Russia & CIS

A social network account of Russia's communications minister was temporarily blocked on Sunday in a cyberattack carried out by hackers presenting themselves as a Turkish activist group.

This year Russia was caught in the biggest doping scandal in the history of athletics.

About 500 people were evacuated from two railway stations in Moscow on Friday after police were tipped off about bombs being planted.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into a law a bill allowing agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) to open fire on crowds.

Russian air strikes in Syria have killed 2,371 people - a third of them civilians, including 180 children - according to a tally released Wednesday by a Britain-based monitoring group.

In 2015 Russia was shaken by a series of high-profile trials, with authorities coming down hard on enemies of the regime and showing leniency to friends.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, foreign media companies and entrepreneurs swept into Russia, bringing with them a wave of modernization and expertise.

A Crimean official said on Thursday that Ukraine had cut off a major source of electrical power to the region, a month after saboteurs first plunged the Russian-annexed peninsula into darkness.

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has accepted the request from Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to assist in re-conciliation with Russia. The Serbian president has thus become the fourth mediator after the presidents of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus, who said that their relations with Turkey were perfect

The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany have agreed to extend the Minsk peace accord on Ukraine into 2016, the Kremlin said in a statement on Wednesday, following a phone call between the four leaders.

The Ukrainian government will approve a ban on the import of some Russian goods later on Wednesday, said Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, a retaliatory move in a growing trade row between the two former allies.

A Russian court on Wednesday sentenced a blogger to five years in jail for what it said was his extremist activity on the Internet after he urged people to attend a protest against high transport fares.

As the year ends, where does Russia stand? How do Russians see key political issues, what do they spend their money on, how health-conscious are they? And how is the country seen by its neighbors?

European Athletics president Svein Arne Hansen does not expect Russia to return to international competition in time for next year's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Even as Russia's beleaguered NGOs were struggling to come to terms with the "foreign agents" label, a sweeping new law against "undesirable" organizations has dealt them yet another blow.

Russia is ready "to show flexibility" on the possible easing of sanctions imposed on Afghanistan's Taliban movement by the United Nations Security Council, TASS news agency quoted a senior Russian diplomat as saying.

The clockwork of war never stops. We need to know how the world works - if we know that, then we know how to deal with problems. Our ancestors knew that - that's why they did their best never to lose one single war. One should look through this prism at the events that are currently happening in Ukraine. Where is the truth?

The outgoing year in Russia generated a lot of very important political, economic and social news - much of which got transformed at coub.com, the Russian analogue of the short-form video service Vine.

A ship carrying more than 25,000 pounds (11,000 kg) of low-enriched uranium materials left Iran for Russia on Monday in an Iranian step toward honoring a July 14 nuclear deal.