Russia

[Anaxagoras]

Jesus arrested

[Witness]

Russia Seizes Kremlin Critic Navalny’s Apartment

Russian authorities have seized Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s apartment days after he was discharged from German hospital where he was being treated for poisoning by Novichok, his spokeswoman said Thursday.

Kira Yarmysh said court marshals came after Navalny’s three-bedroom apartment in southeastern Moscow to enforce a $1-million court ruling in favor of catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin. The businessman has earned the nickname "Putin's chef" from his close ties to President Vladimir Putin.

Prigozhin last year won 88 million rubles ($1.1 million) in damages against Navalny and his close associate, who blamed Prigozhin for a dysentery outbreak among Moscow schoolchildren linked to contaminated lunches.

Prigozhin previously vowed to “ruin” Navalny if he survives the poisoning.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/09/ ... ent-a71542

[Witness]

Russian cleaner sweeps to power in surprise village vote

For the past four years, Marina Udgodskaya has scrubbed and mopped the offices of the local administration building in Povalikhino in rural Russia.

Now the 35-year-old cleaner is downing her dusters to move into the boss's seat, after winning an election earlier this month that she only entered to in order to get him reappointed.
When no-one in the village signed-up to challenge Nikolai Loktev, who's from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, he persuaded Ms Udgodskaya to register as his "rival" to ensure the minimum requirement of two candidates.
That plan backfired when the cleaner beat him by a landslide.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54338785 for the rest.

[Witness]

The 'Caspian Sea Monster' rises from the grave

Beached on the western shores of the Caspian Sea, it looks like a colossal aquatic beast -- a bizarre creation more at home in the deep than above the waves. It certainly doesn't look like something that could ever fly.
But fly it did -- albeit a long time ago.
After lying dormant for more than three decades, the Caspian Sea Monster has been on the move again. One of the most eye-catching flying machines ever built, it's completing what could be its final journey.
In July of this year after 14 hours at sea, a flotilla of three tugs and two escort vessels maneuvered slowly along the shores of the Caspian Sea to deliver their bulky special cargo to its destination, a stretch of coast near Russia's southernmost point.
It's here, next to the ancient city of Derbent, in Russia's republic of Dagestan, that the 380-ton "Lun-class Ekranoplan" has found its new, and most likely definitive, home.
The last of its breed to sail the waters of the Caspian, "Lun" was abandoned after the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned to rust away at Kaspiysk naval base, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) up the coast from Derbent.
But before it could fade into oblivion, it's been rescued thanks to plans to make it a tourist attraction right at a time when this unusual travel concept could be poised to make a comeback.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/ ... index.html details & more pics.

[Witness]

Karachays.

[Witness]

Needs to be re-posted every so often.

I approve, but you could vary the pics.

[Witness]

A New Front Opens in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Borscht

“A lot of things were taken away from Ukraine, but they will not take our borscht,” said a chef who is leading a drive to recognize the soup as a Ukrainian cultural heritage.



BORSHCHIV, Ukraine — The roadside cafe is called Borscht, advertised with a gigantic beetroot red sign, leaving little doubt what people around here like to eat.

The fields are planted with beets. The town is named Borshchiv, which means “belonging to borscht.” It is just one of a dozen cities and villages in Ukraine named for borscht.

Given this clear commitment to borscht, Ukrainians wonder why the soup is commonly assumed to be Russian, a national dish of their archenemy.

Now a Ukrainian chef supported by the Ministry of Culture and Parliament is trying to set the record straight with an application to the United Nations’ cultural body, UNESCO, to list borscht as an intangible part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage.

“They can think whatever they like, but borscht is a Ukrainian soup,” said Olha Habro, a grandmother and well-practiced maker of borscht in Borshchiv.

Like the food fight between the Arabs and Israelis over who owns hummus, the dispute sadly divides two neighboring cultures over traditions that might have united them. Borscht is enjoyed in both Ukraine and Russia.

This conflict, though, comes with a twist. Even some Russian culinary historians and authoritative Soviet-era reference books on food place the origin of borscht in Ukraine. But after the Soviet Union broke up, Russia seemed to stake more of its own claim to the soup.

...

In Western countries, borscht came to be viewed as Russian in part because of the tendency for many decades to conflate Russia, which was only one of the Soviet republics, with all things Soviet.

At home, many Soviet cookbooks identified borscht as Ukrainian, including an authoritative study of ethnic cooking published in 1978, “National Cuisines of Our People,” which listed six recipes, all from regions of Ukraine.

