Russia

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37329023

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Telegram is not widely used in Poland, but experts say false messages on it are amplified among extremist groups and then spread on to other platforms that have a bigger reach.

The 22 channels largely present themselves as Polish news and information services. Two claim to be "impartial" while one promises "unbiased" news. One channel bills itself as offering "reliable and verified information hidden from the public", while another has the slogan "we are where the truth is needed".

Most of them frequently cite or replicate content from Russian state media outlets, such as RT and Sputnik, which have been banned in the European Union for manipulating information and spreading propaganda. Poland is a member of the EU.

The channels often quote or link to Russian regime figures and supporters. President Vladimir Putin, deputy head of the national security council Dmitry Medvedev, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Russian propagandist TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov and pro-Russian war commentators known as "Z-bloggers" are all cited.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37269029

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Spain’s EU Commissioner Teresa Ribera mounted a backroom campaign to loosen Brussels’ landmark plan to ban Russian gas, according to five people familiar with the matter, as the bloc strains to kick its remaining reliance on Moscow for energy.

On Tuesday, the EU unveiled a long-awaited legal proposal that aims to snuff out Russian gas imports to the bloc by 2027, as Brussels attempts to crush a vital revenue stream for the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine.

But to do so, it also had to overcome a surprising hurdle: the EU’s powerful cleantech chief, a green champion and staunch Ukraine backer.

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According to three EU officials and two EU diplomats, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely, Ribera repeatedly intervened as her colleagues in the EU’s executive branch drafted the strategy in recent months. They claim she acted out of fear that Spanish firms would face a barrage of lawsuits from Moscow.

“For five weeks, Ribera was saying no good assessment had been done and the risk of getting sued by the Russians was high,” one of the officials said, arguing the Spanish politician “used her cluster role” as Commission executive vice president to try and weaken the plans.

During that time, Ribera lobbied the inner circle of EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen, who is in charge of the strategy and technically works under her, the official alleged, but his “Cabinet remained solid” and refused to budge on the overall plan.

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Spain, the EU’s third-biggest buyer of Moscow’s liquefied natural gas, would also be impacted by the ban.

Currently, the country is required to buy supplies from Russian firm Novatek until 2042 under a long-term contract signed with domestic energy firm Naturgy. Last year, it imported 4.7 million tons of Moscow’s LNG, according to the Kpler commodities platform.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37213169

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Russian strikes across Ukrainian regions killed at least seven civilians and injured at least 23 over the past day, regional authorities reported on June 22.

Russia launched two Iskander-M or North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles, an S-300 anti-aircraft missile, and 47 Shahed-type attack drones and decoy drones against Ukraine overnight, primarily targeting Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine's Air Force said.

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In Chernihiv Oblast, a civilian was killed in a Russian drone attack against the Nizhyn district, Governor Viacheslav Chaus reported.

Later on June 22, emergency workers found three bodies of people killed when a Russian missile hit a four-story residential building in Kramatorsk. Two people were injured, and three other residents may be trapped under the rubble, the State Emergency Service said.

In Kharkiv Oblast, a Russian attack killed a 77-year-old man in the village of Staryi Saltiv, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

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Archived

“They Told Me: Deripaska Is the Client. Don’t You Want To Sell Your Virginity?” - How a network for selling sex with teenagers was built in Russia - and which of its influential clients managed to escape responsibility

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The meeting between the schoolgirl and the man she would later call Oleg Deripaska was organized by five people: Svetlana Titova, Alexandra Shantyreva, Olga Goncharova, Maksim Nekozyrev, and Anastasia Yakusheva. They became the defendants in the criminal case opened in 2019 in Priozersk, Leningrad Oblast.

The network for recruiting girls operated for at least two years (2018–2019) under the cover of regional, often children’s, beauty contests, modeling agencies, dating sites, and themed groups on messengers.

According to detectives from the Investigative Committee, one of the key roles in this network was played by 51-year-old Svetlana Titova. She grew up in Mordovia, where in the 2000s she founded her first modeling agency, Lel. Later, Titova organized several local beauty contests: Miss Carnival, Miss Bust, and Beauty of Mordovia. In 2017, their participants said that Svetlana recruited them into her agency and promised good income.

