Putin, Vladimir V

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      Russian Forces Quash Prison Mutiny Led by Terrorism Suspects, State Media Reports

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      The assailants had taken two guards hostage and were killed, the prison service said.Russian special forces have quashed a short-lived mutiny at a provincial detention center on Sunday, killing detainees, some charged with terrorism, who had broken out of their cells earlier in the day, according to Russian state media.Six detainees who awaited court appearances at a pretrial detention center in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don had managed to take control of the facility, state media reported. Armed with knives, the suspects took two guards hostage, the reports said.A video posted on Rostov’s local news channels and reposted by some Russian officials appeared to show a man identified as one of the detainees brandishing a knife and demanding a car to leave the detention center for an unspecified destination. A detainee is seen in the video holding a black flag associated with the Islamic State. The video could not immediately be verified.Security agents had surrounded the detention center by Sunday morning. Soon after, Russian state media published a short statement from the country’s prison service saying that security agents had stormed the facility, “liquidated” the mutinied detainees and freed the hostages unharmed.The Rostov governor and senior federal officials have yet to comment on the episode.The Rostov mutiny comes less than three months after assailants staged the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade at a concert hall near Moscow. The attack, which killed nearly 150 people, took place despite U.S. intelligence services providing a detailed warning to their Russian counterparts of the impending plot.The Islamic State took responsibility for the concert hall attack. President Vladimir V. Putin, however, has blamed it on Ukraine and Western intelligence services, without providing evidence.Mr. Putin’s critics said those accusations were an attempt to deflect his government’s failure to deal with the threat of Islamist terrorism as their attention shifted to the war in Ukraine.Sunday’s attack could renew the public discussion of that threat, which is fueled by the Kremlin’s suppression of separatist Muslims inside Russia and Mr. Putin’s support for the Islamic State’s enemies in Syria.At least one Russian official publicly questioned how the Rostov detainees managed to break out of their cells and overpower the guards.“They clearly were planning this for a while,” Andrei Medvedev, a Russian propagandist and regional lawmaker in Moscow, wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday. “Where is the protocol for dealing with especially dangerous detainees?”Hwaida Saad More

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      Trump Plays Up His Putin Ties in Claiming He Could Get Gershkovich Released

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      Former President Donald J. Trump claimed that, if re-elected, he could draw on his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin to press Russia into releasing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in a Moscow jail for more than a year.Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that Mr. Gershkovich would be “released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I assume office,” suggesting that his securing Mr. Gershkovich’s release was contingent on his defeating President Biden in November.“Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added. Mr. Trump has frequently bragged about his positive relationship with Mr. Putin, whose strongman tendencies he has praised in interviews and on the campaign trail.Asked about Mr. Trump’s post, a spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters that “Putin has no contact with Donald Trump, of course.”Mr. Gershkovich, who was arrested in March last year in Russia and charged with espionage shortly after, has been designated by the White House as “wrongfully detained,” a label signifying that the United States views him as the equivalent of a political hostage and believes the charges against him are fabricated.Russia has not presented any evidence to support the spying charge, which Mr. Gershkovich and The Journal have vociferously rejected. The Biden administration has said it is working to secure his release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rafael Grossi of the IAEA Acts as the West’s Mediator With Putin and Iran

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      Rafael Grossi slipped into Moscow a few weeks ago to meet quietly with the man most Westerners never engage with these days: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Mr. Grossi is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, and his purpose was to warn Mr. Putin about the dangers of moving too fast to restart the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian troops since soon after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.But as the two men talked, the conversation veered off into Mr. Putin’s declarations that he was open to a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine — but only if President Volodymyr Zelensky was prepared to give up nearly 20 percent of his country.A few weeks later, Mr. Grossi, an Argentine with a taste for Italian suits, was in Tehran, this time talking to the country’s foreign minister and the head of its civilian nuclear program. At a moment when senior Iranian officials are hinting that new confrontations with Israel may lead them to build a bomb, the Iranians signaled that they, too, were open to a negotiation — suspecting, just as Mr. Putin did, that Mr. Grossi would soon be reporting details of his conversation to the White House.In an era of new nuclear fears, Mr. Grossi suddenly finds himself at the center of two of the world’s most critical geopolitical standoffs. In Ukraine, one of the six nuclear reactors in the line of fire on the Dnipro River could be hit by artillery and spew radiation. And Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear-armed state.“I am an inspector, not a mediator,” Mr. Grossi said in an interview this week. “But maybe, in some way, I can be useful around the edges.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Putin Replaces Defense Minister in Rare Cabinet Shake-up

