Evgenia Kotliar is a correspondent for Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Chechen militants led by Shamil Basayev on June 14, 1995, took about 1,500 hostages in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk and seized a hospital. More than 100 died in the course of the five-day drama, many after failed attempts by Russian forces to free the hostages. It came just months after Russian forces launched the First Chechen War in December 1994.
A woman held hostage by Chechen separatists has spoken about it on camera for the first time, 25 years after a five-day siege that left some 150 people dead in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin extended Russia’s COVID-19 lockdown until the end of the month, Moscow city officials on April 2 began to release a tracking app, Social Monitoring, that will allow them to determine whether coronavirus patients remain in self-isolation. Opposition and civil rights activists have denounced the technology for violating privacy rights. To date, Russia has reported 3,548 coronavirus cases and 30 deaths, the highest numbers in its region.
His case has become arguably one of the best known among the dozens of prisoners arrested on criminal charges during Moscow’s chaotic summer of election protests. Now freed from prison, Pavel Ustinov, a 23-year-old Russian actor, told Current Time that he intends to take to the streets to rally for the freedom of other protest prisoners.
As this summer's protests showed, Moscow's camera surveillance systems are becoming more sophisticated and more widespread. They're now known as an "all-seeing eye." What these cameras could mean for ordinary citizens’ civil rights concerns many.
For several years, Aleksandr Gorbunov has been anonymously entertaining millions with his biting commentary on life in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Now, the StalinGulag blogger believes the authorities are losing their sense of humor with him.
