MOSCOW, November 28 (RIA Novosti) The last of the Greenpeace activists arrested in Russia over a September protest at an Arctic oil rig was granted bail Thursday by a St. Petersburg court. The court set bail for Colin Russell from Australia at 2 million rubles ($60,000), the same condition set for the other 29 crew members, who were all […]
» Read more
(Interfax – November 26, 2013) Global warming has delayed snow accumulation in the Moscow region for eight or nine days on average as compared with the second half of the 20th century, Hydro-Meteorological Center Director Roman Vilfand said. “Climate change has shifted steady snow accumulation in the Moscow region by approximately eight or nine days over the past 20 years,” […]
» Read more
MOSCOW. Nov 21 (Interfax) – The actions of the Greenpeace environmentalists who tried to climb an oil platform in the Arctic posed a threat to the lives of the people who are working there, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. “When they climb the platform and create an emergency situation, there could be not just one mistake of an operator but […]
» Read more
MOSCOW, November 22 (RIA Novosti) A spokesman for Russia’s state nuclear corporation said Friday that a facility for the disposal of Soviet-era radioactive waste is to be built in the country’s Far East. Officials said they made the announcement to quell media speculation that a site was being set aside for the dumping of nuclear waste from abroad. Those […]
» Read more
MOSCOW, November 21 (RIA Novosti) The Greenpeace activists detained in Russia over a protest at an Arctic oil rig should be granted clemency, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday as 10 of them were released and many others granted bail. When asked to comment on their case at a meeting with Russian writers, publishers, critics and booksellers, Putin said […]
» Read more
(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Henry Meyer – November 19, 2013) Russia is showing “political will” to end a two-month-long dispute over the prosecution of Greenpeace activists after they began to be set free on bail, President Vladimir Putin’s human rights adviser said. “It’s a good sign,” Mikhail Fedotov said in a phone interview today from Moscow. “I hope the same […]
» Read more
MOSCOW, November 18 (RIA Novosti) Russia ranked 53rd out of 58 countries in a new ranking of efforts to prevent climate change. Russia lost two slots from last year in the Climate Change Performance Index, presented Monday at a climate conference in Warsaw by the Bohn-based NGO Germanwatch. The first three slots in this year’s rating were left unoccupied […]
» Read more
ST. PETERSBURG. Nov 14 (Interfax) – Lawyers have met with several Greenpeace Arctic Sunrise activists in a St. Petersburg detention facility, a Greenpeace spokesman told Interfax on Thursday. “The lawyers met with five environmentalists, including Russian citizen Andrei Allakhverdov, who had been placed into the Kresty [detention facility]. The detention facility is basically all right, and the conditions are acceptable. […]
» Read more
MOSCOW. Nov 12 (Interfax) – The Russian president’s Human Rights Council has asked Investigative Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin to consider the possible release of the Arctic Sunrise crewmembers who were detained for staging a protest off Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya oil rig in the Pechora Sea from custody. “The Russian president’s Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights is […]
» Read more
MOSCOW, November 6 (RIA Novosti) Russian weather experts have said that Tuesday night was the hottest ever recorded in Moscow during the fall season. Mayak radio station cited the Moscow Weather Bureau as saying that overnight temperatures in the city stood at around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). Temperatures in Moscow typically hover around freezing point by November, […]
» Read more
(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, November 3, 2013) The Kremlin celebrates every temporary uptick in the Russian birthrate, but it and many others typically ignore another deeply troubling aspect of that country’s deteriorating demographic situation: extraordinarily high death rates among adults and especially working-age males. Indeed, those rates are so high Russia ranks 175th among the […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – November 6, 2013) Contaminants in the air, water and soil, and the staggering cancer rates place the Russian cities of Dzerzhinsk and Norilsk among the 10 most polluted places on earth for 2013, a joint report by Swiss and U.S organizations said. Dzerzhinsk, once the Soviet Union’s major site for producing chemical […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – October 29, 2013) State pollster VTsIOM released survey results Monday regarding last month’s Greenpeace protest in the Arctic that indicate more than a third of Russians believe the protest was a foreign plot and more than two-thirds disagree with the group’s message of needing to protect the environment from oil drilling. Armed […]
