Free Republic

Residents of the Russian city of Krasnodar on July 20 staged a rare public protest to vent their anger over recent power cuts affecting southern Russia. An estimated 200 to 300 people turned out for the protest to demand that the authorities resume the supply of electricity and water. They blocked a street in the north of the city as they voiced complaints about the cuts to services, which they said are becoming more frequent, Russian online media reported. The protesters said that this summer their lights initially were turned off once a week, then three times a week, and...

UKRAINE has blitzed another major Russian oil refinery in a kamikaze drone strike, the explosions sparking a huge inferno near Moscow. Dramatic video from the scene showed flames raging from the Rosneft energy giant facility in the city of Ryazan on Wednesday. Residents of Ryazan, located 125 miles southeast of Moscow, were said to have heard the rumble of drones about 3am. Two explosions followed the sound, triggering the inferno. The attack came after another Ukrainian strike on two oil refineries in Krasnodar region -snip- Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu demanded more "means of destruction" as Western supplies...

Russians are fleeing Crimea amid fears that Ukraine will soon move to recapture the region that Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in 2014, according to local media reports. Emil Ibragimov, the head of the Crimean project and educational platform Q-Hub, told Radio NV in a video published on Friday that Russians are fleeing from Crimea to the neighboring Russian region of Krasnodar because they fear Ukraine will eventually liberate the Black Sea peninsula. Ibragimov said that many Russian citizens who settled in Crimea after it was occupied eight years ago had already left. -snip- His remarks coincide with an assessment by...

Mysterious pictograms consisting of several circles have appeared on a wheat field in Southern Russia’s Krasnodar region. Was it someone’s joke or did aliens visit us? According to enthusiasts from Kosmopoisk (Space Search group), it’s not the first time such a phenomenon has been discovered. Group members have visited the spot to carry out research and film the area from an unmanned helicopter. The circles appeared in the Dinsky district in the region. “The figure consists of eight circles and rings around them that are interconnected,” the group coordinator, Vadim Chernobrov, told Interfax news agency. “Their sizes vary from 5...

PRAGUE, August 25, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Russian investigators probing terrorism cases in the North Caucasus have noted a growing number of ethnic Slavs among the perpetuators of such acts. The pro-Kremlin daily "Komsomolskaya pravda" published on August 16-19 an investigative report claiming that more than half the members of a recently liquidated terrorist group in Karachayevo-Cherkessia were Russians or Ukrainians. Terrrorist Attacks Across Russia Based on the testimony of three surviving members of the group, called Karachai Jamaat, the investigation believes the network was responsible for three explosions in Krasnodar in August 2003, in which three people were killed and...

August 25, 2003 3 Bombs in Russian City Kill at Least 3 By STEVEN LEE MYERS MOSCOW, Aug. 25 — Three bombs exploded nearly simultaneously in a regional capital in southern Russia early today, killing at least 3 and wounding 17, some of them seriously, officials said. The coordination of the explosions in Krasnodar, not far from the Black Sea, prompted senior officials to attribute the bombings to a summer-long wave of terrorist acts stemming from the war in Chechnya. Seven suicide bombings and one botched attempt attributed to Chechen militants have killed more than 165 people in Russia since...