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“The men knew I was 17, they asked, as well as where I studied, what city I was from,” Irina recalled during her interrogation about that trip to Moscow. “I answered that I was 17, studying to be an economist, that I was a model, and so on.”

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“They were specifically looking for us. I was found at age 15. They wrote to me on VK under some fake photo,” recalls Alena Yaroshenko, another underage girl from the case files. She is now 23. In 2021, she was summoned for questioning in the case against Titova and Nekozyrev, but she refused to testify. Four years later, Alena agreed to speak to journalists.

“They told me the client was Deripaska and asked if I wanted to sell my virginity. Apparently, I had the kind of face Oleg was willing to pay for. He was supposed to come to an economic forum in Petersburg. At first, I agreed, because I had remembered him since childhood from the story with the pen, and I liked him. But then I imagined what my mother would do to me,” she said.

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Thousands of North Koreans are entering Russia, posing as students on “practical training” but instead coming to labor under slave-like conditions [...] The practice directly violates UN sanctions — sanctions that Russia itself has agreed to. The workers toil six days a week, sometimes for up to 20 hours a day, while their wages are divided between the North Korean regime and Russian companies. Among those profiting from the forced labor system is an organization linked to Artem Chaika, the son of Russia’s former prosecutor general.

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Pyongyang uses its labor force as a vital source of hard currency. In 2015, Marzuki Darusman, the former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, reported that foreign employers paid the regime in Pyongyang “significantly higher amounts” than the workers themselves were told they were earning, allowing the government to collect an estimated $1.2 to $2.3 billion annually.

Meanwhile, the workers themselves often received little or nothing in exchange for working grueling shifts of up to 20 hours a day — all while living in conditions of constant surveillance and with insufficient food. In one of his messages, Tkachuk noted that each group of North Korean workers must include a designated “senior” supervisor — a minder tasked with overseeing and controlling the group on behalf of the regime.

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According to Cedric Ryngaert, Head of the Department of International Law at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, given the findings of The Insider’s investigation are correct, Russia is likely to violate UN Security Council resolutions 2375 and 2397, both adopted in 2017. These resolutions, among other conditions, require member states to stop issuing work permits to North Korean labourers and repatriate all of them to their home country within 2 years.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37083862

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The head of one of Russia’s largest steel producers has warned of imminent production cuts and plant closures in the country’s steel industry as a strengthening ruble and high interest rates choke off demand and profitability.

The steel industry, which employs more than 600,000 workers and accounts for roughly 10% of Russia’s export revenues, has long been a pillar of the nation’s heavy industry.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Thursday, Severstal CEO Alexander Shevelev said the industry could be unable to sell up to 6 million metric tons of steel this year, nearly 10% of last year’s total output.

The current forecast for domestic steel consumption predicts that demand could fall from 43-45 million tons to just 39 million tons this year, he said.

“That’s effectively the disappearance of an entire industry’s worth of demand,” Shevelev said.

At the same time, exporting steel has become unprofitable due to the sharp appreciation of the ruble.

“The industry … today is practically unable to export metal products, because it is economically unviable,” Shevelev said.

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Meanwhile, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov warned Thursday that Russia's economy is teetering on the "brink of recession", casting a downbeat tone over the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a key event aimed at attracting investment to the country.

Speaking on the second day of the forum, Reshetnikov said "current business sentiment and indicators" point to a looming downturn.

"Overall, I think we are on the brink of a recession," he told journalists. "Everything else depends on our decisions," he added, urging Russia's Central Bank to show "a little love for the economy."

Russia's economy has been marked by volatility since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with growth now slowing after a period when record defense spending led to "overheating."

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Russia’s Finance Ministry is aggressively increasing its borrowing in a bid to cover growing fiscal gaps and hedge against an increasingly uncertain economic future as military spending surges and oil and gas revenues slump.

Six months into 2025, the ministry has already borrowed more than 2.7 trillion rubles (approximately $35 billion), or 56% of its annual borrowing plan.

This week alone, it raised 195 billion rubles (around $2.5 billion) through two new issues of government bonds, known as OFZs, hitting its second-quarter fundraising target of 1.3 trillion rubles (about $16.9 billion).

Russia is paying steep yields — 15.2% on six-year bonds and 15.5% on 11-year debt — amid high interest rates aimed at taming inflation.

