. Petersburg for a meeting of the Legislative Council under the Federal Assembly to stop fixating on punitive legislation alone.
A St. Petersburg court has declared the Russian LGBT Network an “extremist organization” and banned it from operating in Russia, the Joint Press Service of St. Petersburg Courts announced.
The 142-meter (466-foot) superyacht Nord, belonging to Alexei Mordashov, the owner of Russian steelmaker Severstal, has crossed the Strait of Hormuz, according to the vessel-tracking service Vesselfinder.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, plans to convert Russia’s Khmeimim air base into a training and humanitarian hub, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported, citing a Syrian source familiar with the situation.
Russian e-book and audiobook platforms have started attaching drug-harm warning labels to works by literary classics including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Mikhail Bulgakov, the independent Russian news outlet Verstka reported.
Trust in Vladimir Putin has fallen to 71 percent and his approval rating to 65.6 percent, according to new data from the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM). Some 24.1 percent of respondents said they do not trust Putin, and 23.3 percent do not approve of his performance as president.
A Russian drone attack on Odesa in the early hours of April 24 killed two people and injured 14 others, Oleh Kiper, the head of the Odesa regional administration, said.
A knife-wielding man attacked two doctors at a hospital in Makhachkala on April 23, the Dagestan branch of Russia’s Investigative Committee said.
Russian blogger Victoria Bonya said she has been invited to appear live on a broadcast hosted by propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s team.
Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matvienko has called on Alexei Mordashov, a co-owner of the Russian steelmaker Severstal, to repatriate money from offshore accounts to Russia.
Vladimir Putin proposed a ceasefire for the Victory Day holiday period during a phone call with Donald Trump, Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov said.
An assassination attempt targeting Major General Azatbek Omurbekov was reported at a military garrison in Khabarovsk Krai, according to the Telegram channel VChK-OGPU. An explosive device planted in a mailbox detonated on April 28, killing one person and wounding several others.
Russian billionaires Roman Abramovich and Viktor Kharitonin may be tied to A7, a payment platform created in 2024 to help Russia move money across borders in defiance of Western sanctions — and which has itself been placed under sanctions. That is the finding of an investigation by the independent Russian investigative outlet Proekt, whose sources describe A7 as the dominant player in the cross-border payments market.
A Ukrainian drone struck “one of the industrial sites” in the Perm municipal district and started a fire, Perm Krai Governor Dmitry Makhonin said.
On April 21, Moscow State University (MSU) held a presentation for its new artificial intelligence (AI) school. The new program is part of an infrastructure that Russian state news agencies describe as the “unified AI ecosystem of MSU.” It also includes an AI research center at the university, a supercomputer called “MSU-270,” and the MSU Institute of Artificial Intelligence. That last organization is officially headed by Vladimir Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, who sources familiar with...
Russia’s Digital Development Ministry is developing a mechanism to impose additional charges on international internet traffic, according to a written .pdf response the ministry sent to the Association of Telecommunications Companies.
In the early hours of April 28, Ukrainian forces struck the oil infrastructure in Tuapse for the third time in two weeks. The first fire at the oil terminal burned for four days before it was extinguished. The second took five days to put out; local authorities said one person was killed and another was injured. The third wave of strikes hit a section of the Tuapse oil refinery that had not previously been targeted, as well as the marine terminal. Correspondents from the independent journalis...
TV host Vladimir Solovyov apologized on air to blogger Victoria Bonya after she publicly addressed him, telling her he had been too careless with his words.
Journalist Ksenia Sobchak sat down for a two-hour interview with pro-Kremlin blogger and informant Ilya Remeslo. He is known as someone who spent years fighting Alexei Navalny and was behind one of the criminal cases against the opposition leader. In mid-March, Remeslo unexpectedly published a post criticizing Vladimir Putin on his Telegram channel, and two days later ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where he spent a month. After his discharge, Remeslo told Sobchak about his hospitalizatio...
Russia’s state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has opened an investigation into the Russia-1 television channel over an April 16 episode of the talk show Vecher s Vladimirom Solovyovym (“Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”), in which the host directed a string of insults at blogger Viktoria Bonya, the outlet Mozhem obyasnit (“We Can Explain”) reported.
A top Yandex manager was found dead in the Svetloyarsky district of the Volgograd region, the Volgograd-based news outlet V1.ru reported, citing a source. Sergei Loyter was among a group of fishermen who went missing after heading out onto the Volga River in a motorboat during a storm.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in St. Petersburg in the early hours of April 27, the Iranian agencies Mehr and Irna reported.
A Russian mother and son who fled to Finland after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been denied asylum and now face deportation, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and the project Rulehti report. They are Olga and Nikita Belov.
People detained in connection with what the FSB has described as a planned terrorist attack against Roskomnadzor leadership may belong to Alyi lebed (“Scarlet Swan”), a movement that has campaigned against internet restrictions in Russia. That is the conclusion of the Russian human rights group Department One.
An animal rights activist in Omsk died on April 23 after two drunk men beat her and set their dog on her in an attack the previous month, TASS reported, citing a law enforcement source.
Firefighters have contained and extinguished the open blaze at the marine terminal in Tuapse, the operational headquarters of Krasnodar Krai announced, adding that 276 personnel and 77 pieces of equipment remain on scene as full-suppression work continues.
The defendants in the “Kherson Nine” case were detained in the summer of 2022, when Kherson was still under Russian occupation. They were charged with plotting assassinations of collaborationist officials in the city. In January 2026, a Russian court sentenced them to between 14 and 20 years in prison.
Aishat Khizriyeva, a 21-year-old Chechen woman, has left Russia, the human rights group SK SOS reported on April 23.
Alexei Pimanov, a host on the Russian state-controlled Channel One, died of heart failure on April 23, the network reported. He was 64.