» Read more
(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Andrei Kislyakov, special to RBTH – October 28, 2013) The debate about the permanence of climate change goes on, but the effects of warmer temperatures can already be felt. In an article published in the journal “Nature” in mid-October, British scientists said they had defined a certain “point of non-return” for climate change […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Vladimir Goryachev and Christopher Brennan – October 24, 2013) The Investigative Committee said it had dropped the piracy charges against 30 people who were on board Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship, replacing them with accusations of hooliganism. If convicted of the new charges, the 28 activists and two journalists who were taken into custody in September […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – October 24, 2013) Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya platform, the advance guard of the coming expansion of Russia’s state energy corporations into the Arctic, is a cobbled together bric-a-brac of second-hand parts, some of which date to 1984, environmentalists said. The very presence of the Prirazlomnaya rig in the icy Pechora Sea is the result […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – October 18, 2013) International pressure on Russia over the arrest of Greenpeace activists mounted Thursday as 11 Nobel Peace Prize winners urged President Vladimir Putin to drop the piracy charges against them. The 11 laureates made such an appeal in a letter sent to the Russian president, Greenpeace said. The letter, which […]
» Read more
(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – October 10, 2013) It’s cold, it’s gray, and – given that it’s only October – it’s going to get worse. The weather this time of year is not just unpleasant – it can affect everything from the economy to how Russians feel about their lives, experts say. After record-breaking rainfall in September […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 10, 2013) The piracy charges, based on which the crew of the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise was arrested, are ungrounded and should be reconsidered, Mikhail Fedotov, the head of the presidential human rights council, said. “I hope this decision will be reconsidered. In any case, we will turn to the prosecutor general. He has potential for […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 3, 2013) The majority of Russians approve of the piracy charges against 28 Greenpeace activists who were detained in late September after trying to climb an Gazprom-owned oil drilling rig in the Arctic to protest its environmental impact. A survey from state pollster VTsIOM published Wednesday showed that 60 percent of the respondents believe […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – September 26, 2013) It is impossible to stop Arctic exploitation, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday, adding that Russia guaranteed that there would be no environmental catastrophe, since the most innovative technologies would be used. SALEKHARD, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District The time for an industrial breakthrough has come in the Arctic, President Vladimir […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – September 26, 2013) A state of emergency has been declared in Sochi as water and mudslides have blocked the Olympic resort’s newly built main roads, just as International Olympic Committee inspectors arrived for their final assessment ahead of the upcoming Winter Olympic Games. Many local residents could not travel to work Wednesday […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – September 25, 2013) Moscow residents may not have gotten the typical “Indian summer” this September, but they were able to get an idea of what life is like in a rainforest, just not the tropical variety. As of Tuesday, about 174 millimeters of rain had fallen on Moscow, which is equivalent to the monthly average […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW. September 24, 2013) Russia’s human rights commissioner Vladimir Lukin said he expected that the Russian authorities would not punish the activists of the Greenpeace environmental organization too severely for their protest rally against oil extraction in the Pechora Sea. “I hope that our authorities will realize that they nevertheless had admirable and noble motives and that they […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Lena Smirnova – September 19, 2013) Russian consumers have more interest and demand for environmentally friendly packaging than their counterparts in some developed countries, but still are ranked at the bottom among 11 large consumer markets in terms of actual recycling activity, according to a study that global packaging giant Tetra Pak released this week. […]
» Read more
