Author: Reporter

When Yekaterina Maksimova cannot afford to be late, the journalist and activist avoids taking the Moscow subway, even though it is probably the most efficient route. That is because she has been detained five times in the past year, thanks to the system’s pervasive security cameras with facial recognition. She says police would tell her the cameras “reacted” to her — although they often seemed not to understand why, and would let her go after a few hours. “It seems like I’m in some kind of a database,” says Maksimova, who was previously arrested twice: in 2019 after taking...

Russia alleges that dozens of Ukrainian militants crossed into one of its border towns in its Belgorod region, striking targets and forcing an evacuation, before over 70 of the attackers were killed or pushed back by what the authorities termed a counterterrorism operation. Ukraine denied any involvement in the skirmishes May 22 and 23, instead blaming two Russian groups that claim to be volunteers fighting alongside Kyiv’s forces in an uprising against the government of President Vladimir Putin. While neither version could be independently verified, whatever happened appears to have sent Moscow scrambling to respond to one of the...

At the conclusion of their previous Council of Europe summit in 2005, the 46 member states solemnly declared they would “bear witness to unprecedented pan-European unity.” Fast-forward 18 years, to May 16, 2023 and Europe’s pre-eminent human rights organization faces a massive war on its own continent, forcing it to gather as many of its leaders as possible in Reykjavik, Iceland, to deal with the epochal crisis in Ukraine, one of its member states. Perhaps more heed should have been paid to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s ominous warning at the summit in Warsaw, Poland that “Russia was, is,...

The Justice Department announced a series of criminal cases on May 16 tracing the illegal flow of sensitive technology, including Apple’s software code for self-driving cars, and materials used for missiles, to foreign adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran. Some of the alleged theft highlighted by the department dates back several years, but U.S. officials are drawing attention to the collection of cases now to highlight the work of a task force created this year to disrupt the transfer of goods to foreign countries. “We are committed to doing all we can to prevent these advanced tools from falling...