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Foreign direct investment in Russia fell to just $3.3 billion in 2024, its lowest level since 2001, according to new data published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The data, released during Russia's flagship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, shows a 62.8% decline in investment between 2023 and 2024 and a 50% drop from the pre-war year of 2021, when Russia attracted $38.8 billion.

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, few serious businesses would consider Russia as an attractive investment destination given the political risks that would remain, Sergei Aleksashenko, a former deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank who now lives abroad, told Reuters.

According to the Central Bank itself, foreign investment in Russia’s non-financial sectors has declined by 57% over the past three years. Total accumulated FDI fell from $497.7 billion at the start of 2022 to $216 billion as of January 2025, the lowest level since 2009.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37018296

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Russia poses a direct threat to the European Union through acts of sabotage and cyberattacks, but its massive military spending suggests that President Vladimir Putin also plans to use his armed forces elsewhere in the future, the EU’s top diplomat warned on Wednesday.

“Russia is already a direct threat to the European Union,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. She listed a series of Russian airspace violations, provocative military exercises, and attacks on energy grids, pipelines and undersea cables.

Kallas noted that Russia is already spending more on defense than the EU’s 27 nations combined, and this year will invest more “on defense than its own health care, education and social policy combined.”

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The acts of sabotage and cyberattacks are mostly aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine, military officers and experts have said.

But concern is mounting in Europe that Russia could try to test NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee — the pledge that an attack on any one of the allies would be met with a collective response from all 32.

In 2021, NATO allies acknowledged that significant and cumulative cyberattacks might, in certain circumstances, also be considered an armed attack that could lead them to invoke Article 5, but so far no action has been taken.

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Meanwhile, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said that Nato members will discuss new operational concepts to respond immediately to a Russian military attack - including counterstrikes inside Russia - at the Nato summit later this month.

“The new concept is that if Russia is coming, then we will bring the war to Russia. That's what we are talking about,” Tsahkna said. “We have no time then to discuss whether we can use one of the other weapons or whatever. We have no time. We need to act within the first minutes and hours.”

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37003414

From grenade-throwing contests to marching drills, Pasha Talankin filmed how his school was being used as a military recruiting centre. Now the teacher turned film-maker is in hiding.

Archived

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The teacher, Pasha Talankin, was talking to himself, facing his own crossroads, terrified of his own secret plan. Or, rather, talking to every one of us who wonder: what if an accident of history put me, little me, in a situation where I had a moral choice, where to do the right thing risked not just my comfort but my life?

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His documentary, Mr Nobody Against Putin, is a cross between School of Rock and Nineteen Eighty-Four, a surprisingly funny study of how authoritarian regimes break the spirit of all except the most unlikely and pig-headed. It’s at first about a place that couldn’t be further from our minds: a school community in Karabash, a place Russians regard as the back end of nowhere. Yet it’s also relevant to us all: when Mr Nobody Against Putin won the jury prize for international documentary at the Sundance Film Festival the audience gave a standing ovation, many talking of their own concerns of a future where they could be asked to say things they did not believe. Partly produced by a team from the BBC, the film gets its UK premiere at Sheffield DocFest today. I say to Talankin I hope he accepts my definition of him as heroic.

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[Edit typo.]

In 2024, Russian pharmacies had 134 fewer essential drugs than the year before. Of these, about 15% treat cancer. The remaining are antibiotics, anticonvulsants, immunosuppressants, insulin for pregnant women and drugs for migraines, allergies, tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and so on.

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For example, Endoxan, used as chemotherapy and to suppress the immune system, disappeared in May 2024, as did other drugs used in the treatment of lung and biliary tract cancer.

Last summer, doctors and patients complained about a shortage of the laxative Senade, which is included in the official list of essential drugs.

In October, many regions ran short of antibiotics with different active ingredients.

In November, immunoglobulin, which is extremely important for pregnant women with the Rh negative blood type, disappeared across almost all of Russia.

Meanwhile, even in Moscow and St Petersburg there was a serious shortage of saline solution for several months. For example, in the northern capital’s clinics the wait for procedures with saline solution took up to two months, and pharmacies had only ampoules of 5-10 milliliters.