(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, August 7, 2013) Two-thirds of the territory of the Russian Federation is covered by permafrost, and the melting of this ice is rapidly “converting a large part of Russia into a swamp,” according to studies by British and Russian scholars reported and discussed this week in Moscow’s “Novyye izvestiya.” Researchers at the […]
» Read more
(Moscow News – Anna Arutunyan, Editor and Correspondent at themoscownews.com – July 29, 2013) It’s late July, and that can only mean one thing: Potemkin Tales takes on its favorite subject – primordial myth. When it’s warm outside, the Russian president never fails to give fodder for armchair anthropology. The idea that is central both to politics and the Potemkin […]
» Read more
Subject: Call for Nominations Klebnikov Fellowship Program From: The Paul Klebnikov Fellowship at the Harriman Institute <lch2111@columbia.edu> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 Columbia University Harriman Institute Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies Dear Friends and Colleagues, We write to ask for your help in identifying extraordinary candidates for the Harriman Institute’s Paul Klebnikov Russian Civil Society Fellowship for the 2013/14 […]
» Read more
(Interfax – GOGLAND ISLAND, near St. Petersburg, July 15, 2013) President Vladimir Putin has said he enjoyed going down to the floor of the Gulf of Finland aboard a submersible to see the sunken Russian 19th-century frigate Oleg. Oleg, which sank in 1869, is “in an amazingly good state,” Putin told reporters. “It’s lying on its right side. It’s really […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW, July 8, 2013) Penalties for violating the rules of water use and harmful emissions in Russia, which aim to stimulate energy conservation and environmentally clean technologies, have grown by a degree of magnitude, the Russian Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said in a press release. The administrative fine for violating water use rules when taking water without […]
» Read more
(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, July 6, 2013) Three new pieces of Russian legislation appear likely to inflict serious collateral damage on that country, eliminating a defender of Lake Baikal against industrial pollution, inflicting new suffering on the already hard-pressed numerically small peoples of the north, and destroying some of the last vestiges of federalism in the […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW, June 27, 2013) Temperatures soared to 31.4 degrees Centigrade in Moscow on Thursday afternoon, the hydro-meteorological bureau of Moscow and the Moscow region told Interfax. “A century-old record has been repeated: Moscow had temperatures of 31.4 degrees Centigrade on June 27, 1911,” it said. The bureau does not rule out the temperature record might be beaten by […]
» Read more
(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, June 18, 2013) The Aral Sea, which has been shrinking for almost half a century causing an environmental disaster in Central Asia, has finally stopped drying up, a Russian scientist said on Tuesday. “The sea is currently close to a balance because its surface has shrunk so much that evaporation has gone down too, so that […]
» Read more
(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Alessandro Vitelli & Stefan Nicola – June 14, 2013) The United Nations global warming talks have been set back by six months after Russia and its allies blocked progress at a group charged with implementing decisions of the 190 nations involved in the discussions. The Subsidiary Body for Implementation at the UN talks failed to complete […]
» Read more
(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Lyubov Chizhova and Claire Bigg – June 5, 2013) On June 5, “green-minded” people around the planet are marking World Environment Day, created in 1972 to raise awareness about the need to protect nature. But in Russia, the mood among ecologists is sour. Russia established its own Ecologist Day, also held on June 5, six years […]
» Read more
(Interfax – June 5, 2013) Around 20 Russian major environmental non-governmental organizations (NGO) have received prosecutors’ requests to register as foreign agents. “Around 20 environmental organizations have received prosecutors’ requests. Those who sound familiar, who comprise the environmental movement and who are not of just regional importance have received the requests,” Director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW, May 27, 2013) The personnel of the SP-40 weather station, based on a split ice floe in the Arctic Ocean will be evacuated in mid-June, Natural Resources Minister Sergei Donskoi told reporters on Monday. An icebreaker will depart from Murmansk to collect the personnel and equipment. “If the mission goes as planned and the Yamal icebreaker keeps […]
» Read more
