kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

When Dmitry Unagaev bought his first electric car 5 years ago, the purchase bewildered friends and neighbors in Khabarovsk. Today, the city in #Russia’s Far East is full of battery-powered autos.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-12/in-russia-s-wild-east-an-electric-car-proves-cheaper-than-a-lada

"A group of British academics was secretly in contact with Russian diplomats in four separate embassies as they worked to undermine evidence that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people"

#syria #assange #russia

https://www.thedailybeast.com/syria-chemical-attack-deniers-admit-links-to-wikileaks-and-russia

Massive anti-Putin protests in #russia now. Most are grim, with beating and arrests. Vladivostok stands out - as police blocked all town center so people moved to a large frozen lake nearby. And started to dance in a circle, a Russian tradition called хоровод. So there came a police boat (that drives on ice) but the engine failed and it stopped. So people started to dance the circle around the boat 😄

Interesting reading:

"Aquarium Leaks. Inside the GRU’s Psychological Warfare Program" #russia

https://www.4freerussia.org/aquarium-leaks-inside-the-gru-s-psychological-warfare-program/

By Andrey Zakirzyanov #belarus #russia

UK Intelligence and Security Committee report on #russia very interesting (even though many facts were well-known before)

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeifna6oa6xtmuoi6t2ctnajbva24boz2ftdgj3ato4jx2uqeazbepy

A UN investigation into atrocities committed in #Syria has for the first time accused #Russia of direct involvement in war crimes for indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/russia-committed-war-crimes-in-syria-finds-un-report

‘A typical racket, simple as that’ Nginx co-founder Maxim Konovalov explains Rambler's litigation against his company, which develops the world’s most popular web-server #nginx #russia

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/12/13/a-typical-racket-simple-as-that

A real spy story here, Russia recruited a hitman who murdered a Russian businessman in 2013, gave him a new identity, and then he was arrested in 2019 in Berlin for the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/12/03/identifying-the-berlin-bicycle-assassin-part-1-from-moscow-to-berlin/ #russia #germany #chechnya

Construction of "power vertical" of 2000's continued in the Russian Internet sector... https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/11/18/yandex-proposes-sweeping-restructure-allay-government-concerns-a68209 #russia #media

The U.S., according to the Casella model, is the biggest investor in the Russian economy, with about $39.2 billion worth of skin in the game. That may explain why U.S. sanctions have never escalated to the point where the Kremlin would have been tempted to expropriate U.S. investors. The same goes for the EU. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/11/06/where-russias-foreign-investment-really-comes-from-a68055 #russia #economyy #investments

Oleg Sentsov is free. #Russia and #Ukraine are finally exchanging dozens of high-profile political prisoners

https://meduza.io/amp/en/feature/2019/08/30/oleg-sentsov-is-free

A colleague found a nice archival document that documents similar #hacking activity from 1999 from #russia https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6007145/National-Security-Archive-Naval-Research.pdf

If you follow the discussion about Conversations.im registering with Roscomnadzor you should be probably also aware that Threema.ch did that already in 2017... https://reestr.rublacklist.net/distributor/109474 #security #privacy #russia

Conversations.im has just registered with Russian Roscomnadzor which means it has now obligation to provide user details FSB https://roskomsvoboda.org/48119/ https://reestr.rublacklist.net/distributor/109589 #xmpp #privacy #security #russia