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Sanctions, restrictions and the (poor) quality of generics have led to the emergence of a real black market for brand-name, original drugs. Suppliers buy batches of them in Turkey, India and European countries and then sell them through messenger chats.

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The most popular drugs on the internet are those for cancer treatment. This is unsurprising: most antitumor drugs cannot be found in pharmacies anymore.

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The Russian consultancy RNC Pharma estimates the cost of imported drugs increased a third in 2024.

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Prices have risen for the most common therapies as well, such as over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs and asthma drugs. The reason is that many locally produced medications are made with imported components, which have become much more expensive.

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Meanwhile, Russia produces many cheap generics, for which reason, however, brand-name drugs are leaving the country due to low selling prices. Another problem is that Russian generics do not undergo the required cycle of clinical trials. Their real efficacy is unknown, and they often have many more side effects.

This is the case not only for cancer drugs but also, for example, HIV drugs. In addition, Russia does not produce combination drugs, meaning patients on local treatment regimens need to take several pills at once instead of one, which is much less convenient.

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In the prevailing conditions, patients with orphan diseases find themselves in a hopeless situation. Their drugs are often very expensive, and almost no family can afford them on their own, even though they mean the difference between life and death.

In 2024, 77% of orphan disease patients complained about difficulties in obtaining drugs.

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Prices [for medications] will rise further and there will be even fewer medications on shelves – a fact acknowledged even by official Russian sources.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36864816

Archived

During his official visit to Austria, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disclosed that Russia had proposed exchanging abducted Ukrainian children for captured Russian soldiers—a proposal he firmly rejected, as was reported on June 16.

Speaking at a joint press conference [...], Zelenskyy stated: “We do not exchange them for anything. It is absolutely unfair. Frankly speaking, this is madness, which the Russians, by the way, proposed: we give them military personnel, and they give us children.” The Ukrainian president emphasized that such exchanges are legally and morally unacceptable, underscoring that kidnapped children are victims of Russian aggression, not subjects of negotiation.

Zelenskyy further stressed that Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children constitutes a war crime. The International Criminal Court has previously issued arrest warrants for Russian officials, including leader Vladimir Putin, over the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia. Kyiv estimates that over 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Earlier, Ukraine rescued five more children abducted by Russia, including minors who had been held in reeducation camps and subjected to military training.

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Investigations reveal a system of indoctrination of children abducted by Russia. [...] Ukraine has identified over 150 locations where Russia is holding or has relocated abducted Ukrainian children, including families involved in illegal adoptions. These are around 40 camps, over 40 adoptive families, more than 50 educational institutions, and several Russian state-run facilities—spread across Russia and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

These forced relocations are part of what human rights groups call a state policy of Russification. Children are placed in camps or foster families, issued Russian passports, and compelled to forget their heritage. Some are enrolled in military schools, others are sent deep into Russia, given new biographies as if their pasts never existed.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36830782

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Director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, has claimed that Ukraine and the United Kingdom are allegedly preparing acts of sabotage in the Baltic Sea. It is another disinformation campaign from the Kremlin, according to Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council.

"Ukraine, together with the British, is preparing provocations in the Baltic Sea. One of the scenarios involves staging a fake Russian torpedo attack on a US Navy ship," Naryshkin said.

However, Kovalenko dismissed these claims as false.

"Naryshkin from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service keeps doing the only thing he knows - fabricating nonsense. This time, he invented a fake story about Ukraine and the UK preparing sabotage operations in the Baltic Sea. And this is the same Naryshkin who organized cable sabotage against NATO using ships of the tanker fleet," he said.

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"So now Naryshkin comes up with nonsense and provocations to win favor with Putin. Only Russia is capable of planning sabotage in the Baltic, as it has done before," the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation notes.

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On December 25 of last year, it was reported that underwater communication cables between Estonia and Finland had been damaged.

Arto Pahkin, a representative of Finnish electricity transmission system operator Fingrid, noted that two vessels were in the area at the time the connection was severed.

Later, it emerged that Finnish authorities were investigating an oil tanker suspected of being part of Russia's so-called shadow fleet.