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      Mr. Putin shifted Sergei Shoigu to run the security council, and nominated an economist to run the defense ministry.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia replaced his minister of defense on Sunday with an economist, shaking up his national security team for the first time since his invasion of Ukraine and signaling his determination to put Russia’s war effort on an economically sustainable footing.Mr. Putin kept the minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, in his inner circle, tapping him to run the country’s security council — a position giving Mr. Shoigu close access to the president but little direct authority. Mr. Shoigu will replace Nikolai P. Patrushev, a former K.G.B. colleague of Mr. Putin, who the Kremlin said would be moved to another position to be announced in the coming days.Andrei R. Belousov, an economist who had served as first deputy prime minister since 2020 and long been seen as one of Mr. Putin’s most trusted economic advisers, was nominated to become the new defense chief.The Kremlin said Russia’s ballooning defense budget warranted putting an economist in charge, and that Mr. Belousov would help make the Russian military “more open to innovation.”The cabinet shifts represented a rare overhaul for Mr. Putin, who tends to avoid rash changes, and they could mark a turning point in Russia’s more than two-year war in Ukraine.A photo provided by Russian state media showing President Vladimir Putin of Russia, right, with Andrei R. Belousov at the Kremlin in November.Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Satellite Images Reveal Where Russian Nuclear Weapons Could Be Stored in Belarus

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      A New York Times analysis shows security upgrades unique to Russian nuclear storage facilities, at a Cold War-era munitions depot.The New York Times, Source: Maxar TechnologiesA newly added air defense system.A distinctive security checkpoint.And a triple fence around a bunker.These new security features and other upgrades at a munitions depot in central Belarus reveal that Russia is building facilities there that could house nuclear warheads. If Russia does move weapons to this location, it would mark the first time it has stored them outside the country since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.Russia already has nuclear warheads on its own soil that are close to Ukraine and NATO countries, but by basing some in Belarus, the Kremlin appears to be trying to accentuate its nuclear threat and bolster its nuclear deterrent.Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, made reference to such a site early last year, saying Russia would soon be completing the construction of “special storage for tactical nuclear weapons” in Belarus.The New York Times analyzed satellite imagery and photos, and spoke with nuclear weapons and arms control experts, to track the new construction, which started in March 2023.The site is 120 miles north of the Ukrainian border at a military depot next to the town of Asipovichy. Some of the recently built structures there have features that are unique to nuclear storage facilities at bases inside Russia. For example, a new, highly secure area is surrounded by three layers of fencing, in addition to the existing security perimeter of the entire base. Another telltale sign is a covered loading area connected to what appears to be a concealed Soviet-era underground bunker.The New York Times, Source: Maxar Technologies More

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      At Russia’s Victory Day Parade, Putin Keeps Ukraine in the Distance