(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, May 15, 2013) The spring weather in Moscow broke the temperature record for the second day running on Wednesday, hitting 28.8 degrees Celsius (83.8 degrees Fahrenheit), Meteonovosti weather website reported on Wednesday. “For the second day in a row, Moscow has set a record high. The previous maximum temperature for May 15, registered in 1946, […]
» Read more
(opendemocracy.net – Marc Bennetts – May 2, 2013) Marc Bennetts is a British writer and journalist. He lives in Moscow and is author of “Football Dynamo”, a book on modern Russia and football published in 2008. The fertile territories around Voronezh have long been referred to as Russia’s ‘breadbasket’. They also hold the last major nickel reserves in Europe, and […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 17, 2013) The federal weather bureau announced on Wednesday that all the snow in the capital had finally melted, giving Muscovites the go-ahead to cheer the arrival of spring. On Wednesday morning, the snow cover at the weather station at the All-Russia Exhibition Center in Moscow had fallen to zero centimeters from Tuesday’s measurement […]
» Read more
(Interfax – MOSCOW. April 12, 2013) The rare Siberian cranes that took a migration flight with President Vladimir Putin’s motorized deltaplane in the autumn of 2012, have not reintegrated with the wild over diplomats’ failure to come to terms on their hibernation in Uzbekistan, Vedomosti wrote on Friday citing the Flight of Hope project director, Alexander Sorokin. “Uzbekistan’s border service […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 12, 2013) It’s official: This past winter will down in history as one of the snowiest ever. An astounding 3 meters, 29 centimeters of snow fell on Moscow, more than double the average of 1.5 meters, Deputy Mayor Pyotr Biryukov said Friday. The snowfall hit another record on Feb. 12, when 30 centimeters of […]
» Read more
(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – RIA Novosti – April 1, 2013) World Wildlife Fund expert Alexei Kokorin comments on the latest Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations forecasts. Why is the climate in Russia and the U.S. changing twice as fast as anywhere else? By how many degrees will the temperature in the Arctic rise by 2050, and what […]
» Read more
MOSCOW. April 1 (Interfax) – Yury Neyelov, a member of the Arctic Council, former governor of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, and a senator, believes white bears may become extinct in 30-50 years. “The situation with the population of white bears currently causes serious concerns without exaggeration. According to the World Wildlife Fund, white bears may stop reproducing in 2-3 years, […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Allison Quinn and Andrew McChesney – April 2, 2013) April Fools’ Day proved to be no laughing matter in Moscow on Monday, with the city receiving up to 40 percent of the month’s norm of snow in one day. The city was blanketed with up to 18 millimeters of snow through Monday, or “up to […]
» Read more
MOSCOW, March 20 (RIA Novosti) Temperatures in the Arctic will warm up twice as fast as in the rest of the world this century, Russian Emergency Situations Ministry has warned. “In the 21st century, the temperature in the Arctic the average [speed] of global warming will rise 2-2.5 times faster,” the ministry’s center responsible for monitoring meteorological trends, […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Roland Oliphant – February 6, 2013) The heaviest snowfall in a century brought Moscow and the surrounding region to a near standstill and left hundreds of people without power, officials said Tuesday. And with snowfall set to continue at least until the end of the week, the authorities are bracing for more chaos on the […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Roland Oliphant – January 23, 2013) The government is preparing to allocate 100 billion rubles ($3.3 billion) to clean up pollution left over by Soviet-era industry. Natural Resources and Environment Minister Sergei Donskoi told President Vladimir Putin that a bill to allocate that sum as well as define responsibilities for cleaning up decades-old industrial waste […]
» Read more
(www.opendemocracy.net – Mikhail Loginov – January 16, 2013) Mikhail Loginov is a journalist and novelist based in St. Petersburg. He is the author of the recently published bestselling political thriller “Battle for Kremlin”. Most radiators in urban Russian homes are fed by hot water transported from heating plants miles away. Ageing pipes frequently burst, causing hardship and even fatalities. Could […]
» Read more
(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Roland Oliphant – December 20, 2012) 2012 saw the climate-change-fueled dash for the Arctic’s riches dominate the environmental agenda. The debate over the high north, the annual nightmare of forest fires and continuing battles between activists and developers over roads, mines and the Sochi Olympics are only likely to intensify next year. Greenpeace activists stormed […]
» Read more