News Highlights

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon said his country’s parliament will ratify an agreement that extends Russia’s military presence in Tajikistan until 2042.

Russia will no longer recognize a UN convention that established an international customs transit system aimed at speeding up the movement of goods from Aug. 14, the Federal Customs Service has announced, raising the specter of new import hassles at customs.

The Interior Ministry has started an investigation after 148 traffic police in southwestern Siberia wrote to President Vladimir Putin and the interior minister claiming that their superiors were running a massive extortion racket, the ministry’s press service said Thursday.

Russia said on Thursday a vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to tighten sanctions against Iran would not help resolve the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko warned Thursday that athletes and visitors to the Sochi Olympics will be subject to the country’s laws against promoting homosexuality, contradicting a statement from the International Olympic Committee that the government had promised they would be exempt.

The Pussy Riot rockers jailed for performing an anti-Putin song in a cathedral might be pardoned by the president under a general amnesty this year.

Russian nationalists have jumped on the bandwagon of marketplace raids following a police clampdown in Moscow, taking to the streets in force and armed with baseball bats – to check the documents of fruit vendors, they say.

“Mine’s bigger than yours.” It’s perhaps the starkest manifestation of macho competition known to mankind, and now the president of Belarus appears to be challenging his Russian counterpart to a war of size.

Rosneft, Russia’s top oil producer, said Wednesday that it had started shipping additional oil supplies to China, following an agreement signed last month.

Prominent economist Konstantin Sonin has announced he is quitting Russia’s New Economic School just two months after the institution’s influential rector Sergei Guriev fled to Paris fearing he could be imprisoned.