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      A fighter fly-past returned to Russia’s World War II commemorations, where President Vladimir V. Putin permitted himself a single reference to his “special military operation.”The ballistic missiles rolled through Red Square, the fighter jets zipped overhead and rows of foreign dignitaries impassively looked on. Russia’s annual commemoration of the end of World War II presented a traditional ceremony on Thursday cherished by millions of Russians, a reflection of President Vladimir V. Putin’s broader attempts to project normalcy while resigning the population to a prolonged, distant war.At last year’s Victory Day celebration, as Russia struggled on the battlefield, Mr. Putin said the country was engaged in a “real war” for survival, and accused Western elites of seeking the “disintegration and annihilation of Russia.” On Thursday, he merely referred to the war in Ukraine once, using his initial euphemism for the invasion, “special military operation.”And on Russia’s most important secular holiday, he dedicated more time to the sacrifices of Soviet citizens in World War II than to the bashing of modern adversaries.Still, he did not ignore those adversaries entirely, reviving familiar criticisms and grievances about what he says are attempts to undermine Russia and accusing the West of “hypocrisy and lies.”“Revanchism, abuse of history, attempts to excuse modern heirs of the Nazis — these are all parts of the policies used by the Western elites to spark more and more new regional conflicts,” Mr. Putin said in an eight-minute address.The ceremony itself was slightly more expansive than last year’s bare-bones procedure, a sign of a nation that has recovered from the initial shock of the war and currently holds the advantage on the battlefield in Ukraine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Meeting With Xi, E.U. Leader Takes Tough Line on Ukraine War

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      Ursula Von der Leyen, the European Commission president, pushed Beijing to help rein in Russia’s war in Ukraine after meeting with the Chinese and French leaders in Paris.Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, put pressure Monday on China to help resolve the war in Ukraine, saying Beijing should “use all its influence on Russia to end its war of aggression against Ukraine.”She spoke after accompanying President Emmanuel Macron of France in a meeting with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, who began his first visit to Europe in five years on Sunday. Ms. von der Leyen has persistently taken a stronger line toward China than has Mr. Macron.With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia again suggesting he might be prepared to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine, she said Mr. Xi had played “an important role in de-escalating Russia’s irresponsible nuclear threats.” She was confident, Ms. von der Leyen said, that Mr. Xi would “continue to do so against the backdrop of ongoing nuclear threats by Russia.”Whether her appeal would have any impact on Mr. Xi was unclear, and describing the conflict as Russia’s “war of aggression” in Ukraine seemed likely to irk the Chinese leader. Beijing has forged a “no limits” friendship with Russia and provided Moscow with critical support for its military effort, including jet fighter parts, microchips and other dual-use equipment.“More effort is needed to curtail delivery of dual-use goods to Russia that find their way to the battlefield,” Ms. von der Leyen said of China. “And given the existential nature of the threats stemming from this war for both Ukraine and Europe, this does affect E.U.-China relations.”It is relatively unusual for a top European official to describe the war in Ukraine as an “existential threat” to the European continent. Doing so may reflect Mr. Putin’s renewed talk of the use of nuclear weapons.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Seeks to Build World Pressure on Russia Over Space Nuclear Weapon

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      An American official said the United States had information undermining Russia’s claim that a device it is developing is for peaceful scientific research.American officials are trying to increase international pressure on Russia not to deploy an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space, and have obtained information that undermines Moscow’s explanation that the device it is developing is for peaceful scientific purposes, a senior State Department official said on Friday.Concern over the Russian development of a new generation of space nuclear weapons has been growing in Washington, especially since Moscow’s veto last month of a U.N. measure aimed at keeping space free of such weapons. Some Republicans believe that the Biden administration is not doing enough to deter Russian work on the device, and others are concerned about China’s apparent decision not to pressure Moscow to stop.On Friday, Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, said that while the United States had been aware of Russia’s pursuit of such a device for years, “only recently have we been able to make a more precise assessment of their progress.”Ms. Stewart, speaking at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the orbit the Russian satellite would occupy is in a high-radiation region not used by other satellites, information that undercuts Russia’s defense that it is not developing a weapon.She condemned Russia’s veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution pushed by the United States and Japan aimed at reaffirming the ban against nuclear weapons being deployed in orbit. She argued that every country should be pushing Russia not to deploy a nuclear-armed satellite.“Everything that we’re doing in the diplomatic arena is working to prevent the Russians from going forward with this program,” she said. “The international response should be outrage if this actually does go forward, because it affects everyone, right? Every single country. It’s indiscriminate in its potential effect.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More