News Highlights

Opposition activists are refusing to back down in their bid to stage a rally in support of the Bolotnaya case defendants at the end of October.

Pussy Riot punk band member Maria Alyokhina on Friday dropped her plea for early release from jail to show support for a band mate on hunger strike to protest against prison conditions.

Russia said Friday that it expects the Netherlands to take “exhaustive” measures to find burglars who broke into the apartment of a Russian embassy official in The Hague in an incident that has become the latest flashpoint in recent diplomatic bickering between the two countries.

A bomb exploded outside a mosque in Russia’s North Caucasus on Friday, killing two suspected suicide bombers in a region where Moscow is battling an Islamist insurgency.

Eleven Nobel Peace Prize laureates have written a letter to President Vladimir Putin calling for piracy charges against environmental activists to be dropped.

International talks this week on Iran’s nuclear programme were “quite promising” and Tehran’s new proposals could produce progress toward ending the standoff between global powers and the Islamic state, Russia said on Thursday.

An Azerbaijani man arrested in the killing of a 25-year-old Russian man that set off an anti-immigrant rampage over the weekend in Moscow confessed to the crime, Russian officials said Wednesday, but he told investigators that he acted in self-defense after trying to intervene in an argument between the man and his girlfriend.

President Vladimir Putin’s chief political opponent walked free from a Russian court on Wednesday after it suspended his five-year sentence for theft, and said he could never be “hounded” out of political life.

Russia’s foreign ministry has expressed regret after a Dutch diplomat was beaten up in his Moscow apartment.

An appeals court in the Russian city of Kirov has given Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny a suspended prison sentence for embezzlement.