Even the Soviet classic cookbook, “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food,” first published in 1939 under Stalin, does not describe borscht as Russian. It has only one recipe for the soup indicating a national origin, and that is for “Ukrainian borscht.” The others are specialized versions with mushrooms or low in fat, of unspecified origin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/worl ... rscht.html

[Witness]

[Witness]

Yesterday.

[gnome]

Damn gorgeous photo. What vantage is it taken from, I wonder?

[Rob Lister]

Damn gorgeous photo. What vantage is it taken from, I wonder?

Sarah Palin's back yard.

[Witness]

[ed]

Russia is one of the few places I'd like to visit.

[Giz]

Damn gorgeous photo. What vantage is it taken from, I wonder?

Sarah Palin's back yard.

Unlike Palin, that will never get old.


My name is Palin, VP wannabe:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal backyard, boundless and bare
The lonely sands of Russia stretch far away.

[sparks]

Russia is one of the few places I'd like to visit.

No. You wouldn't.

[Witness]

Stalingrad Volgograd.

[Witness]

Spoiler:

Crimeaours check
Trumpours check
Alaska todo

[Witness]

Weather in Vladivostok:



[typo corrected]

[Hotarubi]

Weather in Valdivostok:

Summer, then.

[Giz]

Weather in Valdivostok:

Perhaps connected to:

“years of Western economic sanctions have made the situation worse, and analysts say up to 12 million Russians drink cheap surrogate alcohol, including perfume, after shave, anti-freeze and window cleaner.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co ... e-38363441

[Witness]

[Churchill]

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-s ... petersburg

Russian scientist working on COVID-19 vaccine plummets to death in St. Petersburg

Occupational hazards such as these seem to be a little too comon.

[Witness]

Russian agent 'tricked into detailing Navalny assassination bid'

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny duped a Russian FSB state agent into revealing details of an attack on him with the nerve agent Novichok, the investigative group Bellingcat reports.

Mr Navalny reportedly impersonated a security official to call the agent.

The agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told him the Novichok had been placed in a pair of Mr Navalny's underpants.

Mr Navalny, who is still recovering in Berlin, posted a recording of the long conversation on his YouTube channel.

He collapsed on board a Russian airliner in August in the attack, which nearly proved fatal.

As part of Mr Navalny's ruse to elicit more details of the assassination attempt, Bellingcat says the call to Mr Kudryavtsev was set up to indicate it was coming from a Federal Security Service (FSB) landline.

In the conversation, Mr Navalny posed as a senior official seeking details for a report on the FSB operation.

Mr Kudryavtsev told him the swift response of the airline pilot and the emergency medical team in Omsk, Siberia - where Mr Navalny was first treated - could have been the reason for the failure to kill him.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 for the rest.

[Churchill]

Russian agent 'tricked into detailing Navalny assassination bid'

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny duped a Russian FSB state agent into revealing details of an attack on him with the nerve agent Novichok, the investigative group Bellingcat reports.

Mr Navalny reportedly impersonated a security official to call the agent.

The agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told him the Novichok had been placed in a pair of Mr Navalny's underpants.

Mr Navalny, who is still recovering in Berlin, posted a recording of the long conversation on his YouTube channel.

He collapsed on board a Russian airliner in August in the attack, which nearly proved fatal.

As part of Mr Navalny's ruse to elicit more details of the assassination attempt, Bellingcat says the call to Mr Kudryavtsev was set up to indicate it was coming from a Federal Security Service (FSB) landline.

In the conversation, Mr Navalny posed as a senior official seeking details for a report on the FSB operation.

Mr Kudryavtsev told him the swift response of the airline pilot and the emergency medical team in Omsk, Siberia - where Mr Navalny was first treated - could have been the reason for the failure to kill him.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683 for the rest.

Just a crazy story. Wonder what will now happen to Mr Kudryavtsev, who got tricked into confessing. Surely his fate will not be good. Otherwise we would never know the precise details of the poisoning. Putin explicitly denied they had anything to do with the poisoning saying Navalny would already be dead if it were them. They are much more embarrassed that they botched the assassination and looked incompetent than being caught doing the killing itself. Not that anyone in the know or even a moderate read of history had any doubt.

[Churchill]

Here is the you tube of Navalny getting the agent to talk:


Russian, with English subtitles.

The entire thing is just so unbelievable and underscores just how corrupt top to bottom the Russian government is.

[Witness]

Lenin saved… by capitalism! Remote Russian region won’t tear down statue to Bolshevik icon because it’s too popular with tourists

https://www.rt.com/russia/511222-lenin- ... icon-spot/

[Witness]

Russian troops leaving Germany:




Lots more pics: https://englishrussia.com/2020/11/06/so ... g-germany/

[Witness]

In other news Navalny went back to Moscow to get immediately arrested…