According to media reports, by stopping the Russian shadow fleet tanker, Finland may have prevented several more serious sabotage operations.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36828391

Archived

What started with masked soldiers in Crimea and covert proxies in Donbas has evolved into a complex, multi-layered hybrid strategy employed by the Kremlin against the West. Over the past decade, the Kremlin has refined its Soviet-inherited playbook of active measures, combining coordinated campaigns of subversion, sabotage, cyberattacks and disinformation to weaken democratic institutions, undermine public trust, and fracture European and Euro-Atlantic unity. It has stepped up its funding of anti-establishment parties across the EU while deploying covert operatives and disinformation strategies to maximize its reach without triggering open confrontation.

Documented attacks increased fourfold between 2022 and 2023 and threefold in 2024 compared to 2023. In this regard, the Kremlin has increased both the range of targets, from critical infrastructure to transportation hubs, and the tactics used, including explosives and improvised tools. This evident escalation reflects the Kremlin’s shift towards more aggressive and adaptable hybrid disruption tactics, designed to remain just below the threshold of triggering a unified European response.

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Poland, Ukraine’s leading supporter and a central hub for NATO logistics, has become a primary target of the Kremlin’s hybrid attacks against critical infrastructure. One striking example came in May 2025, when Polish authorities confirmed that Russian intelligence was behind the fire that destroyed the large shopping centre in Warsaw the previous year, damaging over 1,400 shops and service outlets.

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Numerous instances of Russian hybrid attacks have been recorded across the Baltic states and Romania. The Kremlin has directed these attacks against critical infrastructure, undersea cables and electoral systems.

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In March 2025, Kremlin-linked agents conducted an arson attack on an IKEA store in Lithuania, along with the Russian sabotage of the Baltic Sea cable system, disrupting the country’s internet connectivity.

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Since 2024, Estonia has seen a notable spike in cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. In particular, there has been an increase in satellite-based cyberattacks, which have disrupted the operations of airport infrastructure. Currently, the country is working actively to track the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet”.

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Romania is one of the recent stark examples of the Kremlin’s application of modern hybrid warfare tools. In December 2024, the country’s constitutional court annulled the 2024 presidential election after the country’s intelligence services confirmed Russian interference via fake social media accounts and cyberattacks on election systems.

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A western response should not remain purely defensive. It has to counter the Kremlin’s hybrid attacks that fall below the threshold of triggering a unified European response and incorporate offensive measures. This way, the West can ensure that the Kremlin is discouraged and, if necessary, respond with targeted retaliatory actions against its covert operations, particularly across the EU member states. Otherwise, the Kremlin will continue leveraging hybrid warfare tools to undermine democracies in the West.

The case has been forwarded for criminal charges. A child could be prosecuted as an adult. Defend this, tankies.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36743462

Archived

Finnish authorities have accused senior officers of a Russia-linked vessel that damaged undersea cables last year between Finland and Estonia of criminal offenses related to the wreckage.

They say the oil tanker, the Eagle S, dragged its anchor to damage the Estlink-2 power cable and communication links between Finland and Estonia on Dec. 25. The Kremlin previously denied involvement in damaging the infrastructure, which provides power and communication for thousands of Europeans.

The Eagle S is flagged in the Cook Islands, but has been described by Finnish customs officials and the European Union’s executive commission as part of Russia’s shadow fleet of fuel tankers. Those are aging vessels with obscure ownership, acquired to evade Western sanctions amid the war in Ukraine and operating without Western-regulated insurance.

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The Eagle S was carrying 35,000 tons of oil and investigators allege it left a drag trail with its anchor for almost 100 kilometers (62 miles) on the sea bed before it was stopped and escorted to the vicinity of a Finnish port.

The senior officers, whose names were not made public, were the master, the chief mate and the second mate, Finnish police said.

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The investigators’ findings have been referred to Finnish prosecutors for possible charges.

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The damage to the Estlink 2, which can provide about half of the electricity needs for Estonia in winter, did not disrupt service, although it did drive up energy prices in the Baltic nations.

The cable is about 90 miles (145 kilometers) long and is located at a depth of 90 meters (295 feet) at its deepest point, across one of the busiest shipping lanes in Europe.

The undersea cables and pipelines that crisscross the sea link Nordic, Baltic and central European countries, promote trade, energy security and, in some cases, reduce dependence on Russian energy resources.